okay hello everyone this is colin cox and this is the week one lecture for english composition 2 or english 10 20. what i want to do in this week one audio lecture is just introduce the course i want to do it quickly and economically but i certainly want to talk about this course what you can expect what the expectations are and i also want to just introduce some terms terms we will use not only in this first unit which is the poetry unit but really terms we'll use throughout the entire semester as we explore broadly speaking three different ways of writing the first is poetry the second is fiction specifically short fiction so short stories and finally drama or plays so i'll make reference to bits and pieces from the syllabus but if you listen to my navigating d2l video or watched that is to say my navigating d2l video you know in that video i strongly encourage you to read the syllabus and email me if you have any questions so i won't address specific parts of the syllabus here at least i won't address assignments different grading criteria i'll leave all of that to you to read reflect and then again please email me or you can use the discussion board there's a particular thread where you can submit questions that the entire class can see so if you need to do that then please do so but if you look on the syllabus on the first page you'll see under the textbook learning outcomes and course objectives and i wanted to spend a minute focusing on those in particular identifying three words or phrases that i repeat in both the learning outcomes and course objectives because i think focusing on and discussing those three words will give you a sense of what this course is ultimately about the first word is analyze the second is cultivate and the third is critical so let's spend a bit of time talking about each of those three words so when i use a word like analyze i suppose what i'm asking you to think about is the difference between summary and analysis and as i'm talking you can always re-listen to this but i would encourage you to have something out so you can take notes because i think really understanding the difference between summary and analysis is extremely important when i talk about or when someone in my position talks about summary what they mean is well can you just tell me basically what it was that you just saw or heard or read let's take for example a movie so if i ask you to summarize a movie you're not really doing the work of unpacking what the movie is about because that's part of analysis you're just giving me the sort of thing you might see on a wikipedia entry so if you watch an action movie with two cops and they're friends but you know their their friendship is a bit tense at times and they're often in strange comedically odd situations you might say something like these two cops who are basically friends but they they find themselves in silly goofy comedic situations they need to solve a crime and there's a bit of action from time to time you might mention character names but they ultimately catch the villain or catch the perpetrator they fight by fight and that person goes to prison right so that's basically summary again you're not doing the work of really interrogating the text you're just explaining the text itself and that's a word i'll use a lot throughout this course text when i talk about a text i'm talking about everything from a movie or an episode of a tv show a single poem a short story a novel a play an essay etc now when you analyze something i would argue you're not just summarizing it i think analysis and summary work together but i think analysis attempts to answer bigger questions or it attempts to address bigger questions if summary is what happens analysis attempts to explain why it happens this way or to what effect and i think it's important to remember that so much of human communication whether it's just a casual conversation you have with a friend or a family member or a movie you watch a tv show a book you read all of that communication it's coded and i'll talk about this more later when i talk about language in poetry but if you understand the simple premise that so much human communication again whether it's just you interacting with a person or you experiencing a story if you accept this simple premise that so many human interactions are coded then it's putting you in this position where you're ultimately thinking well what's the meaning or the purpose behind this coded language what does this ultimately mean because it might present itself one way but i am meant to infer or it's attempting to communicate so many different or so many other things in addition to this surface level form of communication so and again i'll talk about this more when i talk about language symbols and imagery in just a few minutes but if you accept the premise and i think you should that so many human interactions are coded then you are always or almost always in a position to think about well what do those codes mean what do those images mean what am i meant to infer from them what can i take from them so again one of the things that we'll do often if not every week in this course is analyze text which is to say the analysis of a text or texts is extremely important to what we'll do in this class now the second word is cultivate and this word has at least for the purposes of this course a multi-faceted or multi-dimensional meaning to it because part of what i what i ultimately want you to do is to cultivate an appreciation for the things i ask you to read a lot of my students who take comp 2 on the first day when i would do traditional non-pandemic classes they would say to me well you know i've never really thought of myself as someone who likes poetry or likes reading i just don't get it and i completely