For Thursday: American Journal, Poems: see below

NOTE: I suspect some people still don't have all their books. If you for some reason don't have this book, or the bookstore doesn't have it, or for ANY reason. please let me know and I can get you copies of the poems. It's better to have the book, but I don't want you to give up simply because you don't have the book. So let me know.

For Thursday's class, read the following poems (you can read more if you want, but I chose the ones that I think are the most interesting and the easiest to read without too much background):

* Szybist, Girls Overheard While Assembling a Puzzle (25-26)

* Wheeler, "From the Split" (pp.35-36)

* Diaz, "My Brother at 3 am" (pp.42-43)

* Rasmussen, "Reverse Suicide" (p.44)

* Wright, "Charlottesville Nocturne" (p.45)

* Limon, "Downhearted" (p.46)

* Wiman, "After the Diagnosis" (p.48-49)

Answer TWO of the following after reading (and I encourage to re-read these short poems, because you'll understand more the more you read them):

Q1: Which poem seems the most like a story we might find in Humans of New York? Why is this? What kind of 'story' is it trying to tell (and does it remind you of a person/photo you saw in the book?)

Q2: Which poem has the most unusual structure? In other words, which poem isn't like any other poem you've read before? Why do you think the poet writes the poem like this? What does it help us see or experience to read it like this?

Q3: In Ada Limon's poem, "Downhearted," she's trying to explore the metaphor of being "down-hearted," which uses the idea we discussed in class of "down" being a metaphor for bad, out of control, unconscious, etc. How does she try to make us understand the emotion in other ways in this poem? To her, what does "downhearted" mean? (NOTE: Ada Limon is the current Poet Laureate of the United States, which means she's basically the ambassador of poetry!). 

Q4: Most of the poems in this selection (except the first one, about the puzzle) are from Part II of the book, which is entitled, "Something Shines Out From Every Darkness." What do you think that sentence is trying to say? How can something shine out from darkness? And how might this help explain or illustrate one of the poems in this section?