How to Annotate
Some of you might be asking, what is annotation? Annotation is the act of adding notes. There is a lot of things that you can cover while annotating. My favorite thing to annotate is poems. They usually have less lines than a story. But tell a deeper story. Today I will use the following poem as an example and walk you through the steps I take to annotate a poem. (I 'm not quite sure who the author is, but we used it as practice in my English class and I fell in love with it.)
Black Valentine
I don 't know how my mother got my father on their bed, or how she stood over him and cast the fishing line of her voice in the dark and hooked him with the barb of her question, or how he managed to swim up out of the bourbon lake in his blood and slur something like language from his mouth of stones, or how that small quiet woman got the courage to raise her arm and wade into the rot and sink knee-deep in the ooze and hit my father hard- sternum, cheek bone, an eye for an eye, I can 't say for sure, all I remember is pressing my face to the cool wall, as if to squeeze through,head first, and stand, a five-year-old child between them and say stop. But I couldn 't do anything, so I pulled the lake blue covers over my face and closed my eyes and saw my first grade teacher cutting paper hearts, and how
I took them home and taped them
To my parents walls, knowing
Mother would hold her tears when Father didn 't come home and after t.v. I 'd curl inside the lukewarm hollow of my bed sheets until I 'd wake hearing my mother 's voice tearing the air to pieces, my father stumbling into the bathroom to throw his body over the toilet and I smell the sharp pungency of his drowning, Mother dives into save him, quiet lapping of her voice against the wooden boat of my bed, my baby my baby, that rocking takes me under in sleep.
Wasn 't that a good read? We are not done yet! That 's why I love this poem; it 's a strong read without any looking
Black Valentine
I don 't know how my mother got my father on their bed, or how she stood over him and cast the fishing line of her voice in the dark and hooked him with the barb of her question, or how he managed to swim up out of the bourbon lake in his blood and slur something like language from his mouth of stones, or how that small quiet woman got the courage to raise her arm and wade into the rot and sink knee-deep in the ooze and hit my father hard- sternum, cheek bone, an eye for an eye, I can 't say for sure, all I remember is pressing my face to the cool wall, as if to squeeze through,head first, and stand, a five-year-old child between them and say stop. But I couldn 't do anything, so I pulled the lake blue covers over my face and closed my eyes and saw my first grade teacher cutting paper hearts, and how
I took them home and taped them
To my parents walls, knowing
Mother would hold her tears when Father didn 't come home and after t.v. I 'd curl inside the lukewarm hollow of my bed sheets until I 'd wake hearing my mother 's voice tearing the air to pieces, my father stumbling into the bathroom to throw his body over the toilet and I smell the sharp pungency of his drowning, Mother dives into save him, quiet lapping of her voice against the wooden boat of my bed, my baby my baby, that rocking takes me under in sleep.
Wasn 't that a good read? We are not done yet! That 's why I love this poem; it 's a strong read without any looking
Bibliography: Kindell, The whyville times, http://j.whyville.net/smmk/whytimes/article?id=8496