15-4 Billy Collins

Billy Collins was born in New York City in 1941. He is the author of several books of poetry. Collins got his PhD in Romantic poetry from the University of California. Collins taught at Lehman College. His poetry Books is about how the books in the library come alive on the college campus. Each book has a coat that is the cover of the book. The authors talk to each other and some family is beside each other. These books speak their own language to each other. His mother reads to him and the characters and places come to life. Within the walls rain soaks New England or standing in a trench coat. The books can take someone to places they haven’t been before anything is possible. We read these books that after we finish is only crumbs on the page that makes a trail. We read in circles looking for more light until the words leave a trail of crumbs.  The birds eat the crumbs that we have left behind from reading the book. We have to listen hard to hear the brother and sister talking to each other as they recede to the woods. The books have come a live but one must listen real close to hear what the books are saying to one another. We don’t hear what the books have to offer and the places they can take us. I enjoyed this poem it made a lot of sense when you think about all those books and shelves full of authors talking to each other. Some kin to each other some not but as the words a read they fall from the pages like crumbs that the birds pick up and eat. When we are done with them just as we are the books, some will never be picked up again but some will.

15-3 15-3 Bobbie Ann Manson

Bobbie Ann Mason writes about blue-collar people in small town and just your normal everyday houses for the average families. Clerk stores workers, waitresses and truck drivers. Men and women who “believe” in progress and are more optimistic in life and the lessons they have learned. She didn’t like television. She believed that it was a waste and was only empty hours. Bobbie grew up in Kentucky. She learned about and met many small-town working people and the culture surrounding her. She spent a lot of time on the farm while growing up in Kentucky. “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason is a story about two common everyday people, Leroy and Norma Jean. Leroy and Norma are husband and wife, he works as a truck driver, and Norma Jean works at the Rexall drugstore. Three months earlier Leroy was hurt in a highway accident that left his leg in pretty bad shape. He can no longer drive his bid rig, so he has been staying at home recuperating. The accident scared him so bad that he’s not really sure that he wants to drive anymore. Leroy like most people who work away from home a lot, started seeing his life and his wife differently. He realized that he had let a lot of things pass him by very quickly while he was out on the long hauls. His wife has been use to him being gone for all these years and it seems that now that Leroy is home he is getting on Norma Jean’s nerves. Leroy is sitting around the house smoking pot and building things with notched popsicle sticks, he tells Norma Jean that he wants to build her a log cabin, she tells him that none of the new subdivisions in their town is going to allow a cabin to be built in them he rides around town and realizes that this is true.Leroy starts to see his wife in a different light, he realizes how much he loves her, but Norma Jean seems to be distant and indifferent towards her husband. She is getting in shape by working out and she is attending classes at college trying to better her career path. Norma Jean’s mother is very judgmental of Norma. She feels as if her mother punishes her when she catches her doing something she thinks she shouldn’t be doing, like smoking. Norma Jean is tired of her life, she wants something different. Leroy knows in his heart that something is different about his wife. He mentions this to him mother-in-law that he thinks their trouble at home and she suggest that he take Norma Jean to Shiloh a small town a few hour up the road from their house. While they are visiting, Shiloh, Norma Jean tells Leroy she wants a divorce. I think he is shocked and in disbelief.

15-2 Amy Tan

Amy’s parents emigrated from China to California. Amy was born in California and has spent most of her life there. She graduated from college in 1973. She spends three years in postgraduate study and then worked as a reporter, then an editor and as a technical writer for computer companies. She published “The Joy Luck Club” in 1989. I remember this! I think it was a series when I was a child that I read after buying it at the book store at school. These were stories of Chinese women and their Chinese American daughters.

