Things to Cover Tonight

Next week, Tuesday, May 30th, 615 lecture, 730 reading

• Weathered Pages Debrief


• Small Groups


• Responses to the book


• Reading itself

• Lynn Martin Preview

• We will need to be ready.


• What makes this special.


• What makes the book special.


• What do you think of the book?

• Pick a poem, now


• Loss/Grief in poetry


• From last week—Grimes, Howell, Me, Pier, Moore, A. Byerrum, T. Martin,


• Why so much?


• “Like all the best poets, Stroud makes the earth again consolable.”


• What do you reach for at 4 am?


• What did we reach for on 9/11?

Stroud’s blurb for Jenifer Lawrence:
what strikes me most in her work is how elegy turns from grief, to wonder, to praise. Theodore Roethke says, "In a dark time the eye begins to see."
In this book, Jenifer Browne Lawrence demonstrates how the creative act, the poem itself, not only helps us to see, but is a way of illuminating the world and transforming the self.

• “Lynn Martin brings the gifts of one who has lost so much.”


• “There, face to face with the most terrifying state of not knowing, they expand outward to the farthest rim of affirmation—where the blue bowl holds everything.”

Options for Elegy:

• First/Most recent experience with death.


• Object that used to belong to someone who is no longer alive.


• My examples


• Dresser


• Hats


• Keely Murphy

• Write a letter to someone who is dead. In it, make a confession.


• Who are your dead? Have them meet in a poem.


• Whenever I look at __________, I am reminded that I’ll be gone too, one of these days.