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Reading and responding to a poem

08/15/2010

William Carlos William's poem, "This Is Just to Say," has generated quite a lot of intertextual responses on YouTube. Check out the more professional dramatized reading by the British actor Matthew Macfadyen and the animation children's project from Uncommon Films. The latter even features a recording of Williams reading his own poem.

I chose the video made by Nicole LaJeunesse for its interpretation of the poem's form -- it may actually be a note stuck to the refrigerator door by a magnet. What if we didn't know it was a poem written by Williams? Would we even think the words written in 12 lines make a poem? Perhaps not. We imagine that the one who wrote it was in a rush and didn't particularly care for punctuation. And if the note was for us, we definitely would not think it a poem!

But here we are trying to interpret what may be just a note. We imagine somebody writing to someone. And if we go by LaJeunesse's and Macfadyen's interpretations, that somebody could be a husband writing a note to his wife. That husband is perhaps feeling guilty and tries to make it up to her by writing an apology. And because it is written down and not something we overhear, we begin to really look at the words on the page. We begin to see that it may actually be a poem, after all. We may even learn that there's a tradition of this sort dating back to Ovid's romantic epistles as well as among ancient Chinese poets (for example, Ezra Pound's translation of Li Po's "The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter").

Photo by Erin Silversmith

So what is the persona (the "I" speaking in the text) trying to say in this note, er, poem? Well, we assume the persona is really saying "sorry" for having eaten the plums. We also assume that the persona knew that the other person (the "you" mentioned in the second stanza) was saving the plums for breakfast, and had placed it in the fridge to keep it fresh and deliciously cold.

But how does the persona say "sorry"?

The note begins with an admission "This is just to say // I have eaten / the plums / that were in / the icebox" (the title serves as the first line; also, that last word dates the poem). That admission is soon followed by the tone of guilt in the second stanza, especially because the persona knew the "you were probably / saving" the fruit for breakfast. The use of "probably" rather than the more direct "you were / saving" allows us to imagine the scene this way: the persona finds the plums in the icebox, is tempted, eats them, and only as an afterthought realizes the mistake. And so the third stanza (made up of four lines like the previous stanzas) begins with an entreaty for forgiveness, followed by a rationalization for the act committed.

But the last three lines of the poem don't seem much of a justification, with the persona trying to lay the blame on the plums being so tempting -- indeed, "they were delicious / so sweet / and so cold." And yet, those three lines somehow imply the persona will really be forgiven. Perhaps because the lines don't really refer just to the plums but also to the shared intimacy between the "I" and "you." I can imagine the "you" reading the note with a half-smile, vicariously enjoying the pleasure of eating the plums as described by the persona.

It's funny how we devoted several paragraphs trying to explain the 12 lines of this poem. But then, that's how poetry really is like -- it condenses into so few lines an emotion or an idea through the use of suggestion or implication. We can choose, of course, to just look at the literal situation offered us -- someone writing a note -- or we can delve into what may be hidden between or beneath the lines, or as someone puts it, "what is not said by saying."

Next installment: Lyric poetry

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Responding intertextually

07/19/2010

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'Woman Reading' by Kuroda Seiki

Close reading has recently gotten a bad rap. Apparently, it turned off students from literature because its quasi-scientific approach to literary analysis has sapped the joy and pleasure out of reading.

This is bad news for literature teachers as close reading has been the pedagogical tool of choice. I found it useful, especially in literature classes for English and Creative Writing majors, but not necessarily for other classes with students coming from a mix of disciplines.

Good thing I came across the idea of intertextuality as a concept that could be employed in literature classrooms. With some colleagues in Silliman University, we came up with a syllabus that we finetuned and later on shared with other teachers in neighboring schools. I was tasked to talk about my experience and to explain how intertextuality can work. Following is an excerpt of what I presented in several seminars and training workshops:

After a brief hiatus from teaching, I came back to the classroom to find it transformed over such a short period. I found my students in introductory courses to Philippine and world literatures more into texting on their cellphones, or into chatting and blogging on the Net, and less into the literary texts they were supposed to read. I came face-to-face with what teachers of literature most dread: students who couldn’t care less.

Photo by Alton

Short of texting them my lecture, I opted for a less costly way of connecting with this alien batch of juveniles. But trying to connect with them can prove to be a most difficult and often frustrating exercise. I only had one thing going for me -- a passion to teach them literature.

I soon found out that while my students had passion, theirs was a different kind. They were willing enough to sit in class for an hour (or an hour and a half) so they could earn a passing grade. But given an opportunity, I knew they wouldn’t have spent a minute more inside the classroom. They would rather pass the time pursuing a “life.” (I often hear them call out to each other, “Get a life!” I know reading literature isn’t part of what they mean by that.)

But I connected with their passion for life. After all, it wasn’t too long ago when I was in their shoes (okay, it has been quite a while). However, I remember that my passion for life -- yes, the same thing they refer to -- was mainly fed by my reading. The narratives of Salinger, Camus, Sartre, Miller, Plath, Lessing, Eman Lacaba, to name only a few, fed my desire for such “intensity” and “fullness” in my life.