The story Half and Half” by Amy Tan is the story of a Chinese girl, Rose, who lived in America with her mother, father and her six siblings, four brothers and two sisters. Her parents had moved to America from China and had done very well for themselves. Since being in The US they had managed to buy a house in the Sunset district and had been blessed with seven children. Mrs. Hsu, the mother, was a religious person. She attended First Chinese Baptist Church every Sunday, but a day at the beach with her family changed all of her feelings about faith. The entire Hsu family went to the beach to play in the water, fish and just have a wonderful time. The fun filled day turned tragic when Rose, who was responsible for watching her youngest brother, Bing, took her eyes of him for one second and he fell into the ocean and drown. That was the day Mrs. Hsu lost her faith, she and Rose went back to the beach the next day, where she talked to God and threw her mother’s ring in to the water as payment trying to get Bing back. She felt she had been faithful and good and she wanted God to return her son for her servitude to him. When Bing did not return she lost faith sticking her bible under the table leg in her kitchen. This is the day that Rose learned about fate. Twenty years later Rose is sitting in her mother’s house and she going to tell her that she and her American husband Ted, the dermatologist, are going to get a divorce. During their marriage Ted has always taken the lead, and Rose just agreed to whatever he wanted to do. I don’t think she ever forgave herself for her brother’s death, she felt as though she didn’t make a good decision on the beach that day and she is ok with Ted making all the moves and her following his lead in their marriage.
Ted has a patient who has a bad experience after a medical procedure and the patient sues him, the wind is knocked out of his sails, he no longer believes in himself. Ted wants Rose to now make the decisions in their marriage and this has cause an unbelievable strain in the relationship. Her mother tells her that she has been told what the problem in the marriage is and now she must fix it. She must start thinking for herself!! She realizes that fate is shaped by half expectation, and half by inattention. She gets her mother’s bible out from under the table leg, in the section where you list Deaths in the family she sees Bing Hsu in erasable ink.

15-1 Alice Walker

Alice Walker was born in Georgia she was one of eight kids from a poverty stricken sharecropper’s family. Her parents supported her writing and after graduating top of her class she got a scholarship to go to college. Her most known work was the Color Purple which has been made into movies and plays. Everyday Use was a good story\that opens with the mother day dreaming of being on a talk show and meeting her daughter again. She wants her daughter to be like her thin, witty, and expressive. But in actually she is a heavy woman that does best at hard labor. She sees how important hard work is and doesn’t have time for fillies ‘She has two daughters Maggie and Dee Several years ago their home had burned down and Maggie one of the daughters hands and arms were burnt badly. Dee the other sister left and said she wouldn’t be back or bring her friends to the little house they lived in after the fire. Maggie feel like she is less of a person because of the way Dee treats her. Maggie see’s Dee as being very pretty and smart. But Dee is very snobby to her family when she returns she brings a man that she might be married too. Dee has changed her name to Wangero Leewanika Kemanjo because she thinks the name is better than the one she was born with. They start taking things from the house saying where they can use it in their home. She gathers quilts and other things. The quilts were to be Maggie’s handed down from the family. Dee says Maggie will just mess them up and they are not for everyday use. Dee sees the things as being something to be put into a museum and not something to use everyday. Maggie and Dee’s mother grabs the quilts from Dee and gives them back to Maggie; her mother knows that Maggie will take care of them and she will cherish and appreciate them.

14-3 Nikki Giovanni’s Poetry

Giovanni’s Poetry Rosa is about black childhood. Black love is black wealth.  They see love being very powerful and they are rich not from money or material things, but from love from each family member. People shouldn’t feel sorry for the black kids. They have love from their mom even though their dad is a heavy drinker. They had good holidays with their family, even birthdays were good. People that had become famous and moved from the poverty stricken places didn’t talk of how happy they were as a child, even though they didn’t have in-door toilets. Basically some people don’t for get where they came from, however some people do. Giovanni doesn’t look at life as being sad and wants the white people not to write of their bad times because they were quite happy. Barbecue was fixed in a large tub for the people of Chicago, but the others took baths in the same tub where the water felt really good to a kid. Their father had to sell his stock and it was hard for their mom to see her dreams be sold with them. I guess it makes you think was it because their farther drunk so much and how they also fought. I am not Lonely was a very good poem. The girl wasn’t scared as she had been. No bad dreams as she once use to have. I would say the girl has turned into a woman. Some one she used to know and sleep with was in her bed and she thought they were going to leave and after they did she got use to her big bed and being all alone. She had a feeling they would leave and they did, which she has adapted to be a lone in her big bed to roll around in all by her-self.

