On xerox handouts, read the poems by Nikki Giovanni, Tess Gallagher, and Theodore Roethke; online, read the following poems by e. e. cummings and W. H. Auden:

cummings'  because i love you) last night,  if i have made, my lady, intricate  Lady, i will touch you with my mind and since feeling is first

Auden's Poem II from  "Five Songs"   "Lullaby" and  "Funeral Blues"
 

Here are a few study questions on each of the poets we're considering, and on particular poems:

Nikki Giovanni
1.  Nikki Giovanni is best known for her militancy during the 1960's as a proponent of black power and black liberation; many of her poems advocate violent revolution as the only practical response to white racism.  Do you hear any hint of this political orientation in her love poetry?  If so, in which poem?  And how does it manifest itself?

2.  Giovanni's poetry is very self-conscious, very meta-poetic.  It refers to itself as poetry.  How does she relate the subject of poetry to the subject of love?  Consider particularly the repetitition of the phrase "a silly poem" in "My House."

3.  How does "When I Nap" play with the reader's responses?  How does the speaker compare to the speaker of Donne's "The Sun Rising" in the way each uses sun imagery?

4.  "Kidnap Poem" is full of puns and other plays on words.  How does this playful technique contribute to the effect of the poema?

5.  What is "the red Black green"?  (If you don't know, try doing a little research).  Why is "Black" the only word capitalized in the poem?

6.  Why does the speaker of "Kidnap poem" say "if i were a poet"?  Isn't the speaker a poet?  Who is the speaker?  Who is the addressee?

7.  Note the very strong enjambment of the last two lines of "Kidnap Poem"; Giovanni breaks for a new line not just in the middle of a syntactic unit, but in the middle of a word!  What's the effect of breaking "kidnap" into "kid" and "nap"?  Look for other interesting enjambments in the poem.

Tess Gallagher
1.  Many of the poems in Portable Kisses emerge from the experience of losing a husband to death (Gallagher's husband was the late Raymond Carver, a famous fiction writer and poet.)  Take a look at the award-winning  Raymond Carver Homepage by your fellow Whitman student Tom Luce.  There are pictures of Ray and Tess, and lots of info on Carver.  In what ways might knowing something about Carver affect the reader's experience in reading Gallagher's love poems?

2.  In the poem "Red Shoes," are the red shoes a symbol of something larger?  Or would it more appropriate to say that they are just shoes, but that their function goes beyond the usual function of shoes?  Discuss their significance in the speaker's life and in the poem.

3.  In what sense is the poem "Lucid Valentine" a valentine?  What makes it "lucid"?

4.  Explain the soldier simile in the opening line of "Lucid Valentine."  How does the rest of the poem extend and develop that simile?

5.  What does it mean to say that the speaker "did not guess our enemy"?  Why does she call that enemy "a season wide and soft as dawn"?

6.  Lines 4-8 are one long, difficult sentence.  Do your best to explain what the speaker says about her "smile" and how it "seemed" at some point "when he looked back": what is the circumstance evoked?  how does the speaker's smile affect the world?  how does it (or did it) affect her relationship with "him"?
 

Theodore Roethke
1.  Presuming, for argument's sake, that the speaker of all the poems on the handout is the same man, and that all are representations of the poet himself, what sort of man is Roethke?  How do relationships with women or one particular relationship with one particular woman help to define his identity?

2.  How does Roethke's poetry compare to Donne's?

3.  Returning to the presumption of question #1, what evidence is there, in the poems themselves, that the speaker represents the poet?

4.  What various meanings does the word "moved" have in this poem?

5.  What kind[s] of "motion" do you envision when reading the second line of the last stanza?

6.  In order to understand more deeply the lines on "English poets who grew up on Greek" and "Turn, Counter-turn, and Stand,"  read 17th-century poet Ben Jonson's Pindaric Ode on a heroic young man who died young, and see the definition of  Ode at this link, noting that Pindar's odes were originally written to be performed by a chorus moving in a three-part dance movement.  To better understand the last three lines of stanza 2, see some pastoral love poems on a hay-harvesting mower in love, "Damon The Mower," and "The Mower's Song," by another seventeenth-century poet, Andrew Marvell.  How does all this literary allusion help to define the speaker's emotions?

7.  "Wish for a Young Wife" is a kind of a blessing or incantation or spell.  What literary devices does the poet use to make it feel as if the magic is effective?

e. e. cummings
1.  Cummings was self-consciously innovative in his free use of punctuation and irregular spacing, his ignoring of capital letters, etc.  He was a pioneer in these techniques that have since become familiar.  Pay particular attention to his use of enjambment.  How does his placement of line endings affect meaning?

2.  How does cummings allude to the Petrarchan tradition?
 

W. H. Auden
1.  All of Auden's lovers were men.  Are his poems distinctly homoerotic, or do they express love and desire in terms that apply equally well to heterosexual desire?

2.  What strategies does the speaker of "Funeral Blues" use to deal with bereavement?  Consider particularly his use of the imperative mood and his combination of everyday, worldly images with extravagant metaphors.

3.  How does the very negative language of "Lullaby" work, given that the point of a lullaby is to console, soothe, and send the listener off to comfortable sleep?