do the two. 1.Thinking about the readings from this Module, write a 200-400 word discussion board post in which you explore one or more of these questions: Would you agree with the statement that "we

Introduction

In the opening chapters of Charles Dickens’s novel Hard Times (1854), the aptly named Thomas Gradgrind warns the teachers and pupils at his “model” school to avoid using their imaginations. “Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts.

Facts alone are wanted in life,” exclaims Mr. Gradgrind. To press his point, Mr. Gradgrind asks “girl number twenty,” Sissy Jupe, the daughter of a circus performer, to define a horse. When she cannot, Gradgrind turns to Bitzer, a pale, spiritless boy who “looked as though, if he were cut, he would bleed white.” A “model” student of this “model” school, Bitzer gives exactly the kind of definition to satisfy Mr. Gradgrind:

Quadruped. Graminivorous. Forty teeth, namely, twenty-four grinders, four eye-teeth, and twelve incisive. Sheds coat in spring; in marshy countries, sheds hoofs.

Anyone who has any sense of what a horse is rebels against Bitzer’s lifeless pic-ture of that animal and against the “Gradgrind” view of reality. As these first scenes of Hard Times lead us to expect, in the course of the novel the fact-grinding Mr. Gradgrind learns that human beings cannot live on facts alone; that it is dangerous to stunt the faculties of imagination and feeling; that, in the words of one of the novel’s more lovable characters, “People must be amused.” Through the downfall of an exaggerated enemy of the imagination, Dickens reminds us why we like and even need to read literature.

What Is Literature?

But what is literature? Before you opened this book, you probably could guess that it would contain the sorts of stories, poems, and plays you have encountered in English classes or in the literature section of a library or bookstore. But why are some written works called literature whereas others are not? And who gets to decide? The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language offers a num-ber of definitions for the word literature, one of which is “imaginative or creative writing, especially of recognized artistic value.” In this book, we adopt a version of that definition by focusing on fictional stories, poems, and plays—the three major kinds (or genres)1 of “imaginative or creative writing” that form the heart of litera-ture as it has been taught in schools and universities for over a century. Many of the works we have chosen to include are already ones “of recognized artistic value” and thus belong to what scholars call the canon, a select, if much-debated and ever-evolving, list of the most highly and widely esteemed works. Though quite a few of the literary texts we include are too new to have earned that status, they, too, have already drawn praise, and some have even generated controversy. Certainly it helps to bear in mind what others have thought of a literary work.

Yet one of this book’s primary goals is to get you to think for yourself, as well as

communicate with others, about what “imaginative writing” and “artistic value” are or might be and thus about what counts as literature. What makes a story or poem different from an essay, a newspaper editorial, or a technical manual? For that matter, what makes a published, canonical story like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener2 both like and unlike the sorts of stories we tell each other every day? What about so-called oral literature, such as the fables and folktales that cir-culated by word of mouth for hundreds of years before they were ever written down? or published works such as comic strips and graphic novels that rely little, if at all, on the written word? or Harlequin romances, television shows, and the stories you collaborate in making when you play a video game? Likewise, how is Shakespeare’s poem My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun both like and unlike a verse you might find in a Hallmark card or even a jingle in a mouthwash commercial? Today, literature departments offer courses in many of these forms of expres-sion, expanding the realm of literature far beyond the limits of the dictionary definition. An essay, a song lyric, a screenplay, a supermarket romance, a novel by Toni Morrison or William Faulkner, and a poem by Walt Whitman or Emily Dickinson—each may be read and interpreted in literary ways that yield insight and pleasure. What makes the literary way of reading different from pragmatic reading is, as scholar Louise rosenblatt explains, that it does not focus “on what will remain [. . .] after the reading—the information to be acquired, the logical solution to a problem, the actions to be carried out,” but rather on “what happens

2. Titles of poems, stories, and other literary selections included in this book are formatted in small caps when those titles first appear in the body of any chapter and whenever they appear in a question or writing suggestion. other wise, all titles are formatted in accordance with MLA guidelines.

