Literature – Lit Bits

Looking for the Parts of Speech in a Poem

When students read and discuss a poem in class, they do not usually expect to analyze the poem’s grammatical construction. But quite often, grammar is the best place to start a close reading. Years ago, I read a fascinating article that changed the way I approach poems with students at all levels. In “Deformance and Interpretation” (originally published in New Literary History), but you can also find it here, Lisa Samuels and Jerome McGann advocate for reading methods that can transform how readers engage with and contribute to a poem’s meaning. They suggest that we read poems backwards, from the last line to the first; isolate one part of speech at a time; and alter the layout of the poem in order to understand why the poet has chosen a particular typographical arrangement.

In what follows, I’ll focus on how reading for specific parts of speech, such as nouns and verbs, can alert students to the preoccupations of the poet. Of course, one could begin class by asking students what each sentence of the poem “means,” and that could yield a great discussion. But if you focus first on parts of speech—especially nouns and verbs, which are the most powerful parts of any phrase or sentence—you’ll find that your most reticent students are able to form opinions on the poem even before they’ve fully analyzed it.

For my example, I’ve chosen Stanley Kunitz’s “The Portrait”—certainly his most recognizable and frequently anthologized poem. Here’s the poem in its entirety, with an audio file of Kunitz reading the work. If you play the audio so that students can hear Kunitz’s brilliant, deeply moving delivery, they’ll understand the poem’s narrative right away: the speaker’s father has killed himself; the speaker’s mother cannot forgive him for doing this; and instead of telling her son what happened, she hits him when he tries to learn about who his father was. The poem is an incredible testament to the toll that such a trauma can take on a family.

First, ask your students to circle or highlight Kunitz’s nouns. The result should look like this:

Even before we’ve read the poem for its narrative, we can see that the poem’s first line features the mother and father; we know that the house plays a large role in the poem, with a focus on the attic (which is in fact the literal attic of the speaker’s childhood) and a reference to a cabinet (which is a metaphor for the mother’s heart); we see that Kunitz is attending to the time of year (spring) and time as a concept; and we can also see that Kunitz is concerned with the body—hand, moustache, eyes, cheek. From this reading of just the nouns, one can already sense that the story of the father’s suicide has deep, lasting effects that are attached to the memories of the house. We can also see that the child who wants to know something about his father learns that knowledge through the body—through the recognition of his father’s face and the slap on his own face that lingers in his mind for decades.

Next, ask your students to isolate the poem’s verbs:

By isolating the verbs, we can see the gothic terror at the heart of Kunitz’s poem. In this reading, Kunitz’s concern with forgiveness—his mother’s refusal to forgive the father—becomes the poem’s first action and tension. One sees, too, that the verbs are incredibly violent: killing, thumping, ripped, slapped, burning. Of course, there are three agents of action in the poem—mother, father, and son—and each of them performs one or more of these actions. In this reading, the poem is reduced to the physicality of its actions, and is already quite exciting. Kunitz wants this to be a hot poem, one that leaves us feeling singed by that “burning” in the final line. Memory, then, is not a cerebral or abstract entity, but one that is visceral, a mark that stays with us forever.

Not every poet will use such verbs of violence and assault; not every poet will use nouns that allude to the time of year or body parts. But that’s precisely the point of the exercise. By charting a poet’s obsessions with language, and with parts of speech specifically, students will be able to think more critically about how and why poets have stylistic differences that are deliberate, unique, and transformative.

The Bits Blog on Literature

The Bedford Bits blog provides instructors with teaching ideas from leading scholars, authors, and professors, focusing on composition generally, while LitBits was created just for literature instructors. However, sometimes the great contributors on Bits have approaches and perspectives that are equally useful in the literature classroom.

For this week’s post, we have gathered a collection of great posts on poetry, using technology and culture to engage students, and writing as a social action.

Holly Pappas, Gen Ed Poetry: Finding a Real Toad or Two

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/literature/gen-ed-poetry-finding-a-real-toad-or-two/archived/

Holly Pappas offers an assignment that will help engage students who are overwhelmed by or bored with poetry, and explains to her students that they don’t need perfect understanding to appreciate what is happening in a poem.

