A WORKSHOPW I T H

T O M K I T CHE N

M A R IA G I U RA

R I CK R E I D

Strategies for teaching ENWR 106

Part 1: What is Literature For?

A Reading of Theodore Roethke’s

“My Papa’s Waltz,”

With Help from Jeanette Winterson

And

Jack Mezirow

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.

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.

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.”

Mezirow’s Theory of Transformational Education

I.

Disorienting

Dilemma

II.

Critical

Reflection

III.

Rational

Dialogue

IV.

Action

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.

Interrogate the questions

1. Is the narrator looking back at the father with fondness? Bitterness?

2. Would the poem make a different impression if we changed

“romped” to “fought” and “waltzing” to “dancing”?

3. Why did the boy hang on and cling to his father? From fear? From

affection?

4. What is the mother’s role here? How would you characterize her

frown?

5. 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?

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?