during [. . .] reading.” The difference between pragmatic and literary reading, in other words, resembles the difference between a journey that is only about reaching a destination and one that is just as much about fully experiencing the ride. In the pages of this book, you will find cartoons, song lyrics, folktales, and sto-ries and plays that have spawned movies. Through this inclusiveness, we do not intend to suggest that there are no distinctions among these various forms of expression or between a good story, poem, or play and a bad one; rather, we want to get you thinking, talking, and writing both about what the key differences and similarities among these forms are and what makes one work a better example of its genre than another. Sharpening your skills at these peculiarly intensive and responsive sorts of reading and interpretation is a primary purpose of this book and of most literature courses. Another goal of inclusiveness is to remind you that literature doesn’t just belong

in a textbook or a classroom, even if textbooks and classrooms are essential means for expanding your knowledge of the literary terrain and of the concepts and tech-niques essential to thoroughly enjoying and analyzing a broad range of literary forms. You may or may not be the kind of person who always takes a novel when you go to the beach or writes a poem about your experience when you get back home. You may or may not have taken literature courses before. Yet you already have a good deal of literary experience and even expertise, as well as much more to dis-cover about literature. A major aim of this book is to make you more conscious of how and to what end you might use the tools you already possess and to add many new ones to your tool belt.

What Does Literature Do?

one quality that may well differentiate stories, poems, and plays from other kinds of writing is that they help us move beyond and probe beneath abstractions by giv-ing us concrete, vivid particulars. rather than talking about things, they bring them to life for us by representing experience, and so they become an experience for us—one that engages our emotions, our imagination, and all of our senses, as well as our intellects. As the British poet Matthew Arnold put it more than a century ago, “The interpretations of science do not give us this intimate sense of objects as the interpretations of poetry give it; they appeal to a limited faculty, and not to the whole man. It is not Linnaeus [. . .] who gives us the true sense of animals, or water, or plants, who seizes their secret for us, who makes us participate in their life; it is Shakespeare [. . .] Wordsworth [. . .] Keats.” To test Arnold’s theory, compare the American Heritage Dictionary’s rather dry

definition of literature with the following poem, in which John Keats describes his first encounter with a specific literary work—George Chapman’s translation of the Iliad and the Odyssey, two epics by the ancient Greek poet Homer.

JOHN KEATS On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer13

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo24 hold.

5 Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene35 Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies

10 When a new planet swims into his ken;46 Or like stout Cortez57 when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific—and all his men Looked at each other with a wild surmise—Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

1816 Keats makes us see literature as a “wide expanse” by greatly developing this

metaphor and complementing it with similes likening reading to the sighting of a “new planet” and the first glimpse of an undiscovered ocean. More important, he

shows us what literature means and why it matters by allowing us to share with him the subjective experience of reading and the complex sensations it inspires—the dizzying exhilaration of discovery; the sense of power, accomplishment, and pride that comes of achieving something difficult; the wonder we feel in those rare moments when a much-anticipated experience turns out to be even greater than we had imagined it would be. It isn’t the definitions of words alone that bring this experience to life for us as we

read Keats’s poem, but also their sensual qualities—the way the words look, sound, and even feel in our mouths because of the particular way they are put together on the page. The sensation of excitement—of a racing heart and mind—is reproduced in us as we read the poem. For example, notice how the lines in the middle run into each other, but then Keats forces us to slow down at the poem’s end—stopped short by that dash and comma in the poem’s final lines, just as Cortez and his men are when they reach the edge of the known world and peer into the vastness that lies beyond.

What Are the Genres of Literature?

The conversation that is literature, like the conversation about literature, invites all comers, requiring neither a visa nor a special license of any kind. Yet literary

3. George Chapman’s were among the most famous renaissance translations of Homer; he completed his Iliad in 1611, his Odyssey in 1616. Keats wrote the sonnet after being led to Chapman by a former teacher and reading the Iliad all night long. 4. Greek god of poetry and music. Fealty: literally, the loyalty owed by a vassal to his feudal lord. 5. Atmosphere. 6. range of vision; awareness. 7. Actually, Balboa; he first viewed the Pacific from Darien, in Panama.