understand and i sympathize with that feeling because i came to this quite late in my life i really didn't start doing this work until my early 20s so part of what i hope you are able to do throughout this course is cultivate an appreciation for the things i ask you to read that doesn't mean i expect because i'm not naive that you'll just love everything i ask you to read and i would certainly encourage you to tell me if you don't like it because that's okay too but if you walk away from this course with a greater appreciation of something if it makes you feel something if it makes you feel good if if you've had a feeling for quite some time about anything whether it's your life or love a relationship friendships i could just keep going on and on and you have this feeling but you've never been able to really put words to that feeling and then you read a poem or you read a story or you read part of a play and you have this sense that this author whomever they are they've put words to a feeling you have i would argue you are cultivating a greater appreciation of the literature that i am asking you to read so that's that's part of what it means to cultivate but i think in addition to that and this this complements everything that i said a moment ago about analysis if you are in a better position if you cultivate this sense to uh know how to decode language decode the words phrases and interactions that encompass a text like a poem or a play or a story or even the sorts of codes in languages that that encompass conversations you have with people i would argue cultivating that skill makes you a more dynamic thinker it makes you less susceptible to perhaps manipulation or lies things that are just simply not true if if you are able to cultivate that kind of skepticism that's fortified with a series of skills that help you understand how language works how certain writers or speakers might deploy images and symbols i think cultivating that skill makes you a more dynamic thinker and it's something that you can certainly apply outside of this course because i know something that a lot of my students ask especially those who aren't interested in perhaps studying literature beyond this course one of the things they always ask is well how the hell is any of this really useful to me how is this applicable and i would argue which i'm arguing now that cultivating those skills cultivating that ability to know how to understand the way certain words and images are deployed but perhaps more than anything just cultivating a greater sense of awareness that so many human interactions again whether it's just a conversation you have with a friend or a literary text you read developing that awareness cultivating that awareness makes you a more dynamic and more flexible thinker and finally this word critical and again i think all of this all of these words in many ways are synonyms for one another even if there are certain subtle differences when i use a word like critical what i ultimately mean is treating something whether it's a literary text or again just a social interaction treating it as perhaps something bigger and more significant than you might otherwise because something that i hear a lot it's it's something that i hear my students say it's something i hear myself say from time to time which is well i just want to enjoy that instead of imagining that anything and everything is potential or or it it has the potential for deeper critical engagement and that's that's certainly part of cultivating as i mentioned before this greater awareness of how interactions are coded and it's certainly connected to this notion of analysis and seeing the differences between summary and analysis i think having a critical disposition toward as many things as possible and knowing how if if you need to from time to time knowing how to slip into that critical disposition is something that's extremely useful it's something that you will find is useful in this course it's something that i would argue you will find is useful in the other courses you need to take but again i think it's something that has this broader applicability outside of the classroom because if you are able to engage critically if you are able to see that some interactions deserve critical engagement that some interactions many interactions perhaps all interactions require you to not be passive but to be active to be actively engaged that's ultimately what it means to be critical so again those three terms there are three terms that i repeat often in the course outcomes and the learning objectives and i hope this brief explanation has given you a sense of how those three terms will certainly work how you will use them in this course but also how they reach and extend beyond this course so transitioning now and this is something you'll read more about in the textbook next week but i want to put some of these analytical critical practices into practice for you here in this audio lecture and this is something that i'll do throughout the semester this is in many ways the point of these audio lectures is to not just ask you to read stuff and then just leave you on your own to sort it out these audio lectures will function as guides you can think of these as again replicating the kind of work we would do in a traditional classroom if this were not an online course and so i want to talk about three poems and there are different aspects or components of poetry that i want to think about and talk about when analyzing and discussing these three poems and i'll describe and define those now again this is reading that i'm asking you to do for next week so there's information in the textbook but again i would encourage you just to jot down a note or two you might find it useful and will certainly use these different