Good Morning, Class!

Welcome!  You've come to the right place.

The readings:

1. "New Contemporary Poems: A Hand-picked Anthology" (MacArthur, ed.)
2. A Moon for the Misbegotten / Eugene O'Neill
3. Tess of the d'Urbervilles / Thomas Hardy
4. A Matter of Personal Choice / (You)

As you're reading, go to the appropriate page below.  Log in to leave a thought, a comment or a question.  Maybe you can respond to what someone else has said already.  I'll be eavesdropping from time to time,, but I'm going to keep my comments to myself.  (If you have any particular questions for me, email me at the school email.)

You're expected to leave at least one entry for the three reading.  (Your personal choice reading is optional).  If you do only that, though, expect no more than a "C".  The more entries -- and the more insightful entries -- they better you'll do.)  But really, if you just use this a a forum for discussion, the points will take care of themselves.

There are two additional assignments.  One you'll find on the poem page: read and annotate the twenty poems in the packet.  Due no later  September 4th, to me in my room.

The other will be a traditional "five-paragraph" essay.  (That means an introduction -- one paragraph, the body of the paper -- three, or more, paragraphs, and the conclusion -- one paragraph.)  The key will be coming up with a strong, narrowly defined thesis.  I will be looking for how well you have defended that thesis.  I will be looking for a) a well-defined structure to the paper, and b) evidence of a thorough and thoughtful reading, presented in c) grammatically suitable language.  I'm looking for a topic that can be suitably discussed in 2 - 5 pages.

I would like to to consider both the play and the novel in your paper.  Now, I haven't finished reading Tess, so check back for updated assignments.  But here's what I've got so far.

A)  Self-regard, self-criticism, and self-destruction.  Josie thinks she's too big and ugly for anyone to love (although Jim claims he loves her).  Jim thinks of himself as an alcoholic and irredeemable sinner.  (Well, yes to the first.)  Tess goes along with society's view of her as a fallen woman, and one whom Fate has chosen for sadness.
How accurate are these mirrors in which they see themselves? In what ways do these characters contribute to their own downfalls?

B)  Perception and Reality.  This topic is related to the first, but from a different angle.  How much of the trouble faced by Josie, Jim, and Tess are not their own fault, but strictly due to the way they are viewed by the world (which may be at odds with the person underneath.

C)  Compare and Contrast: Heroines.  Josie Hogan and Tess Durbeyfield.  They are so different in age, beauty, and experience that I can't imagine one actress playing both parts.  On the other hand, they are both farm girls.  They have difficult fathers.  And their love-lives are nothing to write home about.

D)  Compare and Contrast: Heroes.  Jim Tyrone and Angel Clare.  Jim -- basically a good-hearted guy, excepts when he gives into his self-destructive urges.  I don't yet know Angel that well yet.  He seems like a reasonable guy, a man of principles (who, I have reason to believe, will give into hypocrisy -- maybe born of weakness?)

NEW TOPICS!

E)  Compare and Contrast: Departures.  In Act IV of A Moon for the Misbegotten, Jim goes away.  In "Phase the Fifth" of Tess, Clare goes away.  Two different men with two very different reasons leaving two very different women.  What do you make of it all?

F)  Apply the Quotation.  Hardy writes of Clare: "In considering what Tess was not, he overlooked what she was, and forgot that the defective can be more than the entire."  Consider the wisdom behind this quotation in light of certain of the characters in Tess and A Moon.

New Contemporary Poems

But largely, c’mon — you and I both know — real live American poetry is absent from our public schools.  The teaching of poetry languishes, and that region of youthful neurological terrain capable of being ignited and aria’d only by poetry is largely dark, unpopulated, and silent, like a classroom whose door is unopened, whose shades are drawn.

This is more than a shame, for poetry is our common treasure-house, and we need its aliveness, its respect for the subconscious, its willingness to entertain ambiguity; we need its plaintive truth-telling about the human condition and its imaginative exhibitions of linguistic freedom, which confront the general culture’s more grotesque manipulations.  We need the emotional training sessions poetry conducts us through.  We need its previews of coming attractions: heartbreak, survival, failure, endurance, understanding, more heartbreak.

The first part of the fix is very simple: the list of poems taught in our schools needs to be updated.  We must make a new and living catalogue accessible to teachers as well as students. The old chestnuts — “The Road Not Taken,” “I heard a fly buzz when I died,” “Do not go gentle into that good night” — great, worthy poems all — must be removed and replaced by poems that are not chestnuts.  This refreshing of canonical content and tone will vitalize teachers and students everywhere, and just may revive our sense of the currency and relevance of poetry.  Accomplish that, and we can renew the conversation, the teaching, everything. . .

If anthologies were structured to represent the way that most of us actually learn, they would begin in the present and “progress” into the past.  I read Lawrence Ferlinghetti before I read D. H. Lawrence before I read Thomas Wyatt.  Once the literate appetite is whetted, it will keep turning to new tastes.  A reader who first falls in love with Billy Collins or Mary Oliver is likely then to drift into an anthology that includes Emily Dickinson and Thomas Hardy. . .

