Station 1 – choose one of the following three options

Objects Action Argument

Less than 4 take a photo that tells a story about showing

1+ poses/gestures off status, social credentials or accomplishment

Objects Action Argument

More than 5 take a photo that tells a story about the passing of time or the inevitability of death

Objects Action Argument

2+ objects take a photo that seems to be affirming a certain lifestyle,

1+ expressions identity or behavior but is in fact warning

1+ persons against it

Station 2 – choose one of the following two options

Objects Action Argument

1 of the photos Collaboratively that anthropomorphizes 1+

from Station 1 write a poem objects in the photo

Objects Action Argument

1 of the photos Collaboratively that, like OOO, advocates for “a greater

from Station 1 write a poem appreciation of nonhuman actors”[1]

Station 3 – choose one of the following two options

Objects Action Argument

1 of the photos Individually write that explain how your photo

from Station 1 1-3 paragraphs blends features of selfie & vanitas art

Objects Action Argument

1 of the poems Individually write that explain how your poem

from Station 2 1-3 paragraphs reflects the ideas of OOO

*****Homework: To receive credit, one person in each group should email me the group’s photo and poem. Everyone should email me his or her paragraph(s).*****

Hamlet waxes poetic about skulls:

HAMLET

To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may
not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander,
till he find it stopping a bung-hole?

HORATIO

'Twere to consider too curiously, to consider so.

HAMLET

No, faith, not a jot; but to follow him thither with
modesty enough, and likelihood to lead it: as
thus: Alexander died, Alexander was buried,
Alexander returneth into dust; the dust is earth; of
earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he
was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel?
Imperious Caesar, dead and turn'd to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away:
O, that that earth, which kept the world in awe,

Amy Lowell(1874-1925) anthropomorphizes flowers:

Grotesque

Why do the lilies goggle their tongues at me
When I pluck them;
And writhe, and twist,
And strangle themselves against my fingers,
So that I can hardly weave the garland
For your hair?
Why do they shriek your name
And spit at me
When I would cluster them?
Must I kill them
To make them lie still,
And send you a wreath of lolling corpses
To turn putrid and soft
On your forehead
While you dance?

Sylvia Plath gives a voice to a mirror:


Mirror
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
What ever you see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful---
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

Google Search poems bringing human and nonhuman actors together:

Thomas Lux anthropomorphizes food:

Refrigerator, 1957

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.

[1] See Levi Bryant’s The Democracy of Objects: http://quod.lib.umich.edu/o/ohp/9750134.0001.001/1:10/--democracy-of-objects?rgn=div1;view=fulltext