terms and ideas throughout the semester so first let's start with the speaker anytime you analyze a text whether it's poetry or fiction you should certainly think about who's speaking to you now in poetry it's a lot clearer because often poems are shorter but there's also this sense especially if you study the history of poetry that poetry perhaps unlike short fiction or unlike the novel which feels more individual and isolated poetry it's it's almost meant to feel more communal you could almost imagine and this is something that happened in the english renaissance period the elizabethan period the late 16th century and early 17th century and of course well before that and well beyond it but people would gather in elizabeth's court and they would just speak poetry to an audience so thinking about a speaker is extremely important because and this is something i'll talk about multiple times throughout the semester but you should certainly believe or you should you should at least assume there's a difference between the person who wrote the poem the author or the poet and the speaker embedded in the poem itself because they're not always the same person because think about it if if i could only write poetry that is a reflection of my own experiences that would be extremely limited i could only write poetry from the perspective i'll tell you from the perspective of a white cisgendered man i could not write perhaps or or attempt to dramatize the experiences of women people of color gay or trans individuals so again the point is think of the speaker and the poet or the author as to potentially different things people entities that's not always true but again it's it's good to have that kind of critical skepticism but another reason why thinking about the speaker is so important is because again if we want to assume or adopt a kind of skepticism the more we know or the more we understand about a speaker the better we can assess whether or not what the speaker tells us is ultimately true again thinking through or attempting to unpack the way language is coded because and this is again something i'll return to throughout the semester you need to be extremely skeptical of speakers or when we get to fiction and short fiction narrators because not all speakers in poetry much like not all narrators in fiction are reliable there is a difference between an unreliable speaker or narrator and a reliable speaker and narrator and that's something you should maybe write down just those two words unreliable reliable again that's not to assume because i think it would be very difficult to construct any form of meaning or any forms of meaning if you assume that all speakers and all narrators are lying to you or they are not trustworthy or they are unreliable but it's it's perhaps what i'm attempting to say is think about it on a continuum and not a binary so it's not someone's reliable or unreliable it's well where where would i plot them within that continuum are they more reliable or less reliable and more importantly what leads me to conclude whatever it is i conclude about a speaker or a narrator why do i think this narrator is more reliable than this other narrator or why do i think this speaker is more reliable than this other speaker again those are interesting and thoughtful ways to critically engage with the text to not be passive to not just consume something but to actively work to understand it so i'll talk a lot about speakers this semester but i also want to think about situations and settings because you could imagine situations and settings certainly help to create at times certain boundaries and certain expectations for us as readers when thinking about settings in particular there's a distinct difference between a temporal setting and a spatial setting so for example if you have the sense that a poem for example that i want you to read was written and meant to be set in the 1950s well that provides a set of expectations that would be totally different than a poem that's set in 1778 or 1814 or 1352 right so thinking about temporal setting is extremely important but spatial setting is equally important we'll talk about how for example certain authors and poets use different spaces to mean certain things or to signify certain things for example some of the poetry that i'll ask you to read later in this unit draws these stark distinctions between the chaos and the oppressiveness of the city and the expansive serenity of the country so thinking about setting the differences between country and city and certain ideas and notions that are attached to those spatial locations that's extremely important as well so speaker setting and situation theme and tone as well so defining tone i think is a bit easier than theme tone is quite simply how a text feels and texts feel different ways based on a variety of different things or components with poetry in particular i would encourage you just to think about language the words that are used the types of words that are used the way different poets structure language does it have a form or not is it free verse or not but also like what's it about because that helps you better understand the tone of a text as well if a poem is about someone dying prematurely you could use words like sad morose melancholy to potentially describe the tone assuming the language reflects that situation or if it's a poem that's a celebration of a marriage or a relationship again you might use words like happy excited but again you would want to confirm that the language perhaps matches the expectations of the setting or or the again the language as it relates to tone matches settings so hopefully this is also giving you a sense of how even though these different terms that you can use to engage with the text even though they're