Make the following observations:
- Roethke poem: Make one observation that looks at the role of a structural element. Why was it chosen?
- Hayden poem: Make one observation that investigates a structural choice and justify that choice.
*McBee article: Note one point he makes that feels important to you and clarify why this stood out to you.
Those Winter Sundays
BY ROBERT HAYDEN
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?
My Papa’s Waltz
BY THEODORE ROETHKE
The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother’s countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Theodore Roethke, "My Papa's Waltz" from Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke. Copyright 1942 by Heast
Magazines, Inc. Used by permission of Doubleday, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1961)
By Thomas Page McBee Mr. McBee is a journalist and author. Oct. 27, 2018 About a month ago, I was reading
the new novel “Lake Success,” by Gary Shteyngart, when I came across a familiar trope. The book follows the
story of a straight, white hedge fund manager, Barry Cohen, as he abandons his life to take a trip across
America via Greyhound bus. Along the way, Mr. Shteyngart’s narrator takes pains to point out — but not
engage with — two visibly transgender women, but it’s not exactly clear why. It’s not until he gets to Texas,
where Barry observes a young trans woman who is upset because she can’t afford the fare, that we learn why
he finds these women so intriguing. “She was eating ice cream and crying,” Barry says. “But even in her tears
she knew who she was.” At some point between 2011, when I transitioned, and 2018, a curious thing
happened in the relationship between trans people and popular culture. A certain subset of trans people —
usually (though not always) palatable, sympathetic and conventionally attractive — became pervasive,
appearing on magazine covers and in prestige dramas. Some even became full‑fledged celebrities. And we
took on — in some mainstream liberal circles, anyway — an often crude, if occasionally flattering, symbolism:
Our presence in a project lent it an air of edginess, sometimes even glamour. Above all, as Mr. Shteyngart’s
narrator alludes to, we were seen as authentic. And yet all these narratives emphasizing our authenticity did
little to protect us last Sunday, when those in power appeared determined to strip us of our basic rights. Very
few of the people who so enthusiastically celebrated our stories of “finally being ourselves” showed up at the
rallies that took place across the country, in the wake of news that the Trump administration aims to define us
out of existence. And even as trans people on television are increasingly beamed into living rooms across the
country, we’re also seeing an uptick of violence against the most marginalized members of our community. The
ProblemWiththeWrong Kind of Trans Visibility 11/12/2018 Opinion | The Problem With the Wrong Kind of Trans
Visibility - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/transgender-visibility-trumpmemo.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FTransgender%20issues&action=click&cont… 2/4 Trans and
nonbinary people — by most estimates, not even 1 percent of the population — have come to hold an outsize
role in our cultural imagination, especially in the minds of film directors, journalists and fashion and television
executives (who are still, with some notable exceptions, almost never trans themselves). And yet, it’s not
exactly clear what this role has done for us. L.G.B.T. activists and their supporters rally against the Trump
administration’s stance toward transgender people. on the steps of New York City Hall, October 24, 2018 in
New York City. Drew Angerer/Getty Images It’s strange being trans in 2018. Everyone knows we exist, but very
few people know one of us well enough to see us as complex, fully formed human beings. Trans people may
be on more screens and magazine covers than ever before, but for the 84 percent of Americans who believe
they’ve never met a trans person in real life, we still live in the realm of the imagination, theoretical at best.
We’ve made real progress in an astonishingly short amount of time: from seven years ago, when, as one of the
first out trans journalists in the country, I was still spending much of my time helping reporters and editors
newly attuned to trans issues use correct pronouns, to today, when a transgender candidate has won the
Democratic nomination for governor of Vermont, and shows like “Transparent” and “Pose” not only receive high
critical praise but also feature powerful trans storytellers and actors behind and in front of the camera.
11/12/2018 Opinion | The Problem With the Wrong Kind of Trans Visibility - The New York Times
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/transgender-visibility-trump-memo.html?
rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FTransgender%20issues&action=click&cont… 3/4 Which is why the backlash
feels so painful — rooted, as it is, not just in the usual demeaning rhetoric from conservatives or the ignorant
and uninformed, but also in decades‑old talking points from women calling themselves feminists who argue
that trans women aren’t women, and from those purportedly concerned about the ways social pressures may
be leading children toward medical interventions too soon — never mind the lack of concrete evidence that this
is any sort of widespread problem. Violence against trans people (and especially trans women of color) last
year was the highest it’s been since it was first measured; over half of trans boys have attempted suicide.
Erasure is a battle most of us spend our entire lives fighting against, which is why the memo from the
Department of Health and Human Services suggesting that the existence of trans people is, itself, a matter of
debate, opened old wounds. Despite all the attention on our stories, trans people almost invariably risk
tremendous loss in endeavoring to be “authentically” ourselves. The triumph you see on television only
happens if there is a welcoming world to greet us on the other side. This past week, for me, raised the question
once again: Is there? It’s probably not coincidence that the surge in trans visibility has accompanied an era of
precarious gender politics. Even before #MeToo, the boundaries of the old boys’ club that defined our political
and economic structures for hundreds of years were being challenged. Women, trans and not, who resist the
idea that men have an inherent right to their bodies — at work and at home — are upending conventional
wisdom about gender roles. At the same time, a global “masculinity crisis” has spurred both a thoughtful
examination of traditional ideas of manhood and a sometimes‑violent, vitriolic backlash. In these turbulent
times, challenging gender norms is not just the territory of trans people. But whether or not you connect to the
“authenticity” of trans stories probably says a lot about how you feel generally about gender in this moment.
Even if you don’t know a single one of us, perhaps our existence encourages you to believe that gender is
more expansive than you imagined and that progress is possible. Maybe it even reminds you that gender
policing of any kind serves the status quo, whether it’s defining people by their genitalia, monitoring wha
women wear or telling boys that “real men” don’t cry. That’s all true, and it makes sense that the trans person
(for our new supporters, anyway) seems to hold a special place in this tumultuous new landscape — some
combination of foil, role model and technological wonder. And this special place has meant that there is more
space in the wider culture for our stories. But I’ve begun to wonder whether this sense of us as special, while it
may help people who aren’t trans begin to see new possibilities for gender, also creates a kind of license for
holding us apart when the going gets tough. In 2014, Time famously declared that we’d reached a “trans
tipping point.” In the years since, the magazine has come to look both prescient and wildly wrong. “Visibility” for
trans people was supposed to help humanize us, to give the broader culture a sense of the people behind our
stories. And though that has been true, in part, the didactic, often body‑focused framing of those stories and
the gender‑war timing of that visibility has also 11/12/2018 Opinion | The Problem With the Wrong Kind of
Trans Visibility - The New York Times https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/27/opinion/transgender-visibilitytrump-memo.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FTransgender%20issues&action=click&cont… 4/4 rendered
us into symbols, metaphors, pawns and boogeymen. I believe that many people of all genders do want to see
the rigid state of our gender politics improve, not just for trans people but for all of us. But reducing trans
people into a symbolic vanguard is not only dehumanizing — it’s dangerous. True progress happens when all
of us are released from the realm of “other” — which means allowing trans people to captain our own stories,
where we can depict ourselves as fully fleshed‑out people: not just brothers, mothers, neighbors and friends,
but also reflections of an aspect of humanity as old as time. We’re not metaphors; we’re who you would have
been if you’d been born trans.