Michael Bailey

Blackboard Web site

Some people have had trouble accessing the Blackboard site.

Here's the address link:

http://cobbk12.blackboard.com/

Aunt Jennifer's Tigers

The assessment on "Aunt Jennifer's Tigers" follows:

Poetry Explication #2

 
Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers
by Adrienne Rich

Aunt Jennifer's tigers prance across a screen, 
Bright topaz denizens of a world of green. 
They do not fear the men beneath the tree; 
They pace in sleek chivalric certainty. 

Aunt Jennifer's fingers fluttering through her wool 
Find even the ivory needle hard to pull. 
The massive weight of Uncle's wedding band 
Sits heavily upon Aunt Jennifer's hand. 

When Aunt is dead, her terrified hands will lie 
Still ringed with ordeals she was mastered by. 
The tigers in the panel that she made 
Will go on prancing, proud and unafraid.

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Use the poem to answer the following questions.  You may answer the questions on the back of this sheet.  Be sure to support your answers with information from the text.

1. The poem gives clues about Aunt Jennifer's relationship with her husband. Describe their relationship and support your answer with quotes from the poem.
2. The tigers are an obvious symbol, but what do they mean?  What words and phrases does Rich use in order to convey the symbolic meanings of the tigers?  This question seeks your opinion and understanding.  Give it and prove it.
3. What does this poem suggest about the role of women in marriage and in society? 
4. What makes this a “feminist” poem?

Hint:  Aunt Jennifer is sewing needlework of some kind, most likely cross-stitching.  The needles and wool make reference to that.  Ivory needles were used before metal and plastic needles, so it is likely that Aunt Jennifer is from an earlier time, say the late 1800’s or the early 1900’s.

Vocabulary:

prance:  move in a sprightly manner; walk with lively steps

pace: walk back and forth

sleek:  smooth and shiny; well-groomed

topaz:  transparent brown gemstone; yellowish brown color

denizen:  resident

chivalric:  relating to knights and the knight’s code of honor

ordeals:  difficult experience

ivory: material made from elephant’s tusks; creamy white

panel:  flat rectangular piece of wood, here used to frame the needlework.

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For an interesting essay about this poem, go to the following link:

http://www.brocku.ca/english/courses/4F70/aunt.html

Poetry Responses for Black History

This week’s selection is dedicated to the Black poets of America who have made and are making significant contributions to American literature.  Please read the biography that precedes each poem.

Read each of the poems carefully.

Choose one poem and write a thoughtful response to it.  The response is your personal reaction and opinion of the poem.  Think deeply about the poems.  Be honest in your reflections.  This assignment is about engaging poetry and allowing poetry to engage you.

The response should be at least one-half page in length.

This response is due on February 8, 2008.  It is worth 20 points.

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Gwendolyn Brooks was born in Topeka, Kansas, in 1917 and raised in Chicago. She is the author of more than twenty books of poetry, including Children Coming Home (The David Co., 1991); Blacks (1987); To Disembark (1981); The Near-Johannesburg Boy and Other Poems (1986); Riot (1969); In the Mecca (1968); The Bean Eaters (1960); Annie Allen (1949), for which she received the Pulitzer Prize; and A Street in Bronzeville (1945). She also wrote numerous other books including a novel, Maud Martha (1953), and Report from Part One: An Autobiography (1972), and edited Jump Bad: A New Chicago Anthology (1971). In 1968 she was named Poet Laureate for the state of Illinois, and from 1985-86 she was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She also received an American Academy of Arts and Letters award, the Frost Medal, a National Endowment for the Arts award, the Shelley Memorial Award, and fellowships from The Academy of American Poets and the Guggenheim Foundation. She lived in Chicago until her death on December 3, 2000.

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The Mother

by Gwendolyn Brooks

Abortions will not let you forget.

You remember the children you got that you did not get,

The damp small pulps with a little or with no hair,

The singers and workers that never handled the air.

You will never neglect or beat

Them, or silence or buy with a sweet.

You will never wind up the sucking-thumb

Or scuttle off ghosts that come.

You will never leave them, controlling your luscious sigh,

Return for a snack of them, with gobbling mother-eye.

I have heard in the voices of the wind the voices of my dim killed

               children.

I have contracted. I have eased

My dim dears at the breasts they could never suck.

I have said, Sweets, if I sinned, if I seized

Your luck

And your lives from your unfinished reach,

If I stole your births and your names,

Your straight baby tears and your games,

Your stilted or lovely loves, your tumults, your marriages, aches,

               and your deaths,

If I poisoned the beginnings of your breaths,

Believe that even in my deliberateness I was not deliberate.

Though why should I whine,

Whine that the crime was other than mine?--

Since anyhow you are dead.

