3-5 page essay

by

Humanities

Find a poem/song which deals with a subject that you, too, have a strong opinion about and write an essay in which you compare/contrast the viewpoint about that subject presented in the poem/song with what you believe.

Additionally, when you are giving your view of the opinion expressed in the poem/song, make sure that you are providing examples from the poem/song that support what you think that the piece is saying. I am not saying that you should paraphrase the song (don’t do only that!) but just make sure that you are answering the question “What is poem about and what does it say about that subject?” as well as “How does this viewpoint compare with what I think about this subject?”

( the song that im using is kendrick lamar- how much a dollar costs censor the profanity and try to tie in the fact that this is how the reaction that most people with wealth would react in this situation and how when we as humans feel like we are moving up in the world we tend to forget about and neglect those in need even though we dont know that persons story)

A note about using songs for this essay: Songs are valid choices when talking about poetry because most well written songs have strong poetic elements….They are pretty much poems set to music.

HOWEVER!..
A. Make sure that you choose a song that, after you have taken away the music associated with it, is still worthy of your attention. There are songs whose lyrics can stand alone as fine poetry and then there are those which, once the music is gone, don’t really hold up to analysis. (Try writing an essay on the Beatles’ “She loves you (yeah, yeah, yeah)” and see how far you get, for example. Great song. Lousy poetry. LOL)

B. Don’t organize the structure of your essay around the structure of the song ( or poem, for that matter). Remember that whether you are talking about your experience or your opinion, your focus in these essays is YOUR response and how it compares to the poem/song

C. Quote the lines of a song the same way that you quote the lines of a poem: put it in quotes and if you are quoting more than one line, separate the lines of the poem with a “/”. For example, “In her poem ‘To a Daughter Leaving Home’, Linda Pastan starts out the poem by saying, ‘When I taught you/ at eight to ride/ a bicycle’. ” See? (The poem itself is in the book on page 916).