I'm reading a book again on writing about literature, trying to extract what I can then communicate to my composition / literature students as they work on the first drafts of their essays that are due on Monday. As always, I feel like I'm learning what I should have known a month ago, and I wonder if they will wonder why in the hell I didn't tell them any of this a week or two ago. And I think about how I can maybe let them guess that there was some ingenious reason for not telling them these things "too soon," because I wanted them to write in a freer space. I think also that I should have known these things a lot longer than a month ago - how about two years ago, when I was starting my graduate program, or further back than that, when I was always agonizing over what exactly I was supposed to be doing when I wrote about literature? My writing process was mostly what I'd figured out without overt instruction. And I could romanticize that, and think that it's what has helped my writing - that I'm not constrained by formulas, but by my own kinds of logic - but I don't know if that's true. I wonder if a person can only get so far my way. At any rate, I'm excited to try to write a paper myself now, but I don't know when I'll get to one.
It's been nine minutes since I started this, and it's 5:48 am. Luckily, I woke up at 4:30 and couldn't sleep any longer, so I decided to take a shower and then read that book. But that made me want to write, so I gave myself just these thirty minutes to do so. There is never enough time anymore to write, or so I tell myself. It's more that I'm not in the state of mind to write, or I think that I need a few hours at least to sink into anything worth saying. I feel myself always on the surface of everything, not in a frame of mind conducive to deep insights. But who's to say if any of that is true? I tell my students to develop a habit of writing, even 15 or 20 minutes a day - because the writing books say to do this. And maybe our best insights don't depend on having hours of open time. At any rate, I had 30 minutes, and now it's 5:54 am, so I have 14.
But I've been sitting for two minutes now, just listening to the sounds outside, because the door to the back is open, since it's in the 70s out there.
I'm teaching some excerpts from Francisco Jimenez's trilogy today - the trilogy I wrote my master's essay on. A student wrote on Blackboard (our class website) that for some reason, these touched him differently than even the previous readings - that something about the kindness of those who helped Jimenez during his grade school and college years really moved this student. And it made me think about how I too found his trilogy so moving, and how as I wrote my master's essay - and afterward - I wondered if that affection and respect came through. Was there no way in the form for me to communicate that? And if so, why not? I'm not sure about this. Maybe enough of my feeling came through, or at least some. But there is this dilemma - this need to say something scholarly - something significant - and in that demanded form, I struggle to not lose the ability to say what I feel about a piece of writing.
I have 3 minutes left now. This is what these particular 30 minutes of thinking and typing are turning into on the 'page.' 2 minutes now. I waste time reporting these things, but I am thinking about how long it actually takes to write well. Not as long as I tend to think, but longer than what my students think as they wonder why their two hours of pounding out an essay haven't materialized into a well-written piece of work. Writing takes time. I keep telling them that.
Friday, September 27, 2013
Tuesday, September 17, 2013
Writer's Block
by Lucy S.
I've started quite a few posts in the recent weeks but not finished them. At times, I think I'm losing faith in the ability of writing to do anything, but I know better than that. Just last week, I taught Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and that surely proves the possibilities, at least, of what a human being can do with the written word in the world. (Notice... "I taught..." I am TEACHING a college class now - something I yearned to do for most of my adult life, something that felt impossible for me... I should be writing about THAT, and yet I am somehow overwhelmed into writing paralysis of a sort.) Well, then - I'm not losing faith in a general sense. But this weary malaise too often threatens to take me over. It comes in part at least from working on reading and writing for so many of my waking hours. It comes from the fraying connections with people I've been close to, people I miss so much. It comes from feeling that maybe there's nothing more to try for, an illogical idea, but it rolls on in at times. It comes from certain absences, and from accepting those absences "for now" - a deferral too easy to let last into perpetuity.
And I am losing faith in my OWN writing - because writing itself sometimes puts me in this frame of mind. Writing hurts. So I don't know how truthfully I represent anything when I'm in this frame of mind.
