Finish work on "Passion" esays/Magic Realism stories

Work on "Passion" essays or Magic Realism stories. Hand in work at end of period.

If you are finished with this project, begin reading David Sedaris or Christopher Moore. Visit their websites (Christopher Moore's has games and lots of fun!)

Here are the links:

www.chrismoore.com/

www.npr.org/programs/specials/lists/sedaris/

Magical Realism

There have been some videos that show Magical Realism really well. Can you see any similarities?

Simply Irresistable
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNhbjTllZR4

Chocolat
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLAuf4-a0I4

Big Fish
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-d-kjzBmz6I



Today we are going to conclude Like Water for Chocolate.

Finish Like Water for Chocolate

We will finish watching the movie on Friday.

Finish Reading Like Water for Chocolate. We will conclude the book with a final discussion on Tuesday.

Mexican Traditions WallWisher

I looked through what you came up with in class to put on the wallwisher and I thought that you had some really interesting and relevant information!! You should take a look at some of the info your classmates found.

Nice job!!!

Thank you for participating on such activities! It is certainly noted. :-)

Ms. Moraites

Passion Essay

In a well-developed personal informal essay of 3-5 pages, consider what are your passions. You can draw on anecdotal experience, readings, famous quotes from others, music lyrics, etc.

Consider this quote from Like Water for Chocolate as your "starting point" or inspiration:


"Each of us is born with a box of matches inside us but we can't strike them all by ourselves; just as in the experiment, we need oxygen and a candle to help. In this case, the oxygen, for example, would come from the breath of the person you love; the candle could be any kind of food, music, caress, word, or sound that engenders the explosion that lights one of the matches.” (115)

More about Like Water for Chocolate

Like Water for Chocolate's full title is: Like Water for Chocolate: A novel in monthly installments with recipes, romances and home remedies.

The phrase "like water for chocolate" comes from the Spanish "como agua para chocolate". This phrase is a common expression in some Spanish speaking countries and was the inspiration for Laura Esquivel's novel title (the name has a double-meaning). In some Latin American countries, such as Mexico, hot chocolate is made not with milk, but with water instead. Water is boiled and chunks of milk chocolate are dropped in to melt thus creating the hot chocolate. The saying "like water for chocolate," alludes to this fact and also to the common use of the expression as a metaphor for describing a state of passion or -sometimes- sexual arousal. In some parts of Latin America, the saying is also equivalent to being "boiling mad" in anger.[8]

This is the story of Tita (Lumi Cavazos), a young woman growing up during the Mexican Revolution. Tita lives with her mother and two sisters, Rosaura and Gertrudis, on a
large ranch; her father died shortly after her birth. As the youngest daughter of the family, Tita, by long-standing tradition, can never marry; it is her responsibility to care for her mother into old age. Tita is raised in the kitchen, learning to cook and take care of household responsibilities from early childhood, and she is aware of the family tradition. She falls in love anyway, with a young man named Pedro (Marco Leonardi). When Pedro asks for Tita's hand in marriage and is refused, he agrees to marry Rosaura instead -- so he can be near Tita, the true love of his life. Tita pours heartbreak and anger into her cooking, and her feelings are magically transferred to the rest of her family.

In literature, magic realism often combines the external factors of human existence with the internal ones. It is a fusion between scientific physical reality and psychological human reality. It incorporates aspects of human existence such as thoughts, emotions, dreams, cultural mythologies and imagination

http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/likewater/


http://www.salon.com/oct96/interview961104.html
An interview with the author...

SparkNotes
Like Water for Chocolate is a popular novel, published in 1989 by first-time Mexican novelist Laura Esquivel. The novelLaura Esquivel follows the story of a young girl named Tita who longs her entire life for her lover, Pedro, but can never have him because of her domineering mother's traditional belief that the youngest daughter must not marry but take care of her mother until the day she dies. Tita is only able to express her passions and feelings through her cooking, which causes the people who taste it to experience what she feels.The novel was originally published in Spanish as Como agua para chocolate and has been translated into thirty languages; there are over three million copies in print worldwide.

The novel makes heavy use of magical realism. The novel was made into a film in 1993.[4] It earned all 11 Ariel awards of the Mexican Academy of Motion Pictures, including the Ariel Award for Best Picture, and became the highest grossing foreign film ever released in the United States at the time.
Laura Esquivel Biography
Like Water for Chocolate (Criticism): Information and Much More ...
As a site for the crucial link between food and life, .... In Like Water for Chocolate, magic realism becomes an appropriate vehicle for the expression of ...
www.answers.com/topic/like-water-for-chocolate-novel

Mexican Traditions

Setting is an important element to this book. Laura Esquivel writes from what she knows. As she wades through this story about a woman who wants to seek out her passions, it is clear that she infuses her writing from her own background.

For more info on a biography of Laura Esquivel:
http://www.biography.com/articles/Laura-Esquivel-185854

Remember that Like Water for Chocolate is a flashback story. It begins and ends with the a woman telling the story of her great aunt Tita. This present day setting acts as a frame through the story.

The bulk of the story revolve around a young girl, Tita, fighting against the traditions and issues that are relevant during the turn of the twentieth century in Mexico.

So, what are those traditions?

I'd like you to work together to find background information about these five topics:

Food

Fabrics

Family/Women’s Role

Mexican Revlution/Flag

Cultural Rituals – Religion/Tradition


Each of you should find one fact or website or youtube video about each of these topics and your contributions here:
http://wallwisher.com/wall/likewaterforchoc


So, the question is, How does YOUR background influence your writing?

Continue to work on your second person short story. If you are finished, begin to work on either:

1. An essay about your passions

or

2. A story in which you try your hand at magical realism



As you begin to think about your next projects of writing about your passions or creative magical realism stories, your stories will be infused with your background. How can you elaborate on that and make it uniquely you?

Food is an important aspect in Mexican culture. What is important in YOUR background? How can you use that, like Laura Esquivel, to stabilize your and focus your writing?

Ms. Moraites

Like Water for Chocolate

For today, you were to read up through July. We have already talked about what Magical Realism is. If you weren't here last class and didn't get the handout, please come see me to get one.


I'd like you to comment and answer the following question:

Using any other outside texts or films that you have read and Laura Esquivel's Like Water for Chocolate, what do you notice about the genre of Magical Realism? Pull out 2-3 examples that really stuck you from Like Water for Chocolate that represents this type of genre.


PS) No additional reading assignment for Thursday. (You should be read through July.)

FINISH YOUR SECOND PERSON SHORT STORIES!!

Ms. Moraites

Like Water for Chocolate

You have read through February for today. Over the break, you should read up to ( but not including) August. So, you will have read January-July when we come back from the break. (And finish up those 2nd person stories!)

Agenda for today:

1. What is Magical Realism?
2. What have you noticed about the book so far?
3. Watch Like Water for Chocolate film

Interested in more links?

Laura Esquivel's biography:

http://www.biography.com/articles/Laura-Esquivel-185854

IMBD about Como agua para chocolate:

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103994/

Magical Realism:

Definitions of Magical Realism:

http://www.public.asu.edu/~aarios/resourcebank/definitions/

http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/MagicalRealism.html

http://www.themodernword.com/gabo/gabo_mr.html

Agenda 11/18 Read Ch. 7 in class

1. For Friday: Finish the book A Prayer for the Dying Ch. 8!!!!!
2. Work on 2nd person stories
3. Review handout about A Prayer for the Dying for Friday discussion (quiz?)

