AP12 Poetry Resources from AP!

Here's the link, shockingly hard to find, it turns out, where you can see all the recent AP exam questions.  For a quick sample look at question #1 on the 2008 exam; it's actually a comparison between two poems on the same subject, but as you'll see when you look at other years, sometimes they will have you compare two poems, sometimes just analyze one that's usually a bit longer or more difficult.  In either case, notice that the prompt always follows the same basic structure:

Introduce your brief essay with a summary of the poem's main ideas, then in each body paragraph, explain, in the style we've been practicing how the poet uses one technique to advance that basic meaning. Also take heart that even though you only get 40 minutes for each of these, the test people know this, and expect a very short bare-bones essay, really just an "expanded outline," where each paragraph is only 3 sentences tops, + a 3-sentence intro and 3-sentence conclusion.  You can feel free to be very formulaic on these, it keeps it clear, as long as your ideas are accurate.