Annotate "Assembly Line" using the detailed step by step provided in class today.
Start thinking about a variety of ways in which you could organize a commentary on this poem.
Finish memorizing your poem. I will start with the end of the alphabet in calling you up to my desk to recite. If we do not finish, we will continue recitations on Tuesday.
Shu Ting is the pen name of Gong Peiyu. Associated with the Misty school, she was the leading woman poet in China in the 1980s. A southeast Fujian native, she was sent to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution before she graduated from junior high school. Then she worked in a cement factory and later a textile mill and a lightbulb factory and began to write poetry. In 1979 she published her first poem and in 1983 was asked to be a professional writer by the Writers' Association, Fujian Branch, of which she now is the deputy chairperson. Her collections of poetry include Brigantines (1982) and Selected Lyrics of Shu Ting and Gu Cheng (1985). She won the National Poetry Award in 1981 and 1983, but she was also attacked in the early 1980s (during the Anti-Spiritual Pollution Campaign, along with many of the other Misty Poets). Her work is deeply romantic in nature, and must be understood as a reaction to the repression of romance in literature, film, song and theater during the decade long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966 1976). Her tender, romantic poems sometimes don't play as well in English translation as they do in Chinese, since modern and postmodern sensibilities have outmoded such sentiment, but her poems have a crystalline, lyrical strength that often saves her from her own saccharine tendencies and that has made her the best known contemporary Chinese woman poet in the West. She has also published several books of prose.