Interview with O'Nan Prayer for the Dying

Weekly Wire
The Boston Phoenix The Curse of O'Nan
In his new novel, Stewart O'Nan explores the landscape of affliction.

By Chris Wright

MAY 10, 1999:

A PRAYER FOR THE DYING, by Stewart O'Nan. Holt, 208 pages, $22.

A novelist friend of mine, upon hearing that I was about to interview Stewart O'Nan, asked me to relay a question. "Why," she wanted to know, "do you write so many damn books?" And it's a good question. Since 1993, the 38-year-old Pittsburgh native (and Connecticut resident) has published four novels and one book of short stories, all to high critical acclaim. Indeed, during the past six years, O'Nan has shown himself to be not only prolific, but also one of America's most thoughtful and versatile young novelists -- a fact rubber-stamped a few years back when the literary magazine Granta placed him on its much-heralded Top 40 list of young American writers.

A large part of O'Nan's appeal is in the mind-boggling variety of his subject matter. From plumbing the tormented psyche of a Vietnam vet to spinning the self-serving memoirs of a female death-row inmate, O'Nan has proved himself willing to explore a wide range of psychological, historical, and geographical landscapes. In his latest novel, A Prayer for the Dying, O'Nan takes us to late-19th-century rural Wisconsin, where a town named Friendship finds itself on the wrong end of an Old Testament double whammy: pestilence and fire.

Stopping by the Phoenix offices for an interview en route to the Red Sox season opener, O'Nan agrees that his literature has a tendency to roam. "I have a short attention span," he deadpans. "I'm interested in all these different people. It's like when you see someone on the street, you want to follow them home."

Not that you'd really want to follow any of O'Nan's characters anywhere. "Typically," he says, "I write about people who are completely fucked up." Then again, we'd all be a little fraught if we were in a Stewart O'Nan novel. Regardless of the disparity of their circumstances, all of O'Nan's characters are pretty much in the same spot: wedged between hope and despair, having the life squeezed out of them.

Jacob Hansen, the unlucky protagonist of A Prayer for the Dying, is certainly no exception. Described by O'Nan as a "Christian existential horror book," A Prayer for the Dying is O'Nan's grimmest to date, putting Jacob through a series of trials that make the suffering visited upon Job seem like a tough episode of America's Funniest Home Videos.

As O'Nan puts it, "It's not the feel-good comedy of the year."

The story opens blithely enough:

High summer and Friendship's quiet. The men tend the shimmering fields. Children tramp the woods, wade the creeks, sound the cool ponds. . . . Cows twitch and flick.

You like it like this, the bright, languid days.

The "you" refers to Jacob (the book is narrated in the second person). An earnest, God-fearing Civil War veteran, Jacob is an almost absurdly good man. He not only serves as Friendship's constable, preacher, and undertaker, but also manages to be an attentive husband and doting father in his spare time. Of course, ministering to a community's spiritual, judicial, and corporal needs is challenging enough at the best of times. In the worst of times, it's downright ravaging. As Jacob is about to discover.

A stranger's corpse is discovered in the woods behind a local farm, "belly-down beside the smudge of a dead campfire." Having just tended to that emergency, Jacob finds another body, this time a woman, also lying face down. She's not dead, but mad, raving about having seen Jesus. Both people, it turns out, are afflicted with diphtheria, an infectious and fatal disease. These first two cases establish a terrible momentum that continues throughout the book. Before long, the good people of Friendship are dropping like flies -- and the flies are having a field day.

O'Nan says A Prayer for the Dying was inspired by Michael Lesy's historical montage Wisconsin Death Trip, which documented a real-life diphtheria epidemic that swept through the region in the 1890s. "I ran into the book in a library somewhere," he says. "I read it and had this weird, queasy reaction to it, that gothic feeling of being terrified of and attracted by something at the same time. I thought, if I could get that feeling into a book, into a piece of prose, that would be amazing."

He got it, all right. Though A Prayer for the Dying invites obvious comparisons to Albert Camus's The Plague, O'Nan insists his book owes a far heavier debt to George Romero's schlock-horror film The Night of the Living Dead, which, he says, "is about isolation, about people boarded up in houses, about crazy people wandering a landscape that is empty and beautiful."

The book certainly contains more than its fair share of gothic horror. O'Nan seems to delight in offering up descriptions of Jacob's gory undertaking duties (a creepiness heightened by the fact that he insists on chatting with the corpses while he nicks their ankles and drains them of their blood). He describes the effects of diphtheria with a poet's scrutiny ("eyes sunken in violet pits, cheeks creased and hollow"). And, as the disease spreads, a horrible madness grips the town. People are shot, poisoned, burned alive. There are intimations of necrophilia and cannibalism.

The really disturbing aspect of the book, though, is in watching Jacob's saintly commitment to his duties contort into a kind of mania. "You'll do what's best for everyone," he says in the early days of the outbreak. But, as Jacob discovers, doing the right thing is by no means a clear-cut proposition. (In an awful ironic twist, Jacob's compulsive desire to observe proper care for the dead is instrumental in spreading the disease.)

Inevitably, Jacob goes off his rocker. When his own family appears to have been stricken, he even loses his grasp on his faith. Meanwhile, evidence mounts that Jacob's motives are more personal than spiritual anyway, and we start to question his faith. This is part of O'Nan's brilliance: he forces us into the same moral snarls as his characters, and then leaves us to work our own way out of them.

Moral complexity notwithstanding, O'Nan also has an ability to create situations of near-farcical dreadfulness. He pushes the macabre to the edge of comedy, and then holds it there. What next? you think, and before you're finished formulating the question another very bad thing is batting you over the head. And that's what makes for a good horror novel, says O'Nan.

As in the best horror novels, though, much of what's really frightening about A Prayer for the Dying lies in what's left unsaid. One of the creepiest moments of the book, for instance, occurs during a scene of supposed domestic bliss:

After dinner Marta plays the melodeon and the two of you sing. She falls off the stool but you prop her up, set her foot on the pedals, her fingers on the keys, help her find middle C. Jesus Our Redeemer. He Will Overcome. Amelia plays on the floor with her cornhusk doll.

Marta and Amelia are Jacob's wife and child, and we're pretty sure by this point that they're dead. But the confirmation is horrible for its insidiousness, the realization made all the more eerie because it creeps up on us, reveals itself to us in this awful vision of madness.

The book is equally murky in the many philosophical questions it raises. Faith and responsibility, good and evil, despair and salvation -- it's not what's revealed about these things that makes their presence so powerful, it's what we're left to figure out for ourselves. At one point during one of his many self-inquisitions, Jacob asks:

Who are you angry with?

Not God.

No? Who else is there? Is this the devil's work?

It must be, you think, but uncertainly. It must be, but you're confused.

In this instance, as with the rest of the book, the second-person narrative adds an air of immediacy and universality, and takes Jacob's search for answers to the reader. After all, you are confused, too. There's a gauze of indeterminacy hanging over the entire novel, and for this reason it's a challenging, even difficult book to read.

"Good," says O'Nan. Though he'd like us to be entertained by his books, he also wants us to face up to questions we might otherwise "shrug off." In this, he likens A Prayer for the Dying to an "abusive but loving parent: half the time it's cooing to you and patting you on the back, and the other half it's beating the crap out of you."

In meting out misery and pain to his beleaguered characters, though, O'Nan more often takes on the role of vengeful deity than abusive parent.

