A Conversation With My Father By Grace Paley

Discuss how your investigation of the generic conventions of poetry has influenced your understanding of at least one poem that you have studied in this unit.

Wendell Berry’s past is more than just his own in “My Great-Grandfather’s Slaves,” but his past is intertwined with the slaves that grew up with. A quick reading of this poem by Berry would not give the reader that he was connected with the slaves, but rather that they lived separate lives. Berry says he sees the slaves and their activities but does not ever write about how they are connected until the very last stanza. After reading the final stanza it gives the rest of the poem a new meaning and if the reader does not take the time to closely re-read the writing they will miss out on what Berry is really trying to portray. Wendell Berry is trying to show the reader how his past is linked with the past of his grandfather’s slaves with his

The Short Story “My Father’s Life,” by Raymond Carver illustrates the difficult task of a son trying to find his own sense of identity and individualism while watching his father’s life unravel. Carver explores the relationships of his parents and his own struggle with sharing the same name with his father and the similarities and differences between them.

The poem “Mothers and Daughters” is written by Pat Mora. Pat Mora is a contemporary award winning writer, who writes for children, youngsters and adults. She was born in El Paso, TX in the year 1942. She attains a title of a Hispanic writer; however, the most of her poems are in English. In her literary work, one can observe the different aspects of the immigrants’ lives such as language issues, family relationships, immigrants’ experiences and cultural differences (1187).

Animals help humans in our lives for sharing their features. Every new experience can make a person change; sometimes the changes are positive, and other times it is negative. Either way, here is no avoiding change. Animals are kind, helpful, and playful.

The current generation is quizzical of the importance that religious teachings hold in our evolving pro-choice society. In past generations, spiritualism was a method of uniting the community and nurturing the young. However, we find that faith has the adverse effect. While separate from other religions, a rise in hate fueled discrimination and separatism is observable between different communities in all corners of the globe. In this generation, it is only logical that as religion is taught, after learning from present and past events, the very essence of the teachings is skewed and put into question.

Abandoned. The man’s father was not known by his family as he left before they could come to know him. Leaving his wife, son, and daughter alone in The Great Depression they had to develop their own strengths. The family developed flaws along with their strengths. For the son, he came to be like his father with desires to abandon his family, but the mother and daughter didn’t follow the same path and grew to support themselves differently. The truth of life those is that one is always better than the other. Some believe it is the daughter, Laura, who is stronger, but the mother, Amanda, is truly the stronger of the two. She’s constructive, sturdy natured, and observant.

A loss for words by Lou Ann Walker Is sort of like her own biography of her life With deaf parents. The book starts out with The author's feelings of being a person of hearing and And sort of feeling like an outsider because of her parents. Her maturity had to be at a certain young age because she had to interpret and handle many important situations. The readers are then introduced to Walker's parents and how they got their diagnosis. Walkers father named Gale was diagnosed deaf when he attended a funeral out in the cold at three months of age. I thought this particular part of Gale was interesting as he was outside just like everyone else. Walkers mother, on the other hand, Doris Jean, became deaf when she developed a high

Interesting information: I attended the Defense Language Institute in Monterey while I was in the

Violated nonimmigrant status or a condition of entry into the U.S Encouraged or aided any other alien to enter the U.S. illegally

The father in “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, was a hardworking man, who worked through the “blueblack cold” weather. His “Cracked hands that ached From labor in the weekday” (3-4) showed the pain he’d go through just to provide for his family. However “No one ever thanked him”(5)

died I would want to die too.’ The boy said, ‘So you could be with me?’ the father said, ‘Yes. So I could be with you.’ The boy reply to his father, ‘Okay’” (11). This means that the father never wants to leave his son alone. He wants to live and die with his son.

In 1959 C. Wright Mills introduced the sociological imagination. This is “the ability to connect the most basic, intimate aspects of an individual’s life to seemingly impersonal and remote historical forces.” (Colton p, 4). When I think of this lesson, I believe that it is an idea which in the end, can be positive. If you take any aspect in your life, good or bad and apply this theory you have the chance to see that when you look at the bigger picture, you are not this only one with your blessing or curse. As pointed out in chapter one of You May Ask Yourself, this idea may be negative because it proves that our lives are ordinary. In my mind, in this day and age, some people need to be reminded that they are ordinary in one or more aspect of their life. It also shines a light, allowing one to realize that there is a problem in our society that needs to be corrected. When I apply this theory to my life as a wife and more specifically, an Army wife, I can see that there are many people being effected by the same things that cause me stress and worry in my day to day life.

The poem I decided to do this week was “From Mother to Son” by Langston Hughes. I chose this poem because the title instantly drew me to read it. My thoughts were that the poem was probably about a conversation or maybe a letter between a mother and a son. There were a few things that stuck out to me, such as, the beginning line, “Well, son, I’ll tell you:” The mother was possibly asked a question beforehand by the son. Another thing that stuck out to me was the word “ain’t” in line two. The mother may have very little education and was possibly poor.

When you think of family love, you probably think of a nice loving family, one that gets you presents for your birthday or a special occasion. My family isn't like that, my step-father is out doing other women, my mother is drinking the liquor store dry, and a snobby step-sister too. I do all the chores in the house I do the laundry, wash dishes, make food and clean my house and guess what, that's what I do everyday.