studies, like all disciplines, has developed its own terminology and its own sys-tems of classification. Helping you understand and effectively use both is a major purpose of this book. Some essential literary terms are common, everyday words used in a special way

in the conversation about literature. A case in point, perhaps, is the term literary criticism, as well as the closely related term literary critic. Despite the usual con-notations of the word criticism, literary criticism is called criticism not because it is negative or corrective but rather because those who write criticism ask searching, analytical, “critical” questions about the works they read. Literary criticism is both the process of interpreting and commenting on literature and the result of that process. If you write an essay on the play Hamlet, the poetry of John Keats, or the development of the short story in the 1990s, you engage in literary criti-cism. By writing the essay, you’ve become a literary critic. Similarly, when we classify works of literature, we use terms that may be familiar

to you but have specific meanings in a literary context. All academic disciplines have systems of classification, or taxonomies, as well as jargon. Biologists, for exam-ple, classify all organisms into a series of ever-smaller, more specific categories: kingdom, phylum or division, class, order, family, genus, and species. Classification and comparison are just as essential in the study of literature. We expect a poem to work in a certain way, for example, when we know from the outset that it is a poem and not, say, a factual news report or a short story. And—whether consciously or not—we compare it, as we read, to other poems we’ve read. If we know, further, that the poem was first published in eighteenth-century Japan, we expect it to work differently from one that appeared in the latest New Yorker. Indeed, we often

choose what to read, just as we choose what movie to see, based on the “class” or “order” of book or movie we like or what we are in the mood for that day—horror or comedy, action or science fiction. As these examples suggest, we generally tend to categorize literary works in two

ways: (1) on the basis of contextual factors, especially historical and cultural context—that is, when, by whom, and where it was produced (as in nineteenth-century literature, the literature of the Harlem Renaissance, American literature, or African American literature)—and (2) on the basis of formal textual features. For the latter type of classification, the one we focus on in this book, the key term is genre, which simply means, as the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, “A particular style or category of works of art; esp. a type of literary work characterized by a par-ticular form, style, or purpose.” Applied rigorously, genre refers to the largest categories around which this

book is organized—fiction, poetry, and drama (as well as nonfiction prose). The word subgenre applies to smaller divisions within a genre, and the word kind to divisions within a subgenre. Subgenres of fiction include the novel, the novella, and the short story. Kinds of novels, in turn, include the bildungsroman and the epistolary novel. Similarly, important subgenres of nonfiction include the essay, as well as biography and autobiography; a memoir is a particular kind of autobiogra-phy, and so on. However, the terms of literary criticism are not so fixed or so consistently, rig-orously used as biologists’ are. You will often see the word genre applied both much more narrowly—referring to the novel, for example, or even to a kind of novel such as the historical novel. The way we classify a work depends on which aspects of its form or style we concentrate on, and categories may overlap. When we divide fiction, for example,

into the subgenres novel, novella, and short story, we take the length of the works as the salient aspect. (novels are much longer than short stories.) But other fictional subgenres—detective fiction, gothic fiction, historical

fiction, science fiction,

and even romance—are based on the types of plots, characters, settings, and so on that are customarily featured in these works. These latter categories may include works from all the other, length-based categories. There are, after all, gothic novels (think Stephenie Meyer), as well as gothic short stories (think Edgar Allan Poe). A few genres even cut across the boundaries dividing poetry, fiction, drama, and

nonfiction. A prime example is satire—any literary work (whether poem, play, fic-tion, or nonfiction) “in which prevailing vices and follies are held up to ridicule” (Oxford English Dictionary). Examples of satire include poems such as Alexander Pope’s Dunciad (1728); plays, movies, and television shows, from Molière’s Tartuffe (1664) to Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) to South Park; works of fiction like Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Voltaire’s Candide (1759); and works of nonfiction such as Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729) and Ambrose Bierce’s The Devil’s Dictionary (1906). Three other major genres that cross the borders between fiction, poetry, drama, and nonfiction are parody, pastoral, and romance. Individual works can thus belong simultaneously to multiple generic categories

or observe some conventions of a genre without being an example of that genre in any simple or straightforward way. The old English poem Beowulf is an epic and, because it’s written in verse, a poem. Yet because (like all epics) it narrates a story, it is also a work of fiction in the more general sense of that term. Given this complexity, the system of literary genres can be puzzling, especially

to the uninitiated. used well, however, classification schemes are among the most essential and effective tools we use to understand and enjoy just about everything, including literature.

