Poetry Assessment

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How do a poet’s writing choices convey a speaker’s identity? After reading poetry, write an essay that addresses the question and analyzes writer’s craft, providing examples to clarify your analysis. What conclusions or implications can you draw?

One way a poet’s writing choices convey a speaker’s identity is through verb tense.

Past, present, or future tense verbs give the reader clues about the speaker in poems. For

example, in “Golden Retrievals” the speaker is a dog. Mark Doty uses present tense verbs like

“capture,” “I’m,” and “calls” to demonstrate that the dog is narrating in the present. These

present tense verbs reinforce Mark Doty’s message that animals live in the moment while

humans live in the past and future. Another example of using verb tense to show the speaker is

apparent in “Stars” by Nikki Giovanni where a young child is narrating. The author uses past

tense verbs “learned,” “burned,” and “asked” to show the speaker had just learned about stars

for the first time in school, and he or she is trying to make a connection to his or her brother

being burned out. Giovanni’s choice of past tense verbs shows the child is using the earlier

lesson to understand Donny. Gary Soto’s “Oranges” is another poem where the verb tense

shows a clear speaker: an older man looking back on his first crush. This is obvious in the first

two lines, “The first time I walked/With a girl, I was twelve” where the verbs “walked” and

“was” are in the past. This writer’s decision to use past tense verbs tells the reader that the

speaker is reflecting back on an earlier experience, and he is no longer twelve years old. Doty, Giovanni, and Soto use the writer’s craft of verb tense to show the reader the identity of each speaker.