1. Year 12: English Literature

2. Year 12 English Literature
Differences between new A Level and old AS/A2 system
Demands of the course
Independent reading and writing
Difference in expectations between KS4 & 5
Equipment you will need to buy
A4 note pad (for notes and longer pieces)
Poetry anthology

3. Poems of the Decade, selected by William Steghart
ISBN (10):
ISBN (13):

5. “Born Yesterday” & “Nettles”
Work in pairs
Take one poem each; annotate for all/any aspects of language, structure/form that strike you as interesting/significant
Then, work together; make notes on the backs of the poems and/or further annotations: Consider the presentation of childhood in these poems.

6. 2.1) Poetry: “Genetics” by Sinéad Morrissey
In what ways do we take after our parents or other members of our families?
Is it easy for us to recognize our own resemblances to others?
How do we feel about these resemblances?

7. Vocabulary
Quarry: (n) excavation pit from which building stone etc. is obtained; (v) to extract/obtain (e.g.) from/as if from a quarry
Demure: (adj.) shy, modest, reserved

8. Listen/Read What is the poem about (overall focus/theme)?
How does the speaker/poet feel about her subject? What clues are there to this?
Look at the form and structure of the poem: what do you notice; what might the significance of this form be?

9. Villanelle A1 b A2 a b A1 a b A2 a b A1 A2 19 lines
5 x tercets (3-verse stanza)
1 x quatrain (4-verse stanza)
A1 and A2 are the refrains
A1 and A2 repeated alternately as third verse of subsequent stanzas
A1 and A2 final couplet of quatrain

10. A1 b A2
a b A1
a b A2
a b A1 A2
My father’s in my fingers, but my mother’s in my palms.  I lift them up and look at them with pleasure –  I know my parents made me by my hands.  They may have been repelled to separate lands,  to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,  but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.  With nothing left of their togetherness but friends  who quarry for their image by a river,  at least I know their marriage by my hands.  I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.  And when I turn it over,  my father’s by my fingers, my mother’s by my palms  demure before a priest reciting psalms.  My body is their marriage register.  I re-enact their wedding with my hands.  So take me with you, take up the skin’s demands  for mirroring in bodies of the future.  I’ll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.  We know our parents make us by our hands.

11. Are there any significant language patterns (repeated images, symbols, metaphors; use of semantic fields)?
What might there significance be?
“I know my parents made me by my hands”
“quarry for their image by a river”
“the skin’s demands | for mirroring in bodies of the future”

12. 2.2) “Inheritance,” by Eavan Boland
What does the title alone suggest to you?
Might it suggest any possible connections to “Genetics,” by Sinead Morrissey?

13. What do Morrissey and Boland have in common?
Morrissey (b. 1972)
Boland (b. 1944)
Born and raised in Ireland (Portadown, County Armagh; Belfast)
Lived in Japan and New Zealand before returning to Belfast
Born and raised in Dublin
Lives between America and Ireland

14. Vocabulary
Three Rock Mountain: Irish mountain range, part of Dublin Mountains
Bobbin: a cylinder or cone holding thread, yarn, or wire, used especially in weaving and machine sewing
Fretful: feeling/expressing distess/irritation
Oral: Spoken
Oral tradition/orature: Tradition of spoken poetry/literature/culture
Bard: oral poet
Lyric poetry: personal/introspective/emotional poetry (distinguished from dramatic/narrative poetry)

15. Read/Listen What are your initial impressions?
Are there any obvious similarities/differences between this poem and “Genetics”?
Are there any difficulties?

16. Do the following quotations affect your reading of the poem in any way?

17. Summary/Review (Poetry Foundation)
Domestic Violence (2007) weaves different and competing kinds of history—the national, the personal, the domestic—together in poems that also meditate on the legacy of Irish poetry itself.

18. In Boland’s own words…
It’s very hard, even for a contemporary lyric poetry, to escape history. […] Irish poetry has a bardic history. The Irish bards lay down in darkness to compose. They wrote poems to their patrons that ranged from christening odes to the darkest invective. They were poets who were shaped by an oral culture […] [L]ong after their language was destroyed, they were remembered and quoted in Ireland. The drama of all that still backlights Irish poetry—the painful memory of a poetry whose archive was its audience. There is a sort of communal aspect to the identity of the Irish poet even now that has an effect on the contemporary Irish lyric. *** For a long time, I’ve had a sort of dialogue going on in my mind—maybe even a quarrel—between those elements of poetic experiment and bardic inheritance.

19. My poetry begins for me where certainty ends.

20. [T]hat’s what any poet writing about a particular place wants to do: to transform it, not just catalogue it. When I was in a suburb in Dublin, at the foothills of the Dublin mountains, surrounded every day by the same rowan trees and distances, I wanted to convey not just a place, but the sort of bodily knowledge I got from place.

21. I just wanted to find a way of conveying how things change from the ordinary to the familiar, from the familiar to the known, from the known to the visionary.