"Oh yeah," O'Nan says, "there is that placement of the novelist as God. You worry about that, but you try to be as generous as possible. If you're treating your characters as little game pieces, you would never have anything of consequence. Emotionally, you have to be very close to your characters. You have to love them."

But if O'Nan loves the characters in A Prayer for the Dying, he's got a funny way of showing it. At one point, as Jacob crafts a casket for his daughter, he asks, "Will there be anything harder than this?" And there most certainly will be. Toward the end of the book, as the diphtheria epidemic spreads like wildfire, O'Nan introduces a real wildfire into the proceedings. Having gone from bad to worse, the lot of Friendship's inhabitants goes to absolute worst, and the dutiful Jacob is reduced to the role of helpless onlooker.

Ultimately, O'Nan says, the question underlying all of his work is "When do you give up?" Which, he concedes, "is a horrible question to ask, but it's a question that a lot of people have to face." Then, echoing Hamlet's famous soliloquy on the subject, he adds, "That's the question."

Just don't expect O'Nan to supply the answer.

A Prayer for the Dying

All poetry cycles should be turned in today or you will not receive credit.

Work on 2nd person short story.

Read in A Prayer for the Dying to page 147. TEST ON MONDAY!!!

Until Gwen Dennis Lehane short story 2nd person

Writing in the Second Person

Read Until Gwen by Dennis Lehane (Mystic River)



(1) Write a one-paragraph, present-tense summary of the story.
(2) What kind of person is "dad" (Bobby's father)? Bobby? Gwen?
Use details from the story to support your conclusions.
(3) Is the story in the first person--or is it in the second
person? Is it in the past tense--or is it in the present
tense? What effect does Lehane (the author) achieve with
the point of view and tense he uses?
(4) The story contains several flashbacks. Identify the
flashbacks--and, also, identify the points where Lehane
"skips ahead." Why does Lehane use flashbacks? Why does he
skip ahead?
(5) The story contains similes. Identify them.
(6) "Until Gwen" conveys a message about love and identity.
What is the message about love and identity that "Until
Gwen" conveys?

A Prayer for the Dying Discussion questions

READING GROUP GUIDE
A Prayer for the Dying
A Novel
by Stewart O’Nan
ISBN-10: 0-312-42891-X
ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42891-4
About this Guide
The following author biography and list of questions about A Prayer for the Dying are intended as resources to aid individual readers and book groups who would like to learn more about the author and this book. We hope that this guide will provide you a starting place for discussion, and suggest a variety of perspectives from which you might approach A Prayer for the Dying.
About the Book
Set in Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, A Prayer for the Dying tells of a horrible epidemic that is suddenly and gruesomely killing the town's residents and setting off a terrifying paranoia. Jacob Hansen, Friendship's sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, is soon overwhelmed by the fear and anguish around him, and his sanity begins to fray. Dark, poetic, and chilling, A Prayer for the Dying examines the effect of madness and violence on the morality of a once-decent man.
About the Author
Stewart O’Nan’s novels include Last Night at the Lobster, The Night Country, and A Prayer for the Dying. He is also the author of the nonfiction books The Circus Fire and, with Stephen King, the bestselling Faithful. Granta named him one of the Twenty Best Young American Novelists. He lives in Connecticut.

Discussion Questions
1. The book is narrated in the second person, addressing the main character, Jacob, as “you.” Who is speaking? Why do you think the author chose this mode to tell the story?
2. When Jacob is called to take care of Clytie, he has a very hard time pulling the trigger. Look at the passage (p. 49) in which he has to convince himself to kill her. Why does he agonize when he knows it’s the right thing? What does it mean that he’s “still clinging to some dream of innocence, blamelessness”? Does he continue to cling to that dream later in the story?
3. Why does Jacob elect to bleed and treat the bodies of some victims, even after Doc has told him not to, and even though he knows he’s putting himself in danger? Why is precision and diligence so important to him even when everyone around him is worried only about survival?
4. What role does religious faith play in the story? How does it influence Jacob, Chase, and other citizens of Friendship? Is their faith rewarded?
5. Jacob is a veteran of the Civil War. How does his experience there affect the way he behaves in the crisis in Friendship? How did the war change him?
6. How would you describe the relationship between Jacob and Doc? How do their different ideas about the world lead to different strategies for handling the outbreak in Friendship?
7. How does Jacob’s relationship with Marta affect his behavior in the outbreak? How do his priorities as a father and husband conflict with his responsibility to the town?
8. How do you interpret the book’s ending? What is Jacob choosing when he returns to Friendship? What do you imagine happening to him next?
9. Is Jacob sane at the end of the book? How does the author demonstrate the changes in his mind as conditions worsen?
10. “You’ve stopped believing in evil,” the narrator says of Jacob early in the story (p. 6). “Is that a sin?” Is there evil in this story? Does Jacob come to see it by the end?
11. How do the book’s two epigraphs relate to each other? Why do you think the author chose them?
12. Jacob is committed throughout the book to saving Friendship, and willing to sacrifice himself if necessary. Is he naïve? Does his commitment to principle do more harm than good in the end?

Thurs. 11/5 Stewart O'Nan

Writing in second person---read "Luminous Dial"
Let us talk about writing, just me and you. Pull up a chair and make yourself comfortable. Pour a cup of joe, or whatever your favorite poison is. Settle in and we'll get down to the nitty gritty. I can go on for hours about this writing business, but I won't take up too much of your time today. Writing is one my favorite subjects. I'm thinking it might be yours too. Why do I think it might be yours? Well, you're here aren't you? That's a pretty good indication. I could be wrong though, and I'm more than willing to admit that. But let's talk a bit if you don't mind.

See this paragraph above? That's one way to use the second person properly, when directly addressing someone. I'm addressing you, the reader and possible writer, directly. The paragraph is written with a specific audience in mind, not a general one. I blame my first college professor for my pet peeve about the misuse of the second person. He pounded it into my freshmen skull many years ago that "you" had no place in any essay except for extraordinary circumstances. When I had him again for nearly every other English class, that lesson was simply emphasized in other writings. Other professors touched on it in literature, but he really sent it home.

I mostly blame advertisement for the misuse of the second person in new writing. I don't know how many times I have driven my family to distraction because I've absentmindedly disagreed with an advertisement. Listen to those things sometime - advertisements. Most of them are trying to target a specific market, but the way the commercials are written is so broad. The net thrown tries to catch as many people as possible. The public at large is included in the message. "You" is inclusive. The message is worded so everyone hearing it is led to believe they need that product or service by the simple use of that one little word. It's no wonder beginning writers use it in their writing; they're exposed to it constantly.

Another reason some beginning writers use the second person incorrectly is because they are "telling the tale." Most people learn to talk before they learn to write, and more people are better at telling stories than writing them. When beginning writers start to write the stories in their heads, often things become lost in the translation. Oral telling is different than the written word, and some writers don't make the distinction between what's said and what's written. When storytellers have an audience in front of them, they can say "It's so black that you can't see your hand in front of your face..." or "...the wind's so cold it'll cut right through ya." Storytellers talk directly to their audience. Even if the audience doesn't "feel" the cold, the use of the second person can bring them deeper into the story.

It can be done; Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas by Tim Robbins is a fictional novel written in second person, and there are several short stories which use the second person well, but they are rare. Also, the "choose your own adventure" genre of fiction has often been written in second person. Now that the Internet is so well established, interactive stories and many role playing forums are perfect homes for fictional stories that incorporate the second person.