And, probably just like my students -- though theirs may have been illuminated more by movies than books -- I too sought the real thing. I more than wanted the real thing, I wanted to write about it too. And that is where I found the clue -- the glue that would connect me to them, that would connect literature to texting (and to chatting and blogging on the Net). I would make artists out of them.

After all, just like that yarn about monkeys and typewriters, the time they spend punching buttons on their cellphones would sooner or later result in something. I’m just pushing them along one possible path their texting habit can lead to.

Of course, I didn’t expect them to become Shakespeares. I was just thinking -- how best to make them appreciate literature than to make them write literature. Some would say, ’susmaryosep, how can students be expected to write poems when they have a hard enough time writing book reports.

But isn’t a poem or a story or a play a more exciting piece to write? And isn’t it exhilarating precisely because it is a piece of one’s self, a piece of one’s life?

Still others would ask, where did I get this crazy idea? How sure am I it will work in the classroom?

This crazy idea is not original. Literature teachers have given their students a creative writing assignment at one time or another. My literature teacher in college, a writer in her spare time, gave us that option for our final paper. Spurred by her encouraging comments on the haiku I submitted in her class, I pursued writing as a life. I would like to think that I am repaying some karmic debts by advocating the integration of creative writing in the teaching of literature.

How do I propose to accomplish this? When I decided to try this out a few years back, to energize my somnambular students, I didn’t know where to start. At first, I encouraged my students to try writing poems, stories, and plays. That didn’t get me far. What could I expect from them, after all? But I knew I had a good idea in my hands; I just didn’t know how to go about it.

The lessons I had learned from the Silliman and UP Writers Workshop weren’t much help either -- probably because the participants there already had an inkling of, and had that interest to learn, how good writing should be done.

The critical concept I found useful for my literature classes can be summed up in one word -- intertextuality. How I came upon this critical concept is an intertextual tale in itself. I was telling a colleague how I wanted to integrate creative writing techniques into my literature classes. I told her about how more often than not my “experiments” would fail to achieve the results I wanted.

She got quite excited about my story, saying that she had just the right book for me (one that she was using in her own literature classes). John E. Schwiebert’s Reading and Writing from Literature (2004) was where I came across the concept of intertextuality as applied in the literature classroom.

Intertextuality, in Schwiebert’s terms, follows a “conversation” model for reading and writing. He says that when we read a literary text, we actually bring into our reading other “texts” (like other literary pieces, movies, comics, experiences, etc.) that we recall in the process of reading. These other “texts” are always already “written” into our position as readers, and when reading we are really engaging in some form of dialogue with the text at hand.

Intertextuality also assumes that authors bring into the text other “texts” always already “written” into their lives. Schwiebert points to how scholars have shown that Shakespeare actually used other “texts” in writing Hamlet -- older versions of the Hamlet story, his own theater company’s earlier productions of Hamlet written by other playwrights, his own boyhood, etc. And in the movie Shakespeare in Love, we saw how the Shakespeare character liberally borrowed from the conversations and events around him while writing Romeo and Juliet.

Movie poster from Wikipedia

Seen in this manner, Schwiebert says, a work by Shakespeare (as well as those of Rizal, etc.) seem less a Holy Relic and “more a part of the complicated, ever-expanding web of human discourse.” This approach liberates us from a rather restricting way of looking at literary texts, especially those that belong to the canon.

In using this approach, to quote Schwiebert again, “Hamlet appears as just another turn -- a brilliant and memorable turn, to be sure -- in an ongoing conversation.”

We can write critical and scholarly papers on Shakespeare and his plays, or we can be playful as Tom Stoppard’s appropriation of two minor characters in Hamlet in writing his own play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

Will it work? Will students, especially those in other disciplines, suddenly find the passion to respond to literature?

Apparently, it does. I would like to believe that students sort of prefer this approach to the usual close reading and critical analysis of literary texts. I see them enthusiastically respond to the text at hand perhaps because they aren't limited to the standard paper common in most literature classroom.

Schwiebert suggests at least 10 ideas for intertextually responding to texts:

Converse with specific points in the text that strike you.
Write about any personal connections you have with the readings.
Write a letter to the author and/or a return letter from the author to yourself.
Write an imaginary interview with the author or with a character in a story, novel, or play.
Compose a prequel or a sequel to a story.
Rewrite a text from a point of view different from that presented in the original text.
Rewrite a work into a different genre.
Borrow an incident or theme from a work to write a piece of your own based on a similar incident or theme.
Borrow the genre or form of a work to create a piece of your own cast in the same genre or form.
Draft a fictional biography or autobiography of a character in a story, poem, or play.

We can come up with more ways of responding to the texts we read. We can draw, paint, take photos, make music, perform, etc. Recently, I came across an illustrated review of Miguel Syjuco's novel Ilustrado in Salon. Apparently, intertextuality has gone mainstream too.

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AH 4

AH 4 or "Adventures in Fiction, Poetry, and Drama" is a three-unit course that explores "recurrent themes in fiction, poetry, and drama as reflections of individual and universal concerns" (UP Mindanao Catalog).