Y12 Poetry

1. Welcome to English Literature A-Level
2. Analysing 'Chainsaw vs the Pampas Grass'
3. Making interpretations
4. Unnatural Nature
5. What examiners want
6. Zooming in on Rhythm and Metre
7. Comparing the poems
8. Coming of Age
9. History, by John Burnside
10. Material, by Ros Barber
11. Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn
12. Reading 'Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn'
13. Reading Effects
14. On Her Blindness
15. Genetics
16. Eat Me
17. The Furthest Distances I've Travelled
18. Tackling the Poetry Exam

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Welcome to English Literature A-Level

What did you most enjoy about English lit GCSE? Be honest!

What happens in English Lit?

• Exams at the end of Y12 and Y13
• Studying a range of texts
• All exams, no coursework
• An excellent foundation for other subjects

The poems

Analysing 'Chainsaw vs the Pampas Grass'

The story of mankind is the story of man vs nature.

To what extent do you agree with this statement?

The Chainsaw vs the Pampas Grass

It seemed an unlikely match. All winter unplugged,
grinding its teeth in a plastic sleeve, the chainsaw swung
nose-down from a hook in the darkroom
under the hatch in the floor. When offered the can
it knocked back a quarter-pint of engine oil
and juices ran from its joints and threads,
oozed across the guide-bar and the maker’s name,
into the dry links.

From the summerhouse, still holding one last gulp
of last year’s heat behind its double doors, and hung
with the weightless wreckage of wasps and flies,
moth-balled in spider’s wool…
from there, I trailed the day-glo orange power-line
the length of the lawn and the garden path,
fed it out like powder from a keg, then walked
back to the socket and flicked the switch, then walked again
and coupled the saw to the flex – clipped them together.
Then dropped the safety catch and gunned the trigger.

No gearing up or getting to speeds, just an instant rage,
the rush of metal lashing out at air, connected to the main.
The chainsaw with its perfect disregard, its mood
to tangle with cloth, or jewellery, or hair.
The chainsaw with its bloody desire, its sweet tooth
for the flesh of the face and the bones underneath,
its grand plan to kick back against nail or knot
and rear up into the brain.

I let it flare, lifted it into the sun
and felt the hundred beats per second drumming in its heart,
and felt the drive-wheel gargle in its throat.
The pampas grass with its ludicrous feathers
and plumes. The pampas grass, taking the warmth and light
from cuttings and bulbs, sunning itself,
stealing the show with its footstools, cushions and tufts
and its twelve-foot spears.

This was the sledgehammer taken to crack the nut.
Probably all that was needed here was a good pull or shove
or a pitchfork to lever it out at its base.
Overkill. I touched the blur of the blade
against the near-most tip of a reed – it didn’t exist.
I dabbed at a stalk that swooned, docked a couple of heads,
dismissed the top third of its canes with a sideways sweep
at shoulder height – this was a game.
I lifted the fringe of undergrowth, carved at the trunk –
plant-juice spat from the pipes and tubes
and dust flew out as I ripped into pockets of dark, secret
warmth.

To clear a space to work
I raked whatever was severed or felled or torn
towards the dead zone under the outhouse wall, to be fired.
Then cut and raked, cut and raked, till what was left
was a flat stump the size of a manhole cover or barrel lid
that wouldn’t be dug with a spade or prized from the earth.
Wanting to finish things off I took up the saw
and drove it vertically downwards into the upper roots,
but the blade became choked with soil or fouled with weeds,
or what was sliced or split somehow closed and mended
behind, like cutting at water or air with a knife.

I poured barbecue fluid into the patch
and threw in a match – it flamed for a minute, smoked for a minute more, and went out.
I left it at that.
In the weeks that came new shoots like asparagus tips
sprang up from its nest and by June
it was riding high in its saddle, wearing a new crown.
Corn in Egypt. I looked on
from the upstairs window like the midday moon.
_
Back below stairs on its hook, the chainsaw seethed.
I left it a year, to work back through its man-made dreams,
to try to forget.
The seamless urge to persist was as far as it got.