Or rather, or instead,

You were never made.

But that too, I am afraid,

Is faulty: oh, what shall I say, how is the truth to be said?

You were born, you had body, you died.

It is just that you never giggled or planned or cried.

Believe me, I loved you all.

Believe me, I knew you, though faintly, and I loved, I loved you

All.

Feminist Criticism

It was a fascinating day as we learned about feminist criticism and applied it to three poems.

Tomorrow we present those poems and discuss how they represent male and female roles.

Here's the information about feminist criticism that I handed out today.

FEMINIST CRITICISM

“Feminist criticism examines the social, economic, and cultural aspects of literary works, but especially for what those works reveal about the role, position, and influence of women.  Feminist critics also typically see literature as an arena in which to contest for power and control, since as sociological critics, feminist critics also see literature as an agent for social transformation.”

Robert DiYanni, Literature, p. 2090

Four central tenets of Feminist Criticism

1. Western civilization is pervasively patriarchal (ruled by the father)-that is, it is male-centered and controlled, and is organized and conducted in such a way as to subordinate women to men in all cultural domains: familial, religious, political, economic, social, legal, and artistic.
2. The prevailing concepts of gender-of the traits that constitute what is masculine and what is feminine-are largely, if not entirely, cultural constructs that were generated by the omnipresent  patriarchal biases of our civilization.
3. This patriarchal (or masculinist” or “androcentric”) ideology pervades those writings which have been considered great literature, and which until recently have been written almost entirely by men for men.
4. The traditional aesthetic categories and criteria for analyzing and appraising literary works…are in fact infused with masculine assumptions, interests and ways of reasoning, so that the standard rankings, and also the critical treatments of literary works have in fact been tacitly but thoroughly gender-biased.*

*M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, 6^th ed. (1993), pp. 234-35

Checklist of Feminist Critical Questions

1.      To what extent does the representation of women (and men) in the work reflect the time and place in which the work was written?

2.      How are the relations between men and women, or those between members of the same sex, presented in the work?  What roles do men and women assume and perform and with what consequences?

3.      Does the author present the work from within a predominantly male or female sensibility?  Why might this have been done, and with what effects?

4.      How do the facts of the author’s life relate to the presentation of men and women in the work?  To their relative degrees of power?

5.      How do other works by the author correspond to this one in their depiction of the power relationships between men and women?

Feminist criticism is a type of literary criticism, which may study and advocate the rights of women. As Judith Fetterley says, "Feminist criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read." Using feminist criticism to analyze fiction may involve studying the repression of women in fiction. How do men and women differ? What is different about female heroines, and why are these characters important in literary history? In addition to many of the questions raised by a study of women in literature, feminist criticism may study stereotypes, creativity, ideology, racial issues, marginality, and more.

http://classiclit.about.com/od/literaryterms/g/aa_feminist.htm

Feminist criticism became a dominant force in Western literary studies in the late 1970s, when feminist theory more broadly conceived was applied to linguistic and literary matters. Since the early 1980s, feminist literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways and is now characterized by a global perspective.

Although interested in the subject of feminine language and writing, North American feminist critics of the 1970s and early 1980s began by analyzing literary texts—not by abstractly discussing language—via close textual reading and historical scholarship. One group practiced "feminist critique," examining how women characters are portrayed, exposing the patriarchal ideology implicit in the so-called classics, and demonstrating that attitudes and traditions reinforcing systematic masculine dominance are inscribed in the literary canon. Another group practiced what came to be called "gynocriticism," studying writings by women and examining the female literary tradition to find out how women writers across the ages have perceived themselves and imagined reality.

By the early 1990s, the French, American, and British approaches had so thoroughly critiqued, influenced, and assimilated one another that nationality no longer automatically signaled a practitioner’s approach. Today’s critics seldom focus on "woman" as a relatively monolithic category; rather, they view "women" as members of different societies with different concerns. Feminists of color, Third World (preferably called postcolonial) feminists, and lesbian feminists have stressed that women are not defined solely by the fact that they are female; other attributes (such as religion, class, and sexual orientation) are also important, making the problems and goals of one group of women different from those of another.

Many commentators have argued that feminist criticism is by definition gender criticism because of its focus on the feminine gender. But the relationship between feminist and gender criticism is, in fact, complex; the two approaches are certainly not polar opposites but, rather, exist along a continuum of attitudes toward sex, sexuality, gender, and language.

http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/Virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_femin.html

Friday at Last!

Mucho Poetry today.

If you missed us today, you missed a potpourri of poetry.

We shared responses we wrote about the poems this week and last week.