In non-fiction writing, the use of the second person is commonplace. As in this opening sentence from Take Control of Your Sales by Sonya Carmichael Jones, "Regardless of your writing genre, marketing is the primary means by which your book sales are generated." This article addresses a specific audience, the book writer who wants to sell books. By inserting "you" into the article, the author attempts to draw the writer in and make the article personal. Such casual writing is routine nowadays. However, the above sentence could just have easily been written, "Regardless of genre, marketing is the primary means by which book sales are generated." Both are correct, it's simply a matter of preference.

If used properly, use of the second person can draw the reader into a piece like no other word. Such as this statement: "If you're one of the millions of people in the United States who has ever..." It is written directly to a specific audience. It attempts to hook that audience immediately. Hopefully, anyone who falls into the category of the article will read the rest of article with interest. Those who do not fall under the umbrella of whatever the article covers will most likely not read it. However, since they are not the intended audience, the use of the second person has fulfilled a purpose as well.

Using the second person is the easy way, but it can alienate half the readers in the blink of an eye. Consider an article written about some extreme sport where the author has written "... and you feel the rush of wind screaming through your hair. This is why you dig freefall, the rush..." Well, there went all of his sensitive bald readers and anyone who's never felt freefall, or those who don't "dig" it.

Using the second person can be a very powerful tool in an author's toolkit. But if it's used incorrectly it can gum up the works good and proper. Generally, try not to use the second person in an essay or a fictional story that is not aimed at a specific audience. There are always exceptions of course. What would this wonderful language be without exceptions? In my opinion, there are ways to get around using the second person - notice how I have not used it since the first paragraph except in quotations? A writer simply has to be creative. It's more fun that way. Is there a better way to enhance writing skills than finding more creative ways to say things? I can't think of one.

Well, I enjoyed this time with you. I hope you did too. Thanks for coming by and listening to me voice my opinion. It was a blast. I've got to get on to other things, but I hope you'll stop by again soon.

Take care.
from
www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1200131-That-Second-Person

Go to Stewart O'Nan websites

Finish working on Poetry Cycle

Read to pg. 94 A Prayer for the Dying for Monday

Stewart O'Nan

1. Work on Poetry cycles--DUE TODAY. Be sure you have a "CHRONOLOGY" or thematic overview to unify your cycle. The whole cycle should have a title as well as the individual poems.

2. Go to new links about Stewart O'Nan

3. Place one of the poems of your poetry cycle for comments and suggestions from the class in the GAMZON WORKSHOP folder, POETRY cycles folder..

4. HMWK: READ CHAPTER 1 in Prayer for the Dying

Test--Rita Dove Thomas and Beulah

You may use your books.

Part 1
Identify 8 of the following in complete and descriptive sentences:

Lem, yellow scarf, zeppelin, Thomas, Beulah, Tennessee, Akron, mandolin, canary, the stroke, Wingfoot Lake, Malcolm, courtship, the Oriental ballerina, the house on Bishop Street, Beulah's father, Willemma, the Eiffel Tower

Part 2 Short Essay

Choose one poem to EXPLICATE. Explain the poem's structure (stanzaic form, enjambment, linebreaking, alliteration, assonance, consonance, figurative language, imagery, etc.) using appropriate literary terms and be sure to quote lines from the poem. Provide an interpretation of the poem and discuss its significance in terms of the entire poetry cycle.

Tuesday, 10/27 Poetry Cycles/Test on Rita Dove

There will be a test on Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah on thursday.

You should be prepared to identify the following:
Lem, yellow scarf, zeppelin, Thomas, Beulah, Tennessee, Akron, mandolin, canary, the stroke, Wingfoot Lake, Malcolm, courtship, the Oriental ballerina, the house on Bishop Street, Beulah's father, Willemma, the Eiffel Tower

Also, be prepared to answer an essay question regarding the poetry cycle's
structure and themes.

Today, work on your poetry cycles.

Period 2, guest speaker from GeVa.

POETRY CYCLES DUE MON. NOV. 2

Ms. Moraites' Research

Hi everyone!

I am doing research on integrating pop culture in the classroom. I would like to involve you in my research and writing process! Please go to this website and post your answer to the following question:

What is your favorite song, music artist, or music video of '08/'09? Of all time??
If you can't decide, what songs do you DISLIKE?

Thank you!
Ms. Moraites

Friday, 10/23 Thomas and Beulah

Period 1

Form 3 groups.
In your group, read and discuss 7 poems.
Group 1--through "Weathering Out"
Group 2--through "Pomade"
Group 3--"Headress" to the end

Prepare 2 poems to explicate to the whole class and give an overview of your section of the poetry cycle.


Period 2--Continue to work on poetry cycles --due next Friday
Test on Thomas and Beulah next week

Poetry Cycle Assignment Rita Dove

Go over Mandolin section:

Reader Response to a Poem:
Select one of the poems in "Thomas and Beulah". How does the poem make you feel? In what ways can you relate to the poem? What has Rita Dove done with imagery, form, theme, rhythm, language, etc. to make this poem work? Any lines that particularly strike you as interesting or powerful? Think about poetic technique: enjambment, caesura, metaphor, simile, alliteration, assonance, consonance, linebreaking, stanzaic form, apostrophe, onomatopeaia, etc.

Post your response



Begin working on Poetry Cycle assignment:
Similar to Thomas and Beulah, consider some characters in your own life, imagined characters, or actual historical characters. Imagine the significant chronological dates in their lilves--high points and low points. consider how to construct a series of 8-10 (preferably more) poems that tell a story (narrative poetry) and explore these key moments and occasions.

• a. Your poetry cycle should consist of 8-10 poems
• b. Your poetry cycle should be accompanied by a chronology to support the key dates and occasions you chose to write about.
• c. At least two of the poems should explore the same event from two different perspectives or viewpoints (like "Courtship" in Thomas and Beulah). These poems can have the same title.
• d. Place one poem per page, single-spaced, 12 point type in a clean font and be sure to title each poem. you may want to title the entire cycle as well. Use italics for dialogue, songs, memories, etc as you observe in Rita Dove's work. Experiment with different stanzaic forms and poetic styles.
• e. Poems can, of course, be narrative or lyric, but remember that the overall cycle is a narrative and must tell a story of a life or lives although we only see "fragments" or moments/snapshots of those lives.

Article on Rita Dove

Moving Through Color: Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah

published in Kentucky Philological Review 14 (1999): 27-31.

Abstract

Dove's poetry, unlike that of many of her contemporaries, looks backward toward the period of high modernism for its techniques. She relies on methods like ellipsis, imagistic detail, and depth of symbolism to convey her meaning. Because of these methods, it is difficult to get a precise critical grip on her poetry, for these techniques are necessarily so subtle that they are easily missed. Perhaps this explains the relative dearth of critical attention given to her work. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 collection, Thomas and Beulah, is the poetic story of the lives of her grandparents. Dove's explicit instructions that these poems are to be experienced together in a certain order demonstrates her eagerness to control our interpretation of this volume, and makes this collection of lyrics read like a narrative. The poet's insistence on controlled interpretation also emphasizes two important gestures within the text: the idea of reading backwards to receive a code and apply it, and the idea of color, in all of its racial manifestations, as a progression to be lived through.

