Your sub can blog!

Hello folks,

Just thought that I would provide proof that I can use the blog.  Remember that the homework is to read and work "Dover Beach" and "Church Going" and answer the questions that follow each of them.  Be ready to spend a lot of time reading and rereading if you want to get the most out of these poems, not to mention answer the questions successfully.  

I can't promise I'll always use this blog consistently and effectively, but I will do my best.  

Homework?

1. Read chapter 8 on allusions. Answer the questions following Milton's poem "On His Blindness" (135/127/140/140) and turn them in on Thursday.

2. Read "Snow White and the Seven Deadly Sins" (355/295/365/369) and join in a discussion on the blog.

is the homework from Ms. Minor's blog, since ours is blank I'm assuming its supposed to be the same.

My take on Sylvia Plath's "Spinster"

This is, to me, a funny poem about an imperious, rigid girl who decides she prefers a sort of wintry order, as she sees it, to spring and all it traditionally stands for: love, music, "burgeoning" growth of new life (look that word "burgeoning" up, and you'll see why it's perfect), renewal, fertility, etc., etc.

Now I'd never read this poem before Mrs. Minor chose it from the newest collection. But the first thing I want to sense about it, besides the experience that it contains or relates, is its tone. So I read it through several times, which even done carefully takes just a few minutes. And I find the tone to be rather mocking. The speaker is not peddling her subject's philosophy -- she's creating an ironic portrait that somehow gives us and her particular enjoyment.

So how about this "particular girl"? She's not looking for romance; others are looking for romance from her -- a whole string of them is hinted at by "latest suitor." Suitors are those who go down on one knee to ask for the hand of their adored one. But this "particular" girl (and that word has at least two meanings: one out of a group of girls, or a girl who insists that everything around her must be correct in every detail) finds something disconcerting in the "irregular babel" of birdsong and the leaves' litter (nice a-litter-ation, eh?). When arrogant humans attempted to construct a "Tower of Babel" to reach the heavens, the Biblical God sent the language of the builders into confusion to thwart their ambition. Maybe this arrogant girl simply fails to understand the birdsong that is the one of the primary languages of spring, as she rejects everything about the season that she doesn't understand or finds disorderly, or is afraid of.

(By the way: I don't know how she'd feel about the order of this poem, because its rhythm is often irregular; most regular, perhaps, in the stanza in which "she longed for winter then!" There's a rhyme pattern, but the rhymes are often of the type known as "slant", or inexact rhymes: "wits" & "idiots" is an example of that; so is "weather" and "either" in the last stanza. But we haven't gotten to pattern yet.)

Going through the poem a few times more, I notice that our girl is a queenly sort of person on "a ceremonious April walk" who "judged petals in disarray" and compares the season of spring to a slob ("sloven"). She's afraid of the unpredictability of spring, which could unsettle her "five wits" (a very old, even medieval expression covering common wit, imagination, fantasy, estimation, and memory) and thus reverse her standing in her own royal court from queen to jester (a "vulgar" one who wears "motley"). Such an idiot can "Reel giddy in bedlam spring" and make quite a fool of her/himself.

"Bedlam", I find, is a word that denotes a scene of mad confusion and comes from the insane asylum in old London known as "Bedlam." The allusions to ancient or medieval things somehow reinforces the image I get of a queen in royal surroundings with courtiers in attendance and a jester, or professional fool, on call at his station at foot of the throne. Part of the order of her universe are her five wits, which she keeps in check lest they get out of control -- especially imagination and fantasy. Those are too free-flowing and adventurous. And how did I learn about the five wits? I looked the term up until I found what I sort of remembered from my own reading.

That brings me to her suitor. I think suitor is a good word for him, because he's a wannabe on his way out, and Bedlam might just be the place for the likes of him.  He's the jester, idiot sort. I like Hari's idea of a dog, even if he got stuck on the literal notion of one. This guy is sawing the air with romantic enthusiasm as he gestures and talks and bounds along and off the path like a happy dog -- doing everything but pee on the bushes before he puts his pair of muddy paws on her shoulders and gives her a couple of doggy licks on her puss. But the particular girl doesn't appreciate the dog-boy's Keatsian appreciation of nature and love together in bloom. To her it's all "a rank wilderness of fern and flower."

It's probably just a coincidence, but I can't help but picture this particular girl doing what's known as "playing Hamlet" (she could be an English major, after all, and she does like black!), putting on airs of sophisticated disillusionment while she mutters haughtily to herself:

Fie on’t! ah fie! ‘tis an unweeded garden,
That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature
Possess it merely.

