Week 76: College Reading and Writing: Smith and Bosley
Week 76:
College Reading and Writing: Smith and Bosley
Patricia Smith and
Pamela Bosley: 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 poem and response in the book today, starting
on page 149.
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. How would you describe the undertaker’s tone?
How do you think he feels about the boy? About the boy’s mother?
2. Why do you
think the undertaker tries “not to remember the stories” while he’s working on
the boy?
3. What do you
make of the word “birthed” in the fourth line of the fifth stanza?
Exercise: Summarize the poem
Write a
paragraph summarizing the poem with quotations, in-text citation, and a Work
Cited Page.
example too-short summary, incorporating quotation
and in-text citation:
Patricia
Smith’s poem “Undertaker” is written in the persona of an undertaker who begins
the poem by describing what happens to a head when it’s pieced with a bullet: “[it]
explodes” (149). The undertaker says he can think of “no softer warning” (149)
to explain the effects of a bullet to the young mothers who hire him to “fix my
boy” (149). He describes how the mothers hand him a photo of their deceased
children who are a “smirking, mildy mustachioed player” (149) which implies a
certain attitude the speaker must have towards the men he “fixes.”
Work Cited Page (for
today’s poem)
Smith, Patricia. “Undertaker.” Bullets Into Bells: Poets and Citizens
Respond to Gun Violence. Ed. Brian Clements et al. Beacon Press, 2017.
Exercise: Questions for Comprehension of the response
- Where was Terrell’s life taken?
- How does Bosley describe Terrell?
- How would
you describe Bosley’s tone? How do you think she feels about her son?
Exercise: Summarize the response
Write a paragraph
summarizing the response with quotations, in-text citation, and a Work Cited
Page.
Exercise: Analysis
Question for
analysis: Describe the tone used in “Undertaker.” What is the speaker’s
attitude towards the mother and her dead son? Use specific language from the
poem to help you answer this question. Describe Bosley’s tone in her response.
How does she feel about her son? Use specific language from the response to
help you answer this question. After you’ve described the tones used in the poem
and response, in the final paragraph of your analysis, answer the following
question:
Based on the
language of this poem, who does the persona hold responsible for shooting
deaths among young black men? Who does Bosley hold responsible?
Exercise: Imitation
Think of a personal or public life event that you’ll never
forget. Choose someone other than yourself and write a poem from that person’s
perspective, where they are thinking back, remembering the details of the
experience.
Homework:
- Summary of Poem
- Summary of
Response
- Analysis of
Poem and Response
- Imitation of
Poem
About this class:
In this class, you are welcome to
submit homework for a grade. If it’s not
strong enough to earn an A, I’ll give you some comments to help you revise it,
and let you do it over again. You have as many chances as you want to complete
and perfect the work in this class, and you are welcome to do more than one
week’s worksheet for homework at a time; ask me for sheets you’ve missed. Students who complete 15 weeks of graded assignments
and a longer paper can qualify for college credit. When you get close to completing 15 weeks,
I’ll help you get started on your longer paper.
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