When writing a response paper, you will write a response to one of the short stories, poems, or plays in this module. This document should be double-spaced and in MLA format. Please follow the steps below in order:
Create an original title
Discuss at least one significant (or seemingly insignificant) problem or concern from the reading. Also make sure you refer to the short story, poem, or play you’ve chosen (do this in your first paragraph).
Quote one or two lines from the story you’ve chosen and discuss why the passage stood out to you (do this in your second paragraph).
Write out a question of your own that the assigned reading prompts you to ask about American society or the world in general and then answer it (do this in your in third paragraph).
Upload the paper to this folder.
*Response papers are intended to gives students a way to focus on the questions the readings compel us to ask. This is an active approach to critical reading.
Length Requirement: 250 words (or 1 double-spaced page)
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.
Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
Mothers hardening like pounded stumps, out of stumps,
Out of the bones’ need to sharpen and the muscles’ to stretch,
They Lion grow.
Earth is eating trees, fence posts,
Gutted cars, earth is calling in her little ones,
“Come home, Come home!” From pig balls,
From the ferocity of pig driven to holiness,
From the furred ear and the full jowl come
The repose of the hung belly, from the purpose
They Lion grow.
From the sweet glues of the trotters
Come the sweet kinks of the fist, from the full flower
Of the hams the thorax of caves,
From “Bow Down” come “Rise Up,”
Come they Lion from the reeds of shovels,
The grained arm that pulls the hands,
They Lion grow.
From my five arms and all my hands,
From all my white sins forgiven, they feed,
From my car passing under the stars,
They Lion, from my children inherit,
From the oak turned to a wall, they Lion,
From they sack and they belly opened
And all that was hidden burning on the oil-stained earth
They feed they Lion and he comes.
Source: https://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/levine/they_feed_they_lion.php (Links to an external site.)