Uh uh. Not for her. She's a sharp-edged perfect snowflake, with a taste for "ice and rock". That third stanza is a marvel of hard-edged, astringent words and phrases (Scrupulously austere, frosty discipline, exact -- these are words that could give you paper cuts, and wow would those cuts ever smart in that ice-cold air!). And as I said, this one stanza really stands out for its greater order of rhythm, especially if read aloud after second,  which contains such unruly, rambling lines as "Observed her lover's gestures unbalance the air" and "Through a rank wilderness of fern and flower." In fact, stanza one was pacing along in pretty good order until line four threw everything literally and figuratively off-balance: "Found herself, of a sudden, intolerably struck".

She's shaken by the sheer uncontained fertility of it all. And so she withdraws "neatly" (in what other way could she withdraw?). She's the sort of princess who enchants herself within her own chosen castle, surrounded by thorns ("barricade of barb and check") with a moat full of sharks and the drawbridge up at all times (okay, some of this is my imagery, but I think it fits). The adjectives "mutinous" and "insurgent" are appropriate for our queenly girl who will maintain the picturesque (nicely framed, of course) order of her life at all costs, including love. No revolt by an excitable, overly romantic young man could possibly succeed in dethroning this snow queen to bring the unrestricted freedom of love and the rest of that burgeoning stuff into her realm.

As far as symbols go, I think I previously noted what spring often stands for, while all the time remaining the season of spring. That symbol she rejects, and substitutes clean and orderly winder for spring's rank and gross confusion (thanks, O Prince of Denmark. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest. None of ghat crummy bird babel for you). Winter as a symbol of order and discipline is more of a personal symbol for our heroine. Others might see winter as symbolic of death and also of disorder -- storms and wild weather that could rip a roof off, or send the queen skidding down a sleety path. The house of the final stanza we could take as a metaphor for her chosen isolation from the impetuous and uncontrollable change that spring symbolizers. I know a lot of you found symbols like that. If I were you, I wouldn't be content to simply identify a symbol or two, then re-pack the poem and turn in your puny paragraph of pathetic prose.

The cool thing is that something so compact and brief as this little poem can contain so much in it that magnifies, extends and enriches meaning. All I'm doing is looking at the "how" before I decide (if I ever do such a thing) the "what" of the poem. How did Hari imagine that dog? Well, now I understand a little better, and for me how Sylvia Plath planted the seed that made the dog grow in Hari's brain makes the poem better and more vivid than it was before.

(By the way, Hari: you really need to see a doctor sometime soon.)

Exploring the connations and multiple denotations, noting the echoes thrown off by the allusions -- these things bring me to greater comprehension.

Gee this has been fun! Really! -- So much so that I got carried away and now everything I unpacked is strewn across the floor of the room and all over the bed, too. I haven't got time to get everything back into Sylvia's suitcase and unpack those other two. No, I have to go see the nurse instead to have the staples pulled from my knee.

What? You don't like that kind of kinesthetic/organic imagery?

Sorry. 

If I have time and energy enough when I get back, I'll take much briefer looks at "Barbie Doll" and "Siren Song". But I don't know. I tire very easily these days, and maybe what I did with this poem is enough.

Poetically and analytically yours,

JD

HOW does a poem mean?

I'm going to relay a little advice from poet John Ciardi and then, in a further post, take a stroll through a few of the assigned poems as a way of, if possible, altering and enriching the way you read poetry. Too many of you tend to, in the immortal words of Billy Collins: "…tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it." 

That way lies madness and, probably, an abiding hatred for all things poetical. I'm asking you to take an approach that is gentler on the poem and yourself. And to begin with, I'm going to cite these words of John Ciardi's from chapter one of How Does A Poem Mean?, his wonderful guide to poetry (alas, no longer in print):

