Show-and-Tell (Show-and-Dish?) Workshop
Take turns reviewing for your partner everything you’ve written so far about each of the two
poems you’re considering. (One poem at a time, of course.) Go through your notes, laying
everything out on the table. Provide some oral annotation/amplification/elaboration. Here’s
what I noticed/thought/considered about: speaker, tone/mood/pitch/intensity/pace,
diction/syntax/grammar/punctuation, ambiguity, meter/rhythm, rhyme (and other sound effects:
assonance, alliteration, internal rhyme, etc.), line & stanza structure, imagery, figurative
language (metaphor, synecdoche, hyperbole, understatement, etc.), and so on.
Partners: as your counterpart(ner) shows and tells, your job is to cast a jaundiced eye: be
skeptical, find fault, and play devil’s advocate.
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Sure, you can be supportive and help tease out observations or ideas that really do
deserve to be teased out: That’s interesting; you know what else would support that? In
regards to that, have you also looked at…? I think I see a connection between that and…
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But mostly, get critical: not mean, but frank and blunt. I don’t get that; can you explain
or defend it? That seems speculative; what other textual evidence would you point to?
Okay—but if that’s the case, then what about…? I think you’re reaching; the easier or
more obvious way to read that would be… I hear the tone of that phrase differently. I
would scan that line differently. I think you may be feeling the rhythm wrong. Here’s
something I’m seeing about figurative language in this poem that you might have
missed…
Imagery and Figurative Language: Some Questions to Ask
What kinds of imagery are in the poem:
 visual (things or motions [think of the poem “Windsurfing”] or even attitudes/positions
[e.g., cowering, crouching, slouching, leaning, etc.])?
 aural?
 tactile?
 gustatory?
 olfactory?
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Do these images tend to be concrete “things” or abstractions (e.g., the color “red”; or
more abstract still: emotions—outward signs of anger, fear, etc.)?
How detailed or specific are they? Are they neutrally descriptive or are they evaluative?
How selective are they?
Do they arrange themselves into any sorts of patterns (regular recurrence or alternation,
opposition or complementarity, evolution or progression, etc.)? Are they discrete or do
they work together to form a sort of tableau or gescheft?
What about figurative language?
 Simile
 Metaphor
o Synecdoche
 Metonymy
 Symbol (or rarer:Allegory)
 Understatement
 Hyperbole
 Personification
 Apostrophe
 Other (paradox, irony, pun, etc.)