Asking the Right Questions: Sugar Cane

Now, I've been reading this poem for a few months now. And sometimes I print it out and carry it with me and circle, underline and annotate a physical poem --- more or less intuitively analyzing it with knowledge and gut feelings. And then sometimes I spend hours researching various elements of my intuitive analysis to see if they hold any water. This approach, despite being fun and intellectually satiating, leaves me exhausted and directionless. Or rather, momentum-less. Doing too much research tends to pull me in too many directions to build and support a thesis.

Therefore, I hope to focus the rest of my writing by focusing on questions.  If I am going to look  "overcoming binary oppositions through inflections produced by intertextuality." I am going to have to ask specific questions, such as: what are the binary oppositions in "Sugar Cane"?  How are they overcome? What are the texts within the poem? How is it reflected in the intertextuality?

I received feedback encouraging me to focus on how the poem is self-referential. So I will need to address that with questions which will develop in the paper. I suggested that "Sugar is a medium that can be read" could be a thesis statement.  In order to show that sugar is a medium within a/multiple discourse/s, I will need to define terms to create a context.  I need to ask: What is a discourse? How do we define discourse? What are the discourses within the poem?  How is sugar a art of these discourse?

(*And I believe I will have to define deconstruction too, because I want to analyze this poem... and maybe deconstruct it)