"What greater violence can be done to the poet’s experience than to drag it into an early morning classroom and to go after it as an item on its way to a Final Examination? The apology must at least be made. It is the experience, not the Final Examination, that counts. Though one must note with care…that passionate learning is full of very technical stuff…
"And in poetry there is the step beyond: once one has learned to experience the poem as a poem, there inevitably arrives a sense that one is also experiencing himself as a human being…
W. H. Auden was once asked what advice he would give a young man who wished to become a poet. Auden replied that he would ask the young man why he wanted to write poetry. If the answer was 'because I have something important to say,' Auden would conclude that there was no hope for that young man as a poet. If on the other hand the answer was something like 'because I like to hang around words and overhear them talking to one another,' then that young man was at least interested in a fundamental part of the poetic process and there was hope for him.
"When one 'message-hunts' a poem (i.e., goes through the poem with no interest except in its paraphraseable content) he is approaching the writing as did the young man with 'something important to say'…The common question from which such an approach begins is “WHAT Does the Poem Mean?” His mind closed on that point of view, the reader tends to 'interpret' the poem rather than to experience it, seeking only what he can make over from it into a prose statement (or Examination answer) and forgetting in the process that it was originally a poem.…
"For WHAT DOES THE POEM MEAN? is too often a self-destroying approach to poetry. A more useful way of asking the question is HOW DOES A POEM MEAN? Why does it build itself into a form out of images, ideas, rhythms? How do these elements become the meaning? How are they inseparable from the meaning? As Yeats wrote:
O body swayed to music, o quickening glance,
How shall I tell the dancer from the dance?
"What the poem is, is inseparable from its own performance of itself. The dance is in the dancer and the dancer is in the dance. Or put in another way: where is the 'dance' when no one is dancing it? and what man is a 'dancer' except when he is dancing?"

From How Does A Poem Mean, The Riverside Press Cambridge, Houghton Mifflin Company

Okay. That's all I'm going to quote from Ciardi, although there are times I wish his was our textbook rather than stodgy old Sound and Senselessness. Tomorrow I'll take my own look at "Spinster", "Barbie Doll" and "Siren Song" in a way that I hope will be helpful to you in completing your essays.

Stay well,

JD

Essay posts to turnitin.com

Be sure to post your comparison/contrast essays to turnitin.com before midnight on Tuesday, as well as bringing a hard copy to class.

Prompt and homework --2/18

1.  Join in a blog discussion of the poems "Siren Song" and "Barbie Doll".  

2.  Essay due on Feb. 24:  Both "Siren Song" and "Barbie Doll" deal with the relationship between the individual human being and a society that imposes a dehumanizing conformity.  Compare the poets' use of irony in developing this theme.  This will be a 4-5 page, 100 point essay.  

Prompt -- 2/13/2009

Read and work the poem "Spinster" by Sylvia Plath. Engage in a discussion of the overall symbolism of the poem as well as the imagery and figurative language Plath used.

Prompt and homework -- 2/11; poor Mr. Duncan

First, an update.  Mr. Duncan had surgery yesterday and is in a world of pain.  Be sure to send him all your best positive energy as well as notes of encouragement.   

Second, your prompt:  Work the poem "Ulysses" by Tennyson.  Avoid the urge to go to the web and have some "expert" analyze it for you, even though it is difficult.  Share your insights here with your colleagues and help one another figure it out.  On Friday, bring your typed responses to the questions that follow the poem.   Also read "Curiosity" by Alastair Reid and answer the questions that follow that poem.   By the way, isn't Alastair a great name for a cat?

Third:  We will be spending Friday on symbolism, chapter six

Hamlet essay revisions

Oops -- forgot to mention one last thing. Thanks, Brianna, for reminding me.

Hamlet essay revisions must be in this week. Give yours to the substitute, along with your original, marked-up essay.  It's important that I have both so that I can make a proper evaluation. If you have a 70 or better and just wish to stand pat, a revision is not required. If you have a K, it's mandatory. Thus I expect a lot of recreational reading during my convalescence.

JD 

Set the seats for the incoming class

Please do me a favor: Ms. Hackett, who holds Spanish class in our room, needs the desks moved into the arrangement she's diagrammed on the board. It's group seating. I agreed with her that we could do it and then her last class on B days will put the seats back into our arrangement.

I'd feel terrible if we didn't do this for her. It should just take a minute or two if everyone pitches in.

Thanks,
JD

Another kind of valediction -- and a malediction on me.

Dear class,

Something has come up and I'm going to be absent from class a while. I took a fall on the tennis court and now I've got to have surgery to fix what I broke. I learned that I am not "like gold to airy thinness beat," at least under the sublunary circumstances of weekend sports, and so I endured not an expansion but a breach -- both knees, in fact. Mrs. Minor will join the class along with a substitute teacher tomorrow, so I think you'll have a very productive class. Please give my substitute any written work you haven't yet turned in, and on Wednesday your Valediction essays.

I'll continue to post blogs and stay in touch until I get back, other than Tuesday and maybe Wednesday, when I might not be able.

Au revoir,
JD

Valediction & other poetry work

Blog prompt and homework -- 2/5/2009. Read carefully, because the assignment has changed!

