Groups Projects: Wed., Thurs., Friday and Tuesday

Nature as Metaphor

Your group will introduce the class to your assigned poem on either Friday or Tuesday (20 minutes). (No class Monday - In-service Day)

This project has 4 components:

1. A short presentation, setting the context for the poem. (Introduce us to the poet and provide any relevant historical information - written during WW1, during the Harlem Renaissance, etc.) (5 min.) Submit outline.

2. A journal entry: Write a question about your poem to be used as journal entry. (5 min.) Submit question.

3. A collage: Create a collage. Explain how the collage reflects your understanding of the poem. The collage can be hard copy or electronic. (5 min.) Submit hard copy or electronic file.

4. Class discussion: Engage the class in a discussion of the poem. Your group should prepare 3-5 discussion questions that encourage your peers to think critically about the poem. (5 min.) Submit questions and notes regarding answers.

You must be in class Thursday and on your presentation day in order to get credit for this assignment.

Assigned poems
William Blake: "The Lamb" & "The Tyger" (Sarah, Christin, Quinton, Jamaal)
Robert Frost: "Birches" (Ryota, Ronaldo, Keeley)
Walt Whitman: "A Noiseless Patient Spider" (Chad, Nhung)
Louise Erdrich: "I Was Sleeping Where the Black Oaks Move" (Jen, Lindsey, Joey, Forrest)

Points Possible: 100

Nature and Time

Today, we discussed how nature is an endless fountain of inspiration for poets. Because so many were absent today, I'll go into more detail about this topic on Wednesday. For now, get acquainted with Elizabeth Bishop's "The Fish," a poem within this tradition. Click on the link below (Elizabeth Bishop Reading "The Fish") and...

1. Listen to Elizabeth Bishop reading her poem
2. Click on each of the Elements of Poetry (Assonance, Denotation and Connotation, etc.)
3. Read the definition.
4. Look at the examples in the poem.
5. Complete the exercise (2 prompts for each element).

No class Tuesday. Use the time to complete the exercise above, due Wednesday.

Note: The mid-term will be distributed Thursday (due Wednesday, Oct. 22nd) and we will begin a group project. You must be in class both Wednesday and Thursday to get credit for this project. Happy fall.

More on Countee Cullen's "Heritage"

Today, we concluded that, in "Heritage," Cullen explores the tension he feels between his Christian values and African heritage. This tension manifests itself in the poem's:

• Structure (rhyme scheme, stanza division, line breaks, line length, spacing) -- Example: rhyming couplets
• Syntax --Example: “What is Africa to me?”
• Word choice (connotations, double-meanings, puns, slang) – Example: “So I lie,” adjectives: “strong” (4) “regal” (4), “barbaric” (13).
• Sound - alliteration: “sun or scarlet sea” (2), barbaric birds,” “cats crouching” (34, 35), Repetition: “What is Africa to me?” and “So I lie,” the “unremittent beat” (66)
• Imagery/figurative language (simile, metaphor, personification): biblical throughout, “like a baited worm” (78)

Homework for Monday: In about one page, compare/contrast "Heritage" to either Phillis Wheatley's "On Being Brought From Africa to America" or Hughes's "The Negro Speaks of Rivers." Consider their similarities (both in terms of content and form) and their differences. It might be helpful to list the formal constructs by category for Wheatley's poem or Hughes's poem (as we did with "Heritage), to better indentify potential intersections.

Please also read the section on "Nature and Time" (11-14) and the first three poems on the syllabus for Week 4 (Bishop, Blake, and Whitman).

Poems as Arranged Life

Before returning to specific poems, we spent the first few minutes of class talking about MLA conventions (quotation marks around poem titles, citing line numbers, etc.) We also discussed writing effective paragraphs (see link below) and writing assertively (avoiding "I think," "I believe" statements).

Then, we began a discussion of "poems as arranged life."

In the last two weeks, we've discussed how “poems originate in crucial moments of private life… (Vendler 27)

However, poems don’t simply record what has happened. As Vendler says, “Art interrupts the stream and constructs one segment or level of the stream for processing” (27).

Assignment: With your partner, choose one life moment from the newspaper that you feel would be a subject worthy of a poem.

Then, we took our discussion to the next level, considering how form reinforces and reflects content.

