Unit 1 Questions from the Vendler Book

As I noted on the first day of class, in Unit 1 we'll be compiling a list of questions that can offer us a way "in" to poetry that seems difficult or complex. I've gathered a few of these questions here and I offer them as help as many of you write your first blog posts next week:

• What piece of life, private or public, is the poem concerned with? Where and when is this life being lived?
• How does the author avoid cliché? How does he or she bring originality to this moment?
• Where is the moment of disequilibrium in the poem? How is the status quo disturbed?
• What patterns (phonetic, grammatical, syntactic, psychological, temporal, spatial, etc.) appear in the poem? How do these patterns impact the sense of the experience depicted?
• How does the structure of the poem reinforce (or work against) the central contrast or comparison being made in the poem?
• Does the poem have a plot or a narrative? Does it begin at the beginning, in the middle, at the end, or somewhere else entirely? How does the author’s decision to begin at this point affect your interpretation of the action?

We'll continue to add to this list as we develop questions through our reading of the Vendler book and our in-class discussions.

Class Discussion for Wednesday, January 13

As I noted on the first day, in Unit 1 we'll be working to develop a set of questions that will prompt you to think about poems more deeply. Vendler actually proposes a few of these questions in chapter 1, namely:

• What piece of life, private or public, is the poem concerned with? Where and when is this life being lived?
• How does the author avoid cliché? How does he or she bring originality to this moment?
• Where is the moment of disequilibrium in the poem? How is the status quo disturbed?

These questions can be very useful as you try to determine what is unique about a poem, or what specific piece of information the author is attempting to communicate to you. Here are some examples of how these questions might be applied to some of the poems in chapter 1:

• Describe the disequilibrium between perception and reality in Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It." How does Komunyakaa depict this disequilibrium? What does the poem, and this sense of disequilibrium in particular, have to say to us about the nature of "memory" and "memorial" in general?
• How does Rita Dove use setting to create a sense of disequilibrium in "Flash Cards?" How does the speaker fit into the poem's two different settings?
  
• Vendler noted that in "The School Children," Louise Glück subverts cliche by making the tradtionally quaint image of children bringing an apple to their teacher into something more sinister. What are some of the other key images in the poem? Do they also fit this pattern of moving from quaint/cliche to more complex and sinister?

These are just some questions to get you thinking if you're stuck. We can talk about any or all of the poems in class on Wednesday. See you then!