Houston Community College System Creative Writing Epithets
Question Description
1. Choose a prompt, write your response, post your work, telling me which prompt you chose, and writing a brief “defense” – something about why you chose that prompt, what challenges you encountered, what the process was like, what insights you gained, etc. Then, I will comment on your work; you will then reply to my comment by focusing briefly on one or more specific aspects of craft; finally, I will enter a grade.
5.4: Epithets
“Epithet (Links to an external site.)” means something like name, but in poetry or other rhetorically-aware writing, it is a renaming, a byname, a replacement for a name, a nickname, a descriptive name, etc.
A name is, in a sense, an argument about identity and relationship or association. I will provide one other naming exercise later in which you might focus on your own name, but in this one, what I have in mind is something broader or subtler: the various ways in writing that we make arguments about identity and association through renaming. In the model poems below, you will see some of the following poetic strategies:
Copiousness: adding names together, letting them accumulate, in a sort of argument of riches.
“Branding”: associating, however arbitrarily, a common thing, animal, or person with something famous.
Conjuring: repeating a name in a way that calls forth some presence, often to contrast with stark absence.
So: write a poem, essay, or story that explores aspects of naming or labeling, and the secrets, contradictions, contrasts, etc. that arise from studying and arguing for names.
Karl Shapiro (Links to an external site.), “Buick”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/171492 (Links to an external site.)
Henry Reed (Links to an external site.), “Naming of Parts”
http://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/naming-of-parts/ (Links to an external site.)
Gwendolyn Brooks (Links to an external site.), “Mayor Harold Washington”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/182442?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Daily+Poem+of+the+Day&utm_content=Daily+Poem+of+the+Day+CID_0eb00ae896bd2377726ffbe400b99df1&utm_source=Campaign+Monitor&utm_term=Poem+of+the+Day+Mayor+Harold+Washington (Links to an external site.)
Marilyn Hacker (Links to an external site.), “Iva’s Pantoum”
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/ivas-pantoum (Links to an external site.)
Laure-Anne Bosselaar (Links to an external site.), “Stillbirth”
https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/stillbirth
2. After readings some of the Web Links, Suggested Readings, or Lectures (from any week or the supplements), write your report here. Remember to write at least 100 words.

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