I'm trying to teach my students to write truthfully and to write with careful, specific detail. I told them about little talk versus big talk, except I screwed up and told them Ray Bradbury talked about this in his book on writing, but later, Justin told me it was Chuck Palahniuk. I haven't corrected that mistake. But I told them that they need LOTS of little talk - all the details that make for a poem or a story - and big talk used very sparingly. Yesterday, I talked to them about how we need textual evidence to support claims in these papers, and in "creative" writing, we have to write that textual evidence ourselves in our own texts. Either way - "academic" or "creative" writing - applying the big talk / little talk rule helps. Don't go on and on making statements about how "life" is, and don't write self-indulgently, at least not outside of your journals.
The professor at my undergrad university with whom I felt uncomfortable used to say that we needed to make our writing a "gift" to the reader. I often doubted him, though that precept always came back to nag me. My writing is TESTIMONY, I thought, and that's it's own kind of gift - one that people like him wouldn't understand - I thought. Now... I don't know. There are so many things that I wonder about maybe getting wrong. I mean, was he really in error over that one - making one's writing a gift? I suppose the question is what kind of gift and for whom.
Yesterday, as class was ending, I asked some students how they thought it was going so far - if they were finding the workload about right or too much, what they thought about the readings and any thing else. Three stayed for a few minutes to say that the class is "different," that the readings are about right, that they actually enjoy them and feel excited to write. One said that in another class, there is so much to read and so many questions to answer that he just plows through without thinking much about it other than to get it done. That same guy said he never liked English in high school, but now is excited to write the first paper.
This brings to mind images from one of my favorite poems, a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa called "Sunday Afternoons." He writes of being sent outside with his siblings while his parents fought in the house:
Writing is an act of communication. What happens when some people are told repeatedly that their writing is of little value, that it is deficient? Are we to engage with one another as full human beings or as producers of objects that we each coldly assess? Shouldn't we be helping one another express ourselves as well as possible in service to a deep ethic of care for one another and for our truths? Or shall we press in with our petty or not so petty power and crush what we can of the blue shells?
I am trying to unlearn being unkind, having learned it from too many places. I am trying to retain what kindness is left in me, or even to somehow grow it up. I write because I've been lucky enough to know kind people who hold the speckled blue eggs oh so carefully, or even leave them in their nests while standing near to encourage and protect and cheer on the transformations into creatures who fly and sing.
Most everyone has "writer's block" - don't they? Why? Where do they learn it?
I've started quite a few posts in the recent weeks but not finished them. At times, I think I'm losing faith in the ability of writing to do anything, but I know better than that. Just last week, I taught Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and that surely proves the possibilities, at least, of what a human being can do with the written word in the world. (Notice... "I taught..." I am TEACHING a college class now - something I yearned to do for most of my adult life, something that felt impossible for me... I should be writing about THAT, and yet I am somehow overwhelmed into writing paralysis of a sort.) Well, then - I'm not losing faith in a general sense. But this weary malaise too often threatens to take me over. It comes in part at least from working on reading and writing for so many of my waking hours. It comes from the fraying connections with people I've been close to, people I miss so much. It comes from feeling that maybe there's nothing more to try for, an illogical idea, but it rolls on in at times. It comes from certain absences, and from accepting those absences "for now" - a deferral too easy to let last into perpetuity.
And I am losing faith in my OWN writing - because writing itself sometimes puts me in this frame of mind. Writing hurts. So I don't know how truthfully I represent anything when I'm in this frame of mind.
I'm trying to teach my students to write truthfully and to write with careful, specific detail. I told them about little talk versus big talk, except I screwed up and told them Ray Bradbury talked about this in his book on writing, but later, Justin told me it was Chuck Palahniuk. I haven't corrected that mistake. But I told them that they need LOTS of little talk - all the details that make for a poem or a story - and big talk used very sparingly. Yesterday, I talked to them about how we need textual evidence to support claims in these papers, and in "creative" writing, we have to write that textual evidence ourselves in our own texts. Either way - "academic" or "creative" writing - applying the big talk / little talk rule helps. Don't go on and on making statements about how "life" is, and don't write self-indulgently, at least not outside of your journals.
