Station 1 – choose one of the following three options
Objects
Action
Less than 4
take a photo
1+ poses/gestures
Argument
that tells a story about showing
off status, social credentials or
accomplishment
Objects
More than 5
Action
take a photo
Argument
that tells a story about the passing of time or
the inevitability of death
Objects
2+ objects
1+ expressions
1+ persons
Action
take a photo
Argument
that seems to be affirming a certain lifestyle,
identity or behavior but is in fact warning
against it
Station 2 – choose one of the following two options
Objects
1 of the photos
from Station 1
Action
Collaboratively
write a poem
Argument
that anthropomorphizes 1+
objects in the photo
Objects
1 of the photos
from Station 1
Action
Collaboratively
write a poem
Argument
that, like OOO, advocates for “a greater
appreciation of nonhuman actors”1
Station 3 – choose one of the following two options
Objects
1 of the photos
from Station 1
Action
Argument
Individually write that explain how your photo
1-3 paragraphs
blends features of selfie & vanitas art
Objects
1 of the poems
from Station 2
Action
Argument
Individually write that explain how your poem
1-3 paragraphs
reflects the ideas of OOO
*****Homework: To receive credit, one person in each group should email me the
group’s photo and poem. Everyone should email me his or her paragraph(s).*****
1
See Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/9750134.0001.001/1:10/--democracy-ofobjects?rgn=div1;view=fulltext
Hamlet waxes poetic about skulls:
HAMLET
To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may
not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander,
till he find it stopping a bung-hole?
HORATIO
'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.
HAMLET
No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with
modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as
thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,
Amy Lowell (1874-1925) anthropomorphizes flowers:
Grotesque
Why do the lilies goggle their tongues at me
When I pluck them;
And writhe, and twist,
And strangle themselves against my fingers,
So that I can hardly weave the garland
For your hair?
Why do they shriek your name
And spit at me
When I would cluster them?
Must I kill them
To make them lie still,
And send you a wreath of lolling corpses
To turn putrid and soft
On your forehead
While you dance?
Sylvia Plath gives a voice to a mirror:
Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful--The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
Google Search poems bringing human and nonhuman actors together:
Thomas Lux anthropomorphizes food:
Refrigerator, 1957
More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.