Week 15: Aziza Barnes and Judi Richardson from Bullets into Bells

Week 15: College Reading and Writing

Aziza Barnes and Judi Richardson: Annotating, Summarizing, Analyzing, Imitating

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

to summarize: to put something in your own words

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

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

We are doing the third poem and response in the book today, starting on page 11.

Exercise: Read and annotate

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

2. Write any questions you have in the margins or in your notebook

3. Put tricky parts into your own words in notes in the margins or in your notebook

Exercise: Questions for Comprehension of the poem

1. What are some of the things you think about when you hear this speaker saying “the/body   does its job just one//function to release what can’t stay” (Barnes 11)?

2. Why are the brain and heart “a big town” (Barnes 11)?  Why are the kidneys “hot spots like Vegas” (Barnes 11)? 

3. What are some of the things you think about when you hear this speaker talking about “a clog    at the 3rd/counter”(Barnes 11)?

4. Why does it matter that the things “he was ordering” were “things that don’t feel like food””(Barnes 11-12)?

5. What does the title have to do with anything?

Exercise: Questions for Comprehension of the response

1.     What does Judi Richardson want you to know about her daughter?

2.     What does she want you to know about “this country”(Richardson 13)?

Exercise: Summarize the poem

Write a paragraph summarizing the poem in your own words, with quotations, in-text citation, and a Work Cited Page.  Don’t include your opinion, just summarize the poem.

Example too-short summary, incorporating quotation and in-text citation:

In Aziza Barnes’ poem “I Could Ask, But I Think They Use Tweezers,” Barnes pulls together a shooting at McDonald’s and its aftermath at an emergency room. Her comparisons between the “brain” and “heart” and a “big town” let us imagine the body as a place with a “clog”  like the McDonald’s counter (Barnes 11-12). She remarks that bullets are more dangerous now than they were in the “good-ole-days” and that if cloth gets stuck in the wound “well you have to get that out too” (Barnes 11-12).

Work Cited Page

Barnes, Aziza. “I Could Ask, But I Think They Use Tweezers” Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence. Ed. Brian Clements et al. Beacon Press, 2017.

Exercise: Analysis

Question for analysis: What’s the effect of the form of this poem, its lack of punctuation and paragraphs, its unusual spacing?  How do you read it differently than you read the response?  How do you read it differently than a newspaper article or other things that you’ve read? Quote the text in your work.

Exercise: Imitation

One of the things Barnes does in her poem is to consider the effects of a bullet, the big ways it impacts a body even though “the bullets are small” (Barnes 12). Write your own poem about the larger effects of something small—forgetting to eat, or losing your temper, or oversleeping, or whatever you think of.  Choose elements of the poem by Barnes to help shape your piece.  For example, you may choose to spread your poem out on the page, or skip punctuation for effect.

For homework, revise these in a blue book or on loose paper; do not turn in your notebook or rip out pages to turn in.

1.     Summary of Barnes

2.     Analysis

3.     Imitation

From PBS.org:

 “I Could Ask, But I Think They Use Tweezers” grew from Barnes’ long struggle to find the language to talk about the murder of a friend. He was shot and killed at 18, just before he planned to train to be a firefighter. (She asked us not to share his name out of respect for his family’s privacy.)

The poem, told in broken but interconnected fragments, parallels the physical effects of gun violence on the body — how bullets break apart a system. “It’s all very firmly connected, and if one part is struggling to survive, then the rest are compensating for that part,” she said.

These stories are not uncommon in a country that does not value black life, Barnes said. “I’d be hard-pressed to find someone close to me that hasn’t had to deal with something like this,” she said. “It’s more than a tragedy. It’s disgraceful.”

Gun violence, and its effect on communities of color, “can’t be solved with political correctness, or an idea of political correctness, or any more police or any more prisons,” she said. “We have to interrogate why black bodies are viewed as disposable bodies and the behavior that comes along with that.”