Elegies and Odes

With both:

• What are you emphasizing about your subject? What makes your subject 'special' or strange or so very individual to you that you need to write about them?

With elegies:

• What represents this person most? Voice, dress, actions, ...???

• What are you trying to say about the death, with the death, about Death?

• Figurative language: allow description of your subject to take you to another world!

• Theodore Roethke's "Elegy for Jane"

Elegies

1. James Reiss' "The Breathers"

2. Joan Larkin's "Afterlife"

4. Jericho Brown's "Another Elegy"

4. Jimmy Santiago Baca's "Meditations on the South Valley: Part XX"

5. A.E. Housman's "To An Athlete Dying Young"

6. Mary Jo Bang's "You Were You Are An Elegy"

7. Yusef Komunyakaa's "We Never Know"

With odes:

• What are you celebrating by celebrating the subject?

• Again, what quality of the subject stands out to you as another way to look at the subject?

Odes

1. Allen Tate's "Ode to the Confederate Dead"

2. Pablo Neruda's "Ode to a Large Tuna in the Market"

3. Alexander Pope's "Ode on Solitude"

4. Elizabeth Alexander's "Praise Song for the Day" (Read for Obama's inauguration)

5. John Keats' "To Autumn"

6. Kevin Young's "Ode to the Midwest"

7. Anne Sexton's "In Celebration of My Uterus"