creating a poem imitating Sleeve Notes by Paul Muldoon

For an extra-credit assignment (that will cover half of a writing), I ask you to write a poem in imitation of Muldoon’s “Sleeve Notes”:

1. Choose three of your favorite artist’s albums and use them as headers as Muldoon does.

2. You want to use the kind of space and line lengths that he does (so you need to get close to how he arranges his…including all the space around the words in the third section where it seems that things are breaking or shattering or falling down the page.

3. You want to use experiences like your memories of listening to the songs in each album and capture where/what/who/when/how in them. Use images as Muldoon does (e.g., “the big Armani suit” and “roared and soared through the yucca-scented air” or “another shot of Absolut”) to *show* us the circumstances vs. just telling us how you felt.

4. The idea/feeling can be whatever you wish: memories, how you felt at that time of your life, what the musician made you imagine for your future, etc. But try to convey that through these images and a suggestion of story.

5. Then in 4-5 sentences below your poem, please write about the process of writing the poem. What happened? What choices did you make and why? Was there anything that surprised you about this process? Did it help you get more of a sense of where Muldoon was coming from in his poem? Why or why not?