Advanced Placement Literature and Composition
2013-2014 Poetry Assignment
Mrs. Bakahai Litman
Why a Poetry Response?
(Approximately 60% of the AP exam deals with poetry.)
Often students cringe when they learn that a major focus of this course is poetry. As children
most of you loved poetry, reciting nursery rhymes and chanting limericks. What happened? I
don’t have the answer, but one of my goals this year will be to rekindle your enthusiasm for and
appreciation of poetry.
Laurence Perrine suggests, “People have read poetry or listened to it or recited it because they
liked it, because it gave them enjoyment. But this is not the whole answer. Poetry in all ages has
been regarded as important, not simply as one of several alternative forms of amusement, as one
person might choose bowling, another chess, and another poetry. Rather, it has been regarded as
something central to existence, something having unique value to the fully realized life,
something that we are better off for having and without which we are spiritually impoverished.”
John Ciardi writes, “Everyone who has an emotion and a language knows something about
poetry. What he knows may not be much on an absolute scale, and it may not be organized
within him in a useful way, but once he discovers the pleasure of poetry, he is likely to be
surprised to discover how much he always knew without knowing he knew it. He may discover,
somewhat as the character in the French play discovered to his amazement that he had been
talking prose all his life, that he had been living poetry. Poetry, after all, is about life. Anyone
who is alive and conscious must have some information about it.”
This year we will approach poetry two ways. We will study some poems in class, learning about
the tools and devices poets use in their craft, talking about what a poem means or how it made
you feel, or seeking answers to questions we raised while reading or studying. We might call
this our structured or formal study of poetry. But we will also study poetry informally through
poetry responses.
Directions
You will select one poem from the attached set of poems, and write one poetry response per
week. (Due to holidays and/or scheduled breaks, you will omit some weeks. I will inform
you in advance of which weeks you will not turn in responses to me. If I do not inform you
that a response is not due for a specific week, you must turn it in on or before the day it is
due-unless you have an excused absence. No exceptions!!!!!! Again, you should choose one
poem from a list of poems I have given you (You are not allowed to select your own) and write
a response to that poem. These responses should be a minimum of one typed page. Please type
and print the response and turn it in at the beginning of class on the day that I specify for you to
turn it in. (Again, I do not accept these late!) Later in the semester, you will be required to post
your responses on-line using EDU 2.0 or Google and respond to some of your classmates’
responses. (Details will follow later.)
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What to Include
What should you write on a poetry response? You may approach this assignment several ways.
Sometimes students write an analysis of the poem. They explain what is going on in the poem
and relate what they think the theme is. Other students begin with the theme and elaborate on
that, while some apply the poem to themselves by relating a personal experience. Occasionally a
student will write a response on one line from the poem. What you do with the response is up to
you as long as you say something. Do not spend time telling how you could not understand
the poem no matter how you tried. Naturally, I do not expect you to like all the poems, but if
you dislike a poem because of its content or style, then support that with specifics. I have given
you a sample response (attached) from a former AP student.
Read all the poems from the list every week. Read them at different times, in different places,
and in different moods. You will notice how the poems will reveal themselves to you over the
weeks. Although you are only required to respond on paper to one poem, you should become
acquainted with all the poems on the list.
How You Will be Graded
The Poetry Responses will be listed as two grades in the Daily Grades Category, one for each
semester. However, these responses are not graded in a traditional manner. The only response I
will not accept is one where the student writes a page about how he or she could not understand
the poem, ending with a series of questions directed to me for explanation. For each Poetry
Response that’s missing, I will deduct ten points.
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Poetry Response #1
The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim
Because it was grassy and wanted wear,
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I marked the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I,
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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Advanced Placement Literature and Composition Poetry Responses (First Semester)
this round dome proves its maker is alive;
the corpse of the insect lives embalmed in honey,
prays that its perishable work lives long
enough for the sweet-tooth bear to desecrate—
this open book . . . my coffin.
This Is Just to Say
William Carlos Williams
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
The Cat
Miroslav Holub
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Outside it was night
like a book without letters.
And the eternal dark
dripped to the stars through the sieve of the
city.
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
I said to her
do not go
you’ll only be trapped
and bewitched
and will suffer in vain.
The Facebook Sonnet
Sherman Alexie
Welcome to the endless high-school
Reunion. Welcome to past friends
And lovers, however kind or cruel.