separate they are intimately and deeply intertwined now a word like theme is quite interesting because a theme is quite simply what is a text about and it's quite often easy to reduce your understanding of themes to just single words or short phrases like marriage love war etc those are all themes for a text you might even say again those are what the text whether it's a poem or a short story that's what they're ultimately about they're trying to understand those dynamics or those ideas and finally and again i've these these final terms i've talked about them a bit but i wanted to address them specifically imagery symbols and language because they all work together so when thinking about imagery and symbols again what you're really thinking about is just how so often when human beings communicate if not always because that's how language works what we're ultimately deploying are these codes we're ultimately deploying something that represents something else and so i'll just give you a simple practical example think about a symbol or a bit of imagery like the american flag and i would encourage you just pause for a second what sorts of ideas what sorts of feelings or concepts do you associate with the american flag i think a lot of people especially if they are american and i think this is important because situation matters if you are an american in the 21st century you might associate words like freedom liberty opportunity with this symbol this flag so so in many ways the combination of the shapes and colors of the american flag they may not necessarily mean any of those words like how many people would associate stars with freedom i don't think any of us necessarily would but because of how they are collected in and on the american flag and because and this is perhaps more important we as a group of human beings we as a group of people have decided that's what those colors and symbols together mean that's how meaning is then formed but again i think it's extremely important to think about situation and setting when trying to understand how symbols and imagery work because if you showed the american flag to someone who lives in the middle east maybe someone whose family died because of a war that we fought they may look at the american flag and think something completely different they might see death oppression not the the creating of the conditions for freedom but perhaps the rather aggressive stripping of one's freedom so again i say all of that only as a as a way of bringing to your attention that not all symbols and not all imagery mean the same thing to everyone therefore if you want to ultimately understand how a poet or a speaker in a poem for example deploys a particular symbol or image you also need to go back and think about that speaker think about that poet as well so again getting this sense of again how these different terms like speaker situation setting theme tone imagery symbol language how deeply interconnected it all is while they do exist independent of one another they're also deeply reliant on one another they work with one another and there are other concepts that i'll talk about throughout the semester like form i don't want to address that here because it's a completely different conversation that would take a little longer than i want and the three poems that i asked you to read for this week while a few of them maybe two of them have a discernible rhyming pattern to them i don't think form is necessarily that important you might disagree with me but i want to save that conversation for a later day so with that said if you haven't gone to your textbook yet or if you want to follow along what i what i want to do now is talk about a couple of the poems that i asked you to read and the first one begins on page 735 it's the poem richard quarry by edwin arlington robinson so follow along with me while i read it i'll just read it one time but i would strongly encourage you especially in the poetry unit read the poems i asked you to read multiple times the more reading you do the more you re-read the work i ask you to do the better you'll understand it the more you'll start to see because just reading it once may not be enough so again follow along whenever richard went downtown we people on the pavement looked at him he was a gentleman from soul to crown clean favored and imperially slim and he was always quietly arranged and he was always human when he talked but still he fluttered pulses when he said good morning and he glittered when he walked and he was rich yes richer than a king and admirably schooled in every grace in fine we thought that he was everything to make us wish that we were in his place so on we worked and waited for the light and went without the meat and cursed the bread and richard corey one calm summer night went home and put a bullet through his head okay so using some of the terminology that i just spoke about let's piece through or analyze this poem and i'll say this i don't want you to think that doing the work of analysis for example in an essay means that you need to paragraph by paragraph talk about the things excuse me talk about things the way i do it here there are many examples in your book and i'll provide videos on d2l of what an essay about a literary text can look like should look like etc but at least when you're initially attempting to understand a text i think following these different steps might be helpful and useful but definitely apply these strategies in a way that is best for you but if we start with the speaker even though the poem is called richard corey it becomes quite obvious by maybe line two that even though it's a poem about richard corey richard isn't the speaker and perhaps ironically enough he isn't even given an opportunity to speak really so what we