The Natural Reading

Select 5 quotations that would be useful for a question on the topic of 'Man Vs Nature'

are there any structural features that support this reading?

Making interpretations

LO: To consider how to develop our personal interpretations of the texts

Write another alternative explanation

Assessment criteria

Articulate informed, personal and creative responses to texts

Seeing through critical lenses

• 'Filters' on cameras change the way we see a place
• Just like using 'filters' to change the way a picture appears, we can use different critical theories to shape the way we view a text
• Different things can stand out, and other aspects fade into the background

Our first theory: The Freudian Mind

The Freudian Mind

1. ID - our base, animal instincts and desires
2. EGO - Our 'self', balancing the competing id/superego
3. SUPEREGO - our socialised morality

Applying the Freudian Lens

Unnatural Nature

“Creation's final law:
Nature [is] red in tooth and claw”

Alfred, Lord Tennyson - 'In Memoriam A.H.H.'

“A knowledge, a dim earnest, of the calm
That Nature breathes among the hills and groves.”

William Wordsworth - The Prelude

Reading The Gun

As we read, we'll use the reflection grid to keep track of our ideas

The Gun

Bringing a gun into a house
changes it.

You lay it on the kitchen table,
stretched out like something dead
itself: the grainy polished wood stock
jutting over the edge,
the long metal barrel
casting a grey shadow
on the green-checked cloth.

At first it’s just practice: perforating tins
dangling on orange string
from trees in the garden.
Then a rabbit shot
clean through the head.

Soon the fridge fills with creatures that have run and flown.
Your hands reek of gun oil.
And entrails. You trample
fur and feathers. There’s a spring
in your step; your eyes gleam
like when sex was fresh.
A gun brings a house alive.
I join in the cooking: jointing
and slicing, stirring and tasting –
excited as if the King of Death
had arrived to feast, stalking
out of winters woods,
his black mouth
sprouting golden crocuses.

What examiners want

The assessment criteria

A real question

Compare the ways in which poets explore violence in ‘The Gun’ by Vicki Feaver and one other poem of your choice from Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry 2002–2011.
In your answer, you should consider the following:

• the poets’ development of themes
• the poets’ use of language and imagery
• the use of other poetic techniques.

[25 Marks]
June 2022

Brainstorming ideas

 ________
|VIOLENCE|
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Zooming in on Rhythm and Metre

Copy down these sentences

Jack and Jill went up the hill

I went across the road and bought a pair of shoes

Whenever we speak, we have a rhythm, stressing some syllables and unstressing others.

It’s useful to learn how to record this:

• / is used to indicate a stressed syllable
• x to indicate an unstressed syllable.

Pairs (or triplets) of syllables for units called ‘feet’. E.g.

Forgot --> = iamb (unstressed, then stressed)
Mountain --> trochee (stressed, then unstressed)

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet south,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.

Comparing the poems

How do the poets explore ideas of Guilt in the poems The Lammas Hireling and Giuseppe?

Criteria reminder

Exploring connections

Coming of Age

What point was being made about growing older in An Easy Passage?

To My Nine-Year-Old Self

What do we expect from the title alone?

The Poem 🔖

History, by John Burnside

What do you think has been the most significant historical event in your lifetime?

What is the significance of the poem's opening line/subtitle?

St Andrews: West Sands; September 2001

The Poem

St Andrews: West Sands; September 2001
Today as we flew the kites -
the sand spinning off in ribbons along the beach
and that gasoline smell from Leuchars gusting across
the golf links;
The tide far out
and quail-grey in the distance; people
jogging, or stopping to watch
as the war planes cambered and turned
in the morning light –
today - with the news in my mind, and the muffled dread
of what may come – I knelt down in the sand
with Lucas gathering shells and pebbles finding evidence of life in all this
driftwork: snail shells; shreds of razorfish;
smudges of weed and flesh on tideworn stone.

At times I think what makes us who we are
is neither kinship nor our given states
but something lost between the world we own
and what we dream about behind the names
on days like this our lines raised in the wind
our bodies fixed and anchored to the shore
and though we are confined by property
what tether us to gravity and light
has most to do with distance and the shapes
we find in water reading from the book
of silt and tides the rose or petrol blue
of jellyfish and sea anemone
combining with a child’s
first nakedness.