Article

Rita Dove's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1986 collection, Thomas and Beulah, is the poetic story of the lives of her grandparents. After a dedication to her mother, on the dedication page, the reader is told in boldface type that, "These poems tell two sides of a story and are meant to be read in sequence." Dove's explicit instructions that these poems are to be experienced together in a certain order demonstrates her eagerness to control our interpretation of this volume, and makes this collection of lyrics read like a narrative. The collection itself is divided into two sections, "Mandolin," which tells the story of her grandfather, and "Canary in Bloom," which is the tale of her grandmother. The poet's insistence on controlled interpretation also emphasizes two important gestures within the text: the idea of reading backwards to receive a code and apply it, and the idea of color, in all of its racial manifestations, as a progression to be lived through.

Dove's poetry, unlike that of many of her contemporaries, looks backward toward the period of high modernism for its techniques. She relies on methods like ellipsis, imagistic detail, and depth of symbolism to convey her meaning. Because of these methods, it is difficult to get a precise critical grip on her poetry, for these techniques are necessarily so subtle that they are easily missed. Perhaps this explains the relative dearth of critical attention given to her work. While critics marvel at what she does, scholarship has yet to tell us exactly how she does what she does. 1

Dove carefully balances colors in Thomas and Beulah. She is writing black history, a particular history of two individuals. This history, these people, are woven around events larger than themselves. Thomas and Beulah are the warp of the cloth, while national and international events are the woof. The first color to confront the reader in the initial poem, "The Event," is a racial identifier: "the two Negroes leaning" (4 All parenthetical references are to line numbers). But Dove does not linger on this color. Instead, three lines later, she presents a completely non-racial color: "Thomas' silver falsetto" (7). The next two colorful objects are yoked together, thereby signifying both themselves and a third color, the synthesis of the two. The paddlewheel churns both brown mud and white moonlight (10). After this, another striking color is conjured. The yellow of the bananas in the ship's hold stands like the silver of Thomas' voice, unable to be pinned to a race (12). Lem speaks the brown of chestnuts (17), and this brown is associated with the green crown of the island (20).

At the end of the poem Dove mentions water twice (23 and 27). This water is interesting for what has already been said of it above in line 10, and for what happens to it in the final line of the poem. The water contains the two opposite colors of white and black. But these two are gently mixed together to create some color that is neither dark nor light, but rather gray. This color serves as a touchstone for the color imagery of the entire book that follows this crucial poem. Just as Lem's death sits like a specter above Thomas' life with Beulah, so too does gray sit behind all other colors. But this gray is not drab or tepid. Rather, it is a collection of opposites fused together. As such, it possesses the strengths of both black and white. Again and again throughout this book, Dove uses gray to show the dance between black and white.

One other color is, at first glance, oddly placed in this poem because it doesn't seem to have racial significance. The silver of Thomas' voice is usually seen on a color wheel as a gray with more reflective qualities. This silver/gray, however, possesses the strength of shirred black and white. But it also contains something extra, an ability to reflect on its own nature, and on the nature of those around it. This is the ultimate description of Thomas' voice, especially when, later in the volume, he produces reflective music with the mandolin. While this gray possesses the dynamism and self-consciousness that have characterized the relationship between black and white in the latter half of this century, Dove presents not the usual black/white tale, but a much more vivid one.

In doing so, she utilizes an oddity of coloration which must be discussed before proceeding. Transparent or translucent objects are mentioned 37 times in these poems, accounting for the third largest "color" group. These transparent or translucent images do not possess a color of their own. Rather, they show the color of objects behind them. Dove creates a color that has no color at all. Examples of such are bodies or glasses of water, windows, cellophane, Scotch tape, or other clear or slightly opaque objects. This color participates in the colors around it just as the silver/gray reflects the colors surrounding it.

A breakdown of the colors Dove uses shows, on a very literal level, how she reaches beyond stereotypical color usage. Her first three predominant colors, white (59 references), yellow (54 references), and transparent/translucent are three colors that are obvious, deliberate choices for her. Black and brown appear far less frequently in the poetry. If Dove were overtly concerned with racial overtones, we would expect some kind of juxtaposition between black and white. Instead, the reader gleans a concern for something beyond race, a rapprochement, a movement, as I will now discuss, toward clarity and understanding.

The main character of the first half of the volume is associated with a specific color. Dove continually presents Thomas' yellow scarf. Even when he is not wearing it, it is used as a strap for his mandolin hanging on the wall. Of course, he is portrayed as what he is, a black man. But his constant association with the color yellow casts a different light upon him. Dove carries this color throughout the first half of the collection, but it is not until this first half has ended that she gives us a way to decode the color. The first poem in the "Canary in Bloom" section, "Taking in Wash," gives us the code to read the colors of the first section.

This reading backward in order to interpret previous imagery is a fascinating exercise that Dove continually demands of her reader in order to gain a full understanding of the poems. For example, the reader does not learn of Lem's death, which occurs in "The Event," until much later in the volume. In the same way, the reader does not learn the code for interpretation of the yellow color symbolism in the "Mandolin" section until that section is over.

Understanding the way color is used in this poem is a first step to decoding the color of the "Mandolin" section. The first color in the poem is Beulah's father's nickname for her: "Pearl" (1). This color, appropriately enough, sets the tone for the rest of the poem. A black woman is called something white, not in some attempt to deny her race, but in a verbal embrace of affection, respect, and love. Beulah's father's coloration is then described. His skin paled in winter, moving from the brown of buckeyes to the yellow of ginger root (3-5). Beulah's mother accounts for this through an appeal to his mixed racial heritage. It is the Cherokee in him that creates such a movement. Beulah's father does not move toward whiteness on a metaphorical level, as his daughter does through his naming of her. Rather, he becomes paler in actuality. After showing white and green as seasonal images (10), the narrator claims that Beulah is "Papa's girl," even though she is black (11-12). This linking together of the two characters includes Beulah in this progression from black to yellow, from darkness to vibrancy. The white winter quickly countermands the blackness that precedes it (13). During the time when Beulah's father turned yellow, Beulah herself turned to the silver/gray of a mirror, which reflected her blackness.

The final colors in the poem dance around one another in a symmetrical way that is reflected in the actions occurring in the poem at that time. Beulah's mother and father are fighting, for he is drunk and she is doing someone else's laundry, an act that infuriates him. There is obviously tension here, delicately understated by Dove, but manifested nonetheless in the battle between her colors. First we see the whiteness of the arctic and the hankies (18-19). The final two images are in opposition to this whiteness. Mama is a dark fist (23), and she unleashes her fury in a biblical allusion, swearing to defend her daughter by cutting Papa down like a brown cedar of Lebanon (26). These two colors, each reinforced through duplication, swirl around a central color. Mama stands upon an embroidered red rose, right in the middle of black and white. The clash of these two may produce blood, or it may produce beauty. Whichever they bring forth, one color does not overpower another. They mix together, like the shirred water of "The Event," to create another color that possesses its own strength. Papa's color does not move toward its opposite. Mama's color does not move at all. Beulah's blackness is called white by her father, and reflected back upon her by the silver/gray mixture of black and white. Black and white then dance together to create something different from both of them.

Here we see Thomas linked to Beulah's father through the color yellow. At first, Thomas wears his yellow around his neck, either a sign of authority and favor or a yoke of burden. But then the mandolin moves to the wall; Thomas removes his yellow, which is more than Beulah's father can do. While both are able to move beyond blackness, Thomas alone can control his movement. Beulah's father is at the mercy of the winter, with its snow and harrowing white light. Thomas, on the other hand, can pick up or put down his new color. In some small way, then, he possesses more control over his destiny than any other significant male in the volume.

