Voice and Breath: Jean Valentine and the Care of Others

Over the last few class periods we've talked about Jean Valentine's poems and the emotional and ethical power lyric poems (or songs) sometimes have for us. I'd like to see you explore this topic more fully in your main blog post this week.

• For yesterday's class you made notes on six of Valentine's poems. For this week's blog, develop one of those into a full length post.
• Most of us carry certain notions about those who crusade for Human Rights. At least as she comes across in her poems, Jean Valentine doesn't look much like a "crusader" and she never explicitly mentions human rights. Write a post that makes the argument that Valentine's poems are a form of human rights advocacy. Be specific and support your claims.
• In class we will make some comparisons between Rich's poem and Valentine's. Use your post to expand on or develop this comparison.
• We started our discussion of Valentine by talking about what lyric is and by considering how songs can evoke powerful feelings. Reflect on that. You can write about song lyrics you like but you should also touch on the poems we are reading in class.

Jean Valentine

Most readers will agree that Jean Valentine's poetry is challenging but many also find it powerful and emotionally affecting. Your blog post this week should address some aspect of Jean Valentine's poems. Your focus should be on the selection from The Cradle of the Real Life or those in the "New Poems" section.

Here are some questions and topics you might consider:

How the poems depict and think about the body.
How they construct or think about female experience.
How Valentine uses animals and animal imagery.
The role that human suffering (illness, loss, loneliness) plays in the poems.
How the poems represent the relationship between the speaking "I" of the poem and the "you" she addresses.

You could also write reflectively about the experience of reading the poems.

Remember that you'll want to develop and support your claims, thinking of your readers.

Being Good, Being Happy, Reading Well

For this week’s blog you can choose to return to Tuesday’s discussion of Lark & Termite and the challenge to read the novel as an address to the problem of “how to be good” or (if you were an “h”) “how to be happy.” Your post should develop and expand on what you did in class.

Alternatively you can turn your attentions to Jean Valentine’s poems, particularly those selected from her volume The Cradle of the Real. Often in the first encounter with a poem, a volume of poems, or a new poet, simple description turns out to be a useful tool. We’re brought along to believe poems demand explanation, translation into meaning or a point of some kind, but sometimes a careful description of the poem and the experience of reading the poem can take you a long way toward understanding. So after you have spent some time reading the assigned selecction, choose a poem or a small cluster of poems and write descriptively about it (or them). Even in this kind of exercise you should work to make your post well reasoned and coherent rather than simply a collection of observations. Be bold.

Finally, you could use this week's blog to explore the topic of goodness and flourishing. Go to this link, then click on the left side of the page to listen to the podcast of this interview with Jean Vanier. Do you see connections between Vanier's perspective and Phillips' novel? Write thoughtfully about those. If this link does not work you can paste it in to your browser.

http://www.onbeing.org/program/wisdom-tenderness/234

Sometime next week you should finish Lark & Termite. Whatever expectations Phillips created for you and whatever appetites she cultivated will have been satisfied or frustrated or--perhaps most likely--modulated into a somewhat different set of expectations and desires you couldn't have predicted when you set out. Maybe you bought into those, maybe not. Chances are you could say right away, without any reflection, whether you found the novel satisfying or not. But having read your way through it you've now got enough experience to answer this question more reflectively. Use one of the following prompts to get your blog entry started. Or, if you have an idea of your own, start there.

1. If you changed your mind about something as you were reading, describe what it was that changed and think some about what the novel does to make that happen. Stories that interest or entertain or move us do so strategically. Can you point to a strategic move Phillips makes in the novel and reflect on how it affected you?

2. Some kinds of stories including folk tales and the most basic (or cheesiest) forms of genre fiction depend on "stock characters," figures so standard and familiar we need little introduction or detail to recognize them. By contrast, literary fiction in our time depends on the development of subtle, complex characters--people readers want to know and understand and even analyze. Choose a character in this novel and think about how Phillips develops her or him over the course of the novel--opening questions, peeling back layers, filling in details. Write about that.

3. We talked on Thursday (January 17) about disequilibrium at the beginning of a narrative and about the various ways things are out of balance at the start of this novel. Does the end of the novel restore equilibrium? Create a new kind of equilibrium? How does the idea of equilibrium help you make sense of the way this novel ends? Or doesn't it?

Breaking Ground

Breaking Ground

If this is your first blogging experience or if you have a hard time with introductions, starting your blog for this course may feel a little daunting. As you generate new posts and begin to feel the blogging experience as a form of conversation you're likely to find that it gets a good deal easier.

Here are some ideas for your first post.

1. A post on the book jacket notes that "the novel invites us to enter into the hearts and thoughts of the leading characters." True enough. But the narration of Robert's story differs slightly from the narration of Lark's story. How does it differ? And what difference, if any, does the difference make?

2. A novel like this one, with multiple perspectives and multiple storylines, has to begin somewhere. Why do you think Phillips chooses to begin her story when and where she does, in the mind of Corporal Robert Leavitt?

3. In his novel The Sound and the Fury William Faulkner makes brilliant use of a severely retarded narrator named Benji, who in his strangeness and naivete is able to see things as others cannot, to communicate things others will not. Based on the reading you've done so far, how would you describe Phillips' use of multiply disabled Termite? Is he simply the object of others' actions and feelings or does he have some agency--some power--of his own?

4. Phillips makes a number of distinctive choices in her way of telling this story. Choose one feature of the narrative you find striking or important. Describe it and talk about its significance.