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At U of All People, WAC, or Writing Across the Curriculum, has become big, and it’s no longer just for students writing in a chemistry class. Even faculty and administrators have joined the trend toward hybridization and crossovers. See the printout below, found in a board room after a splice of an academic administrators’ meeting with a poetry workshop.

GAME PLAN

• Opening
• Imagery
• Other Parts
• Theme
• Conclusion

Opening

□Introduction
1. The sun glinting on the oak-hued seminar
table at an angle of four o’clock
2. Minutes from previous meeting
3. The sobriety of our endeavors edges us forward

□Address to Reader

1. You, who so resemble us
2. See report from 2007

□Establish Issues
1. The growing fiscal debt
2. Greenbacks drifting into a bottomless pit

Imagery

□List of Things

1. The Chancellor’s Fund for Excellence,
the new Dana Gioia Residential College
2. Open maws, fevered hands reaching out

□This Thing Is Like That Thing
1. The debt is an untamed lawn
2. The fund drive is like a mower that has
come upon boulders hidden in the grass

□Juxtapose Words with Cute Visuals
1. Balance the budget;
budget the balance (chiasmus)
➼ ♬ $ :-) ☜
2. “Money is a kind of poetry”
-- Wallace Stevens
moolah ≈, $, ¢, £

Other Parts

□Such as Enjambment and Cut ✄ Faculty Raises ✍
□Bulleted Lines
•Impact
•Decisiveness
•Terse tercets

□Miscellaneous
1. Insert arresting metaphor here
2. Pause for caesura and coffee break

Theme

□The Importance of Art
1. Humanities are the loss-leader
of the academy
2. “Poetry makes nothing happen.”
3. A glint in a business major’s
contact lens

□Budget Shortfall
1. There is never, no, never enough
2. Imagine a plant that grows shorter instead of taller
every year. What soil nourishes it?
3. Impose hiring freeze

□Cosmetic Measures, Like Brushing Pancake Makeup over a Burn
1. Building for the Future,
a four-step plan in quatrains
(first draft)
2. The smell of fresh paint from the newly renovated
library lounge

Conclusion

□Endings Are Always Hard
1. Seated in silence, hands matched as if in prayer
2. “In my end is my beginning”

□Repeat Earlier Points
1. Dana Gioia Residential College
2. Chancellor’s Fund for Excellence
3. The angle of the sun, now declining at five o’clock

□Any Questions?