have here is a situation where the speaker or the speakers of this poem are are disconnected from the subject matter because richard corey is very much the subject matter of this text look for example to line two we people on the pavement looked at him so using the plural we and not the singular eye almost gives us this sense that it is a poem written and produced by a collection of individuals not just by a single individual it is a single unified voice but it's a single unified voice that seems to collect and house these multiple voices but even the sense of hierarchy that we learn about throughout the poem i think you could argue robinson effectively establishes it here in the first two lines again whenever richard corey went downtown we people on the pavement looked on him excuse me looked at him so a couple of things first this idea that richard goes downtown there is this sense that he is somehow elevated and as he's moving down that's when he starts to interact with for a lack of a better phrase the riff raft of the town so perhaps what we're getting here is a sense of this socio-economic hierarchy in this place wherever it is we're not given a sense we're not again we're not given a town name or a city or anything like that but there does seem to be this obvious hierarchy perhaps it is a hierarchy predicated on money and finance again perhaps it's an economic hierarchy or perhaps because again most social hierarchies are the product of economic hierarchies perhaps it's that as well but i guess the important thing is what we learn about our speaker here or what we learn about the speaker here is unlike richard who seems to live in or or occupy this elevated position the speaker or speakers are not as elevated their their position is perhaps a bit lower if we wanted to use certain socioeconomic markers to understand where everyone fits or where you might plot everyone on a kind of socio-economic hierarchy now again situation and setting is not nearly as clear to us as it might be in other poems or other texts now the textbook does clarify that this poem was published originally in 1897 but i would almost encourage you for a moment to disregard that bit of information disregard that fact because i think part of what's interesting about what robinson does here is how by not locating it in a particular place and by not overtly locating the text at a particular time perhaps what robinson wants to do is suggest that what he dramatizes in this poem is something far more universal sure it's something that might exist at a particular moment in time but again by not clarifying those particulars perhaps what he's ultimately suggesting is this is a kind of dynamic that is too often repeated in society where perhaps these social hierarchies exist and because of those social hierarchies there becomes what perhaps some scholars or philosophers would describe as class antagonism but perhaps when you look at the dramatic into this poem perhaps again this universal idea that robinson tries to articulate is as well no matter how much you might think you know someone or no matter how much you think you might know a person there's always distance or there's always a gap in that knowledge because i think that's that's part of what's so surprising to us about the final line of the poem is this sense that it didn't really feel like i would argue at least that we were building to this that final line feels like something of a twist maybe even something that surprises the speaker or the speakers of this poem so again identifying setting and situation but also perhaps attempting to understand why in some texts there might be a lack of information about a setting or a situation can reveal perhaps some important ideas or dynamics at play in the text and if we wanted to think about theme and tone i'll i'll leave tone aside for just a moment because i've talked about some of the themes already i think this is a poem in some ways about those socioeconomic hierarchies that exist when human beings organize themselves the the both the the reference but also antagonism that the masses might feel toward those at the top those that occupy those elevated positions in certain socioeconomic hierarchies but also just the sense that despite what we might perceive to be richard's success and richard's material wealth and material prosperity that doesn't seem to to secure him or that doesn't offer security at all it seems because how how then how do we justify or how do we explain perhaps is a better word why he committed suicide or why he commits suicide at the end of the poem so again if we wanted to think about themes i've just mentioned a couple of those but we could even reduce it to a cliche that people often talk about that money material wealth and prosperity while it can buy a lot of things perhaps it can't buy the the sort of satisfaction that we think it might or it should because again what what would potentially explain richard's suicide at the end at least from the perspective of the speaker and i think that's important as well because the speaker in this poem spends three stanzas focusing it seems on this one consistent aspect of who richard is which which that is of course his wealth and prosperity as projected by his physical appearance and his behavior so i think what we're also seeing here are the limits or or the lack of reliability that almost every speaker inherently has again i don't think that means that we should conclude that this speaker lied to us sometimes speakers don't tell us things because they don't know things so again i think that idea it's certainly at play in this poem too but if we wanted to think about tone and here i'll talk a bit about language again i think what we see is is something the the way language and the tone of this poem