Moving backward again to the last poem which features Thomas, we can see his final color progression. "Thomas at the Wheel" is the typically understated description of Thomas' death by heart attack. Here, in the grip of death, Thomas moves beyond the yellow of this life to the transparency of the next. Dove links the transparent/translucent rainstorm that Thomas encounters to the river that Lem drowned in (1). The black asphalt quickly gives way to the transparent glass doors of a drugstore (4-5). Then this transparency becomes a part of Thomas, as he feels his chest filling with water (9). He is a seed pod floating on a transparent sea (16). He sees writing on the transparent water, and the last thing he imagines is his wife opening a transparent window and missing him (21-23). Thomas' movement toward yellow has now, in death, gone beyond that particular color. He ends in a colorless state, as if he were purged of color. Thomas' movement toward the vibrancy and warmth of yellow is not invalidated. It is merely seen as a step in a larger progression toward completion, wherein he allows all colors to flow through him.
But we must also read forward from this midpoint of the volume. The "Canary in Bloom" section gives us its dominant color in its title. Throughout this section, the image of a yellow canary is associated with Beulah. "Taking in Wash," besides breaking the code of "Mandolin," also presents the starting point for Beulah's journey through color. As mentioned previously, she is her father's white pearl, even though she is black. These conflicting colors reach some sort of resolution in the poem through the silver/gray of the mirror that shows her herself. But this mirror does not possess the power of the paddlewheel to mix colors gently. This dichotomy is too much, and Beulah, with her "stricken eyes / scream[s] the house awake" (16-17). So she too moves toward yellow, the yellow of the canary, like her husband and her father. Her movement is encapsulated in the final poem of the volume, where once again we must read backwards in order to break the code of color.

The penultimate poem in the collection, "Company," contains a significant clue concerning the nature of this code of color. The poem begins with the color red, seen before as a sign of beauty or danger (3). This is quickly displaced by Beulah's own image, the yellow canary (4). The canary is pitted against Thomas's dominant symbol, the mandolin (4-5). Dove then brackets the green of spring, the silver of fish, and the red of sirens with two white images, moonlight and salt (6-11). But the most important passage in the poem follows, awash in the white light and flavor that precede it. Beulah makes a telling reference to her relationship with Thomas: "If this is code, / she tells him, listen: we were good, / though we never believed it" (11-13). Beulah validates their separate selves, their separate journeys and symbols, as well as their journey together. She encapsulates their lives, both apart and together, and calls them a code to be read and deciphered. The movement toward yellow can now be seen for what it truly is: a movement toward unity, toward strength, toward goodness.

However, this is not Dove's final color code in this volume. "The Oriental Ballerina," like the section that it closes, calls up its first color in its title. It is significant that this title occurs immediately after Beulah's last words, as the final poem in the volume. In it, we have the culmination of all the color imagery in the collection. Its title gives us Thomas' and Beulah's color. This ballerina is dancing on a white carnation (1). She is not yet bathed in the yellow glow of daylight (3), coming through the transparent windows (4), for the walls are still black with darkness (4). Yet even in their blackness they are tinged with white ghosts of red gardenias (5-6). The ballerina dances on the wallpaper's white carnations in pink slippers (10-11). The background for these carnations is the color of brown grease, brown teabags, and brown walnut veneer (18-19). Meanwhile, in the Orient, people are taking off robes bedecked with red roses (21). The yellow sun finally comes through the transparent windows, and they become translucent (23-24). The yellow sun shines upon the bed, the transparent glass with a yellow straw in it next to the bed, and then on the white pillow and a white handkerchief (26-38). Parenthetically, the yellow of the Orient is bracketed with a silver/gray of mist (35-36). The ballerina then dances in a tunnel of white light, while all around her is black shadow (43-45). Beulah, her head on the white pillow, notices nothing else but this play between white and black (46-47). This is the last thing she sees before she dies.

Dove presents here the interconnectedness of darkness and light, of black or brown and white. At first in the wallpaper, with its oppositional foreground and background, and finally in Beulah's perception of the ballerina and her surroundings, Dove shows that, at the end of life, black or white does not matter. What remains from the poem is the yellow sun, still shining, and the yellow dancer, still giving order to chaos. Like the spinning paddlewheel of "The Event," the ballerina shirrs white and black to produce something new, with its own energy.

Beulah's death parallels her husband's. She can no longer see colors. Nevertheless, the walls are "exploding with shabby tutus. . . " (52). This explosion must be occurring within Beulah's mind, for she can no longer see the wallpaper. Dove cannot contain this riot of color with single descriptors, for it is all colors, fused together. It is many tutus, all colorful or colorless, exploding within Beulah. Thomas' death drained him of color. Beulah's death fills her with all colors. Dove presents a paradox that solves itself. The absence of color is equal to the possession of all colors, for both go beyond signifying just one thing. Both incorporate everything and nothing. It does not matter whether we call the experience positive or negative, a fulfillment or a purgation. In the final analysis, the result is the same. Thomas and Beulah represent two ways of arriving at the same reality. Both have gone beyond color. Thomas has moved from the Negro leaning on the rail of a riverboat to a man possessing the color of the sun to a transparent man lying on the front seat of a car. Beulah has moved from the juxtaposition of Pearl the black girl to a woman possessing the yellow of a canary to a woman filled with all colors, lying in her bed. Filled or drained, what is left of them is their progression toward universality. We are left with this: the movement beyond what both of these people were to what they become in death, icons of a private history that speaks in universal tones.

Notes

1. Some of the most perceptive appreciations of Dove's poetry are: "Scars and Wings: Rita Dove's Grace Notes," by Bonnie Costello, in Callaloo 14.2 (1991): 434-38; "Crossing Boundaries," by Ekaterini Georgoudaki, in Callaloo 14.2 (1991): 419-33; "Four Salvers Salvaging: New Work by Voigt, Olds, Dove, and McHugh," by Peter Harris, in Virginia Quarterly Review 64.2 (1988): 262-76; "The Assembling Vision of Rita Dove," by Robert McDowell, in Callaloo 9.1 (1986): 61-70; "The Poems of Rita Dove," by Arnold Rampersad, in Callaloo 9.1 (1986): 52-60; and "I and Ideology: Demystifying the Self of Contemporary Poetry," by Gary Waller, in Denver Quarterly 18.3: 123-138.

The Poems

The first poem in "Mandolin"

The Event

Ever since they'd left the Tennessee ridge
with nothing to boast of
but good looks and a mandolin,

The two Negroes leaning
on the rail of a riverboat
were inseparable: Lem plucked

to Thomas' silver falsetto.
But the night was hot and they were drunk.
The spat where the wheel

churned mud and moonlight,
they called to the tarantulas
down among the bananas

to come out and dance.
You're so fine and mighty; let's see
what you can do, said Thomas, pointing

to a tree capped island.
Lem stripped, spoke easy: Them's chestnuts,
I believe. Dove

quick as a gasp. Thomas, dry
on deck, saw the green crown shake
as the island slipped

under, dissolved
in the thickening stream.
At his feet

a stinking circle of rags,
the half-shell mandolin.
Where they wheel turned the water

gently shirred.

