Week 1

Poppies

The earth is rocky and full of roots; it's clay, and it seems doomed and polluted, but you dig little holes for the ugly shriveled bulbs, throw in a handful of poppy seeds, and cover it all over, and you know you'll never see it again - it's death and clay and shrivel, and your hands are nicked from the rocks, your nails black with soil. –Anne Lamott



                                     

Welcome to the Introduction to Literature (ENC1102) class here at the Art Institute.  As your instructor, I will post description of course material and assignments and discussion of key terms and selections presented in class (and additional material too, perhaps).  You should visit the site to stay abreast of material and apprised of any changes to assignments or selections to be covered.

Course Description:  The course is designed as a study of some of the various genres of literature–lyric and narrative poetry, fictional and non-fictional narratives, and dramatic works in performance.  The themes, forms and conventions of the various works we read will provide means of discussion, and written and oral performance.

Themes:  

Nature:   perhaps the primary thematic focus, and a wide field of play, for there is no escaping Nature, the ultimate source and end of all things human and non-human.  What is Nature actually, and what is not?  We look at nature through the lens of "Art," an entirely human construct, one which here includes philosophy, religion, history, science and, importantly, language.   We humans are nature’s creatures, however distinct, highly evolved, and seemingly "superior" to other species.  Whether little or much our awareness of the physical universe–Earth, Sun, Moon, Stars, and all the world's “creatures great and small,” etcetera– we are defined and bound by our relationship to the natural world, the Cosmos, out of which we emerged, as did all things, some 13 billion years ago, when the Big Bang occurred, according to scientific claims and calculations. The tree of life is an old and apt symbol of this connectedness, mythological and scientific.

       

The Human Experience and Journey (Individual/Society):  We are born, grow to youth and maturity, age, and then die . . . and in this our lives, individually and collectively, reflect the age-old succession of the seasons and organic life.  A continual process of creation and destruction, as the old gives way before the new, and what is past becomes an archive of artifacts, memories and stories, whereby we can trace our origins, and wonder and speculate about the mysteries of Time.  In fact, As William Faulkner wrote, the past is never dead. The vital function that artists perform in creating art works, their evocations and explorations of the material and spiritual realms, of human growth and identity, the conflicts between individuals and societal groups, provide an endless source of insight, inspiration, and wonder.  I am hoping you find it so, at any rate.

Religion/God/ Spirituality:  The course material invites you to consider representations of nature, of the human and what we have made of things, the phenomena,  and the noumena of the world.   What to think of nature, our origins, the Creation,  each other, family, society, culture?  Indeed, we may see nature, including humans and their constructs, an antagonist, an ally, a morally neutral, even amoral force, reflective of forces and processes far beyond our ability to comprehend, in which savagery, destruction, suffering and death stand equally with kindness, creation, joy, and life.  Life comprises a great many conceptual opposites and their reconciliation is a life's work.  The poems and stories illustrate just such work. We think in categories of opposition: life/death; light/dark; good/evil; finite/infinite; material/immaterial; mutable/immutable; temporal/eternal; transcendence/immanence; the One/the Many, holy/unholy.  We have the given and what we make of it verbally or linguistically, conceptually.  Art manifests the human imagination and spirit in its attempt to recreate, name, and understand life.

To summarize, we live in time, and in space, and the cycles of nature and stages of life provide rich subject matter for writers reflecting on the experience of living.  Nature, in fact, appears a mirror and a touchstone of the Self and human experience.  We are part of universal nature, and we bring our particular human nature to it, with our griefs, our joys, our forebodings, aspirations, and imaginings.  The Book of Nature informs us to the extent we take the time to read it and to acknowledge how it shapes us. A falling leaf, a sudden snowfall, the stars shining in the blackness of space–these speak to us.  Indeed, it is a story of "supernatural" dimensions in human imagination, and thus the religious and spiritual experience is necessarily a theme we will address. Consider the following the following two poems, the first concerned with states of consciousness that arise in groundless, in-between moments, nothing doing but aware above all, when we are face to face with the unknowable, or what is behind the veil of the familiar, the matter behind all matter, invisible, "ungraspable"(Strand line 3). And the second, the endless demands that so fill the daily life that Nature's respite appears the speaker's salvation.

