I was especially struck by the poetry included in the section “Many Tones: Poems about Family Relationships” from the week’s reading.
From the snuggly “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” to the colder ways and modes of love’s expressions in “Those Winter Sundays” the poetry sent me along an emotional tide. I enjoyed hearing what the class made of the different tones and themes expressed in this collection of poetry.
On a side note, I was also happy to see the work of one of my former undergraduate professors, Daniel Tobin, included in this selection. His writing is rich and I would encourage anyone, and especially those with Irish ancestry or interest in Irish culture, to check out his work (especially his latest book of poetry).
I’ve also been thinking a lot about the relationship between visual form and content (the subject of an optional reading in Fussell). How would you compare the visual form in “Postcard from Kashmir,” with its rather short lines, with the longer lines of “After Making Love We Hear Footsteps”? How does their shape match their content? How do all the poets in this section use space to their advantage (or, perhaps, to their disadvantage)? Compare, for example, the nearly box-like shape of “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” with the waving lines of “Postcard from Kashmir.”
I’m also hoping that any difficulty you were having with the citation of poetry has been resolved. Keep in mind that you usually cite the lines of poetry in the text citation. And, titles of poems are put in quotation marks (as I have done above). If you did not buy the MLA handbook, some of the basics are provided for you in the Norton (look for the chapters called “The Research Essay” and “Quotation, Citation, and Documentation” in the Norton).