Joelle Hahn, Poetry, Proliferating

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/uncategorized/poetry-proliferating/archived/

Technology has made an undeniable impact on the written word, and Joelle presents a variety of online resources for navigating online poetry.

Traci Gardner, Using Pop Culture to Hook Students on Poetry

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/teaching-with-technology/using-pop-culture-to-hook-students-on-poetry/tgardner/

Song lyrics, commercial jingles, and Dr. Seuss all play a role in Traci Gardner’s plan to entice students into loving poetry.

Andrea Lunsford/Jeanne Law Bohannon, Multimodal Mondays: Day in the Life: A DIY Assignment Using Immediate Media, Archives, and Animation to Engage Student-Scholars in Digital, Public Writing

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/uncategorized/multimodal-mondays-day-in-the-life-a-diy-assignment-using-immediate-media-archives-and-animation-to-engage-student-scholars-in-digital-public-writing/alunsford/

An explanation of how Twitter, Storify, and Go Animate bring digital learning and literacy to the classroom.

Traci Gardner, A List of Ten Inspired by Literary Starbucks

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/assignment-idea-2/a-list-of-ten-inspired-by-literary-starbucks/tgardner/

Traci Gardner uses Literary Starbucks as a model, creating an assignment that allows students to playfully explore the minds and characters of great literary figures.

Michael Michaud, Writing is a Public Act: Take One

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/authors-2/michael-michaud/writing-is-a-public-act-take-one/archived/

In this exploration of how the private writing of the college classroom differs from the public writing of the internet, Michael Michaud discusses his efforts to bring student writing into the public sphere and generate discussion about the impact that writing can have.

Andrea Lunsford, Writing to Make Something Happen in the World

http://blogs.bedfordstmartins.com/bits/authors-2/andrea-lunsford/writing-to-make-something-happen-in-the-world/alunsford/

Andrea Lunsford discusses “good writing” in the context of words that serve a performative – even a transformative – purpose in the world, sharing and causing waves of social justice and change.

Promoting Literature on Campus

This year, in teaching my Shakespeare course, I used the 450th birthday as an excuse to get students to bring Shakespeare awareness to campus. To that end, I created an assignment that I called “Pop-up Shakespeare,” which I described like this:

You will be developing some sort of experience for your fellow Heidelberg students, whether it’s through chalking Shakespearean sonnets onto the sidewalks, developing a Shakespeare film festival, performing flash mob scenes, or creating a Shakespeare-related volunteer project (just to suggest some ideas). For this assignment you can work with a group or alone. You must document the event through pictures; you will also write a brief analysis of your work, explaining why you chose to do what you did.

The object of the assignment was to encourage students to have some fun with Shakespeare and to exercise some creativity in doing so. It was ultimately a small part of the final grade, but I wanted something that would make Shakespeare just a bit less intimidating and would make literature a bit more visible on campus.

The results were fun — and I heard from a number of colleagues in other departments how much they were enjoying the different things that students were posting around campus. We had some sidewalk chalk, we had a movie night in one of the residence halls, and mostly we had a lot of great signs.

Teaching Shakespeare’s Contemporaries

Every other year I teach a course called “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries.” And therefore every other year I end up thinking that it’s the worst possible name for the course. For starters, when you consider that Great Britain boasted a population of 4,811,718 in 1600, the title alone would obligate me to entertain 4,811,717 thousand individuals, and though my strength is as the strength of ten, I am but one man. More seriously, if we were even to entertain only the dramatic entertainments of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, that still leaves an enormous number of plays.

Consider this: with enough time on his hands or money in her pocket, an industrious young man or woman of 21 in 1584 could have seen the premier of the plays of John Lyly, as well as plays by Thomas Kyd, Christopher Marlowe, and Robert Greene before she or he hit 30. In the next decade, my imaginary – though aging – playgoer could see plays by all of the Thomases (Heywood, Dekker, Middleton), the Johns (Marston, Webster, Fletcher), Ben Jonson, Francis Beaumont, Cyril Tourneur before he or she had passed his or her 40^th. Won’t they be tired? Oh yeah, by the way, they could have also seen all the plays of Shakespeare, and about 1200 more for which we have records in the period.

