Where+I+Come+From

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** Where I Come From ** ** Elizabeth Brewster ** ** The Poem ** People are made of places. They carry with them hints of jungles or mountains, a tropic grace or the cool eyes of sea gazers. Atmosphere of cities how different drops from them, like the smell of smog or the almost-not-smell of tulips in the spring, nature tidily plotted with a guidebook; or the smell of work, glue factories maybe, chromium-plated offices; smell of subways crowded at rush hours.

Where I come from, people carry woods in their minds, acres of pine woods; blueberry patches in the burned-out bush; wooden farmhouses, old, in need of paint, with yards where hens and chickens circle about, clucking aimlessly; battered schoolhouses behind which violets grow. Spring and winter are the mind's chief seasons: ice and the breaking of ice.

A door in the mind blows open, and there blows a frosty wind from fields of snow.

1. Think about Brewster's opening phrase, ' People are made of places.' What does that mean to you? 2. Where are you from? List 5 places where you have lived or travelled to and then briefly note how that place moulded you as a person. eg Shanghai. Its over-population and general indifference towards the individual has made me self-reliant.
 * Introductory Activity**




 * Questions to consider**
 * What // smells // can you find in the poem? How would you describe them?
 * What is the effect of the numerous lists in the poem?
 * Explore the syntax of the poem.
 * Why do you think the poet has chosen to describe people in terms of places?
 * Comment on any instances of rhyme that you find.
 * Much use is made of caesura. What impact does this have on the poem?
 * How do you think the narrator of the poem feels about ‘where I come from’? Explain your answer.
 * Draw and outline of yourself and inside collect / illustrate the outline with images of places that represent you. Be prepared to share your work with the class.
 * Complete the following table by considering the images’ depiction of people:



- Elizabeth Brewster was born in 1922 in the small lumber town of Chipman, New Brunswick, Canada. - As a young poet in the 1940s, Elizabeth Brewster wrote in an almost desperate attempt to order the chaos of her own psyche. - Most of Brewster’s early poetry was based on rural and small-town rather than urban experience and that it was mainly traditional in form. - The bulk of her poems centre around trees, oceans, cabins and childhood recollections, lulling the reader into a state of rustic complacency.
 * Elizabeth Brewster Mini-Biography**