14-2 Tillie Olson

Tillie Olson has gained wide critical attention as a prose stylist and spokeswomen for the poor, the oppressed, and the despised people of America.  She was born in Nebraska to Russian immigrant parents. Olson’s story of I Stand Here Ironing is a story written from a mother’s point of view of her troubled daughter Emily. Her mother has just gotten a call from the girl’s school, which they expressed that she “needs help”; her mother looks back on how she has raised her. As her mother thinks about this she thinks how she  put so much into her daughter when she was younger.Her mother looking back feels what every mother thinks of their kid what all mother feel about their child that they are beautiful, because we love them. The bubbles remind her of how she spit bubbles and cooing.The babies feet and hands and overalls are things that she pictures and remebers of her as a baby.she talks about Emily as in ecstacy which is a big change from her attitude throughout the story.her mother looks back and sees that she can’t spend the time and care for her, because her husband has left them and she has to support them by working.The woman downstairs don’t spend the time with her as she would or any mother to a child would.She has looked for her husband and he didn’t want to see his family suffer eventhough he knew they would but he wouldn’t be there to actually see the poverty. He was a very selfish person that must have been out of sight out of mind kind of person. Her being a young mother trying to work and raise a child by herself wasn’t easy. Now she looks back and sees that while she was trying to make a living to care for her she slipped through without what her mother thought she needed. I see her mother feeling as though she has failed not only her daughter but her self when she was only trying to support them.

14-1 Flannery O’Connor

Flannery O’Connor was born in Savannah Georgia where she lived until she died, at age thirty-eight. She is known for her wit, simplicity and masterful reproduction of colloquial speech of her native South. She is known for her short stories. Mrs Freeman has been working for Mrs. Hopewell for four years, and the two women often converse over breakfast in the Hopewell’s kitchen. Mrs. Hopewell considers Mrs. Freeman to be extremely nosy. Hugla is Mrs.Hopewells daughter that is called Joy and her mother refueses to call her by her legal name. Hulga was choosen for it’s uglyness. Mrs. Freeman loves calling her by the name Hulga, because she likes what she thinks is ugly things. Hulga makes eggs while her mother considers how she probably should not have earned a Ph.D. in philosophy, since it has not brought her any good. Hulga has been sick and probably does not have long to live. That is the reason she still lives at home.
As Hulga makes eggs, her mother wonders what she said to the Bible salesman who visited the day before. He told her that he was just a poor country boy and that he had a heart condition that might kill him soon. He didn’t want to go to college, he just wanted to sell Bibles. Mrs. Hopewell ask him to stay for dinner and Hugla ignoired him which really borthers her mom. After dinner, Manley the salesman leaves. Hulga was standing in the road and he stopped near her to talk. Mrs. Hopewell wonders what was said between her daughter and Manley. Eventually, Mrs. Hopewell brings up the Bible salesman, and Mrs. Freeman mentions that she saw him leave clearly, she saw him talking to Hulga. Hulga and the salesman connected about the fact that they both might die soon from a heart condition, and he invites her on a picnic for the next day.She goes to meet him at the gate.Manley has been waiting for her behind a bush across the street, and as they walk toward the woods, he asks her about her wooden leg. She is bothered by his question. He kisses her and she really don’t think it is that great.They continue to kiss, and without her leg she feels entirely dependent on Manley. But she begins to panic and wants her leg back. He opens his brief case to reveal that there are only two Bibles inside, and that they are fake; they open to reveal a flask of whiskey, a pack of cards, and some medicine in a box. Hulga is shocked and asks, aren’t you just good country people?” He laughs and implies that he is going to rape her. She yells at him, “You’re a Christian!” and accuses him of being a hypocrite. He still refuses to give her her leg instead, he slams it inside his brief case and climbs down the ladder, leaving her up in the loft On his way down, he calls to her that she is not so much smarter than him; he doesn’t believe in God.  Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Freeman are in the back pasture and as they watch him leave, Mrs. Freeman comments that she could never be as simple as he is.

13-3 James Baldwin

James Baldwin was born in Harlem. He has been called one of the important black writers of the twentieth century. He was the oldest of nine kids. At age fourteen he underwent a religious experience and began to preach. Sonny blues is about two brothers and the two sides of the African Americans. Sonny’s brother has been arrested for drugs he reads the newspaper to find this out. As he takes the sub-way to the school where he teaches he can’t believe he is in jail. He hears the kids and thinks of their child-hood. As the teacher leaves he meets an old friend and tells him of his brother’s arrest. He has given up on helping Sonny and this makes him mad. He feels like he has given up on Sonny also. The man tells Sonny’s brother he thought he was to smart to get caught. The friend tells him he would have killed himself a long time ago if he was smart. Meaning it would be better to die than to have a drug addiction. He later admits that he had turned Sonny on to drugs. Sonny’s brother wants to know what will happen to him now. He tells him they will send him to get help for the drugs. He writes Sonny while in jail since it has been a year since he has talked with him. Sonny is released from jail and has a desire for music and he wants his brother to hear him play.  He recalls when his mother has ask him to watch after Sonny His mother tells him about his dads brother that was killed by a drunk driver that ran over him. He doesn’t get why Sonny loves his music and finally he agrees to hear him. After he hears him play the blues, he has a better understanding of his desire for music.