Most people enjoyed  "WHAT THE CHILD KNOWS ABOUT THE NIGHT," "Ex-Basketball Player," and "In the Dark."

Sixth period insisted on returning to last week and tore into "The Spoon" and "Cloudy Mirror."

Here's part of an interview with Charles Simic, the author of "The Spoon." It's from Artful Dodge at  http://www.wooster.edu/ArtfulDodge/interviews/simic.htm.

EW: In 1965 your object poems like "Fork," "The Spoon," and "Knife" didn't receive much praise. But you said that you felt the object, "the irreducible itself," was the place to begin. How does this strategy relate, if at all, to Imagism? Also, do you still feel that this approach to poetry is valid?

Simic: Well, I think for me it was a useful way to begin again. What happened was I got tired of my work, and I had this feeling that I needed to begin again with something simple. One day in my apartment I was sitting in my kitchen and I noticed these things-you know, knife, fork, spoons, other things. Objects. So I said, let me write poems about this. Now, yes, Imagism did the same thing-although I wasn't too hip about that. I wasn't really then thinking about William Carlos Williams and Imagism. The more immediate influence was French Surrealist poetry written in the 20's, al-though my approach was different. It was an enormously important moment: to discover a whole area of these objects and to write poems about them because, well, nobody wrote poems about forks and knives, or an axe or a pair of shoes. It gave me a kind of freedom. I thought at first I would have a whole book just on these object poems. But I found I was repeating myself, that I could not duplicate quite the same quality of attention, or simply that I didn't have interest in some objects. Take brooms. I remember one day I noticed a broom in the corner of the kitchen and I said "Aha!" I now had a poem called "Broom." But then I had to have a book, I had to have a lot of object poems. So I kept looking around, going to other people's homes. I'd see an ashtray. Okay, let's try an ashtray. Toothpick, let's try a tooth-pick. And then I found out I really didn't give a damn about tooth-picks or ashtrays, but that I did care a lot about brooms. So, I couldn't do very many poems. It ended up that I had a only about ten poems, maybe a dozen.

JC: But elsewhere you say that objects are an impediment to insight. A character in one of your poems says "'We reach the real by over-coming / the seduction of images.'" If you get too obsessed with images you're sort of missing the forest for that tree, or that broom, or that toothpick or whatever.

Simic: Well, the character who says that in the poem happens to be a philosopher friend of mine. The person telling the story in the poem, however, knows that what this character says is impossible. It's certainly impossible for me. One of the wonderful things about objects is that they are like drawing. You really have to look at them with your eyes open, and then you have to look at them with your eyes closed, and only then can you begin to see more. The object is the task master. If you're writing about a fork, or a knife, or a spoon-or whatever you're writing about-you can't be arbitrary; you have to be faithful to that thing itself. There's a tremendous struggle back and forth-temptations to imagine too much, to invent, to dis-tort. On the other hand, if you simply look at it, there's not much to describe beyond a certain point. So back and forth, back and forth you go, between the impulse to be realistic and the imaginative impulse. Through such fundamental, opposing impulses there comes an incredibly interesting "other thing." But, like anything else, it's only interesting for a period of time. You get to a point where you just can't do it anymore.

EW: I wanted to ask you about the nature of the narrative thread that seems to binds these images together in your poems. Typically the reader of your poems is hit with a dazzling series of loosely connected images, and then often there's that final line that some-how connects everything. Is this in fact the logic of your narrative movement? And, if so, is it a conscious construction?

Simic: Well, depending on the poem. I mean, if one believed only in one kind of logic one probably could not write a poem at all. I want all of my poems to communicate. I am not interested in not communicating. But I also know it's possible to communicate on levels that are unpredictable. The simplest answer to your question would be to say that when I feel these things connect, I feel deeply that they connect only at some point. After revising the poem end-lessly, endlessly, endlessly, I say, "Aha, now it works." But I'm not interested in stepping away and saying, "How did you get that to work?" I just know intuitively it works. One should never under-estimate the imagination of the reader, the intelligence of the read-er. The reader can pick up on these seemingly unrelated images. For me it's a process of paring things down, moving things around until they seem to click together in some sort of fashion.

Monday we will begin to consider three new poems and learn about Feminist Criticism.

3rd, 4th, and 6th Periods began the study of Diction by reading and analyzing "I Wandered Lonely as  Cloud."

This poem is representative of the Romantic period of Literature.  William Wordsworth, the author of the poem, was the Poet Laureate of England from 1843-1850.  A poet laureate is the official title of a well-known poet who is selected by the government to write poetry for specific national events.  The current poet laureate in England is Andrew Motion.

The current US poet laureate is Charles Simic whose poem "The Spoon" was recently featured in the Poetry Responses #1 packet.