In the spirit of boosterism, I have selected twenty works I believe worthy of inclusion in this curriculum — works I believe could empower us with a common vocabulary of stories, values, points of reference. The brief explications and justifications I offer below for nine of these poems are not meant to foreclose the interpretive possibilities that are part of a good poem’s life force. Rather, I hope they will point to areas worthy of cultivation in that mysterious inner space, the American mind.

~Tony Hoagland, Poet

Okay, Tony.  I accept your challenge.  The thing is, I don’t care for your list of poems, so I’ve chosen my own.  Class, here are twenty (plus one) poems to whet your appetites, and to entice you into the joys of poetry.

~ Jim MacArthur, Teacher

Click to enlarge.

Okay, here's what to do with the poetry packet.  Two things.

1. Interact with the poems as you read them.  Have a conversation with the poet.  (See an example to the right as I read two poems by Marie Howe -- at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in Farmington, July 12, 2015.)  If you're not sure how to read a poem -- no seriously, it's different from other reading, go here.  The completed, annotated set of poems must be turned in no later than September 4, 2015.

2.   Leave a comment on the blog (below).  As you're reading, if you have a favorite poem (or even a passage from a poem -- that's fine) share it with your classmates.  Or if you're puzzled by something, ask what others have come up with.





By the way, I encourage all of you to drop by the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival this summer.  (Although I must warn you, they are now charging a $15.00 dollar admission fee.*  Well, considering I'll pay $50 dollars for a seat at Fenway, plus another $20 to park, plus gas and tolls -- it's still a great deal.  But poetry is for everybody -- not just the elites.)  Ted Kooser, United States Poet Laureate from 2004 to 2006, opens the Festival on June 24th.  Other Poet Laureates who have read there include Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Philip Levine, and Natasha Trethewey.  (Natasha has been here twice -- once as a young unknown and then later in her first reading as Poet Laureate.)  Many of the poets in your packet are Sunken Garden alumni.  There's food and drink. live music, then a poetry reading -- all in a beautiful setting on a lovely summer evening.  One can hardly get more civilized that that.

* Update -- Well, they are and they aren't.  If you're 18 or under (like you), it's FREE!  If you're over 18 (like me) it's still $15.00.  And only $12.00 if you buy your ticket online.  

How to Read a Poem

How to Read a Poem

Step 1 – Giving it the once over.

The first thing to do is give the poem a slow, steady reading from beginning to end.  (You can stop a little bit to try to figure things out, but not too much.)  Read it out loud, if you can.  (If the poet has an accent, use an accent.)              All you want to do at this point is to get a general idea of “what the poem is about”.

Step 2 – Figuring it out.

Now that you have a general idea of where the poet is going, you can begin to unlock the diction and imagery of the poem.  This needs to be done slowly.  You may have to read the same phrase, line, or stanza a few times.  At this point, you’ll want to interact with the poem.  Underline.  Make notes.  Ask questions.  Talk back.  (It’s called “marginalia”.)             Once that stanza comes into focus, you may want to go back to an earlier stanza, unravel that one, then proceed again.  Slowly, more and more of the poem will come into focus.

Diction: how the words are strung together.  The diction of a poem tends to be a little more confusing than the diction of prose.  You have to figure out what goes where – what phrase refers to what noun, what that pronoun is modifying.  Work at it.              Sometimes words are used in unusual ways.  “Because their words had forked no lightning. . .” says Dylan Thomas.  Here “fork” is used as a verb.  (Try identifying exactly what part of speech a word is being used as.)  A road can fork.  Conceivably you could fork a pork chop from a platter.  Here it’s being used a little differently – in a new way particular to this poem.

Imagery: Natasha Trethewey says “let the image do the work”.              Dylan Thomas doesn’t explain what he means by “their words had forked no lightning”.  As far as he’s concerned, he already has – why beat a dead horse?  There’s no hidden meaning here: there’s no symbolism.  The image is one of sudden illumination, which in the context of the poem indicates blinding insight.

Remember Occum’s Razor.  This principle is “often incorrectly summarized as ‘the simplest explanation is more likely the correct one,” (according to Wikipedia), but for our purposes, that definition will do.  I find that very often students try to look too deeply into a poem.  When Dylan Thomas says “Father”, he’d not referring to God, or the Church, or the patriarchal society that he lives in.  He means his dad.  (His dad might be a godlike figure to him, but in the first context, he’s still Dad.)

Step 3 – Putting it all together.

Once you gone through it slowly, untangling the syntax and grasping the imagery, go back and give it a start-to-finish read.  Go slowly but steadily.  (Out loud is always a good idea.)  By now you should have a pretty good idea of what’s going on.

Step 4 – A close reading in class.