Sometimes I am dizzy with the fear
of losing everything – the sea, the sky,
all living creatures, forests, estuaries:
we trade so much to know the virtual
we scarcely register the drift and tug
of other bodies scarcely apprehend
the moment as it happens: shifts of light
and weather and the quiet, local forms
of history: the fish lodged in the tide
beyond the sands; the long insomnia
of ornamental carp in public parks
captive and hung in their own

slow-burning transitive gold jamjars of spawn
and sticklebacks or goldfish carried home
from fairgrounds to the hum of radio
but this is the problem: how to be alive
in all this gazed-upon and cherished world
and do no harm a toddler on a beach
sifting wood and dried weed from the sand
and puzzled by the pattern on a shell
his parents on the dune slacks with a kite
plugged into the sky all nerve and line
patient; be afraid; but still, through everything
attentive to the irredeemable.

Material, by Ros Barber

LO: to consider how the poem explores ideas of self and parenthood through objects

What objects do you associate with your parents?

Material

My mother was a hanky queen
when hanky meant a thing of cloth,
not paper tissues bought in packs
from late-night garages and shops,
but things for waving out of trains
and mopping the corners of your grief:
when hankies were material
she’d have one, always, up her sleeve.

Tucked in the wrists of every cardi,
a mum’s embarrassment of lace
embroidered with a V for Viv,
spittled and scrubbed against my face.
And sometimes more than one fell out
as is she had a farm up there
where dried-up hankies fell in love
and mated, raising little squares.

She bought her own; I never did.
Hankies were presents from distant aunts
in boxed sets, with transparent covers
and script initials spelling ponce,
the naffest Christmas gift you’d get –
my brothers too, more often than not,
got male ones: serious, and grey,
and larger, like they had more snot.
It was hankies that closed department stores,
with headscarves, girdles, knitting wool
and trouser presses; homely props
you’d never find today in malls.
Hankies, which demanded irons,
and boiling to be purified
shuttered the doors of family stores
when those who used to buy them died.

And somehow, with the hanky’s loss,
greengrocer George with his dodgy foot
delivering veg from a Comma van
is history, and the friendly butcher
who’d slip an extra sausage in,
the fishmonger whose marble slab
of haddock smoked the colour of yolks
and parcelled rows of local crab

lay opposite the dancing school
where Mrs White, with painted talons,
taught us When You’re Smiling from
a stumbling, out of tune piano:
step-together, step-together, step-together,
point! The Annual Talent Show
when every mother, fencing tears,
would whip a hanky from their sleeve
and smudge the rouge from little dears.
Nostalgia only makes me old.
The innocence I want my brood
to cling on to like ten-bob notes
was killed in TV’s lassitude.
And it was me that turned it on and eat
bought biscuits I would bake
if I’d commit to being home.

There’s never a hanky up my sleeve.
I raised neglected-looking kids,
the kind whose noses strangers clean.
What awkwardness in me forbids
me to keep tissues in my bag
when handy packs are 50p?
I miss material handkerchiefs,
their soft and hidden history.

But it isn’t mine. I’ll let it go.
My mother too, eventually,
who died not leaving handkerchiefs
but tissues and uncertainty:
and she would say, should I complain
of the scratchy and disposable,
that this is your material
to do with, daughter, what you will.

Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn

LO: to consider the nature of art with relation to the poem.

Should art be provocative or beautiful?

“Art for art's sake is an empty phrase. Art for the sake of the true, art for the sake of the good and the beautiful, that is the faith I am searching for.”

• George Sand, 1872

Do you agree with George Sand's comment?

Some necessary context

• 'Ode to a Grecian Urn' is one of the seminal poems exploring the nature of art and beauty
• Written by John Keats, it was inspired by the Sosibos Vase (right), an intricately carved marble urn from c. 50BC
• The vase is covered in depictions of gods and goddesses, dancing to music at a festival

What would Keats say is the purpose of art?