The professor at my undergrad university with whom I felt uncomfortable used to say that we needed to make our writing a "gift" to the reader. I often doubted him, though that precept always came back to nag me. My writing is TESTIMONY, I thought, and that's it's own kind of gift - one that people like him wouldn't understand - I thought. Now... I don't know. There are so many things that I wonder about maybe getting wrong. I mean, was he really in error over that one - making one's writing a gift? I suppose the question is what kind of gift and for whom.
Yesterday, as class was ending, I asked some students how they thought it was going so far - if they were finding the workload about right or too much, what they thought about the readings and any thing else. Three stayed for a few minutes to say that the class is "different," that the readings are about right, that they actually enjoy them and feel excited to write. One said that in another class, there is so much to read and so many questions to answer that he just plows through without thinking much about it other than to get it done. That same guy said he never liked English in high school, but now is excited to write the first paper.
This brings to mind images from one of my favorite poems, a poem by Yusef Komunyakaa called "Sunday Afternoons." He writes of being sent outside with his siblings while his parents fought in the house:
They’d latch the screendoorsA first year student has written this in a letter to me: "I always hate creating a piece and then turning it in feeling as though I have done a very decent job, only to have it returned back to me with deductions and red splattered across the pages." I had them write me letters to hand in by the second class-meeting, and many expressed in various ways an idea of themselves as not very good writers and some pain with that. They hope that somehow this will be different... And they are afraid to hope.
& pull Venetian blinds,
Telling us not to leave the yard.
But we always got lost
Among mayhaw and crabapple.
Juice spilled from our mouths,
& soon we were drunk and brave
As birds diving through saw vines.
Each nest held three or four
Speckled eggs, blue as rage.
Where did we learn to be unkind,
There in the power of holding each egg...
Writing is an act of communication. What happens when some people are told repeatedly that their writing is of little value, that it is deficient? Are we to engage with one another as full human beings or as producers of objects that we each coldly assess? Shouldn't we be helping one another express ourselves as well as possible in service to a deep ethic of care for one another and for our truths? Or shall we press in with our petty or not so petty power and crush what we can of the blue shells?
I am trying to unlearn being unkind, having learned it from too many places. I am trying to retain what kindness is left in me, or even to somehow grow it up. I write because I've been lucky enough to know kind people who hold the speckled blue eggs oh so carefully, or even leave them in their nests while standing near to encourage and protect and cheer on the transformations into creatures who fly and sing.
Most everyone has "writer's block" - don't they? Why? Where do they learn it?
Monday, September 16, 2013
Thoughts on September 16th
by Lucy S.
I should be writing about so many things, but I haven't been, and now it's six short or long years since Rose died as of today, and I feel I should write something, I've read Emerson writing about losing his young son, and how you somehow can't get close to these losses, how existence goes on.... and, oh, I should just go grab my Emerson book, but i'm tired because I have to get up in five and a half hours, so I'll let that somewhat sloppy paraphrasing suffice. Sometimes that old "why" question pounds on in my mind, like now... Sometimes I still cry. Sometimes the pain is dull. Sometimes I feel new variations of missing her, because it has just been so damn long. It just gets to be so very long since we've talked with these lost ones. I wonder how the old people manage all that yearning and loss a lifetime will finally fill you with.
Just the other day, Jonathan was saying how "Angel Baby," that OLD song by Rosie and the Originals, reminds him of Rose; Justin and I said, "Yeah..." and Justin said she used to play this one tape all the time with that song and a couple by Notorious B.I.G. - then rewind and play again, over and over.
I was on a rant to Justin this evening about how I "hate" video games and all those mediocre distractions from real greatness... But then I think about how she used to play Dr. Mario over and over, and my argument crumbles in my mind now. I don't know what I really think about those or so many other things. Right now, I'd love to sit next to her on that old couch in Aguanga and play some rounds with the falling pills. Anyway, I used to love that dumb game and the way it could suck me in for a while. Maybe I still would.