excuse me the way robinson deploys language in this poem it's not always unified and the tone it's not always reverence or celebration at times there's perhaps some critical condemnation of richard happening i think it's really easy to identify those moments when the tone of the poem and the language robinson uses is intended to celebrate richard again perhaps demonstrate reverence that these speakers have for him but if you look at the final stanza things start to turn notice the first two lines of the final stanza or or that final block of four lines so on we worked and waited for the light and went without the meat and cursed the bread now here we need to do a bit of work to decode some of the coded language here if we start with that first line that i read so on we worked and waited for the light there is this sense there is this longing it seems in this line and perhaps some of this this longing then ultimately and understandably leads to a kind of frustration and antagonism and if you are the speakers of this poem and i identified them earlier as perhaps sitting or positioned a bit lower socioeconomically you can understand why they might direct some of that frustration and antagonism towards richard but i think we get an even better sense of this in the next line line 14 and we went excuse me and went without the meat and cursed the bread so here what we need to do is think about how words like meat and bread function symbolically because some of you might read this and think but wait i don't understand bread's amazing it's just carbohydrates and you can put butter on it why would someone curse bread well for the longest time because now meat is so ubiquitous which is to say it's everywhere and at least in this country in most places it's reasonably priced all of that is to say it's a lot easier to procure meat now then it actually has been throughout the course of human history meat for the longest time would have or or or those who had access to meat would have not been just everyone the masses wouldn't have had access to meat it would have only been those positioned much higher socioeconomically and everyone else would just really have bread so here again we're seeing how robinson uses words and images like meat and bread to not just reflect things human beings consume to survive but but how they also reflect certain social and economic dynamics and i think because they quote went without the bread excuse me went without the meat and cursed the bread that might again do the subtle work of suggesting that even though there is a lot of reverence for richard in this poem there's also a fair amount of antagonism as well because of the position or the space that he occupies socioeconomically but here at the end and when you do that kind of work i think the poem starts to reveal some subtleties that may not have been apparent upon a first reading when you really engage with it and not just passively consume it but i think one of the big questions we're left to conclude is well what does this poem ultimately mean what is it ultimately about and you'll hear me say this throughout the semester i think great pieces of literature often ask more questions than they answer and perhaps the best way of understanding what this poem ultimately means is to think of well what questions does it try to interrogate and while i've i've spoken about some of them i'll do my best to just summarize even though i haven't used a word like celebrity when talking about richard corey i think a word like celebrity is extremely appropriate because i think what we're seeing here is something that actually happens a lot today in contemporary society what are the dynamics of and what are the dimensions of celebrity worship because i think it's never just one thing certainly there's a fair amount of reverence perhaps even some jealousy but but connected to that and i think jealousy is an interesting word here there's also a fair amount of antagonism as well but when thinking about this as as an extension of the dynamics of celebrity worship i think a poem like richard corey also reveals or attempts to bear witness to just the the amount of space or the gaps between those in or or those individuals who occupy those celebrity positions that that elevated status and the rest of us how yeah we can infer certain things but there's there's still so much that we don't know so many unanswered questions and i think you could also argue this is both connected and separate from what i just said this is a poem that interestingly and i think beautifully and effectively dramatizes class dynamics and class distinctions and the sorts of feelings that emerge when those sorts of class dynamics exist in a society especially those kinds of stark class dynamics because i think the impression whether it's true or not is difficult to say with any certainty i think the impression is richard occupies a position very much near the top and those telling this story the speakers are much closer to the bottom so there is this sizeable gap between them and perhaps there's something that you think or something that you have thought about that i didn't mention and you'll certainly have opportunities throughout the semester if you want to take them to write about that think about it talk about it etc so with that said let us transition to divorce by billy collins this poem as you can see is quite short it's on page 742 so as i read it follow along with me once two spoons in bed now 10 forks across a granite table and the knives they have hired so i haven't spoken a lot about form necessarily today but i think here form or just the way the poem appears the way words and lines are structured i would argue thinking about that is potentially important and i think one of the questions worth asking