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For your timed writing, we'll be looking at "A Story" by Li-Young Lee. Of course, on the
AP test no one is going to read you the poem, but I thought I would have a recording available
to you so you could hear it, how it's supposed to sound.
Remember, when reading a poem, even reading it to yourself, that line breaks, like this
one here, noticed how there's no punctuation on the end here of the first line, so you
need to read it as if it is all one sentence. Yes, there is a line break, which could be
significant, but it's punctuated as if it is meant to be read as one sentence.
Here we go. "A Story" by Li-Young Lee.
Sad is the man who is asked for a story and can't come up with one.
His five-year-old son waits in his lap. Not the same story, Baba. A new one.
The man rubs his chin, scratches his ear.
In a room full of books in a world of stories, he can recall
not one, and soon, he thinks, the boy will give up on his father.
Already the man lives far ahead, he sees the day this boy will go. Don't go!
Hear the alligator story! The angel story once more!
You love the spider story. You laugh at the spider.
Let me tell it!
But the boy is packing his shirts, he is looking for his keys. Are you a god,
the man screams, that I sit mute before you? Am I a god that I should never disappoint?
But the boy is here. Please, Baba, a story? It is an emotional rather than logical equation,
an earthly rather than heavenly one, which posits that a boy's supplications
and a father's love add up to silence.
OK, so now that you've heard the poem think about the diction the poet is using. What
sort of word choice has the poet made? How does that word choice set the mood of the
poem? Does the mood change?
Also think about the images of the boy in the lap of the father. But then you have the
boy older. What does that mean? How does the author convey the time shift here? If you
didn't notice the time shifts when I was reading it, why didn't you notice? Where does it shift
ahead? Where does it shift back? Is it an actual flash-forward, or something else altogether?
Also, you need to notice details. I was told by an AP grader that many students who wrote
about this poem a few years ago when it was on the test did not even notice that the boy
is five years old. It says it for you, right there that the boy is five, whereas the father
is just having a flash-forward and thinking about when the boy is older.
Think about the language. Very simple sentences. What does that mean here? We have short sentences,
very simple, and of course, in this third stanza here, the whole stanza is one long
sentence. What does that mean? What is the author conveying through the sentence structure?
And finally, the inverted syntax. From the very beginning, you get a sort of uncomfortable
sentence structure. "Sad is the man who is asked for a story and can't come up with one."
Why does the author put the word "sad" at the very beginning, instead of "The man who
is asked for a story and can't come up with one is sad"? Why does the author start with
"Sad is the man"?
Go through the poem. Look through it. What do you notice? Annotate it for things like
imagery that you've gone over the last million years of your school life. What theme, or
universal understanding, is the author conveying through the text, sentence structure, and
language?