How can Rose and William both be gone? Loss can make you ask the same old questions, never fully un-stunned.
She used to tell me I'd be a good counselor. Sometimes she used to ask me why I didn't even "do anything" (didn't shoplift, didn't drink much, didn't party....). She said, "Damn, you're like a nun." A nun... I used to laugh and roll my eyes.... "Yep, that's me, alright - a real nun.," I'd say.
Five days ago, on 9/11, I thought of them both - Rose and William - because they were living with us when it happened. For me, their deaths have become blended into that anniversary.
I have to go to sleep. When I wake up, it will be the real morning of September 16.
I should be writing about so many things, but I haven't been, and now it's six short or long years since Rose died as of today, and I feel I should write something, I've read Emerson writing about losing his young son, and how you somehow can't get close to these losses, how existence goes on.... and, oh, I should just go grab my Emerson book, but i'm tired because I have to get up in five and a half hours, so I'll let that somewhat sloppy paraphrasing suffice. Sometimes that old "why" question pounds on in my mind, like now... Sometimes I still cry. Sometimes the pain is dull. Sometimes I feel new variations of missing her, because it has just been so damn long. It just gets to be so very long since we've talked with these lost ones. I wonder how the old people manage all that yearning and loss a lifetime will finally fill you with.
Just the other day, Jonathan was saying how "Angel Baby," that OLD song by Rosie and the Originals, reminds him of Rose; Justin and I said, "Yeah..." and Justin said she used to play this one tape all the time with that song and a couple by Notorious B.I.G. - then rewind and play again, over and over.
I was on a rant to Justin this evening about how I "hate" video games and all those mediocre distractions from real greatness... But then I think about how she used to play Dr. Mario over and over, and my argument crumbles in my mind now. I don't know what I really think about those or so many other things. Right now, I'd love to sit next to her on that old couch in Aguanga and play some rounds with the falling pills. Anyway, I used to love that dumb game and the way it could suck me in for a while. Maybe I still would.
How can Rose and William both be gone? Loss can make you ask the same old questions, never fully un-stunned.
She used to tell me I'd be a good counselor. Sometimes she used to ask me why I didn't even "do anything" (didn't shoplift, didn't drink much, didn't party....). She said, "Damn, you're like a nun." A nun... I used to laugh and roll my eyes.... "Yep, that's me, alright - a real nun.," I'd say.
Five days ago, on 9/11, I thought of them both - Rose and William - because they were living with us when it happened. For me, their deaths have become blended into that anniversary.
I have to go to sleep. When I wake up, it will be the real morning of September 16.
Monday, September 2, 2013
September 2013 with Sean and Ryan
by Lucy S.
This is my ongoing account of what I've read or watched with Sean and Ryan - which I for some reason didn't think to keep years ago, so undoubtedly, many things have been forgotten. But I list what I remember and add on what we read or the movies we see as we go. We've just now finally finished Willa Cather's My Antonia. They loved it, as I love it.
This is one of my two favorite passages in it.
Here is our ongoing list. We've watched MANY more movies than this, and just haven't tried to list most of them.
Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)
Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451
Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring
Cather, Willa. My Antonia.
Dawson, George Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times
DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux
Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Chapter One.
Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)
Habila, Helon Oil on Water
Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out
Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)
Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible
Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine
Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series
Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)
Lowry, Lois The Giver
Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue
Lowry, Lois Messenger
Lowry, Lois Number the Stars
More, Thomas Utopia
Nix, Garth Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)
Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)
Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)
Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty
Roy, Aruhndhati. Walking with the Comrades
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter series
Sinclair, Upton The Jungle
Sinha, Indra Animal's People
Skye, Obert Levin Thumps (five)
Stowe, Harriet Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Bulosan, Carlos. "Be American"
Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”
Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”
Edmundson, Mark. "The Ideal English Major."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”
Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist."
Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Travens, B. "Assembly Line."
Wright, Richard. "The Library Card."
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl"
Zitkala-Sa "An Indian Teacher Among Indians"
Ashbery, John. "The Painter."
Auden, W.H. "Musee des Beaux Arts."
Barghouti, Mourid. "Even Gods."
Barghouti, Mourid. “The three cypress trees.”
Cullen, Countee. "Incident"
Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1263)
Dickinson, Emily. "The bustle in a House" (1108)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”
Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall”
Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”
Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”
H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”
Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays"
Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”
Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Banking Potatoes"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It"
Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”
Lorde, Audre. "Coal"
Lorde, Audre. "From the House of Yemanjá"
Merwin, W.S. "Losing a Language"
Neruda, Pablo. "It Rains."
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"
Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing"
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”
Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”
"A Better Life"
"Children of Heaven"
"The Cove"
"Darwin's Nightmare"
"Flow"
"The Garden"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"In a Better World"
"Joyeux Noel"
"La Cosecha" (The Harvest)
"Life in Debt"
"Planet Earth" series
"Under the Same Moon"
"Winter's Bone"
This is my ongoing account of what I've read or watched with Sean and Ryan - which I for some reason didn't think to keep years ago, so undoubtedly, many things have been forgotten. But I list what I remember and add on what we read or the movies we see as we go. We've just now finally finished Willa Cather's My Antonia. They loved it, as I love it.
This is one of my two favorite passages in it.
(End of chapter 16, book one) “Years afterward, when the open-grazing days were over, and the red grass had been plowed under and under until it had almost disappeared from the prairie; when all the fields were under fence, and the roads no longer ran about like wild things, but followed the surveyed section-lines, Mr. Shimerda’s grave was still there, with a sagging wire fence around it, and an unpainted wooden cross. As grandfather predicted, Mrs. Shimerda never saw the roads going over his head. The road from the north curved a little to the east just there, and the road from the west swung out just a little to the south; so that the grave, with its tall grass that was never mowed, was like a little island; and at twilight, under a new moon or the clear evening star, the dusty roads used to look like soft gray rivers flowing past it. I never came upon the place without emotion, and in all that country it was the spot most dear to me. I loved the dim superstition, the propitiatory intent, that had put the grave there; and still more I loved the spirit that could not carry out the sentence – the error from the surveyed lines, the clemency of the soft earth roads along which the home-coming wagons rattled after sunset. Never a tired driver passed the wooden cross, I am sure, without wishing well to the sleeper.”I can't say anything more about the passage right now. I just want to let it be.
Here is our ongoing list. We've watched MANY more movies than this, and just haven't tried to list most of them.
Books
Adams, Richard Watership Down (me and Ryan)
Blanding, Michael The Coke Machine
Bradbury, Ray Farenheit 451
Card, Orson Scott Ender's Game (one only in the series)
Carson, Rachel Silent Spring
Cather, Willa. My Antonia.
Dawson, George Life Is So Good
Dickens, Charles Hard Times
DiCamillo, Kate The Tale of Despereaux
Dodson, Lisa The Moral Underground
Douglass, Frederick Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Eagleton, Terry. How to Read a Poem. Chapter One.
