Hello, classes! It was wonderful to see everyone again. It sounds like things are getting back to normal-ish for all of us. An observation stolen from a student: in 2020 "normal" was The Walking Dead. In 2021, "normal" is Mad Max. It made me laugh, and laughing seems like a wise thing to do, maybe the wisest thing to do these days. Check out this top tier TikTok satirist. Every time I visit the HEB, I look for Jedidiah, but still no sign. So, during our one day of class this week, we dipped our toes into our next poetry unit with "Poetry" by Marianne Moore. We also used this as an opportunity to begin to wrap our minds around Modernist Poetry, and how Modernism differs from Romanticism. There are many things that I like about about this poem, including the three discussion points I suggested in class today:
But my reason for choosing this as our post-winterpocalyse first poem of the unit because of the argument it presents. Marianne Moore seems to believe that life is important, and poetry can be helpful when it creates an accurate reflection of life as it is in all its complexity. Beauty mixed with ugliness. Reality. According to Moore, imaginary gardens of airbrushed reality that edit out the frogs are "trivial," and it's hard for me to disagree with her when I think of the half-true realities created through social media. It's especially interesting to read Moore's poem with an idea of the context in which she wrote it. Above is a slightly boring 10 minute video that gives a much more coherent idea of the Modernist movement in poetry than the one that I zipped through in class. Basically, I think of most of human artistic evolution as growth, gradual change and progression. But not here: the difference between Romantic literature and Modern literature is more like a schism, a fault line, or a trench. This fracturing came from the trauma and large scale global suffering of social unrest, the Great Depression, and, above all, World War I. The dissonance created by her line breaks (enjambment) mirrors the dissonance of Modern concert musicians like Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky.
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AuthorI'm a Houston high school teacher. Welcome to my adapted, socially-distanced, quarantined AP English Literature and Composition classroom. Archives
May 2021
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