CARLOS ESCOBAR: Welcome again to another edition of AP Daily
practice session.
My name is Mr. Carlos Escobar, and I'm coming to you
from Miami, Florida.
Today, we're going to be dealing with another poetry prompt.
And as always, look in the video description for you
to be able to download the PDF for questions
so you can follow along.
For our last video, we looked at a pre-20th-century poem.
So this time, I want to focus on something
a bit more contemporary, so that you
can see that the same sort of steps that we take,
the same sort of thinking that we take for an older poem
can be adapted to something more contemporary.
This is always the way that our prompts look like.
We have the main prompts at the top
and then we have a series of bullet points
at the bottom, which we always have
to focus on because these bullet points are tied to our rubric.
Remember, you're not simply writing an essay,
you're writing an essay that is tied to a rubric--
so you have to make sure that you hit certain points.
We have to have a thesis statement.
That thesis statement will be supported by our evidence,
and all of our arguments in support of that thesis
statement will help us develop a line of reasoning.
As we write the essay, we have to always use
appropriate grammar and punctuation.
These points are so critical to writing a successful essay
that I think that if you have any questions about any
of these, you have to go into AP classroom
and click on the AP Daily videos that we have already
created for you that discuss how to create,
how to develop each of these items
that you see on the screen right now.
But most of our time today will be spent on the actual prompt.
And what I always say is we cannot read through the prompt
quickly, we have to dissect the prompt because it's helping us
write our essay.
We just have to be able to figure out how it that is
providing that support.
So the prompt here is, in P.K. Pages poem,
The Landlady, published in 1943, the speaker
gives a complex portrayal of a landlady.
Read the poem carefully.
Then, in a well-written essay, analyse how Page uses literary
elements and techniques to convey this complex portrayal.
So what is inherently found within this poem
that can help us.
Well, we have always the poet and the title.
Now, titles are funny because sometimes a title isn't
even provided by the poet itself,
it's provided by the publisher.
Or sometimes the poem's title doesn't quite
tell us what the poem is going to be about.
So here we have, The Landlady.
I can only assume that this poem is
going to be about a landlady, and I'm
hoping that it is because I can start thinking about, what
is a landlady?
What would someone's association be with the landlady?
And subsequent to that, I'm given the time period, 1943.
It may not sound too contemporary to you
because it's not contemporary to us right now,
but the last poem that we did in a different video
was from the 16th century.
So I'm very happy to see something
from at least the 20th century.
And I'm going to start thinking about what
was happening around 1943 that might influence
the writing of this poem or the message in this poem.
Now, sometimes there won't be a connection between history
and the work itself, but it's always a filter
that I have to turn on when I'm entering a poem.
I love the next part of the prompt.
It gives us the context.
It holds our hands so that we don't
enter a poem without knowing anything about it.
And here we're told that the speaker
will give a complex portrayal of a landlady.
We see the direct connection here between the poem's title
and the context of the poem.
So it is about a landlady.
And notice that we're being told that the speaker is
giving a complex portrayal of the landlady.
I spoke about the word, complexity, in a previous video
and about how we think through the complexity.
It's not just a synonym, it's not just a very sophisticated
word, but a layering of the different aspects
of this individual.
Then we're given our task.
And our task is to write an essay that
analyzes how Page uses literary elements
and techniques to convey that complex portrayal.
In my previous video, I focused on the complex portrayal,
so this time, we're going to be looking
at the literary elements and techniques.
And let's talk about what we mean by these literary elements
and techniques.
We're not talking about these obscure, convoluted terms
that nobody knows.
You're not going to--
excuse me-- you're not going to earn extra points for talking
about a literary device that we're going to have to look up.
As a matter of fact, you're not going to be deducted points.
Not that that even exists because that's not
how these essays are scored, but you're not
going to start off on the wrong foot
if you're talking about very simple terms.
There's nothing wrong with sticking to imagery, metaphor,
personification.
These basic elements are sometimes the most important,
the richest elements that are conveying
meaning or attitude or the portrayal
of a complex individual.
So if we're not going to focus on these obscure terms
and we can focus on the terms that we know,
what are we supposed to do?
Discussing the function of these elements is key.
We do not want you to simply state
that there's a metaphor in line two
and personification is taking place between the third
and the fourth stanza.
That doesn't contribute to the answer
without the connection to the meaning.
There's got to be a marriage between your observations
of language and how that language is functioning
to convey the meaning of the poem,
or to help you answer the prompt, develop a claim,
formulate a thesis, and ultimately
your line of reasoning throughout this essay.