is why is the poem so short and i think there's a couple of ways you can answer or enter into that question i think one i don't know if this is cynical or not but maybe you might conclude that well it's a short poem because this is what a lot of marriages look like before divorce they're just short they don't last that long you know people getting married all the time yada um i had one student who made an interesting observation that perhaps even though there is a sense of antagonism at the end of the poem with the lawyers who are meant to represent the knives there's something almost fantastical about this poem this is something of a fantasy projection perhaps anyone who wants a divorce or needs divorce they they hope it only lasts as long as it took me to read this poem so so maybe there's a kind of fantastical wish fulfillment happening here you know everyone wants if they must get divorced for their divorce to last only four lines and then i had another student who said you know i think it's because once a relationship has deteriorated to the point that divorce is inevitable the whole marriage just feels like this it just feels like nothing and that's not to say that it's meaningless but nothing in the sense that summarizing the marriage or or summarizing the relationship it it really just hits these predictable marks that that perhaps this is too often what happens all of the subtlety all of the nuance all of the specificity of the marriage or the relationship just gets reduced to these over simplified cliches so i'll leave it to you to decide what you ultimately think of the form of this poem but i think this decision that billy collins made to write a poem about divorce as visibly and noticeably short as it is he clearly did this with some intention or some intentionality but if we use the the terms that i introduced earlier and thought about this poem in a more deliberate way again using these terms and these ideas as a way of analyzing the text starting with speaker i don't necessarily know if there's a lot we can say because there isn't and again this is this is connected to the form right because it is such a short poem it's it's difficult to know who this is now i think we can arrive at certain definitive conclusions for example i don't think this is one of the two individuals involved in the divorce nor is there any real suggestion that one of the lawyers are narrating this experience because whomever speaking they are talking about this it seems with a kind of distance there seems to be a kind of critical distance here but aside from that i don't know if there's anything more we can say but i think this does afford us an opportunity to pause and ask why why does collins not provide more information about the speaker why why does collins leave all of those potential answers left unanswered again is part of the point because because this speaker doesn't seem invested like in richer quarry is is there the sense that they are more objective that we as readers might trust their observations more are we led to believe that this speaker is something of an omniscient figure again that that they're not party to this in the same way that the speaker or speakers in richard corey were party to the events narrated in that poem now if we think about situation and setting much like richard corey i think there's an interesting similarity here aside from perhaps references to granite tables this this feels like a poem that could in theory exist anywhere at any time so perhaps collins instead of locating it in something specific he wants this to be more universal i think what's also quite interesting is how collins doesn't gender anyone in this poem and i think in that way he's trying to make it more expansive and more inclusive because you could imagine that this is not just about heterosexual marriages perhaps it is also about homosexual marriages as well or just marriages at large again he seems to want this to be more expansive again he's he's again this is another one of those situations where the lack of information the lack of detail the lack of specificity tells far more than perhaps more details and more specificity might i've already spoken about theme just a little bit but i'll talk about tone i think the tone is really interesting here the speaker feels a bit detached again they don't seem terribly invested in this they seem to want to just narrow what they see with as much fidelity to the truth as possible which again that's that's certainly connected to some of the observations we made earlier about the speaker and the theme it's it's right there in the title this is one of those interesting poems where the theme of the piece or so much of the theme of the piece is just embedded in the title itself but again because of the lack of specificity i think we as readers are perhaps meant or intended to fill that gap in knowledge or information and in that way this becomes a poem less about a particular divorce and perhaps more a poem about a divorce that we've experienced whether it's a divorce that we actually had or perhaps for a lot of us myself included a divorce that our parents experience so again i think the poem from a thematic perspective almost encourages us to fill the details this is almost like a pre-fabricated poem where it has some of the pieces in place and then you organize them and and fill them as you want and as you desire now the use of symbols and imagery is quite interesting because there's this large thematic conceit throughout the entire poem which is the parties involved in this divorce the lawyers too are collins represents them with spoons and silverwares the sort of things you might find in a kitchen and notice the transition and the significance of the transition these two they started as spoons and