(Download) "Homework: Richard Powers, Walt Whitman, And the Poetry of the Commodity." by Ariel # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free

eBook details

Title: Homework: Richard Powers, Walt Whitman, And the Poetry of the Commodity.
Author : Ariel
Release Date : January 01, 2003
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines,Books,Professional & Technical,Education,
Pages : * pages
Size : 191 KB

Description

In a novel called Gain published in 1998 by the novelist Richard Powers, there is a passage in which the heroine, a 42-year-old mother and real estate broker named Laura who has just discovered she has cancer, tries to help her 13-year-old son with his homework. She finds him at the kitchen table, frustrated, cursing the poem in front of him (I warn you in advance that the language is realistic) and starting to cry. His assignment is a poem called "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by the nineteenth-century poet American Walt Whitman. She asks him, "What are you supposed to do with it?" And he answers: "Supposed to say what it's f*****g about" (86). His mother has other things on her mind, as you might imagine, but she wants to keep up the pretense of normal life, so she offers to help. She looks at the poem, and we get bits of the poem juxtaposed with bits of her thoughts: This poetry homework seems painfully irrelevant, next to the thoughts of her diagnosis and prognosis and chemotherapy that are filling Laura's mind. In fact, the novel suggests, nothing could be more relevant to her situation, if only she could see it. But relevant in an extremely complex way. If there is any knowledge that might help her, or might have helped her, this poem may contain it.