So if we go back to this palm of The Landlady,
I want to give you a task right now.
I want you to pause this video and read this.
And not think of the complexity so much right now,
but I want you to practice your literary devices,
your expertise of literary devices right now.
I want you to read through this and just spot them.
Now, I understand that I told you that is not the point--
and it's not the point--
but it's a launching pad to analysis.
So I want you to go stanza by stanza
and see which devices you can find being
employed throughout this poem.
Once you've read the poem and you've
identified these devices, then click pause again
to come back to the video.
Suppose you're back with me now.
So we're going to go through this poem together stanza
by stanza to see what we come up with.
I don't want you to become frustrated
if I talk about terms that you didn't see,
and I don't want you to become frustrated
if I'm not highlighting the terms that you saw.
There are no right answers here.
There are no set terms that we want you to focus on.
We simply want you to bring your knowledge to your understanding
of the poem and use that knowledge
to develop claims and an argument in your essay.
So let's look at the first stanza here.
I'm focusing on the sepia area, this is really
creating an image in my mind and the borders are described here
as coming through as trains.
So now we have a simile.
So we have imagery, we have simile, and it's a poem.
So I'm going to focus on sound and I
see the repetition of these sounds
throughout these two lines.
Sometimes we know the name of a term,
but we don't remember the name.
And that's OK.
Sometimes we recognize language functioning
in a particular way, but we don't have the vocabulary
to describe that, and that's perfectly OK, too.
If you know the name and you can call this alliteration
or consonant or imagery and simile, then that's OK as well.
Always bring what to the table, but remember
we're going to connect it to meaning afterwards.
And we finally have another simile here
at the end of the line.
In the second stanza I was really
intrigued by this phrase, "her ticklish ears."
I think the imagery there is important.
So we have this landlady who seems to be very intrusive.
People avoid her.
She's getting herself into everyone's business.
And it's described-- her ears are
described as being ticklish.
And I thought that was interesting.
They weren't described as her evil
or her malignant or malicious ears,
but rather her ticklish ears.
And that might help us with complexity later on.
In stanza 3, I liked this line here, this sentence,
"They hold the walls about them as they weep or laugh."
I felt like that was an important image.
Why are they holding the walls, what are they trying to muffle,
and what do these walls represent to them?
And then that final phrase there, "She
peers stippled with curious flesh."
Again, the curiosity of her flesh, her involvement
in these people's lives really comes through with the imagery.
We have another simile in the next stanza and then
a metaphor, which gets a little bit extended.
And then the next two stanzas, I see repetition.
I see repetition of the word, knows,
knowledge seems to be important here.
Repetition that occurs later on after the simile
in the final stanza with all, all, all.
So I developed a bunch of observations
about literary devices in this poem.
Remember we're not going to work in isolation.
We're not only going to talk about devices,
we also have to talk about the complexity of the portrayal,
but right now, I'm going to focus on these devices.
And what we found was simile, alliteration, imagery,
metaphor, personification, repetition.
You might want to challenge yourselves
and pause the video again, and see
if you find throughout the poem other instances of some
of these devices.
And you might want to add some devices that I haven't even
brought up.
All of these observations are in contribution
or in service of the most important thing, which
is the complex portrayal of this landlady.
We cannot forget that notion and we have to understand that
our essay is going to be a combination of these two
things, the complex portrayal of the landlady and how these
terms are coming together developing language that helps
to convey that complexity of that portrayal.
That thought of understanding is what
we have to bring to the poem.
To this poem, a 20th-century poem, to all poems--
pre-20th, post-20th century.
What I want you to walk away with today
is an understanding that the complexity is developed,
it's conveyed.
We are inferring that complexity because of the way
that language is coming together in the poem.
And poets are going to use these literary devices to build
complexities in the language, to build figures in the language
that then we have to decipher and we have to pull together
in order to understand the mechanism that
was created to develop the complexity of the character.
And that then is how we respond to this question.
We develop a thesis that answers how this character is complex.
We develop a response that infuses
the manipulation of these terms, the uses
of these literary devices in order
to help us understand why this landlady is not a single note
figure, but rather as close to a human being
as we can get in poetry.
Thank you so much.
I hope you join us next time for the next AP Daily Video
Practice session.
All of these videos will help you be successful
on the AP exam.
Just keep tuning in.
Best of luck.
Take care, everyone.
Goodbye.