Why Read Literature?

Because there has never been and never will be absolute agreement about where exactly the boundaries between one literary genre and another should be drawn or even about what counts as literature at all, it might be more useful from the outset to focus on why we look at particular forms of expression. over the ages, people have sometimes dismissed all literature or at least certain

genres as a luxury, a frivolous pastime, even a sinful indulgence. Plato famously banned poetry from his ideal republic on the grounds that it tells beautiful lies that “feed and water our passions” rather than our reason. Thousands of years

later, the influential eighteenth-century philosopher Jeremy Bentham decried the “magic art” of literature as doing a good deal of “mischief” by “stimulating our passions” and “exciting our prejudices.” one of Bentham’s contemporaries—a minister—blamed the rise of immorality, irreligion, and even prostitution on the increasing popularity of that particular brand of literature called the novel. Today, many Americans express their sense of literature’s insignificance by

simply not reading it: According to a 2016 national Endowment for the Arts (nEA) report, only 43% of u.S. adults read at least one work of imaginative litera-ture in the previous year, the lowest percentage since nEA began its yearly sur-veys in 1982. Though the report also demonstrates that women are significantly more likely to read literature than men, as are college graduates, the drops in the literary reading rate occurred across the board, among people of all ages, races, and educational levels. Even if they very much enjoy reading on their own, many

contemporary u.S. college students nonetheless hesitate to study or major in lit-erature for fear that their degree won’t provide them with marketable creden-tials, knowledge, or skills. Yet millions of people continue to find both reading literature and discussing it

with others to be enjoyable, meaningful, even essential activities. English thrives as a major at most colleges and universities, almost all of which require under-graduates majoring in other areas to take at least one course in literature. (Per-haps that’s why you are reading this book!) Schools of medicine, law, and business are today more likely to require their students to take literature courses than they were in past decades, and they continue to welcome literature majors as appli-cants, as do many corporations. (As former Google and Twitter executive Santosh Jayaram told the Wall Street Journal in 2012, “English majors are exactly the people I’m looking for.”) So why do so many people read and study literature, and why do schools encourage and even require students to do so? Even if we know what literature is, what does it do for us? What is its value? There are, of course, as many answers to such questions as there are readers.

For centuries, a standard answer has been that imaginative literature provides a unique brand of “instruction and delight.” John Keats’s on First Looking into Chapman’s Homer illustrates some of the many forms such delight can take. Some kinds of imaginative writing offer us the delight of immediate escape, but imaginative writing that is more difficult to read and understand than a Harry Potter or Twilight novel offers escape of a different and potentially more instruc-tive sort, liberating us from the confines of our own time, place, and social milieu, as well as our habitual ways of thinking, feeling, and looking at the world. In this way, a story, poem, or play can satisfy our desire for broader experience—including the sorts of experience we might be unable or unwilling to endure in real life. We can learn what it might be like to grow up on a Canadian fox farm or to party-hop with a model. We can travel back into the past, experiencing war from the perspective of a soldier watching his comrade die or of prisoners suffering in a nazi labor camp. We can journey into the future or into universes governed by entirely different rules than our own. Perhaps we yearn for such knowledge because we can best come to understand our own identities and outlooks by leaping over the bound-aries that separate us from other selves and worlds. Keats’s friend and fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley argued that literature increases

a person’s ability to make such leaps, to “imagine intensely and comprehensively” and “put himself in the place of another and of many othe[r]” people as one has to in

order “to be greatly good.” Shelley meant “good” in a moral sense, reasoning that the ability both to accurately imagine and to truly feel the human consequences of our actions is the key to ethical behavior. numerous recent studies by cognitive psycholo-gists and neuroscientists endorse and expand on Shelley’s argument, demonstrating that while we read our brains respond to fictional events and characters precisely as they would to real ones. Perhaps as a result, readers—particularly of literary, as opposed to popular, fiction or nonfiction—perform better on tests measuring their ability to infer or even predict, to understand, and to empathize with others’ thoughts and emotions. reading a poem, as opposed to a prose translation, sparks more activ-ity in more areas of the brain, including those associated with personal memory and emotion, as well as language. As a result, scientists posit, poetry triggers “reappraisal mechanisms,” making us reflect and rethink our own experiences. reading literature

of various genres thus, as one review of a decade’s worth of research concludes, “enables us to better understand people, better cooperate with them.”