The first three steps have been done on your own.  Now we’ll bring it back to class and give it a “close reading”.  We’ll see how you’ve done so far on figuring it all out.  At this point you may get new information – on the poet, or the times, or the language – that may fill in some blanks or cause you to adjust your previous interpretation.

Step 5 – All together now.

After we’re done with it in class, and before it’s time to take the unit test or the timed essay, go over it one more time yourself, blending your reading with our in-class reading.  It will all be a lot clearer and you should have a good appreciation for what made the poem important enough to make our curriculum.

A Moon for the Misbegottten

When it comes to standing ovations, I'm old-fashioned. I think they should be reserved for truly outstanding performances. Nothing bugs me more than people who sit in their seat a while, then decide "Yea, I guess it's worth a standing ovation." If you're not absolutely propelled out of your seat by a performance, then sit down.When I saw A Moon for the Misbegotten a few years ago at the Hartford Stage Company, I leapt to my feet at the final curtain.

Here's why -- the love story, between Jim Tyrone and Josie Hogan, is beautiful, complex, and tormented. Now you take Romeo and Juliet: he was hot for her, she was hot for him; not much of a story, really. I can't tell you now about the nature of the characters or the relationship -- you'll have to discover that for yourself.

The play is set in Connecticut, of course, but back in the 1920's.  It's more of a rural, agricultural Connecticut, compared to our Connecticut of suburban commuters in their McMansions.

And the playwright, Eugene O'Neill is a Connecticut native. And he's a heavyweight.  As should become apparent as you read this.

Be sure to leave your name when you leave your response.

Addendum: I encourage you to take a look at the following short article: "Yes, More Drama: The Deep and Unique Pleasure of Reading Plays".  The author, Dan Kois, says the when you read a play -- to really read a play -- is to cast it, direct it, and star in it.  Try it yourself!




Oh, and -- SPOILER ALERT -- Josie's not promiscuous.  (She just says she is.)

And What Else Will You Be Reading this Summer?

And I hope you will be.  The assignments are short (excepting Tess) for a reason.  Some AP teachers, I'm convinced, create their reading lists with other teachers in mind, not students.  (And if they think students are really reading everything they've assigned, they're kidding themselves.)

I think reading matters, and I want to allow you some time to read something that you really want to.  (Not to say that what I've assigned isn't great literature: it is.  But maybe -- just maybe -- it's not what you would have chosen on your own.)

I start ever summer with a big pile of books, now that I've got some spare time on my hands.

What will you be reading?

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

The poems are short.  The play is short.  This one is long (around 400 pages in my edition).  It's a classic 19th century novel, deliberately paced.  But it has a lot to recommend it.

Personally I love Thomas Hardy, but although I've read all the rest of his majors novels, as well as some those lesser known, I've never read Tess, which is one of his greatest.  I often assign a Hardy novel; I thought I'd read this one with you.

In this novel, as in all of Hardy's work, Fate plays an enormous role.  We are tiny, pathetic creatures, at the mercy of forces bigger than us and which -- if they care for us at all -- are hostile to us.  This one all starts of with a chance encounter on a country lane, where John Durbeyfield is told that he is descended from a noble family.  And this leads to. . .  which leads to. . .  and then unfortunately. . .  and it all ends here:

Tess is set in a transitional time.

"Between the mother, with her fast-perishing lumber of superstitions, folklore, dialect, and orally transmitted ballads, and the daughter, with her trained National teachings and Standard knowledge under an infinitely revised code, there was a gap of two hundred years as ordinarily understood.  When they were together, the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed."

One of the things changing is social mores.  Attitudes toward sex and marriage, the role of women, are changing, as people move away from life on the land and into the Age of Industrialization.  It may be hard to believe now, but Hardy was a scandalous writer in his day.

Many of hardy protagonists, like Tess, are young ladies.  We tend to overlook just how young they are, especially in light of the times in which they lived.  When the story begins, Tess is your age -- 16 or 17 -- but she hasn't grown up as fast, in many ways, as you have.

Now, I want you to beware of the several movie version of Tess that are available.  I've watched one so far, and I will probably be watching others.  The first one I've seen has some gaping holes in the plot.  And I didn't really care for this particular Tess at all.  (Although the actress playing her is quite pretty, it's not the right kind of pretty -- at least to my mind.)  And resist the urge to use Sparknoes, etc.  You'll miss out on a visit to Hardy's Wessex.

Here's my favorite part so far:

"I don't know about ghosts," she was saying; "but I do know that our souls can be made to go outside our bodies when we are alive."

The dairyman turned to her with his mouth full, his eyes charged with serious inquiry, and his great knife and fork (breakfasts were breakfasts here) planted erect on the table, like the beginning of a gallows.

"What--really now? And is it so, maidy?" he said.

Ah, breakfast!  A real breakfast, a big breakfast, a breakfast to keep you going though a morning of hard work on the farm!