In Andrei Codrescu's book, The Poetry Lesson, the poet draws upon one of his many interesting teaching strategies to produce a unique sort of assignment. He assigns each student a “ghostly companion”—a poet, any poet, with whom the student may pretend to have a secret connection.
Taking after Codrescu, Dr. Lehman proposes that we adopt this idea, but instead of taking an assignment, each of us gets to choose his or her own companion using the criteria of your choice. Maybe you find a poet with your same birthday, someone you love or someone you hate, someone whose name begins with the same letter as yours.
Once you have chosen the identity of your ghost, choose a poem by that person and do a radical revision, one in which the reader won't be able to tell that there was any antecedent. One way to accomplish this is to print out the chosen poem in triple-space, and write your own poem between the lines. Or, you can choose to argue with the original text. We here at Next Line, Please say, why not?
With one special rule, which is to not tell us who your companion is or what poem you used for inspiration. On the following week, everyone will be expected to reveal the identity of the GC and the title of the poem you chose.
Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post, and to enter your candidate!