Such abilities have great pragmatic and even economic, as well as personal,

moral, even political value. In virtually any career you choose, you will need to interact positively and productively with both coworkers and clients, and in today’s increasingly globalized world, you will need to learn to deal effectively and empa-thetically with people vastly different from yourself. At the very least, literature written by people from various backgrounds and depicting various places, times, experiences, and feelings will give you some understanding of how others’ lives and worldviews may differ from your own—and how very much the same they may be. Such understanding is ever more in demand in an age when business success—according to many a venture capitalist, marketing consultant, and Silicon Valley entrepreneur—often depends less on technical know-how than on both a grasp of the whys and hows of human behavior within and across cultures (markets), and the ability to tell compelling stories to potential funders and consumers alike. Similarly, our rapidly changing world and economy require intellectual flexibility,

adaptability, and ingenuity, making ever more essential the human knowledge, gen-eral skills, and habits of mind developed through the study of literature. Literature explores issues and questions relevant in any walk of life. Yet rather than offering us neat or comforting solutions and answers, literature enables us to experience diffi-cult situations and human conundrums in all their complexity and to look at them from various points of view. In so doing, it invites us sometimes to question con-ventional thinking and sometimes to see the wisdom of such thinking, even as it helps us imagine altogether new possibilities. Finally, literature awakens us to the richness and complexity of language—our

primary tool for engaging with, understanding, and shaping the world around us. As we read more and more, seeing how different writers use language to help us feel others’ joy, pain, love, rage, or laughter, we begin to recognize the vast range of pos-sibilities for expression. Writing and discussion in turn give us invaluable practice in discovering, expressing, and defending our own nuanced, often contradictory thoughts about both literature and life. The study of literature enhances our com-mand of language and our sensitivity to its effects and meanings in every form or medium, providing interpretation and communication skills especially crucial in our information age. By learning to appreciate and articulate what the language of a story, a poem, a play, or an essay does to us and by considering how it affects oth-ers, we also learn much about what we can do with language.

What We Do with Literature: Three Tips

1. Take a literary work on its own terms. Adjust to the work; don’t make the work adjust to you. Be prepared to hear things you do not want to hear. not all works are about your ideas, nor will they always present emotions you want to feel. But be tolerant and listen to the work first; later you can explore the ways you do or don’t agree with it.

2. Assume there is a reason for everything. Writers do make mistakes, but when a work shows some degree of verbal control it is usually safest to assume that the writer chose each word carefully; if the choice seems peculiar, you may be missing something. Try to account for everything in a work, see what kind of sense you can make of it, and figure out a coherent pattern that explains the text as it stands.

3. Remember that literary texts exist in time and that times change. not only the meanings of words, but whole ways of looking at the universe vary in different ages. Consciousness of time works two ways: Your knowledge of history provides a context for reading the work, even as the work may mod-ify your notion of a particular age.

Why Study Literature?

You may already feel the power and pleasure to be gained from a sustained encounter with challenging reading. Then why not simply enjoy it in solitude, on your own time? Why take a course in literature? Literary study, like all disciplines, has devel-oped its own terminology and its own techniques. Some knowledge and under-standing of both can greatly enhance our personal appreciation of literature and our conversations with others about it. Literature also has a context and a history, and learning something about them can make all the difference in the amount and kind of pleasure and insight you derive from literature. By reading and discussing different genres of literature, as well as works from varied times and places, you may well come to appreciate and even love works that you might never have discovered or chosen to read on your own or that you might have disliked or misunderstood if you did. Most important, writing about works of literature and discussing them with your