The first poem in "Canary in Bloom"

Taking in Wash

Papa called her Pearl when he came home
drunk, swaying as if the wind touched
only him. Towards winter his skin paled,
buckeye to ginger root, cold drawing
the yellow out. The Cherokee in him,
Mama said. Mama never changed:
when the dog crawled under the stove
and the back gate slammed, Mama hid
the laundry. Sheba barked as she barked
in snow or clover, a spoiled and ornery bitch.

She was Papa's girl, black though she was. Once,
in winter, she walked through a dream
all the way down the stairs
to stop at a mirror, a beast
with stricken eyes
who screamed the house awake. Tonight

every light hums, the kitchen arctic
with sheets. Papa is making the hankies
sail. Her foot upon a silk
stitched rose, she waits
until he turns, his smile sliding all over.
Mama a tight dark fist.
Touch that child

and I'll cut you down
just like the cedar of Lebanon.

The final poem in "Mandolin"

Thomas at the Wheel

This, then, the river he had to swim.
Through the wipers the drugstore
shouted, lit up like a casino,
neon script leering from the shuddering asphalt.

Then the glass doors flew apart
and a man walked out to the curb
to light a cigarette. Thomas thought
the sky was emptying itself as fast
as his chest was filling with water.

Should he honk? What a joke-
he couldn't ungrip the steering wheel.
The man looked him calmly in the eye
and tossed the match away.

And now the street dark, not a soul
nor its brother. He lay down across
the seat, a pod set to sea,
a kiss unpuckering. He watched
the slit eye of the glove compartment,
the prescription inside,

he laughed as he thought Oh
the writing on the water. Thomas imagined
his wife as she awoke missing him,
cracking a window. He heard sirens
rise as the keys swung, ticking.


The penultimate poem in "Canary in Bloom"

Company

No one can help him anymore
Not the young thing next door
in the red pedal pushers,
not the canary he drove distracted

with his mandolin. There'll be
no more trees waking him in moonlight,
nor a single dry spring morning
when the fish are lonely for company.

She's standing there telling him: give it up.
She is weary of sirens and his face
worn with salt. If this is code,

She tells him, listen: we were good,
though we never believed it.
And now he can't even touch her feet.

The final poem in "Canary in Bloom"

The Oriental Ballerina

twirls in the tips of a carnation
while the radio scratches out a morning hymn,
Daylight has not ventured as far

as the windows-the walls are still dark,
shadowed with the ghosts
of oversized gardenias. The ballerina

pirouettes to the wheeze of the old
rugged cross, she lifts
her shoulders past the edge

of the jewelbox lid. Two pink slippers
touch the ragged petals, no one
should have feet that small! In China

they do everything upside down:
this ballerina has not risen but drilled
a tunnel straight to America

where the bedrooms of the poor
are papered in vulgar flowers
on a background the color of grease, of

teabags of cracked imitation walnut veneer.
On the other side of the world
they are shedding robes sprigged with

roses, roses drifting with a hiss
to the floor by the bed
as here, the sun finally strikes the windows

suddenly opaque,
noncommital as shields. In this room
is a bed where the sun has gone

walking. Where a straw nods over
the lip of its glass and a hand
reaches for a tissue, crumpling it to a flower.

The ballerina has been drilling all night!
She flaunts her skirts like sails,
whirling in a disk so bright,

so rapidly she is standing still.
The sun walks the bed to the pillow
and pauses for breath (in the Orient,

breath floats like mist
in the fields), hesitating
at a knotted handkerchief that has slid

on its string and has lodged beneath
the right ear which discerns
the most fragile music

where there is none. The ballerina dances
at the end of a tunnel of light,
she spins on her impossible toes-

the rest is shadow.
The head on the pillow sees nothing
else, though it feels the sun warming

its cheeks. There is no China;
no cross, just the papery kiss
of a kleenex above the stink of camphor,

the walls exploding with shabby tutus. . . .

Rita Dove 10/13

Read "Mandolin"

Take notes about imagery and image patterns

Visit website:


www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=6719

Thomas and Beulah by Rita Dove
© Walter Benefield
Mar 9, 2001

Like snapshots in a photo album, Rita Dove’s award winning collection of poetry "Thomas and Beulah" provide glimpses into the lives of two people in love living together yet apart in an imperfect world. Dove mixes biographical, historical and social elements to create a journey of love, marriage, life and death in 1920's Middle America. Dove’s collection of narrative poems are based loosely on the lives her maternal grandparents.
The journey begins with Thomas in the poem entitled “The event.” Thomas and his friend Lem venture out of Tennessee onto a river boat "with nothing to boast of but good looks and a mandolin", which is a pear shaped stringed instrument. This departure by Thomas would eventually bring him to Akron, Ohio and Beulah.

The poem "Courtship" has Beulah on one "Fine evening...waiting-for what? A magnolia breeze, someone to trot out the stars?" Beulah meets Thomas. "Promises" a poem of marriage contains one of the most beautiful verses in the collection. "A deep breath, and she plunged through sunbeams and kisses, rice drumming the both of them blind." In that, most natural of processes after marriage comes children. "Variation on Guilt" shows Thomas the expecting father in a hospital waiting room less than pleased when "the doors fly apart...It's a girl, he can tell by that smirk." Thomas and Beulah in all have four children all girls.

Dove poetizes the emotional subject of sickness and death in several poems in the collection. In a more descriptive poem "Thomas at the wheel" shows Thomas in his car and eventually "he lay[s] down across the seat, a pod set to sea, a kiss unpuckering", having a heart attack. The poem "Company" is a tragic but fitting near end to the collection, Beulah leaves her dying husband this message, "listen: we were good, though we never believed it."

"Thomas and Beulah" is one personal history told from two perspectives and does not hold to a precise line of chronology and only the most rational of critics would protest; Dove the consummate artist creates her own order of things.

Delving into research before writing this review of "Thomas and Beulah" I unearthed some disturbing facts about this award winning collection of poetry.

Rita Dove received the Pulitzer Prize for this work in 1987. Many considered the eighties a time of upsurge in the popularity of poetry with increases in published works as proof. Despite the positive climate, the New York Times newspaper respected for its quality literary coverage never reviewed “Thomas and Beulah.” I only make light of these facts because there are other fine works like “Thomas and Beulah” that go unnoticed by those who are suppose to notice.

Week of 10/5 Fugitive Pieces/Rita Dove

Tuesday, 10/6---Test Fugitive Pieces, Fugitive Pieces story due; Finish viewing film

Thursday, 10/8---Begin reading Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah; 2nd period Hispanic Heritage assembly

Agenda Oct. 2 Thursday Fugitive Pieces/ Rita Dove

Thank you for making the effort to finish reading Fugitive Pieces. Those of you who have not finished the book have the weekend to complete it. We will have a short essay test on Tuesday and your short stories will be due then.

The next book we will read is a poetry cycle by Rita Dove that won her the Pulitzer Prize.

The cycle consists of 31 poems about her grandparents. It's called thomas and Beulah. Rita dove's daughter attended the university of rochester and she has spoken here several times. She's an interesting and challenging poet. She was the first African-American woman to be Poet Laureate of the United States.

Please visit her website:

http://people.virginia.edu/~rfd4b/

Wed. 9/28

Use the double period to finish reading Fugitive Pieces and work on your short stories which are due on Tuesday, Oct. 6.

There will be a test on Fugitive Pieces on Friday, so be sure you finish reading it.