The Night, The Porch                          by Mark Strand

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart

What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself

To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.

Trees can sway or be still.  Day or night can be what they wish.

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort

Of being strangers, at least to ourselves.  This is the crux

Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting

For Something whose appearance would be its vanishing–

The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,

Or less.  There is no end to what we can learn.  The book out there

Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

Woman Work                                                       by Maya Angelou

I’ve got the children to tend

The clothes to mend

The floor to mop

The food to shop

Then the chicken to fry

The baby to dry

I got company to feed

The garden to weed

I’ve got shirts to press

The tots to dress

The can to be cut

I gotta cleanup this hut

Then see about the sick

And the cotton to pick.

Shine on me, sunshine

Rain on me, rain

Fall softly, dewdrops

And cool my brow again.

Storm blow me from here

With your fiercest wind

Let me float across the sky

‘Til I can rest again.

Fall gently, snowflakes

Cover me with white

Cold icy kisses and

Let me rest tonight.

Sun, rain, curving sky

Mountain, oceans, leaf, and stone

Star shine, moon glow

You’re all that I can call my own


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I must down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by.   –John Masefield (1878-1967), British poet

                      

      Eternal, Infinite, Immutable, Immortal, God, the One, and their polar opposites–the temporal, finite, mutable, mortal, human, the many–we shall see how these concepts are embodied, literally and/or figuratively in various works.  We shall see how some artists have articulated the search for Truth, God, the impact of Beauty, the experience of the Sublime.  Literature gives us a window into the human experience that is not to be missed.  

As regards the symbols of stories, myths and legends, whether of ancient Babylon, Egypt, Greece, India  the Judeo-Christian world, Native America, or the contemporary U.S., Joseph Campbell, a scholar in comparative literature, wrote that they refer “primarily to our inner selves” and not to “outer historical events” (Thou Art That 28), that they are psychological archetypes known to all mythologies.”  Beyond the necessities imposed by our animal nature, he writes, is “another order of living, which the animals do not know, that of awe before the mystery of being, the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, that can be the root and branch of the spiritual sense of one’s days” (29).

When we read  the lines “To see a World in a Grain of Sand/ And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” by William Blake, we may sense the great mystery of the heavenly, infinite realms evoked by his focus on the familiar, small by comparison, microcosm of sand particle and wild flower. By metaphor and symbol we bridge in language inner and outer worlds, subject and object, the personal and the cosmic.  Blake wrote, "The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or Geniuses, calling them by the names and adorning them with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged & Numerous senses could perceive." In this way, they acknowledged a living spiritual connection with the world around, saw in it divinity.  

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In writing about literature, you will reproduce in summary or direct quotation lines of text to illustrate and to ground your descriptions and interpretations in the precise language used by the poet.  You will want to show readers how you have arrived at your conclusions about its construction and meaning.  Use quotation marks around the word-for-word phrasings and lines and a slash or virgule to separate lines of text that run no more than three successive lines. Blocks of text four or more lines in length should be indented or offset 10 spaces, without use of quotation marks.  The example below illustrates the block format:

Example presentation:  summary description, block formatted quotation, and response to a poem:

      In "Snow Toward Evening," Melville Cane shows the surprise and delight of an unexpected turn in the weather.  The poem begins thus:

         

                      Suddenly the sky turned grey.