Let's undervalue and unmend
I said to her
do not go
why want
nothing?
The present. Why can't we pretend
Every stage of life is the same?
Let's exhume, resume and extend
Childhood. Let's all play the games
But a window was opened
and she went,
a black cat into the black night,
she dissolved,
a black cat in the black night,
she just dissolved
and no one ever saw her again.
Not even she herself.
That preoccupy the young. Let fame
And shame intertwine. Let one's search
For God become public domain.
Let church.com become our church.
Let's sign up, sign in and confess
Here at the altar of loneliness.
But you can hear her
sometimes,
when it’s quiet
and there’s a northerly wind
and you listen intently
Reading Myself
The Day Millicent Found the World
Robert Lowell
William Stafford
[Note: Parnassus is a mountain in Greece and,
according to Greek myth, the seat of music and
poetry.]
Every morning Millicent ventured farther
into the woods. At first she stayed
near light, the edge where bushes grew, where
her way back appeared in glimpses among
dark trunks behind her. Then by farther paths
or openings where giant pines had fallen
she explored ever deeper into
the interior, till one day she stood under a great
dome among columns, the heart of the forest, and knew:
Lost. She had achieved a mysterious world
where any direction would yield only surprise.
Like thousands, I took pride and more than just,
struck matches that brought my blood to a boil;
I memorized the tricks to set the river on fire—
Somehow never wrote something to go back to.
Can I suppose I am finished with wax flowers
And have earned my grass on the minor slopes of
Parnassus. . .
No honeycomb is built without a bee
adding circle to circle, cell to cell,
the wax and honey of a mausoleum—
And now not only the giant trees were strange
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but the ground at her feet had a velvet nearness;
intricate lines on bark wove messages all
around her. Long strokes of golden sunlight
shifted over her feet and hands. She felt
caught up and breathing in a great powerful embrace.
A birdcall wandered forth at leisurely intervals
from an opening on her right: “Come away, Come away.”
Never before had she let herself realize
that she was part of the world and that it would follow
Wherever she went. She was part of its breath.
Aunt Dolbee called her back that time, a high
voice tapering faintly among the farthest trees,
Milli-cent! Milli-cent! And that time she returned,
but slowly, her dress fluttering along pressing
back branches, her feet stirring up the dark smell
of moss, and her face floating forward, a stranger’s
face now, with a new depth in it, into the light.
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To star, big-eyed Narcissus, into spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
Praise in Summer
Richard Wilbur
Obscurely yet most surely called to praise,
As sometimes summer calls us all, I said
The hills are heavens full of branching ways
Where star-nosed moles fly overhead the dead;
I said the trees are mines in air. I said
See how the sparrow burrows in the sky!
And then I wondered why this mad instead
Perverts our praise to uncreation, why
Such savor’s in this wrenching things awry.
Does sense so stale that it must needs derange
The world to know it? To a praiseful eye
Should it not be enough of fresh and strange
That trees grow green, and moles can course in clay,
And sparrows sweep the ceiling of our day?
Alone
Edgar Allan Poe
From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were—I have not seen
As others saw—I could not bring
My passions from a common spring—
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow—I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone—
And all I lov’d—I loved alone—
Then—in my childhood—in the dawn
Of a most stormy life—was drawn
From ev’ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still—
From the torrent, or the fountain—
From the red cliff of the mountain—
From the sun that ‘round me roll’d
In its autumn tint of gold—
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass’d me flying by—
From the thunder, and the storm—
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view—
Cottonmouth Country
Louise Glück
Fish bones walked the waves off Hatteras.
And there were other signs
That Death wooed us, by water, wooed us
By land: among the pines
An uncurled cottonmouth that rolled on moss
Reared in the polluted air.
Birth, not death, is the hard loss.
I know. I also left a skin there.
Of Mere Being
Personal Helicon
Wallace Stevens
Seamus Heaney
The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze décor,
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotten board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
You know then that it is not the reson
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings. Its feathers shine.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird’s fire-fangled feathers dange down.
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In this, as all, prevail:
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, you’re straightway dangerous
And handled with a chain.
Heritage
James Still
I shall not leave these prisoning hills
Though they topple their barren heads to level earth
And the forests slide uprooted out of the sky.
