Wed, April 10 Spoon River Anthology

Due Thursday, vocabulary 10
Note that Thursday we will be in the library writing on Black Boy. You will not have access, nor time, to reference your book. Specifically, you will select one or two incidents in Wright's biography and connect it (them) to a similar historical or contemporary situation. It may be personal. Come prepared. Make sure you describe the situations vividy, both as you recall from the text and your parallel situation. The parallels need not be situational, but may focus on theme.
For those going on the music trip, please make sure to turn in your essay as well. Send along, give to a classmate, drop under the door of 176 or put it in my mailbox, which is located behind the main office desk.
In class: chosing poems from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters. We will read the introductory poem as a class. You will then choose one poem of a minimum of 10 lines to MEMORIZE and PERFORM on Monday. We will review the performance rubric.
In class on Thursday we are in the library. On Friday, we'll look at the music of the Mississippi Delta, such as Richard Wright would have been familiar.

The following is from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoon_River_Anthology


Spoon River Anthology (1915), by Edgar Lee Masters is a collection of short free-form poems that collectively describe the life of the fictional small town of Spoon River, named after the real Spoon River that ran near Masters' home town of Lewiston, Illinois.  The collection includes two hundred and twelve separate characters, all providing two-hundred forty-four accounts of their lives and losses.

Each following poem is an epitaph of a dead citizen, delivered by the dead themselves. They speak about the sorts of things one might expect: some recite their histories and turning points, others make observations of life from the outside, and petty ones complain of the treatment of their graves, while few tell how they really died. Speaking without reason to lie or fear the consequences, they construct a picture of life in their town that is shorn of façades. The interplay of various villagers — e.g. a bright and successful man crediting his parents for all he's accomplished, and an old woman weeping because he is secretly her illegitimate child — forms a gripping, if not pretty, whole.

"The Hill"
Where are Elmer, Herman, Bert, Tom and Charley,
The weak of will, the strong of arm, the clown, the boozer, the fighter?
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
One passed in a fever,
One was burned in a mine,
One was killed in a brawl,
One died in a jail,
One fell from a bridge toiling for children and wife—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Ella, Kate, Mag, Lizzie and Edith,
The tender heart, the simple soul, the loud, the proud, the happy one?—
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
One died in shameful child-birth,
One of a thwarted love,
One at the hands of a brute in a brothel,
One of a broken pride, in the search for heart’s desire;
One after life in far-away London and Paris
Was brought to her little space by Ella and Kate and Mag—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where are Uncle Isaac and Aunt Emily,
And old Towny Kincaid and Sevigne Houghton,
And Major Walker who had talked
With venerable men of the revolution?—
All, all are sleeping on the hill.
They brought them dead sons from the war,
And daughters whom life had crushed,
And their children fatherless, crying—
All, all are sleeping, sleeping, sleeping on the hill.
Where is Old Fiddler Jones
Who played with life all his ninety years,
Braving the sleet with bared breast,
Drinking, rioting, thinking neither of wife nor kin,
Nor gold, nor love, nor heaven?
Lo! he babbles of the fish-frys of long ago,
Of the horse-races of long ago at Clary’s Grove,
Of what Abe Lincoln said
One time at Springfield.