teachers and other students will give you practice in analyzing literature in greater depth and in considering alternative views of both the works themselves and the situations and problems the works explore. A clear understanding of the aims and designs of a story, poem, or play never falls like a bolt from the blue. Instead, it emerges from a process that involves trying to put into words how and why this work had such an effect on you and, just as important, responding to what others say or write about it. Literature itself is a vast, ongoing, ever-evolving conversation in which we most fully participate when we enter into actual conversation with others. As you engage in this conversation, you will notice that interpretation is always

variable, always open to discussion. A great diversity of interpretations might sug-gest that the discussion is pointless. on the contrary, that’s when the discussion gets most interesting. Because there is no single, straight, paved road to an under-standing of a literary text, you can explore a variety of blazed trails and less traveled paths. In sharing your own interpretations, tested against your peers’ responses and guided by your instructor’s or other critics’ expertise, you will hone your skills at both interpretation and communication. After the intricate and interactive process of interpretation, you will find that the work has changed when you read it again. What we do with literature alters what it does to us.

• • • To help you think further about how literature operates as a vast, never-ending,

ever-expanding conversation that outlives—even as it invites and potentially works through and on—all of us, we close this chapter with two poems, Hai-Dang Phan’s My Father’s “norton Introduction to Literature,” Third Edition (1981) and Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter, by another American poet, John Crowe ransom. Phan’s 2015 poem responds in a wonderfully personal way to an array of literary texts published decades, even centuries, before his own birth (in 1980), including ransom’s elegy and a Shakespeare play that elegy echoes. But as his title suggests, Phan responds to these texts by means of another one—the traces of his

own still-living father’s responses to them, as recorded many years ago on the pages of his father’s copy of an earlier edition of the very book you are now reading and, we hope, literally leaving your own distinctive marks on. What answers might these poems offer to the questions Why read literature? Why study it?

HAI-DANG PHAN

My Father’s “Norton Introduction to Literature,” Third Edition (1981)

Certain words give him trouble: cannibals, puzzles, sob, bosom, martyr, deteriorate, shake, astonishes, vexed, ode . . . These he looks up and studiously annotates in Vietnamese. Ravish means cướp đoạt; shits is like when you have to đi ỉa; mourners are those whom we say are full of buôn râu. For “even the like precurse of feared events”8 think báo trước.

Its thin translucent pages are webbed with his marginalia, graphite ghosts of a living hand, and the notes often sound just like him: “All depend on how look at thing,” he pencils after “I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / Were toward Eternity—”9 His slanted handwriting is generally small, but firm and clear. His pencil is a No. 2, his preferred Hi-Liter, arctic blue.

I can see my father trying out the tools of literary analysis. He identifies the “turning point” of “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber”; underlines the simile in “Both the old man and the child stared ahead as if they were awaiting an apparition.”1 My father, as he reads, continues to notice relevant passages and to register significant reactions, but increasingly sorts out

his ideas in English, shaking off those Vietnamese glosses. 1981 was the same year we vưọt biển2 and came to America, where my father took Intro Lit (“for fun”), Comp Sci (“for job”).

“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,”3 he murmurs something about the “dark side of life how awful it can be” as I begin to track silence and signal to a cold source.

25 30

Reading Ransom’s “Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter,” a poem about a “young girl’s death,” as my father notes, how could he not have been “vexed at her brown study / Lying so primly propped,” since he never properly observed (I realize this just now) his own daughter’s wake. Lãy làm ngạc nhiên vê is what it means to be astonished.

8. Hamlet 1.1.121 (p. 1399); the line (spoken by Horatio) immediately precedes the second appearance of Hamlet’s father’s ghost. 9. Final lines (23–24) of Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death—” (p. 872). 1. From Flannery o’Connor’s short story “The Artificial nigger” (1955). “The Short and Happy Life of Francis Macomber”: short story (1936) by Ernest Hemingway. Turning point: see chapter 1. 2. Crossed the border (Vietnamese). 3. Poem (1923) by robert Frost (p. 1143).