According to Vendler, "The poet discovers the emotional import of that life-moment by subjecting it to analysis; the analysis then determines how the moment is described, and the invented organizational form that replicates it” (27).

We looked specifically at Blake's "Infant Sorrow," outlining the formal constructions that reflect the poem's content. These include:

1. Contrast: Physical vs. mental (one stanza each)
Main verb in stanza one: “leapt”
Main verb in stanza two: “thought”
2. Environmental
The child’s dependency on his parents is reinforced by the poem’s structure.
Each stanza begins with the parents, and in the final stanza “they literally enclose him” (29) .
3. Adjectives: realistic (many) and supernatural (one)
Helpless, naked, loud, bound, weary vs.
“like a fiend hid in a cloud” (4)
4. Grammatical
“ –ing” adjectives to reflect what the baby can do (“piping,” “struggling,” “striving.”
Other adjectives to reflect what the baby is feeling (“helpless,” “naked,” “like a fiend,” etc.)

See summary on pg. 31.

Assignment: With your partner, determine possible formal constructions that would replicate/reinforce the poem’s content.

Also, students were given the opportunity to revise the assignment due today based on our discussion. Revisions are due Tuesday. Wednesday, bring a favorite poem to class.

Typicality, Tone, and the Harlem Renaissance

On Monday, we discussed several strategies a poet uses to construct a self within a poem. These included: construct temporal space; relocate the speaker in space and time; add depth; include details that make it seem as if the author has intimate knowledge of a given historical time and place; and ensure the speaker's motivations, justifications, and conclusions are reasonable.

Today, we added two more: typicality and tone.

Typicality is exactly how it sounds: the experience is typical rather than narrowly personal (Vendler 183).

Tone, too, is connected to identity construction: “Every poem suggests to its readers the tones with which they might give voice to it; and conversely, the tones you feel to be present, as you get to know the poem well, give you clues to the perceptions and emotions of the self, constructed in the poem, that generates these tones” (184).

In this context we discussed Whitman's "I Hear America Singing," and Hughes' "I, Too" and "Theme for English B." In their journals, students were asked to determine the tone (in one word) of either Whitman's poem or Hughes' "I, Too." Then, they were asked to explain what words (considering their connotations) and punctuation led them to this conclusion. The last ten minutes of class were devoted to finishing Thursday's character sketch.

Assignment for Monday: Choose one poem and explain how the author "constructs a self." In other words, how does the poet get the reader to "turn into" the speaker of the poem? Draw on the strategies we discussed this week. Choose any poem from Week 1 or 2 except “Ellen West.” Parameters: typed, approximately 1 page double-spaced.

Alvarez and Atwood

Thursday, to continue the theme of "constructing a self," we first discussed Julia Alvarez's "Dusting" and Margaret Atwood's "This is a Photograph of Me."  Several people commented that the child in "Dusting" did not want to live a life of anonymity but wanted to leave her mark on the world (unlike her mother). We connected this poem to ones we had read earlier, including Heaney's "Digging" and Dickinson's "I'm Nobody! Who are you?" We also discussed the symbolic nature of Atwood's poem, and the significance of the parenthesis in the final stanzas. Interestingly, the speaker's identify becomes less clear -- "It is difficult to say where/precisely, or to say/how large or small I am:/the effect of water/on light is a distortion" (19-23) -- as the poem progresses.  Finally, students were paired according to interest to write a character sketch of Ellen West, J. Alfred Prufrock, or the narrator in "Theme from English B," considering whether she/he was round or flat, static or dynamic.  We will continue this project on Friday. 

T.S. Eliot

Wednesday, we spent the entire class period discussing T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Students shared their insights on the particular section they were assigned. Keeley mentioned that the inclusion of Michelangelo was significant, given his famous statue David, held to be a symbol of youth and beauty, a projection of the human ideal. This stands in contrast to J. Alfred Prufrock, a middle-aged man who describes himself as "Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse" (119). We also spoke of Eliot's use of simile ("Streets that follow like a tedious argument" (8)) and of repetition, the latter reflecting the mundane nature of life as well as Prufrock's belief that "There will be time." We mentioned too, that this poem falls in the modernist tradition, one that both looks back (to Homer's Odysseus in the final lines, for example) and forward, in an attempt to reflect the ever-changing world.