Fleischman, Paul Seedfolks
Funke, Cornelia Inkheart books (three)
Habila, Helon Oil on Water
Hochschild, Adam Bury the Chains: The British Struggle to Abolish Slavery
Jimenez, Francisco: (trilogy) The Circuit; Breaking Through; Reaching Out
Jacques. Brian Redwall (books)
Jaffee, Daniel Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival
Kingsolver, Barbara The Poisonwood Bible
Klein, Naomi The Shock Doctrine
Lapierre, Dominique and Javier Moro Five Past Midnight in Bhopal
L’Engle, Madeleine Wrinkle in Time series
Lewis, C.S. Chronicles of Narnia series (all, me and Ryan; Sean up to book 2)
Lowry, Lois The Giver
Lowry, Lois Gathering Blue
Lowry, Lois Messenger
Lowry, Lois Number the Stars
More, Thomas Utopia
Nix, Garth Keys to the Kingdom (me and Ryan)
Peck, Dale Dritfhouse books (two)
Peck, Robert Newton A Day No Pigs Would Die (me and Ryan)
Philbrick, Rodman Freak the Mighty and Max the Mighty
Roy, Aruhndhati. Walking with the Comrades
Rowling, J.K. Harry Potter series
Sinclair, Upton The Jungle
Sinha, Indra Animal's People
Skye, Obert Levin Thumps (five)
Stowe, Harriet Uncle Tom's Cabin
Tolkien, J.R.R. The Hobbit
Twain, Mark The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Short Stories and Essays
Bulosan, Carlos. "Be American"
Chesnutt, Charles “Po’ Sandy”
Chopin, Kate “The Story of an Hour”
Edmundson, Mark. "The Ideal English Major."
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Birth-Mark”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The May Pole of Merry Mount”
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “The Minister’s Black Veil”
Hughes, Langston. "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain."
Hurston, Zora Neale. "How It Feels to Be Colored Me"
Irving, Washington “The Adventure of the German Student”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of the Moor’s Legacy”
Irving, Washington “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Irving, Washington “Rip Van Winkle”
Kafka, Franz. "A Hunger Artist."
Poe, Edgar Allen “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Travens, B. "Assembly Line."
Wright, Richard. "The Library Card."
Zitkala-Sa "Impressions of an Indian Childhood"
Zitkala-Sa "School Days of an Indian Girl"
Zitkala-Sa "An Indian Teacher Among Indians"
Poetry
Ashbery, John. "The Painter."
Auden, W.H. "Musee des Beaux Arts."
Barghouti, Mourid. "Even Gods."
Barghouti, Mourid. “The three cypress trees.”
Cullen, Countee. "Incident"
Dickinson, Emily."Because I could not stop for Death" (479)
Dickinson, Emily. "Hope is the thing with feather" (314)
Dickinson, Emily. "I felt a funeral in my Brain" (340)
Dickinson, Emily. "I like a look of Agony" (339)
Dickinson, Emily. "I'm nobody! Who are you?" (260)
Dickinson, Emily. "Much Madness is divinest Sense" (620)
Dickinson, Emily. "Tell all the truth but tell it slant" (1263)
Dickinson, Emily. "The bustle in a House" (1108)
Dickinson, Emily. "There's a Certain Slant of Light" (320)
Frost, Robert: “Home Burial”
Frost, Robert: “Mending Wall”
Frost, Robert: “The Road Not Taken”
Frost, Robert “The Wood Pile”
H. D. excerpt from “The Walls Do Not Fall”
Hayden, Robert. "Those Winter Sundays"
Heaney, Seamus. “Digging”
Hughes, Langston. “I, Too”
Hughes, Langston "Theme for English B"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Banking Potatoes"
Komunyakaa, Yusef. "Facing It"
Komunyakaa, Yusef: “Sunday Afternoons”
Lorde, Audre. "Coal"
Lorde, Audre. "From the House of Yemanjá"
Merwin, W.S. "Losing a Language"
Neruda, Pablo. "It Rains."
Owen, Wilfred. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "England in 1819"
Shelley, Percy Bysshe. "Ozymandias"
Thomas, Dylan “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”
Whitman, Walt. "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry."
Whitman, Walt. "I Hear America Singing"
Williams, William Carlos “This Is Just to Say That”
Williams, William Carlos “The Red Wheelbarrow”
Movies
"A Better Life"
"Children of Heaven"
"The Cove"
"Darwin's Nightmare"
"Flow"
"The Garden"
"The Grapes of Wrath"
"In a Better World"
"Joyeux Noel"
"La Cosecha" (The Harvest)
"Life in Debt"
"Planet Earth" series
"Under the Same Moon"
"Winter's Bone"
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