                      The day,

                      Which had been bitter and chill,

                      Grew soft and still.     (1-4)

                                         

The lines above, by virtue of end rhyme, appear as couplets of uneven length that come to a hushed, extended close with the words "soft and still."  Notice the first couplet constitutes one simple sentence (line 1) and the brief start, the subject alone–"The day" (line 2) of the next sentence, which takes three lines to complete. So though we have exact end rhyme on both couplets, the rhythm changes by virtue of line length and sentence pattern.  The particular arrangement of words within lines, the breaks between lines, presence or absence of rhyme and the weight of accents or beats shape the sense and potential meaning of the text.
       The next line is a single word, "Quietly," from which the remainder of the poem hangs, as if suspended, like the "petals cool and white," the snow that falls "from some invisible blossoming tree" (lines 7, 6).   The airy dance of flakes is wonderful, a kind of epiphany, a manifestation of divine grace.

The following poem builds on the biblical story of Adam and Eve, personalizing the voice of Eve in a way the foundation text, of course, does not:

Eve Recollecting the Garden                                  by Grace Bauer

Was it your nakedness

or the knack you had

for naming I learned

to love?  Crow, you whispered

and wings flapped black

as satin in the sky

Bee, and sweetness thickened 

on my tongue, Lion

And something roared beneath

the ribs you claimed

you sacrificed.  Our first quarrel

arose about the beast

I thought deserved a nobler tag

Than dog.  And Orchid–­

a sound more delicate.  Admit it!

Dolphin.  Starling.  Antelope

were syllables you stole

from me, and you

were the one who swore

we’d have to taste those blood

red globes of fruit

before we’d find the right word

for that god-forsaken tree.

HOMEWORK:  For homework please read the poem "Sestina," by Elizabeth Bishop and answer the six questions posted below in response to it.  Read also the first several pages of selections in the packets distributed week one, beginning with the first entries and working forward.  Dip into the introduction and "Nature" section of Ralph Waldo Emerson's essay Nature  for some background understanding of nineteenth century romantic views (a very influential writer's work here, but not altogether clear at times, rather difficult, in fact).  Next week we'll look at another sestina called "Sestina," by Algernon C. Swinburne.

The following questions should serve as a guide and will be useful when you start writing in response to the texts: 

1.  What does the title indicate (use a dictionary when advisable)? How does it frame or shape our understanding of the poem body?

2.  Who is speaking and why, or to what purpose?  What tone(s) of voice do you hear and where?

3.  What is the situation? What's the poem about?  Is a story being told?  What's the conflict or at stake   for the speaker or central character?

4. What image(s) do you find most attractive or arresting? Why so?  In what sense do they support a theme of the poem? (see final question)

5. Which words, phrases, lines or images present difficulties of interpretation?

6. What is the climax of the poem or story and its apparent theme(s)?

Essay 1 is to be a short response (350-500 words) to any one or two of the texts supplied.  It will be due week 3. In class next week we will cover the first of the two sestinas and I will be checking to see if you have provided notes to the texts, and giving points for the discussion that your notes contribute to the class (out of the 10 possible participation points).

Note:  the following site, which I have permission to use from the author, contains much helpful background information on reading poetry, the formal elements of poetry, key themes of English Romanticism, readings (interpretative presentations/essays) of selections, etcetera. It appears as a link on the upper right pullout drawer of the blog page, A Guide to the Study of Literature.

http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/cs6/read_lyr.html

You might also look at the some of recitations collected at poetryoutloud.org to get a sense of the range of material and approaches possible in reciting poetry, whether familiar or wholly new to you.  Here for instance, is one young lady's reading of  e.e. cummings'  free verse poem "i carry your heart": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-nymX7IIWM

This first page may be updated to cover week one's lecture and discussion before we meet again for class week 2.  Until then  . . . I leave you with one more poem, a famous one, too!

The Panther                        Rainer Maria Rilke ( 1875-1926 )

His vision, from the constantly passing bars,

has grown so weary that it cannot hold

anything else.  It seems to him there are

a thousand bars, and behind the bars, no world.

As he paces in cramped circles, over and over,

the movement of his powerful soft strides

is like a ritual dance around a center

in which a mighty will stands paralyzed.

Only at times, the curtain of the pupils

lifts, quietly.  An image enters in,

rushes down through the tense, arrested muscles,

plunges into the heart and is gone.