Her name was Đông Xưa, Ancient Winter, but at home she’s Bebe. 35

“There was such speed in her little body, / And such lightness in her footfall, / It is no wonder her brown study / Astonishes us all.” In the photo of her that hangs in my parents’ house she is always fourteen months old and staring into the future. In “reeducation camp”4 he had to believe she was alive

because my mother on visits “took arms against her shadow.” Did the memory of those days sweep over him like a leaf storm from the pages of a forgotten autumn? Lost in the margins, I’m reading the way I discourage my students from reading. But this is “how we deal with death,” his black pen replies. Assume there is a reason for everything, instructs a green asterisk.5

Then between pp. 896–97, opened to Stevens’ “Sunday Morning,”6 I pick out a newspaper clipping, small as a stamp, an old listing from the 404-Employment Opps State of Minnesota, and read: For current job opportunities dial (612) 297-3180. Answered 24 hrs. When I dial, the automated female voice on the other end tells me I have reached a non-working number.

2015

4. Prison camp used for the indoctrination or ideological retraining of political dissidents; such camps were common in Communist-ruled postwar Vietnam (1975–86). 5. See above, “What We Do with Literature: Three Tips.” 6. Poem (1915, 1923) by Wallace Stevens

AI-DANG PHAN (b. 1980) From The Best American Poetry 2016 (2016)* [“My Father’s ‘Norton Introduction to Literature,’ Third Edi-tion (1981)” i]s a found poem, artifice meets accident, sourced from the literary works and reader’s notes of my father’s textbook. I wanted to convey the uniquely tactile, sensuous, and material experience of reading and responding to a printed book, alongside the intimate thrill of handwriting. It’s a poem-quilt made of well-worn texts [. . .]. It’s a capsule biography, a portrait of my father (who served during the war as an officer in the South Vietnamese Navy, mostly on a small patrol boat unit in the Mekong Delta); as an immigrant trying to learn the language and literature of his adopted country; as a father trying to come to terms with the loss of his first child, whom he only ever saw alive once, and while he was in reeducation camp. I feel compelled to note that it’s my mother’s grief, briefly acknowledged and secreted inside a borrowed metaphor, which haunts the margins of the poem when I return to it now. After all, she was the one who had to deal with the death of her daughter while her husband was imprisoned, her private sorrow its own prison house. It’s also a self-portrait because my life is bound up with this family trauma, and the historical trauma surrounding it. Insofar as I grapple with these legacies, as a writer I’m interested in the formal problems and possibilities they pose. Given the intense emotional response my father’s marginalia provoked in me and what became the concerns of the poem, I needed a distancing strategy to combat the threat of cheap senti-ment, false immediacy, and unknowing appropriation. Hence, the professorial persona and voice of the detached academic. In October 2012, when I came across my father’s Norton while visiting my parents in Wisconsin, I had just started teaching at Grinnell College and entered a period of uncertainty about the course of my writing life. It’s a reconciliation between two selves, the poet and the professor, that I, too, often see as conflictual, not to mention the age-old wars between fathers and sons, the present and the past. It’s my marginalia on his marginalia, a double-annotation and translation, of what words, memories, people, and events mean as they change contexts, of the unknowable. It’s a rec-ord and reenactment of reading, between the lines, behind the words, for the lives we’ve missed, others’ and our own. (186–87) * The Best American Poetry 2016. Edited by Edward Hirsch, Scribner Poetry, 2016. The Best American Poetry Series, edited by Dennis Lehman.

JOHN CROWE RANSOM Bells for John Whiteside’s Daughter

There was such speed in her little body, And such lightness in her footfall, It is no wonder her brown study7 Astonishes us all.

Her wars were bruited8 in our high window. We looked among orchard trees and beyond Where she took arms against her shadow,9 Or harried unto the pond

The lazy geese, like a snow cloud Dripping their snow on the green grass, Tricking and stopping, sleepy and proud, Who cried in goose, Alas,

For the tireless heart within the little Lady with rod that made them rise From their noon apple-dreams and scuttle Goose-fashion under the skies!

But now go the bells,1 and we are ready, In one house we are sternly stopped To say we are vexed at her brown study, Lying so primly propped.

1924

• What can you surmise from the poem about the speaker’s relationship to the dead girl? Why might it matter that the poem uses the first-person plu-ral (we), not the singular (I)? that it never explicitly mentions death? Why exactly are “we [. . .] vexed” and “[a]stonishe[d]” (lines 19, 4)?