As I mentioned previously, English teachers like to obsess over the question, What is it about?

What do we mean by this question, though? What are we asking when we ask what something is about? That word about has an interesting origin. It comes from two Old English words: on + butan. Butan is a geographic word: it refers to a surrounding space. So on+butan roughly translates to on the outside of or in the neighborhood of. So when we ask, What is this about? we are, in a sense, asking What neighborhood is this? or Where are we? or What is this place? The 7th grade is learning Geography in Social Studies, and its useful to think of literature as being like a kind of geography. Lets think of a literary text as a kind of designed space, like a guided tour through a new and novel land, or a theme park with all of the characters and rides, or a garden of measured hedges and carefully composed oral colors and shapes, or a piece of architecture, a building designed to communicate a specic experience, even as you explore its every nook and cranny. Consider the poem Prayer (I) by George Herbert, written in the 17th century. Its a religious poem, and it feels very traditional and ordered and stylized, like an old high church hymn. Theres a strict pattern of rhythm and rhyme it follows: The rst line nearly rhymes with the third: age and pilgrimage The second line rhymes with the fourth: birth and earth This pattern of alternating rhymes continues in the second stanza: tower and hour, spear and fear.

Indeed, we see that this is a variation on the English, or Shakespearean, sonnet: 14 lines, alternating rhymes, a concluding couplet at the end. True to form, it also keeps a regular iambic beat, giving it that very measured, even, meditative quality. Grammatically, the poem is one long sentence, orto be more preciseone long fragment, for there is just one subject and no verb. That subject is PRAYER, announced in capital letters at the beginning of the poem, the noun form of an action. Everything that follows after that rst word is an appositive, a noun phrase describing or dening that rst word. In eect, the poem is saying, Prayer is the Churchs banquet Prayer is an Angels age Prayer is Gods breath in man returning to his birth Prayer is the soul in paraphrase Prayer is a heart in pilgrimage and so on.... Phrase after phrase, Herbert goes on to dene prayer again and again, turning it around and around and examining every side, as if it was a diamond with many facets. Prayer is universal, it is ordinary, it reaches back to the beginning of creation, it is intimate and immediate, and nally, in the end, it is something understoodit is heard and accepted by the divine, it is full of hope and devotion.

George Herberts poem has a classic, solid, traditional structure that communicates order and meditation and worship. Its like a cathedral designed to point the parishioners eyes and attention in one directionupward, to the heavens. It is overwhelming in its awe. Teresa Caders poem feels very dierent. It feels more modern, more casual, more mundane. It seems serious, even dramatic, but it keeps its focus on a very specic scene full of ordinary details. She doesnt build blocky stanzas of themes and arguments but icks through ashes of images in quick little couplets. However, there are echoes of words and phrases from Herberts earlier poem. To begin with, Cader starts with Herberts conclusion: [Prayer is] something understood becomes Understanding something isnt prayer, necessarily. She starts by reversing Herberts phrase and bringing his conclusion into doubt. She then picks up other phrases of Herbert and starts turning them on their head: Churchs banquet and exalted Manna, divine food provided to Gods people in their time of need becomes cinnamon croissants; the spear that pierced Christs side is turned into a spit for hot pretzels...under glass; God is taken out of Herberts cosmic history but is proclaimed by Cader to be in the details; a man is not garbed in Herberts holy, priestly dress, but as a smart-suited businessman in the best cuts of wool;

the reversed thunder is seen to come from a wailing, gawping baby, milky-breathed not the Milky Way; instead of a mighty intercessary engine to bend the will of the Almighty and a fortress sanctuary for the sinner, we have airplane engines racing to meet their schedules and guided by the air trac control tower; instead of a metaphorical plummet connecting heaven and earth, we have a radar plumbing the skies for airline activity; church bells are turned into bell-bottom jeans; a kind of tune, which all things hear and fear becomes heavy metal music bleeding from the earphones of a teenager. The glorious, sacred space of prayer, in other words, is picked apart to describe an ordinary day at the airport. And then the poem shifts its tone as it re-frames Herberts heart in pilgrimage to a journey of strangers locked in a tube, a foreboding way to describe passengers in an airplane. Theres an absurd faithful among them, prepared to meet the stars/ in a bi of pressured air. And we see that this is not an ordinary day at all; this is the day of September 11, 2001, and those absurd faithful are Islamic extremists who want to martyr themselves and humiliate the West. Cader repeats Herberts list of softness, joy, love, and bliss but leaves out peace. There is a slivered wish for a safe landing, a normal uneventful passage to new

destinations, the casual trips and vacations of the citizens of the most privileged and powerful nation in the world, but Cader ends by quoting an entire line from Herberts poem: the six days world would be transposed in an hour. Whereas Herbert used the line to claim that all of creation could be distilled in an hours prayer, Cader, in a dark and sorrowful irony, takes the line to mean that all of reality would shift forever, that nothing would be the same, once that plane takes o into its hours ight. What Cader does is take Herberts cathedral and tear it apart, phrase by phrase, stone by stone, timber by timber and, with the same material, make her own spacenot a church but a memorial. Her poem, too, is a kind of prayer, not full of condence and hope like Herberts, but full of doubt and dread and loss. She has made her own sacred space to reect and remember the deep and unexpected tragedy of that day. Each work of art you encounter this year will be a unique place, made and designed a particular way. Dont just pass through them, blind and ignorant. Sit and study in them, get a feel for them, try to gure out how and why each feels dierent than other placesask where its trying to take you.