22. Formal/structural features:
Use of punctuation
Verse/stanza structure
(Differences to “Genetics”?)
What kinds of relationships is the speaker negotiating in this poem? In what ways does this follow/differ from “Genetics”?
Set out response in a grid…

23. Similarities
Differences
Quotations/refernece
So what?
Form/structure
“Genetics”= villanelle
“Inheritance” =
Setting/Irish landscape/scenery
“Genetics”: “quarry their image by a river”
“Inheritance”: “No good offering the view… might not even be theirs.”

24. HW
Compare the significance of the past in “Inheritance” and one other poem you have studied.
Significance means both “importance” and “meaning” (what does the past signify?)
Approx words
Due this time next week
Summarize each poem briefly
(mention what each is about, and key themes/feelings/issues)
Interpret what the past might mean/how it might be used in the poem
(e.g. personal history/national history; is reflection on past used as a way of pondering the present or projecting into the future?)
Discuss use of form/structure first, but link this to the question
(how do form/structure or lack of form/structure reflect concerns with the past?)
Analyze and compare 4-6 instances of interesting/significant language use
(use terminology where possible – e.g. metaphor/simile etc.)
Use historical/cultural context and/or biographical info. to support your comments if/where possible
(e.g. history of Ireland in “Inheritance”)

25. 3.1-3.2) “History,” by John Burnside
What is history?
Or: what is the difference between the past and history?
What would you expect a poem entitled “History” to be about, and how might it connect with the others we have studied?
Is history always about the past? (Think of common ways in which the word “history” is used.)

28. Read from the beginning of the poem up to “first nakedness” on p. 26.
In what sense is the poet engaging with history?
What is the “news” he mentions in the second stanza?
What is the poet negotiating in the fourth and fifth stanzas? In what sense is this history?

29. After “9/11” there was a call for the writers to make sense of the event.
What do we mean by “event” in political/philosophical terms?
What is the inherent difficulty of putting “the event” into words?

30. Does this quote affect your reading?
“Our response to the world is essentially one of wonder, of confronting the mysterious with a sense, not of being small, or insignificant, but of being part of a rich and complex narrative.” John Burnside

31. Compare the poem so far with the others.
What similarities and differences can we find?

32. Coastal town in north-east Scotland
Leuchars
St. Andrews
Coastal town in north-east Scotland
Know for railway which goes to St. Andrews
RAF base
Famous for its university (third oldest university in English-speaking world, after Oxford and Cambridge; oldest university in Scotland)
Famous for its gold course
Links: a particular type of golf-course (dependent on the type of terrain and soil); the word derives an old Scots word meaning “rising ground, ridge.”

33. HW
What is the significance of history in John Burnside’s poem of the same name?
For next Tuesday

34. 3.3) Sue Boyle, “A Leisure Centre is Also a Temple of Learning”
Glossaries
Folders

35. What is a temple?
A consecrated (made holy) place of worship; sacred place where religious observances/rituals are carried out
Also, etymologically, a place “cut off”
Heterotopia: hetero- (other/different); -topia (place/space); coined by Michel Foucault
“other space”: a place that is both everyday and different, and articulates the ordinary and the extraordinary; potentially anywhere where one experiences something different (or authentic?), something on the borders of real and unreal (like seeing oneself in the mirror)

36. The leisure a heterotopic space?
What is seen/understood/disclosed/learned there?

37. The honey coloured girl in the women’s changing room is absorbed in making her body more beautiful: she has flexed and toned every muscle with a morning swim and showered away the pool chemicals using an aromatic scrub and a gentle exfoliant.
Lithe as a young leopard, she has perfect bone structure; her breasts mound as though sculptured from sand by a warm wind; her secret cleft is shaved as neatly as a charlatan’s moustache.
In dreamy abstractedness she applies cream, then spray perfumes every part that might be loved. Her long hands move in rhythm like a weaver’s at a loom – tipped throat, underchin, the little kisspoints below her ears the nuzzle between her breasts, her willow thighs.
Her head tilted like a listening bird she brushes her hair so whistle clean it is like a waterfall.
A bee could sip her. She is summer cream slipped over raspberries She is so much younger than the rest of us.
She should look around.
We twelve are the chorus:
we know what happens next.

38. 4.1) Essay Feedback General Feedback: Overall, good first responses
General grasp of poems sound
Most responses gave roughly equal treatment to both texts
Some good writing
Several attempts to integrate new vocabulary into answers
Common Targets:
Structure of responses: makes sense to tackle form/structure first (start broad, then “zoom-in” on language)?
Some responses demonstrated good overall understanding but tended to re-tell rather than analyze (very little language analysis)
More attention to be given to language at phrase/sentence level and/or word/phrase level
A little more attention to be given to alternative interpretations

39. Marking Codes, Feedback, and Progress Grids
Use sheet with codes/descriptors to fill out targets: write in green pen
Fill out progress grids: point of these is to see at a glance any patterns, and to track progress
For now: Band 5 = A; Band 4 = B; etc. Will adjust this when we have more information

40. Group Analysis of poems
On Friday/Tuesday, one sheet per group will be taken in and assessed
Posters to be displayed with names on them (so make them count; no rubbish!!)
Today:
Annotate/diagram for structure and language
On language: look for one pattern (e.g. symbol of x stands for…) and one quotation in isolation