Topic(s) for the Essay

Topic

            For the essay, I would like you to compare one character from A Moon for the Misbegotten and one from In the Beauty of the Lilies.

            Compare Jim Tyrone to one of the male characters in Lilies: Clarence, Teddy, or Clark.  Or, compare Josie Hogan to one of the following female characters in Lilies: Stella, Emily, Esther, or Essie (Alma).

            I recommend reading A Moon for the Misbegotten first, to get a feel for Jim and Josie.  They are both wounded individuals.  Josie has an underlying strength, which Jim no longer has.  Then, as you make your way through Lilies, begin to identify the character that you can work with.  Look for similarities.  (Note: you’re not looking for identical matches.  When you are asked to “compare”, remember that “contrast” is always implied.)

            Once you’ve done all that, and before you write the essay, go back and skim through each work.  Re-read those particular sections where you see similarities.  Then think about the examples you will use to support your thesis.

The Essay Itself

            Any work of writing (any creative work of art, I suppose), is like an iceberg.   The final product is only the top 20%.  The remaining 80% is hidden, underwater if you will.  So for every hour you spend writing the actual essay, there should be four hours of pre-writing.

            The final product should be a six-paragraph essay.

            Paragraph 1 – Introduction and thesis.  Give your reader a brief introduction to the characters you have chosen, and tell us what to be looking for: that is, the gist of the comparison you will be making between the two characters you have chosen.

            Paragraph 2 – First characteristic of character A.  It should be a significant aspect of his/her character, needless to say.  Explain where and how this characteristic shows itself (and perhaps why).  Don’t try to do too much in a single paragraph.

            Paragraph 3 – Two ways to go here.  A)  Corresponding characteristic of character B (with supporting evidence).  Or, B) second characteristic of character A.

            Paragraph 4 – Second characteristic of character A, or B) first characteristic of character B.  If you’re going with the second approach – first one character, then the other – make sure that your correspondences are apparent to your reader.

            Paragraph 5 – One or the other.

            Paragraph 6 – Review and recap your thesis and the connections that you have made between your two characters.

How Long?

            How long is a bridge?  Long enough to do the job.  In this case, thin three to five pages.  No more than five pages, please.  Concision is a virtue of good writing.

How to Read a Poem

It's a different type of reading.  If you've never had much luck with poems,maybe you've been going about it all wrong. . .

How to Read a Poem

Step 1 – Giving it the once over.

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

Step 2 – Figuring it out.

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

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

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

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

Step 3 – Putting it all together.

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

Step 4 – A close reading in class.

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

Step 5 – All together now.

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

20 New and Selected Poems

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

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

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

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

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

~Tony Hoagland, Poet

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

~ Jim MacArthur, Teacher

Click to enlarge.

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

1. Interact with the poems as you read them.  Have a conversation with the poet.  (See an example to the right as I read two poems by Marie Howe -- two-time poet at the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival in Farmington.)  If you're not sure how to read a poem -- no seriously, it's different from other reading, go here.

The completed, annotated set of poems must be turned in no later than September 1, 2017.

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

(3.  If you need a copy of the Poem Packet, go to my THS webpage.)

By the way, I encourage all of you to drop by the Sunken Garden Poetry Festival this summer.  (If you're under eighteen, it's free!)  Poet Laureates who have read there in the past include Ted Kooser, Robert Pinsky, Billy Collins, Philip Levine, and Natasha Trethewey.  (Natasha has been here twice -- once as a young unknown and then later in her first reading as Poet Laureate.)  Many of the poets in your packet are Sunken Garden alumni.  There's food and drink, live music, then a poetry reading -- all in a beautiful setting on a lovely summer evening.  One can hardly get more civilized that that.

A Moon for the Misbegotten

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

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

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

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

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

In the Beauty of the Lilies

John Updike is now considered one of the preeminent American novelists of the 20th century.  We'll have to see how that goes.  Literary reputations have a way of rising and falling.  Melville died a miserable failure, and look at him now.

In the Beauty of the Lilies (where did he get that title from, by the way?) is a saga that follows the fortunes of one American family down through four generations.  Two guiding threads throughout the novel -- religious faith, and the movies.  How are those intertwined, I wonder?

In the beginning (of the novel) the Reverend Clarence Wilmot suddenly loses his faith.  His problem then is: how to you continue preaching the word of God to people, when you don't believe in God?  And he can't.  So he becomes a door-to-door encyclopedia salesman.  (Get it?  Secular knowledge substituting for religious faith?)  And so begins a slow decline for the family -- which is the opposite of how it's supposed to be in America.  With Clarence a shell of his former self, it's up to his wife to pick up the slack.  (And there's another thread for you to follow though the book.)