Week 2: Ellen Bass

Week 2: College Reading and Writing: Suffolk County House of Corrections at South Bay

Ellen Bass's poem "Indigo": Annotation, Summary, Analysis, Imitation

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 answer a question about a text, providing support from the text

Exercise: Read, annotate, and summarize "Indigo" by Ellen Bass

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

2. Write any questions you have in the margins

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

Discussion:  What do you guys think about this poem? 

Demonstration: In-text Quotation and Citation

in-text quotations: another author's words, in quotation marks, in the middle of your own                                                 

            writing

citation: giving the author credit by telling your readers where to find the original

Sample summary with in-text quotation and citation:

The poem "Indigo" by Ellen Bass presents a narrative about regret from a speaker who recognizes the fact that "I'm alive" is "a wonder," but still wishes a tattooed stranger could "have been my child’s father" (Bass lines 36, 35, 12).

Works Cited:

Bass, Ellen. "Indigo."  The New Yorker. Oct. 16. 2017

Summary: Now summarize the poem in your own words, with quotations from the text

Analysis: What do you think Bass means when she says "she’s the only one/ who didn’t hesitate or refuse/or waver or flinch"?  How many people do you think the speaker has asked to kill her? What's up with that?  Support your answer with quotations from the text.

Indigo  by Ellen Bass

line 1) As I’m walking on West Cliff Drive, a man runs

toward me pushing one of those jogging strollers

with shock absorbers so the baby can keep sleeping,

which this baby is. I can just get a glimpse

of its almost translucent eyelids. The father is young,

a jungle of indigo and carnelian tattooed

from knuckle to jaw, leafy vines and blossoms,

saints and symbols. Thick wooden plugs pierce

his lobes and his sunglasses testify

line 10) to the radiance haloed around him. I’m so jealous.

As I often am. It’s a kind of obsession.

I want him to have been my child’s father.

I want to have married a man who wanted

to be in a body, who wanted to live in it so much

that he marked it up like a book, underlining,

highlighting, writing in the margins, I was here.

Not like my dead ex-husband, who was always

fighting against the flesh, who sat for hours

on his zafu chanting om and then went out

line 20) and broke his hand punching the car.

I imagine when this galloping man gets home

he’s going to want to have sex with his wife,

who slept in late, and then he’ll eat

barbecued ribs and let the baby teethe on a bone

while he drinks a cold dark beer. I can’t stop

wishing my daughter had had a father like that.

I can’t stop wishing I’d had that life. Oh, I know

it’s a miracle to have a life. Any life at all.

It took eight years for my parents to conceive me.

line 30) First there was the war and then just waiting.

And my mother’s bones so narrow, she had to be slit

and I airlifted. That anyone is born,

each precarious success from sperm and egg

to zygote, embryo, infant, is a wonder.

And here I am, alive.

Almost seventy years and nothing has killed me.

Not the car I totalled running a stop sign

or the spirochete that screwed into my blood.

line 40) Not the tree that fell in the forest exactly

where I was standing—my best friend shoving me

backward so I fell on my ass as it crashed.

I’m alive.

And I gave birth to a child.

So she didn’t get a father who’d sling her

onto his shoulder. And so much else she didn’t get.

I’ve cried most of my life over that.

And now there’s everything that we can’t talk about.

We love—but cannot take

line 50)  too much of each other.

Yet she is the one who, when I asked her to kill me

if I no longer had my mind—

we were on our way into Ross,

shopping for dresses. That’s something

she likes and they all look adorable on her—

she’s the only one

who didn’t hesitate or refuse

or waver or flinch.

As we strode across the parking lot

line 60) she said, O.K., but when’s the cutoff?

That’s what I need to know.

HOMEWORK: Get started on these in class if you finish the work here!

Analysis: What do you want the end of your life to look like?  What have you seen and read and lived that makes you feel that way?  Would you ask someone to kill you?  Why or why not?  How does your answer compare to what we read in the poem? Use in-text quotations and citation in your answer!            kill you?  Why or what not?

Imitation: Write your own poem about regret.  Include things you see on a walk, a conversation with a loved one, and a shopping trip while you make it your own!