But we don’t have world or time enough – in fact we only have fifteen weeks. So I end up selected about 25 plays and, by selecting, doom each play to the status of sample. Each play must be a sample of something about all of the other plays in the period not written by William Shakespeare, and there’s a surprisingly large number of them. This in turn seems to doom the class to an exercise in which whoever wrote the play they’re reading, they’re always reading a play not-by-Shakespeare, whereas when they’re reading a play by Shakespeare, they’re never reading a play, for instance, not-by-Marston. A former student in the course put it crudely but effectively when she said, there’s Shakespeare and there’s early modern drama. She’s right.

I’m not really complaining, and I’m certainly not diagnosing. At this point I’m merely describing the case that is the case. After all, what else would we want to call the class?

Tudor, Jacobean, and Carolinian Drama
Sixteenth, and Seventeenth Century Plays in English
Plays in English: 1580-1642
Non-Shakespearean Early Modern Entertainments
Early English Drama
Medieval and Renaissance Drama

I could write several hundred words, at least, on the problems of each title, but I’ll spare you for now. Suffice to say that all these course names are variously misleading. For now, at least, “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries” will serve. Not least because it seems, of all the titles auditioned here, to be the most provocatively bad. “Shakespeare’s Contemporaries” is the worst possible name for the course, except for all the others.

Stretching the Field of Knowledge

Throughout the last decade-plus of college teaching, I’ve been called upon to do a lot of teaching outside my immediate area of expertise. A great deal of this began when I working off the tenure track at Florida Atlantic University, where I began teaching a course called “Interpretation of Fiction.” This is a course that primarily covers short stories (though we also read a novel) – and the short story was the one form that I felt, as a student of early modern drama, that I was unqualified to teach. Of course I’d studied short stories in classes – I’ve got three English degrees, after all – but I still felt like I didn’t understand the form, or know the types of stories to bring to the classroom, given that this form simply isn’t something we think about much when we read Shakespeare or Spenser or Milton.

So it was a crash course in the short story, provided by Ann Charters’ The Story and its Writer. But because of that experience, I began reading much more world literature in earnest. I’d studied some Kafka as an undergrad; I’d read some Chekhov in my teen years, but never really thought much of it; and certainly I was aware of the weirdness of Borges’ works. But much of what I was doing in the first semester of teaching that course was learning alongside my students.

Because of that initial experience after graduate school, and because I’ve since worked exclusively at small liberal arts colleges with fewer than 1500 students (and with very small English departments), I’ve spent a lot of time teaching outside of my immediate specialties. And this will continue for the foreseeable future.

In my current position, I’m teaching the courses of a woman who taught at the school for more than 40 years (I am not replacing her. She is an institution unto herself, and I certainly am not trying to fill those shoes. I’ve got my own.). The courses I teach range from Shakespeare and the British Literature survey courses to the survey of modern world literature and the novels course. I’m also in the process of creating a 100-level course on literature about nature, because we’re an institution with a large number of environmental science majors – and this seems like a topic that will interest a large portion of our student population. On top of this, I’m already carving out a niche for directing honors projects that cover, in essence, nerd culture.

Some days, it’s overwhelming. And I miss the comfort of being able to speak extensively on a topic without a whole lot of preparation when students have particular questions. But at the same time, there’s something extraordinary to me about being, ultimately, a generalist. I’m pushed to learn more and more every time I teach, and I’m pushed to expand my own literary experiences.

And that probably explains why I don’t feel bad that my summer reading has been classical Japanese literature, and not the scholarly articles about non-Shakespearean dramatists that I know I should be reading instead. At the same time, I have these moments of guilt about relying primarily on my Twitter feed for news of what’s happening in my primary field (there are lots of great early modernists on Twitter, incidentally). I wonder if I’m doing this wrong.

But those moments are ultimately pretty fleeting, because I’m coming to accept that I can still do my research in the field, and then turn my attention to the Tale of Genji the rest of the time.