Though the waters of Troublesome, of Trace Fork,
Of Sand Lick rise in a single body to glean the valleys,
To drown lush pennyroyal, to unravel rail fences;
Though the sun-ball breaks the ridges into dust
And burns its strength into the blistered rock
I cannot leave. I cannot go away.
Song of the Powers
David Mason
Being of these hills, being on with the fox
Stealing into the shadows, one with the new-born foal,
The lumbering ox drawing green beech logs to mill,
One with the destined feet of man climbing and descending
And one with death rising to bloom again, I cannot go.
Being of these hills, I cannot pass beyond.
Sort of a Song
William Carlos Williams
Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait
sleepless.
Mine, said the stone,
mine is the hour.
I crush the scissors,
such is my power.
stronger than wishes,
my power, alone.
Mine, said the paper,
mine are the words
that smother the stone
with imagined birds,
reams of them, flown
from the mind of the shaper.
Mine, said the scissors,
mine all the knives
gashing through paper’s
ethereal lives;
nothing’s so proper
as tattering wishes.
—through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
As stone crushes scissors,
as paper snuffs stone
and scissors cut paper,
all end alone.
So heap up your paper
and scissors your wishes
and uproot the stone
from the top of the hill.
They all end alone.
As you will, you will.
Untitled
Stephen Crane
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said: “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
Because it is bitter,
And because it is my heart.”
It was a dream
Lucille Clifton
in which my greater self
rose up before me
accusing me of my life
with her extra finger
whirling in a gyre of rage
at what my days had come to.
what,
i pleaded with her, could i do,
oh what could I have done?
and she twisted her wild hair
and sparked her wild eyes
and screamed as long as
i could hear her
This. This. This.
Much madness is divinest sense
Emily Dickinson
Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye,
Much sense, the starkest madness.
‘Tis the majority
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The Book
The trees in the garden . . .
Miller Williams
Stephen Crane
I held it in my hands while he told the story.
The trees in the garden rained flowers.
Children ran there joyously.
They gathered the flowers
Each to himself.
Now there were some
Who gathered great heaps—
--Having opportunity and skill—
Until, behold, only chance blossoms
Remained for the feeble.
Then a little spindling tutor
Ran importantly to the father, crying:
“Pray, come hither!
See this unjust thing in your garden!”
But when the father had surveyed,
He admonished the tutor:
“Not so, small sage!
This thing is just.
For, look you,
Are not they who possess the flowers
Stronger, bolder, and shrewder
Than they who have none?
Why should the strong—
--the beautiful strong—
Why should they not have the flowers?”
He had found it in a fallen bunker,
a book for notes with all the pages blank.
He took it to keep for a sketchbook and diary.
He learned years later, when he showed the book
to an old bookbinder, who paled, and stepped back
a long step and told him what he held,
what he had laid the days of his life in.
It’s bound, the binder said, in human skin.
I stood turning it over in my hands,
turning it in my head. Human skin.
What child did this skin fit? What man, what
woman?
Dragged still full of its flesh from what dream?
Who took it off the meat? Some other one
who stayed alive by knowing how to do this?
I stared at the changing book and a horror grew,
I stared and a horror grew, which was, which is,
how beautiful it was until I knew.
The Hat Lady
Linda Pastan
In a childhood of hats—
my uncles in homburgs and derbies,
Fred Astaire in high black silk,
the yarmulke my grandfather wore
like the palm of a hand
cradling the back of his head—
only my father went hatless,
even in winter.
Desert Places
Robert Frost
Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.
And in the spring,
when a turban of leaves appeared
on every tree, the Hat Lady came
with a fan of pins in her mouth
and pins in her sleeves,
the Hat Lady came—
that Saint Sebastian of pins,
to measure my mother’s head.
The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness included me unawares.
And lonely as it is that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.
I remember a hat of dove-gray felt
that settled like a bird
on the nest of my mother’s hair.
I remember a pillbox that tilted
over one eye—pure Myrna Loy,
and a navy straw with cherries caught
at the brim that seemed real enough
for a child to want to pick.
They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.
Last year when the chemicals
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took my mother’s hair, she wrapped
a towel around her head. And the Hat Lady came,
a bracelet of needles on each arm,
and led her to a place
where my father and grandfather waited,
head to bare head, and Death
winked at her and tipped his cap.
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