Ecopoetry and Water: Study Questions TEST

Poet Forrest Gander wrote the following study questions as a learning resource to accompany his collection Ecopoetry and Water. Each set of questions appears on the poem itself as well as below.

Discussion questions for "From within my bodily singularity"

1. Fiedorczuk, a Polish poet, writes about freedom and the mingling of the human and the nonhuman. Did you know that all over your skin there are living creatures? And that inside your intestines there are parasites that help you digest your food? And that even in your DNA there is the DNA of other creatures that long ago became incorporated into us?
2. This poem occurs at the end of a series of psalms, which are poems of worship. At first the speaker says she doesn’t believe in herself, but then later in the poem, she says, about someone else: “through her I’m my own self entirely/differently, through him, through you.” Do we become ourselves through others?
3. When, in the last stanza, the author begins “and in this rain,” is she connecting the earlier sentence about becoming herself in merging with others to the rain, too? Is she saying that she becomes herself when she merges with rain, or could she mean something else?

Discussion Questions

1. The poet Samuel Gregoire is Haitian and he writes in French and Haitian Creole, the main languages of Haiti, as well as in Spanish, which is spoken in the adjacent country, the Dominican Republic. In this poem, he writes in Spanish about Haitian folktales and myths. Do the non-English words alienate you, or do their sounds and textures draw you into the poem and make you ask yourself questions? Or, how do the English words around familiar Spanish words provide a context for the poem?
2. Because Haiti and the Dominican Republic comprise a single island, much of the literature from those nations features the ocean and tales that are shared by other island countries, such as Turks and Caicos (called Ziltic in Haitian Creole), just to the north of Haiti. This poem mentions rocks, horizons, drownings, and floating islands. The first and last stanzas emphasize delirium, a condition that might affect someone in a boat looking out over endless waves reflecting sunlight. Can you connect that delirium to the strange title of the poem?
3. Knowing all of the references in the poem might help us understand it, but the poem’s sounds also create a felt meaning, don’t they? Can you point out some of the onomatopoeia that Gregoire uses? Does the poem sound very different in English than it does in Spanish? What meanings are lost and what come across in the translation?