Monday, Sept. 28 Agenda

View more of Fugitive Pieces

Work on stories--Due Tuesday

Reading: finish book for Friday/Test on Friday

Thursday Sept. 24 Fugitive Pieces

With a partner, discuss your reading of Fugitive Pieces through pg. 121. What is happening
to Jakob? How does the death of Athos affect him? What is it like in Toronto? Please
share a favorite passage (a passage that you admire as a writer) with your partner (be sure to indicate the page number when you post your comments). When you have finished your conversation with your partner, please post a comment/reader response to your readings.

Work on your short stories!


HMWK: Read to pg. 170 for Monday

Nancy Thorpe Poetry contest

Continue to work on stories
Look at poetry contest:

www.hollins.edu/undergrad/english/thorp/thorp.htm
Go over readings in Fugitive Pieces
POST A RESPONSE TO QUESTIONS 4 and 5 from the READING GUIDE (see earlier post below):


Homework for Thursday:
Read to pg. 121 in Fugitive Pieces

Fugitive Pieces Writing Assignment

A major writing assignment for this Marking Period is a short story utilizing some of the techniques you are exploring while reading Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces.

Let's call this assignment "The Story in Fragments":

1. Your short story should be at least 5 pages long, double spaced, 12 point standard font.
2. Traditionally, it should have a central character (protagonist) dealing with some sort of conflict (self vs. self, self vs. other, self vs. society, self vs. nature, etc.).
3. Nontraditionally, the story should exhibit some of the storytelling devices we have been exploring: stream-of-consciousness, memory, poetic prose, flashback, flash forwards, nonlinear structure, excerpts from history, descriptive verbal photographs of people and places, songs, poems, etc.
4. Along the way, be prepared to share drafts and discuss your story with members of the class.

Due date: Week of Oct. 6 (for peer review)


HMWK: Read "Vertical Time" chapter for Wednesday






Labels: Writing Assignments
Monday, September 15, 2008
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Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
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Fugitive Pieces Reading Guide

Reading Group Guide
Fugitive Pieces
by Anne Michaels

About This Book


The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your group's reading of Anne Michaels's Fugitive Pieces. We hope they will aid your understanding of the many rich themes that make up this radiant and lyrical first novel by one of Canada's foremost poets.

In Poland during World War II, seven-year-old Jakob Beer's parents are murdered by Nazi soldiers and his adored elder sister, Bella, is abducted. The mourning child flees and is miraculously rescued by Athos Roussos, a Greek geologist. Athos smuggles Jakob to his native island of Zakynthos, where he successfully hides him from the Nazi authorities and introduces him to a new world of geology, poetry, botany, and art. After the war the two move to Toronto, and Jakob embarks on marriage and a career as a poet. Through the experience of profound love, Jakob eventually transcends the tragedies of his youth; but his spirit remains forever linked with that of his lost sister. As Jakob gets older, his life and work provide inspiration and, eventually, spiritual regeneration, for Ben, a younger man whose own family has been blighted by the Holocaust.

Fugitive Pieces is an incandescent novel, heartbreaking and finally joyful. Its vivid images, its poetry and its wisdom will prove unforgettable.

1. Why is the first section of the novel entitled "The Drowned City?" Why is the title repeated for a later section?

2. Jakob says that Athos's fascination with Antarctica "was to become our azimuth. It was to direct the course of our lives" [33]. Why do you think Antarctica obsessed Athos? How does the story of the Scott expedition relate to that of Athos and Jakob? Do you agree with Jakob that Athos's fascination directed their lives?

3. "When the prisoners were forced to dig up the mass graves, the dead entered them through their pores and were carried through their bloodstreams to their brains and hearts. And through their blood into another generation" [52], Jakob writes, and later, "It's no metaphor to feel the influence of the dead in the world" [53]. How does the theme of the dead's influence on the living work itself out in the course of the novel?

4. The communist partisans in Greece, who had valiantly resisted the occupying Nazis, themselves committed terrible atrocities after the war, as Kostas and Daphne relate. Do you agree with their theory that violence is like an illness that can be caught, and that the Greeks caught it from the Germans [72]? What other explanations can be offered?

5. "I already knew the power of language to destroy, to omit, to obliterate," says Jakob. "But poetry, the power of language to restore: this was what both Athos and Kostas were trying to teach me" [79]. What instances does the novel give of the destructive power of language? In what ways does writing--both the writing of poetry and of translations--help to heal and restore Jakob? Does silence--the cessation of language--have its own function, and if so, what might it be?

6. "We were a vine and a fence. But who was the vine? We would both have answered differently" [108]. Here Jakob is speaking of his relationship with Athos; of what other relationships in the novel might this metaphor be used? Does Michaels imply that dependence is an integral part of love?

7. What is it about Alex's character that attracts Jakob and makes him fall in love with her? Why does he eventually find life with her impossible? Do you find Alex a sympathetic character, or an unpleasant one?

8. "History is amoral: events occurred. But memory is moral" [138]. "Every moment is two moments" [161]. How does Jakob define and differentiate history and memory? Can you see Fugitive Pieces as a comparison of history and memory?

9. Music is an important element of Fugitive Pieces, and it is central to the lives of at least three of the characters, Bella, Alex, and Naomi. What does music mean to each of these characters? Why has Michaels given music such a prominent metaphoric role in the novel?

10. What does Fugitive Pieces say about the condition of being an immigrant? Jakob never feels truly at home anywhere, even in Greece. Ben's parents feel that their toehold in their new home is infinitely precarious, an emotion that communicates itself to Ben. Does Michaels imply that real integration is impossible?

11. Can you explain the very different reactions Ben's parents have had to their experience in the Holocaust? What in their characters has determined the differing ways they respond to grief and loss?

12. The relationship between Ben and Naomi is a troubled one. Why is he angry at her for her closeness to his parents and her attention to their graves? Why does he reject her by leaving for Greece without her? How can you explain his intense desire for Petra--is his need purely physical? How do Petra and Naomi differ? What is the significance of their names?

13. Science has as important a role in the novel as poetry and music. Why is geology so important to Athos, meteorology to Ben? Does science represent a standard of disinterested truth, or does it merely symbolize the world's terrifying contingency?

14. Why might Jakob have named his collection of poems Groundwork, and in what way does that title relate to his life? Jakob calls his young self a "bog-boy" [5]. Why does Ben take such an interest in the preserved bog people he reads about [221]?

15. The last line of the novel is Ben's: "I see that I must give what I most need." What does he mean by this? What does he most need, what will he give, and to whom?

16. What is the significance of the novel's title? What do "pieces," or "fragments," mean within Michaels's scheme? Where in the novel can you find references to fragments?

More on Fugitive Pieces---Interview with Anne Michaels

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jun/13/fugitive-pieces-anne-michaels-review

Thursday 9/10 Rights and Responsibilities

Pick up Fugitive Pieces/ read Chapter 2 for Monday "The Stone Carriers"

Agenda Sept. 8

1. Read Ch. 1 Fugitive Pieces aloud--discuss
Use link


2. Writing practice (2nd period):

Continue or start work on memory piece from 1st day

OR

Steal a line from Fugitive Pieces and develop a poem or short story

Agenda Thursday, Sept. 3

Welcome to Contemporary Writers 2009-2010

1. Go over course criteria sheet and overview of course

2. Introduction to Anne Michaels--go to website, read poems. We'll be getting the novel next week.


3. Look at Fugitive Pieces trailer--video bar




4. Writing Exercise: The Role of Memory
from Natalie Goldberg's Old Friend from Far Away Test #1
I Remember/I Don't Remember exercise