1. The document discusses a workshop about teaching ENWR 106 that focuses on analyzing Theodore Roethke's poem "My Papa's Waltz".
2. Jeanette Winterson and Jack Mezirow provide commentary on complex emotions conveyed through art and transformational education theory.
3. The workshop leaders engage participants in interrogating questions about interpreting the poem, including views of the father-son relationship and potential revisions in perspective.
1. A workshop With Tom kitchen Maria Giura Rick Reid Strategies for teaching ENWR 106
2. Part 1: What is Literature For? A Reading of Theodore Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz,” With Help from Jeanette Winterson And Jack Mezirow
3. The poem The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a hand caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.
4. Here’s what winterson has to say The artist as radar can help me. The artist who combines an exceptional sensibility with an exceptional control over her material…will bring home signals otherwise lost to me...[art] has in it warnings and chances and painful beauty. It is not what I know and it is not what I am… [Art is the] realisation of complex emotion.
5. Ok, but so what? Complex emotion is pivoted around the forbidden. When I feel the complexities of a situation, I am feeling the many-sidedness of it, not the obvious smooth shape, grasped at once and easily forgotten. Complexity leads to perplexity. I do not know my place. There is a clash between what I feel and what I had expected to feel. My logical self fails me, and no matter how I try to pace it out, there is still something left over that will not be accounted for. All of us have felt like this, all of us have tried to make the rough places smooth; to reason our way out of a gathering storm. Usually dishonesty is our best guide. We call inner turbulence “blowing things out of proportion.” We call it a “seven-year itch.” We call it “over-tiredness.”
6. Mezirow’s Theory of Transformational Education I.Disorienting Dilemma IV.Action II.Critical Reflection III.Rational Dialogue
7. The poem, again The whiskey on your breath Could make a small boy dizzy; But I hung on like death: Such waltzing was not easy. We romped until the pans Slid from the kitchen shelf; My mother’s countenance Could not unfrown itself The hand that held my wrist Was battered on one knuckle; At every step you missed My right ear scraped a buckle. You beat time on my head With a hand caked hard by dirt, Then waltzed me off to bed Still clinging to your shirt.
8. Interrogate the questions Is the narrator looking back at the father with fondness? Bitterness? Would the poem make a different impression if we changed “romped” to “fought” and “waltzing” to “dancing”? Why did the boy hang on and cling to his father? From fear? From affection? What is the mother’s role here? How would you characterize her frown? Readers often have a negative view of the relationship represented here, but many change their minds, seeing some positive aspects to the father and son’s waltz. How might you account for this revision?
9. Winterson, again How much can we imagine? The artist is an imaginer. The artist imagines the forbidden because to her it is not forbidden. If she is freer than other people it is the freedom of her single allegiance to her work. Most of us have divided loyalties, most of us have sold ourselves. The artist is not divided and she is not for sale. Her clarity of purpose protects her although it is her clarity of purpose that is most likely to irritate most people…Why do we flee from feeling? Why do we celebrate those who lower us in the mire of their own making, while we hound those who come to us with hands full of difficult beauty?
