Week 12: Louise Glück

Week 12: College Reading and Writing

Louise Glück: Annotating, Summarizing, Imitating, Analyzing

to annotate: to make notes on something to help you understand it better

to summarize: to put something in your own words

to imitate: to create an original piece of writing based on something you have read

to analyze: to consider a question on the text, providing supporting examples from the text

Exercise: Read and annotate

1. Read the story out loud and underline any words you need to look up

2. Write any questions you have in the margins

3. Put tricky sentences into your own words in notes in the margins

Purple Bathing Suit by Louise Glück

I like watching you garden

with your back to me in your purple bathing suit:

your back is my favorite part of you,

the part furthest away from your mouth.

You might give some thought to that mouth.

Also to the way you weed, breaking

the grass off at ground level

when you should pull it up by the roots.

How many times do I have to tell you

how the grass spreads, your little

pile notwithstanding, in a dark mass which

by smoothing over the surface you have finally

fully obscured?  Watching you

stare into space in the tidy

rows of the vegetable garden, ostensibly

working hard while actually

doing the worst job possible, I think

you are a small irritating purple thing

and I would like to see you walk off the face of the earth

because you are all that’s wrong with my life

and I need you and I claim you.

Exercise: Questions for Comprehension

1. What do you think she means about “your mouth” and “that mouth?” Why?

2. What can you infer about the speaker’s relationship with “you”?

Exercise: Summarize the poem

Write a paragraph summarizing the story in your own words, with quotations from the poem, in-text citation, and a Work Cited Page

example summary, incorporating quotation and in-text citation:

In her poem “Purple Bathing Suit,” Louise Glück quickly calls into question her original assertion that she likes “watching you garden” (line 1). She reveals her frustration with this person—who may be a husband, loved one, or child--by pointing out that they are “ostensibly/working hard while actually/doing the worst job possible” (Glück lines 14-16).  The last stanza begins with a shock, that she thinks they are “a small irritating purple thing/and [she] would like to see [them] walk off the face of the earth” (lines 17-18).  The last line, however, gets back to the tenderness we see in the beginning: while she may be frustrated, she still “need[s]” and “claim[s]” this person (Glück line 20).

Work Cited Page

Glück, Louise. Meadowlands. New York: Ecco. 1996.

Exercise: Analysis

Question for analysis: What do you think is the relationship between the speaker and the person in a “purple bathing suit” ? (Glück line 2).  Support your positions with close attention to the text.   

Exercise: Imitation

Write your own poem about someone you are ambivalent about.  Like Glück, put your poem in quatrains—four-line stanzas—and be specific in your details about what they do and how you feel about it. It can be a real person you know, or yourself, or someone you make up!