Now read this...

As I mentioned a few posts ago, I’m now a paid working mother with a job teaching at the local community college. Only five classes are left before finals. (I’m crossing my fingers to get offered another class or two next semester.) We finished up the short story unit, and now I’m scrambling to decide what poems to cover in those last 5 hours of class. How can I engage the imaginations of these students who universally find poetry boring? I could either go for interesting and contemporary poems, or historically and culturally significant poems, or I could pick out exemplifications of the various figures of speech, forms, sound effects, use of symbolism, etc. . . . What I really need to do is just make a decision!

 

Fortuitously, the short stories I finally chose seemed to complement each other with regard to theme or characterization. Judging by the essays I’ve graded so far, most students only read the ones I quizzed them over, or ones they may already have been familiar with (“The Lottery”). I was surprised to read two journal entries from different students who read O. Henry’s “The Gift of The Magi” negatively. One thought Della was afraid of making Jim mad and that Jim flopping on the couch was a sign of his disgust. The other student felt that the author was urging greater consideration before visiting the pawn shop because he thought the loss of the favorite possessions was a such a great sorrow .

 

The stories we ended up reading were:

• "Godfather Death" by the Brothers Grimm
• Updike’s “A & P” (focused on the idea of chivalry)
• Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”
• Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” (Our two fascinated by death stories)
• Carver’s “Cathedral”
• Willa Cather’s “Paul’s Case” (these were our art stories)
• Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown”
• TC Boyle’s “Greasy Lake” (Our dark wilderness/dark heart stories)
• Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use”
• Tillie Olsen’s “I Stand Here Ironing” (mother/daughter/sister relationships)
• Katherine Anne Porter’s “Jilting of Granny Weatherall”
• O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” (Southern grannies dying stories)
• Kate Chopin’s “The Storm”
• Chekhov’s “Lady with the Pet Dog” (adultery stories)
• Ha Jin’s “Saboteur”
• O’Brien’s “The Things They Carried” (which affected me much more strongly this time around. The first time I read it back in college, I could hardly stay awake. This time I could hardly keep back the tears. I never was interesting in reading more of O’Brien, but now I want to hunt down the story collection from whence this came, of the same title. Perhaps because I have a more intimate connection with war since my husband went to Afghanistan? What a different environment than Vietnam, though.)
• Finally, for irony and cultural literacy: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi”

 

 

No Hemingway after all. After reading the selection in the book, “A Clean, Well-lighted Place,” I decided that despite Hemingway's popularity with adolescents and young adults, I didn't want to talk about such a nihilistic piece. Could be retitled “All the Lonely People.”

 

 

Now for poetry: At first I thought I’d breeze through a different historical period each class session, to unify our approach and to see how poetry has evolved, but the book doesn’t offer much written before Shakespeare aside from “Barbara Allen” and “Sir Patrick Spens.” Next I thought I’d pick themes to guide our reading – love day, war day, nature day, etc. Then I considered assigning vocab terms and picking exemplars. So many possibilities, and so many poems…

 

So far we have just addressed why read poetry – although by “we,” I mean me. I assigned the first 2 chapters in the poetry section of their book, one on definitions of poetry, and the next entitled “Words.” Today I read aloud Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art” and Billy Collins' “Introduction to Poetry,“ a fun one. The college requires a quantitative analysis paper on responses to “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke. The class nearly unanimously agreed that it suggested an abusive situation, rather than merely an image of a father (perhaps scorned by his wife and beat down by his job) boisterously romping with his son. I started to talk about WCW’s “Red Wheelbarrow” although I was a little stumped about what to say, other than “ponder.” Let it stick.

 

Surprisingly successful was the little poetry writing exercise that I borrowed from another teacher. I handed out a paper with a prescribed form for describing a favorite place, and was delighted with the responses. So – more poetry writing in the future. Perhaps that will be the guiding star - starting each class with a writing exercise.

 

The other poem that seemed to go over well was James Stephens’ “A Glass of Beer.” I’m leaning toward trying to pick poems the students can identify with, just so they won’t be left with a bitter taste for poetry.

 

A strong invective is always popular, so ending with a bitter bite:

 

A Glass of Beer

 

The lanky hank of a she in the inn over there

Nearly killed me for asking the loan of a glass of beer:

May the devil grip the whey-faced slut by the hair

And beat bad manners out of her skin for a year.

That parboiled imp, with the hardest jaw you will ever see

On virtue's path, and a voice that would rasp the dead,

Came roaring and raging the minute she looked at me,

And threw me out of the house on the back of my head.

 

 

If I asked her master he'd give me a cask a day;

But she with the beer at hand, not a gill would arrange!

May she marry a ghost and bear him a kitten and may

The High King of Glory permit her to get the mange.