Indian ink includes only twenty-five lines of Flora Crewe's poetry, but from them one can see that she is an expressionist, using thick, rich, concrete language and imagery to depict the emotional tone of her subjective experiences and her reactions to them. Like Stoppard, she also enjoys ambiguity and verbal coincidences, and uses them to create layers of meaning in her poems.
Write a serious expressionist poem or paragraph about some experience you have had since coming to Grinnell. Write so that a sensitive, well-informed, sympathetic, thoughtful reader can understand how you felt.
On this occasion, I'm going to insist on a particular length: not less than 150 words, not more than 250.
Have your work ready to turn in at the beginning of class on November 21. It should be legibly typed or set, double-spaced, with ample margins (I recommend an inch and a quarter at top, bottom, and sides).
This document is available on the World Wide Web as
http://www.cs.grinnell.edu/~stone/courses/stoppard/expressionism.xhtml
created November 13, 2002
last revised November 13, 2002