5th Period moved ahead and wrestled with "Miniver Cheevy."  We discovered that Miniver was a sad little man who lived in a dream world and refused to face his real life. 

Tomorrow we confront "Delight in Disorder."

What a day!

Okay, this is going to be interesting.

Depending on what class you were in, we discussed the following:

1. Cloverfield
2. Monsters
3. Fish
4. The Collective Unconscious
5. The Dream World
6. Master Fish
7. Master Fisherman
8. Triumph in a boat
9. Diction
10. Daffodils
11. Touchy feely poem
12. Ghosts, vampires, spirits
13. Deja vu
14. dreams of death
15. anima
16. animus
17. archetypes
18. Baptism
19. ambiguity
20. miscellaneous stuff

There you have it.  Today's lessons.  You had to be there.

Poetry Explication

In class today, students completed the following assignment.

If you were not in class on Friday, you will need to complete this.

Poetry Explication

Write a well-developed paragraph of 75-150 words in which you provide as much of the following information as is applicable.  Don’t merely answer the questions in order.  Weave the answers and observations together in a coherent manner.

A.       Identify the title of the poem, the author

B.       Describe the poem’s literal meaning.  What is its subject?  Its theme?

C.       Who is the speaker?  What is the speaker’s point of view?

D.      What is the tone of the poem?

1. What sort of attitude, mood or emotion does it convey?
2. Does the tone shift?  If so, how does it contribute to the theme?
3. Is it happy, sad, humorous, angry, nostalgic, serious, frivolous, sarcastic, ecstatic, grotesque?
4. Is there irony: a discrepancy between what is stated and what is meant, conveyed through a tone of voice or contradiction between words and the matter at hand?

E.    How do the voice and tone contribute to the theme and overall effect of the poem?

The Fish

by Elizabeth Bishop

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.

He didn’t fight.
He hadn’t fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in

the terrible oxygen

--the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly —
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
— It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
— if you could call it a lip —

grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels — until everything

was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

Vocabulary for poem:

1. venerable: worthy of respect as a result of great age, wisdom, remarkable achievements, or similar qualities
2. speckled: with a pattern of many small spots or small irregular patches, often of a contrasting color
3. barnacles: a small invertebrate animal with a shell that clings to rocks and ships
4. rosettes: patch of color or a marking resembling the open flower of a rose, especially a cluster of spots on the fur of a leopard
5. entrails: an animal's or person's internal organs
6. peony: a large ornamental shrubby plant. Flowers: large, globe-shaped, red, white, pink. Native to: Europe, Asia, North America.
7. irises: the colored part of the eye that consists of a muscular diaphragm surrounding the pupil and regulates the light entering the eye by expanding and contracting the pupil
8. tarnished: lose shine and become dull because of oxidation or rust, or make something do this
9. isinglass: transparent or translucent gelatin made from the air bladders of various fish, especially the sturgeon. Use: clarifying agent, in adhesives and jellies.
10. sullen: showing bad temper or hostility by a refusal to talk, behave sociably, or cooperate cheerfully
11. crimped: to fold or press the ends or edges of something together
12. bilge: the part of a boat below the water where the sides curve inward to the keel
13. bailer: a bucket, dipper, or other container used for bailing.
14. thwarts: a crosswise seat or transverse member on a rowboat, canoe, or similar small boat
15. oarlocks: a U-shaped pivoting metal rest attached to the side of a boat, in which an oar rests
16. gunnels: the top edge of a boat's sides that forms a ledge around the whole boat above the deck

My Last Duchess

We read "My Last Duchess" by Robert Browning today and discovered that the Duke was not happy with his wife's friendliness toward others.

The speaker of the poem was the Duke who was showing off the portrait of his late wife.  He may have had her killed because she smiled at everyone and did not focus exclusively on him.

The Duke lent the poem an arrogant tone as we discovered that he saw people as objects to be possessed and not to be loved.

My Last Duchess
Robert Browning

That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Frà Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,
How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, 'twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
Of joy into the Duchess' cheek: perhaps
Frà Pandolf chanced to say "Her mantle laps
"Over my lady's wrist too much," or "Paint
"Must never hope to reproduce the faint
"Half-flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart how shall I say? too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.
Sir, 'twas all one! My favor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace all and each
Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men good! but thanked
Somehow I know not how as if she ranked
My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name
With anybody's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
This sort of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech which I have not to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, "Just this
"Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
"Or there exceed the mark" and if she let
Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and make excuse,
E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene'er I passed her; but who passed without
Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands
As if alive. Will't please you rise? We'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed
At starting, is my object. Nay we'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Claus of

Innsbruck

cast in bronze for me!

My Last Duchess
  Robert Browning