collins certainly invites us to think about well what do spoons look like what do they feel like how do they occupy spaces in your kitchen cabinets how do we think about spoons as i'm sure a lot of you know this notion of spooning it's synonymous with perhaps two people in a romantic relationship or or at least two people who have trust and affection for one another holding one another in bed but what i also think is interesting is how spoons are not weapons in the same way forks and knives are spoons have rounded edges so this might also give us a sense of what this marriage or relationship was like at the beginning there was no sense that either party would necessarily attack or even want to attack one another because they're spoons they don't even have the capacity to to do so you could even argue in that way they're they're perhaps defenseless but as you can see as as the poem transitions from line one to line two they quickly become forks they have these sharp edges that someone might use to poke to prod to stab someone and i think what's interesting about what collins does here is he he demonstrates how again through the deterioration of this relationship these two their form actually changes in some way so this marriage the deterioration of this marriage does the work of actually changing them as people and i would what i think is interesting about this i'll say this is is how i think whether you're someone who's had a breakup or a divorce i think you could easily substitute a word like breakup especially if it was a bad breakup in a in a bad relationship upon reflection you might see or come to understand that wow within the confines of that relationship the relationship itself actually profoundly changed me it's like it changed my form in some way i became this person that i don't think i am or this person that i'm not naturally disposed or predisposed to be so i think in that way collins he wants to reflect or bear witness to how the relationships in our lives have this remarkable capacity to to change us and not always in the best way to turn us from perhaps passive defenseless figures into these aggressive defensive figures but billy collins it's worth saying he's he's something of a funny poet he's something of a humorist or a satirist at times and i think you can see the satirical dimensions of collins as a poet in the final two lines of the poem because here lawyers are synonymous with knives or this idea that like the thing lawyers do ultimately is is just cut up the lies that these people have made or built and just divvy them off so i i think in that way collins he's certainly playing with a well understood image of what lawyers are as as these craven almost unethical figures who all they do is just slice and dice and dash and that's and that's it so here at the end much like with richard corey what are we led to conclude ultimately and and again i've spoken about some of this already but i'll try to summarize i i think collins he certainly wants us to think about tone how how would we how does this poem feel to us because i think in that way the poem functions almost like a rorschach test which is to say if you've ever seen those inkblot images where you it's it's just nothing but you construct a kind of meaning from the chaos and the nothingness what sort of meaning did you construct after reading this did you think it was ultimately funny did you think it was sad forlorn regretful i think all of that perhaps is a is a way of thinking about how literature can reveal some of your innate thoughts feelings dispositions tendencies etc but i think the poem and it's right there in the title it's also perhaps trying to ask or or trying to interrogate this question in its in its base form what is a divorce what does it reveal about relationships i think this is connected to the form of the poem and the length what does this poem unto itself suggest about the narratives we tell ourselves about divorce as well i think all of those are interesting questions this poem attempts to explore and interrogate now i asked you to read one final poem for this week and even though i've called it a poem it's it's not actually a poem it's actually a song by bruce springsteen nebraska and because of time constraints i want to keep these lectures around an hour so it is customary for me to not talk about everything that i ask you to read but it's a wonderful song or text and you can actually find the audio version just on youtube i would encourage you to google it and that might afford an interesting opportunity to do some compare and contrast work because the way you read it or the way a family member a friend a significant other might read it it it certainly will vary from how someone like bruce springsteen performs it so i would encourage you when when it's it's available to you certainly certainly utilize that compare and contrast strategy so okay here at the end i'll just remind you of a couple of things this is all on the syllabus there is a discussion forum for this week i have asked you two questions all of the instructions they're on the syllabus but they're also just at the top of the discussion forum itself the answers to my questions are due on friday by the end of the day and anytime something is due unless it's a special unique circumstance i just give you the whole day so you have until 11 59 pm then you are required to respond to two of your classmates and you must do that by sunday so you can begin submitting now if you have any questions don't hesitate to contact me just please again review the syllabus make sure you understand what's expected of you and of course always listen to these audio lectures so for now i think i will go contact me if you have any questions but again this is colin cox and this is english 10 20.