A Simile is Like a Metaphor

Textbook discussions of figurative language tend to insist that similes and metaphors deepen a reader’s understanding of what they are describing. But if you look at how most writers employ similes and metaphors, they don’t so much deepen the meaning of what is being described as they change it. Much like you wouldn’t use an adjective or an adverb unless it changed the meaning of a given noun or verb, you wouldn’t use figurative language to say the same thing your literal language is saying.

Instead, figurative language is one of the best tools for writers who want to add emotional connotations, tone, and atmosphere, to a thing that might not otherwise have these features. Continue reading “A Simile is Like a Metaphor”

On Re-reading for Class

I don’t know about anyone of you out there, but at a certain point in the semester I feel an exhausted relief when I look at the scheduled readings and see that I’ve been smart enough to assign texts that I’ve read before, that I’ve taught before. I have that moment when I think, “I don’t necessarily have to re-read this – I’ve done this before. I’ll just do what I did last time.”

It’s not a good habit, but it’s an understandable one, I think. And I suspect that most of us give in to the temptation from time to time.

But last week, I was reminded once again why it is that I need to re-read for class – and not just because I need to be sure that I’m completely prepared. Continue reading “On Re-reading for Class”

Planning for the Summer

I suspect that most of us who teach at the college or university level look forward to summer not because we don’t have to teach, but because it’s an opportunity to focus our working hours on research and our development as faculty members. Of course, we create lists of writing and research projects that we want to work on – and my lists are always overly ambitious, to say the least.

But I think it’s also important to create reading lists. While I do take some time to read lighter fare (I’m looking forward to Nicole Peeler’s next installment in her Jane True series, for example), I like to create an academic reading list for the summer. I’ve generally tried to have a theme: a writer’s entire body of work or major works from a particular literary era where there is a gap in my own education. So, I’ve had summers of William Faulkner, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare (I’m an early modern scholar, not a Shakespearean per se), nineteenth century British novels (that one really just meant Vanity Fair and several Hardy novels).

I’m currently casting about for what my reading list should focus on this summer. I have a book to review for an academic journal and research-related reading to do, but that’s not the sort of reading that I’m talking about. Likely, I’ll settle on Ben Jonson’s work – I haven’t read many of his tragedies. Though, as I write this, I have to say that Frances Burney’s work also sounds appealing to me right now. I’m still undecided. Continue reading “Planning for the Summer”

And what shoulder…

Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell UP, 1998) and the co-editor of several books, including Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections (UPNE / Brandeis, 2000) and Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation, 2008); his essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, notably Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He has written lesson plans and pedagogical materials for Poetry Out Loud, the Poetry Foundation, and WGBH-Boston, and has been awarded five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to lead summer seminars and school-year workshops on “teaching the pleasures of poetry.”

This morning, William Blake’s “The Tyger” is running through my mind—and through my shoulders. Four beats per line, four lines per stanza: that’s sixteen push-ups every quatrain. I’m gunning for a hundred, but I’m not there yet. Poetry helps.

I started this poetry/fitness kick last summer, when my wife introduced me to Steve Speirs’ book 7 Weeks to 100 Push-Ups. The first week or two went fine, but as the numbers in the final sets grew longer, I could only hit the target if I found something to focus on other than the aches in my delts and triceps. Metrical poems did the trick. Line by line, beat by beat, they held my attention, even as they let me calculate how far I’d gotten. Continue reading “And what shoulder…”

Drama as Theatre; Drama as Literature

It is not always easy to distinguish between drama as literature and drama as theatre. My view has always been that good drama is based on good literature, but having said that, we all know that there are moments in the theatre when the action moves far beyond the printed page and its stage directions. Those are the moments when we realize that drama is theatre.

This meditation is a result of my having just seen a wild adaptation of Molière’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself directed and adapted by Christopher Bayes, whose roots are in the Theatre de la Jeune Lune. Bayes tossed out the standard text and built a commedia dell’arte version on the comic bones that Molière had provided beneath the dialogue. Continue reading “Drama as Theatre; Drama as Literature”