Nancy's powerpoint included Gary Snyder's poem "Hay for the Horses" as an illustration of prepositional phrases and their descriptive power. The poem certainly is a stunning example of that. I also found myself thinking, though, about whether and how grammar (knowing the basic sentence constituents) could contribute to a classroom discussion of the poem. My American Lit. students in a web course read it and like it, but I haven't taught it in detail. He had driven half the night From far down San Joaquin Through Mariposa, up the Dangerous mountain roads, And pulled in at eight a.m. With his big truckload of hay behind the barn. With winch and ropes and hooks We stacked the bales up clean To splintery redwood rafters High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa Whirling through shingle-cracks of light, Itch of haydust in the sweaty shirt and shoes. At lunchtime under Black oak Out in the hot corral, --The old mare nosing lunchpails, Grasshopper crackling in the weeds-- "I'm sixty-eight" he said, "I first bucked hay when I was seventeen. I thought, that day I started, I sure would hate to do this all my life. And dammit, that's just what I've gone and done." Students often see the man's words at the end as quite bitter and regretful ones. I encourage them to imagine the tone and mood of those words as clearly as they can, considering the rest of the poem. What is the man's day like? What is the work like? What impressions do we get of the life? If I were conducting a leisurely class discussion, I might ask students to look at the sentences that make up the poem. Ideally, students might point out that the first two, long, descriptive ones are mostly prepositional phrases, and that the last ones stated by the man have no prepositional phrases but are full of clauses. I would hope a student would notice the pronouns starting the sentence groups: He, We, and I, and the subjects of two verbals, the old mare and grasshoppers. I might ask a question such as How do people (or living beings) fit into their environment and their work here? Are we mostly aware of the individual, or the setting of the individual? I would encourage them to notice that in the opening sentences the people (man and narrator), anonymous in the pronouns, are embedded in the environment and the working just goes by, in the locations of the prepositions, without comment or reflection. At the end, the man's consciousness becomes vocal; he remembers, reflects, reacts, without prepositions but with verbs. I think that maybe, after this kind of look, students might sense that althought the man may indeed have regrets, his words also express the awareness that (to put it colloquially) life happens, that it is what we do and it has a momentum of its own and that that's neither a good nor a bad thing. I don't want to overstate the role of basic grammar knowledge for getting into a poem such as this, but I think the ability to look at the sentences in a poem, name the basic kinds of parts, see patterns and the contrasts, and connect the structures with the moods in a general way, is helpful. It seems to me it doesn't take a specialized or detailed knowledge of grammar for this to happen, but it does take a confidence in and comfort level with the basics. Brock To join or leave this LISTSERV list, please visit the list's web interface at: http://listserv.muohio.edu/archives/ateg.html and select "Join or leave the list" Visit ATEG's web site at http://ateg.org/