3 Written Response need in 12 hours

WRITTEN RESPONSES

These assignments are informal but should also be thoughtful and thorough. They should be detailed and specific enough to not only let me know that you have read the materials you are responding to, but also that you have given them some thought. Specific references to the texts in question are certainly encouraged. These responses should be about 350 words

Read “Eating Alone,”

Eating Alone

Li-Young Lee

I’ve pulled the last of the year’s young onions. The garden is bare now. The ground is cold, brown and old. What is left of the day flames in the maples at the corner of my eye. I turn, a cardinal vanishes. By the cellar door, I wash the onions, then drink from the icy metal spigot. Once, years back, I walked beside my father among the windfall pears. I can’t recall our words. We may have strolled in silence. But I still see him bend that way--left hand braced on knee, creaky--to lift and hold to my eye a rotten pear. In it, a hornet spun crazily, glazed in slow, glistening juice. It was my father I saw this morning waving to me from the trees. I almost called to him, until I came close enough to see the shovel, leaning where I had left it, in the flickering, deep green shade. White rice steaming, almost done. Sweet green peas fried in onions. Shrimp braised in sesame oil and garlic. And my own loneliness. What more could I, a young man, want.

and “Fire.”

FIREA fire burns along the eastern rimof mountains. In the valley wesee it as a celestial prank, forin the summer haze the mountainsthemselves are lost, but as the nightdeepens the fire grows more goldenand dense. On this calm groundthe raw raging of burning windsthat cuts the eyes and singes the hairis seen as a pencil-line of lightmoving southward. I know my sonis there, has been for four days,moved in and out by helicopterswith his squad of fire fighters.By now, without sleep, they’vegone beyond exhaustion. Some can’twaken, some are crazed, a few goon—the oldest—working steadily.I know this from the stories hehas told me of other famous firesfrom which he returned as froma dream, his eyes glazed with seeing,his sense of time and place gone.He would raise his shaking right armabove his head, and with his palmopen sweep it toward me againand again and speak without grammar,sometimes without words, of whathad taken place. I knew it was true.Now in the cool of evening I catcha hint of the forest, of that takingof sudden breath that pines demand;it’s on my skin, a light oil, a sweatborn of some forgotten leaning into fire.-Philip Levine

Have these poems been written with simplicity and clarity? Do the authors manage to imply emotion rather than state it through narrative telling? Do the poems contain conflict? Have the poets included specific, descriptive, sensory details? Also, do you like these poems? Why or why not?