Note: I started this last week, after my run of Saturday mornings with the high school students had concluded. On the last day, I didn’t try to introduce new material; instead, I tried to consolidate some of the fundamentals I had worked on in the previous weeks: concrete language, drawing playfully on the unconscious, listening to language, structure as a way of shaping expression . . . So we did some short exercises that repeated some of the things from earlier weeks in shorter form, then I showed them a video tape from the Lannan Foundation that edits together bits of interviews & poetry readings with the likes of Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Phillip Levine, Allen Ginsburg, Yehudah Amichai, and others. The focus of the video, called Where Poems Come From, is on process as both freedom & discipline. And it was that dynamic I had been trying to put over throughout the whole workshop. After the video, I talked a little bit about the way going to school & living in a media-saturated culture tends to dull our ability to use language freely for our own purposes. I suggested that the students keep writing in a notebook & keep reading things their teachers don’t approve of as a way of keeping their access to their own language & to the language of poems & stories. After that, I opened the boxes of donuts I’d brought, passed out the orange juice, and we simply chatted. Since many of my students are in the process of getting ready to go to college (not necessarily to Clarkson), we talked about everything from the food in the dorms to what you have to do in Freshman English. A lovely group of students with whom it was a pleasure to work. [Previous posts on teaching Project Challenge]

Instructions: Choose two of the first four questions and write a clearly organized, extended paragraph in response; aditionally, everyone must answer question 5.

1. Articulate the relationship between alienation and the modernism of Pound and Eliot. Use specific quotations to illustrate your general statements.
2. Describe the speaker’s relationship to traditional systems of religious belief in Wallace Stevens’ poem “Sunday Morning.”
3. Historically, what we now call High Modernism came into being just after World War I. Read through Pound’s Hugh Selwyn Mauberly, then describe the effect of the war on Pound and his fellow modernists.
4. Robert Frost’s poem “Home Burial” presents us with two characters who cannot come to terms with each other. Describe the way in which the physical layout of the scene and the way the characters move within it dramatizes the moral and emotional content of the poem.
5. [Everyone must answer]. Choose one scene from T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and put it in the context of the larger poem. What is the situation? Wh is speaking? What is the tone? What is the speaker observing? Etc.