1. Before class on Monday: Engage in a blog discussion of "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning" by John Donne. How does Donne use figurative language, diction, and imagery to develop the themes in this poem? Resist the temptation to use the web as a crutch to aid in understanding -- instead, work the poem and THINK about it. Also, read chapter five on figurative language.

2. Due Wednesday: Write a two to three page analysis of Donne's use of figurative language in "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning." Be sure to read the section in your book on writing about poetry before attempting this. Use 12 point Times or Times New Roman and double-space your work.

3. Be prepared to dive back into your group discussions from today. You'll have approximately 20-30 minutes together before presenting your poem and analysis to the class.

"To Autumn" - Supplementary Discussion?

So I thought that I'd see if anyone wanted to discuss "To Autumn" and its assigned questions on the blog.

For starters, question five is a particularly tricky one (in my opinion, at least).

5. Although the poem is primarily descriptive, what attitude toward transience and passing beauty is implicit in it?

Anyone care to chat about it? (I think that I'll think about it over dinner and make a post a bit later, myself.)

EDIT: Looks like J.D. changed the due date of the assignment while I was writing this. Oh well. Anyone still want to discuss?

A little break for you guys

My youthful ward Krista Young has pointed the finger of blame at me. With angry visage she raised it and cried, "J'accuse!"

Why? Because I didn 't put the posting up until this afternoon. I hardly thought the time would matter, since everyone ignores the post until around 7 pm the night before class. Anyway, I did announce the assignment in class.

Still, my hard-won reputation as all-around good guy is in danger. What can I do?

I know -- I'll let you guys turn this written assignment in by Friday -- either e-mailed to me, or handed to Ms. Pandey (lower north) or Mr. Hughes (upper north), my carpool pals who will bring your stuff home to me. If you delay your post for "Those Winter Sundays", do it by Friday night or it will be too late. Besides, there will be a further assignment -- an essay -- over the weekend. (Yes, poetry -- too often dismissed as sensitive sissy stuff -- is, truth to tell, tough, tough, tough. (Dig that alliteration!)

We'll take advantage of the reprieve to discuss the poem and take notes, so you can write a better analysis than you might otherwise have done. We expect you to be thorough with these questions -- some of the Terence work was downright laughable.

Cheers,
JD

Prompt and homework for Thursday, Feb. 5

Blog prompt: Read/work "Those Winter Sundays" 63/57/64/66. What kind of imagery is central to the poem? How does the imagery work to reveal the theme of the poem?

Homework: (a) To turn in: Answer the questions following "To Autumn" (various page numbers: 65/53/67/68) -- pay particular attention to #3 (b) Read sections I-VII -- Writing about poetry

The missing "Why"

As I look over my previous post, I regret not explaining why assignments like the questions for "Terence" are important. My note comes off a bit like petty retaliation for getting the assignment wrong.

That's the wrong note to sound.

So…I'm going to try to explain here what I think you can get out of such assignments besides academic credit:

The blog is useful for posing question and trying out theories, and for general push and pull of opinion. That's one informal way to get into a poem and not be entirely alone in your interpretation.

The questions in Sound & Sense are usually quite good, and lead you to develop a comprehensive understanding of each poem and how it works to convey experience, meaning, music, and feeling. Human nature being what it is, you will skip these pesky questions unless we make them obligatory from time to time. You have to get down in the dirt sometimes and wrestle with the language to get a hold on what's in it.

We call that "working the poem." There's another expression, too: "unpacking the poem." It's best not to think about "solving" or "cracking" the poem, because good poetry does not yield its meaning in that way.

If you approach the analysis assignments conscientiously, I guarantee you that your mind will grow in its ability to cope with ambiguous and artful language. In fact, it will just plain grow.

The blog for such assignments is a sounding board for theories and a way to draw upon the varying perspectives of your classmates. That was the idea behind the "Terence" post. I expect and hope you will use it, but it will not be the main assignment when I ask you to type something and turn it in.

Our discussions in class provide the final synthesis of each poem as it makes its way into our consciousness. I consider them vital, and expect each of you to contribute. I'm going to keep more careful track during this unit of study to see how much you bring to those discussions. A blank expression is less than zero -- at any rate, it rates a zero for participation!

I think, and I hope you agree, that we all wish to use as much of our sophisticated but mysterious brains as we possibly can. Poetry can open up reservoirs of comprehension that you don't presently know you have.

And that goes for me, too! I used to duck poetry, until I had to teach it. Now I count poetry as the most valuable experience -- other than students -- of my teaching career.