Reading 'Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn'

LO: to consider the nature of art with relation to the poem.

What was the main idea we took away from 'Ode to Grecian Urn'?

Ode to a Grayson Perry Urn 🫙

How do the poets explore ideas about youth in the two poems?

Reading Effects

LO: To consider how the poet presents mortality

What makes a better subject for poetry: youth or the end of life?

Which would you rather read?

Effects 📃

Before we read

Effects

by Alan Jenkins

What are the connotations of the title? Are there multiple meanings?

The poem is one single unbroken stanza of nearly 60 lines. Why? What might that reflect about the speaker or the tone?

“Stream of consciousness”

I held her hand, that was always scarred
From chopping, slicing, from the knives that lay in wait
In bowls of washing-up, that was raw,
The knuckles reddened, rough from scrubbing hard
At saucepan, frying pan, cup and plate
And giving love the only way she knew,
In each cheap cut of meat, in roast and stew,
Old-fashioned food she cooked and we ate;
And I saw that they had taken off her rings,
The rings she kept once in her dressing-table drawer
With faded snapshots, long-forgotten things
(scent-sprays, tortoise-shell combs, a snap or two
From the time we took a holiday “abroad”)
But lately had never been without, as if
She wanted everyone to know she was his wife
Only now that he was dead.

And her watch? – Classic ladies’ model, gold strap – 
it was gone, And I’d never known her not have that on,
Not in all the years they sat together
Watching soaps and game shows I’d disdain
And not when my turn came to cook for her,
Chops or chicken portions, English, bland,
Familiar flavours she said she preferred
To whatever “funny foreign stuff”
Young people seemed to eat these days, she’d heard;
Not all the weeks I didn’t come, when she sat
Night after night and stared unseeing at
The television, at her inner weather,

Heaved herself upright, blinked and poured
Drink after drink, and gulped and stared – the scotch
That, when he was alive, she wouldn’t touch,
That was her way to be with him again;
Not later in the psychiatric ward,
Where she blinked unseeing at the wall, the nurses
(Who would steal anything, she said), and dreamt
Of when she was a girl, of the time before
I was born, or grew up and learned contempt,
While the TV in the corner blared
To drown some “poor soul’s” moans and curses,
And she took her pills and blinked and stared
As the others shuffled around, and drooled, and swore…

But now she lay here, a thick rubber band
With her name on it in smudged black ink was all she wore
On the hand I held, a blotched and crinkled hand
Whose fingers couldn’t clasp at mine any more
Or falteringly wave, or fumble at my sleeve –
The last words she had said were
Please don’t leave
But of course I left; now I was back, though she
Could not know that, or turn her face to see
A nurse bring the little bag of her effects to me.

How does the poet present the end-of-life in Effects?

Aim for...

• 3 points about language and word choice
• 2 about punctuation & rhythm
• 1 about structure more generally

On Her Blindness

'ON HIS BLINDESS'
When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one talent which is death to hide
Lodg'd with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest he returning chide,
"Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?"
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies: "God doth not need
Either man's work or his own gifts: who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly; thousands at his bidding speed
And post o'er land and ocean without rest:
They also serve who only stand and wait."

Genetics

LO: To consider how the poet presents the complexity of paired relationships

Today's Poem 🔖

Eat Me

Today's Poem 🔖

The Furthest Distances I've Travelled

Today's Poem 🔖

This was first published in the poet's collection entitled These Days. What does that suggest about her intentions with her poetry?

Tackling the Poetry Exam

For each of these themes, which two poems would you compare?

Write your dream question for the poetry section

What the questions look like

1. Compare the ways in which poets explore [THEME] in [POEM] and one other poem of your choice from Poems of the Decade: An Anthology of the Forward Books of Poetry 2002-2011.
   In your answer, you should consider the following:

• the poets' development of themes
• the poets' use of language and imagery
• the use of other poetic techniques.

(Total for Question 1 = 25 marks)

You get two questions to choose from, with different THEME and POEM

The marking criteria

• AO1:

'development of themes'

'use of language and imagery [and] other poetic techniques'