13-2 Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath’s poem represents the romanticism era. She was born in Boston Massachusetts. Plath writes of her mother and father personalities in her poems. At age seven-teen she published her first poem and her first short story. She went to Smith College on a scholarship. But she became filled with apprehension of horror and death. She was obsessed with isolation and entrapment. Unable to handle her inner and outer worlds she went to a hospital for treatment of which she later writes about by using false name of Victoria Lucas. The word “Lady” she uses with the title has to do with female power. In the poem Lady Lazarus is about being reborn and her resentment of those who care for her. She is frustrated at people’s inability to understand her despair and unwillingness to carry on with her life. Each time she recovers from her death actually from her suicide attempts she is overwhelmed by people that care about her as she returns to the same place she was when she died. I think Plath has an obsession with death but she is very frustrated when she wakes to the same place and same people. She wants to die and wake up somewhere else she thinks she is going to wake up at a different place and she doesn’t so she gets upset and tries to kill herself again. The end is where she rises out of ash from fire. She is on fire and she eats men like air but really it’s like fire where she devours them. Ash, ash you poke and stir everything is burned up where nothing is there. All has burned up. She sees dying is an art that she can’t quite capture to the extent that she can’t stop coming back to the same place.

13 -1 Randall Jarrell

               

      

Randall Jarrell was a teacher most of his life. He stated if he was rich he basically like teaching so much that he would teach for free. Jarrell was a poet and attended Vanderbilt University. Because he had been in the arm forces he wrote of his time there.

The poem Losses written by Jarrell he wrote of death in the air force. I guess this was what he had seen in his time in the arm forces. He writes of death and the loss of death it wasn’t about dying we have died before, but the loss of the person. And how many losses there were. In the new planes with new people I gather was that the other people he had been with before had died. He writes of how their death would be made by a mistake that someone had made. I see this being how important his job was.And how a mistake would kill the people in the plane. The people they had killed and never knew them or seen them. We read our mail and count our missions. I would think he was thinking just how many missions they had left before they were done and could leave. When we lasted long enough they gave us metals. But if they died they were low of causalities. So some of his fellow forces were dead and the cities were burned from the maps they were given with their mission. If they crashed they were given the wrong information and used wrong navigation to establish their position. The planes were taken down by the power lines that they had not navigated right. We blazed up on the lines were the power lines that they struck while in flight. I enjoyed this poem even though it was of death and dying.

12-1 A Raisin in the Sun

I don’t know about anyone else but I felt that I was watching “Good Times” With the mother and the father fussing and the small place they lived. I have to say I did enjoy it.

Walter has a lot of dreams for his family. He wants his father’s money from his death to open a liquor store. His wife Ruth wants a home but she has just found out she is pregnant. She is thinking hard about getting rid of the baby. She doesn’t want to bring another child into the place where they live which isn’t the best neighbor hood. Their home is full with Walters’s mom and his sister. His son is sleeping on the sofa in the living room and they share a bathroom with the neighbors in the building. Lena’s husband had died and she was getting a check for $10.000 from his life insurance policy. She wanted a bigger home buy everyone had their thoughts of where the money should go for. Walter the liquor store, Lena wants a home. Walter’s sister Beneatha is going to college to be a doctor and her tuition isn’t cheap.

Walters’s mom puts a down payment on a house. Mr. Lindner a man from the housing association comes to tell the family they don’t want black people in the community. They are afraid that because they are black they will have trouble in the community. They tell the family they will pay them not to move. The family is very unhappy the welcoming committee isn’t very welcoming at all. Walter isn’t happy with his mom decision his mom has made. His mother feels bad and she gives him what is left. He is to put his sister money in the bank for college and use the other as head of the house. He invests the money with a man named Willy he steals the money and never returned. Walter and his friends were going in together and get a liquor licenses and open a store. But Willy didn’t come back with the licenses and took the money. Walter, after being upset with the loss of the money is getting a plan to get the money back. He calls the man from the home association to come back over. Mr. Lindner arrives thinking that they are going to accept his offer of the money to not move into the white neighbor hood. But Walter stuns them all he doesn’t take the money and tells the family they are moving. The man leaves and they tell the movers to load up and they move into the house that Walters mom had bought for them. Mom finally thinks Walter has become a man.