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    A Study Guide for Claribel Alegria's "Accounting"
    A Study Guide for Claribel Alegria's "Accounting"
    A Study Guide for Claribel Alegria's "Accounting"
    Ebook37 pages27 minutes

    A Study Guide for Claribel Alegria's "Accounting"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Claribel Alegria's "Accounting," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 26, 2016
    ISBN9781535817585
    A Study Guide for Claribel Alegria's "Accounting"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Claribel Alegria's "Accounting" - Gale

      1

      Accounting

      Claribel Alegría

      1993

      Introduction

      Claribel Alegría's poem Accounting was first published in English by Curbstone Press in 1993 as part of a collection of poems in her book, Fugues. Although only twenty-six lines in length, the poem is saturated with a collection of autobiographical images as diverse as her happiness as a child, playing in puddles of water, and her grief at her mother's death. Alegría refers to the vignettes in her poem as electrical instants. These snapshots of her life are only brief moments, but they tell the poet's own story. The title, Accounting, can refer to the systematic presentation of the data that comprises her life. That is what accountants do. They examine financial data, list and interpret it, and balance the account. This is what Alegría has done with this poem. Her poem is an elegy that provides an accounting of her memories over a large span of years. The events and people mentioned in the poem are representative of several of the locations in which she has lived, and thus her memories become the source material for the poem. When Alegría wrote Accounting, she had been writing poetry for sixty-two years. This poem appears in one of her latest collections of poetry, and so its publication also serves as a reflection of her creative life.

      Author Biography

      Claribel Alegría was born May 12, 1924 in Esteli, Nicaragua. When Alegría was nine months old, the family fled the occupation of Nicaragua for El Salvador. Alegría grew up in Santa Ana, El Salvador, and attended a progressive school, Jose Ingenieros, which was named after the Argentinean philosopher. From the time she was nine months old until she was eighteen, Alegría and her family lived as exiles from their native Nicaragua.

      When Alegría was only six years old, she began to create her own poems. Her mother carefully wrote down the poems that Alegría dictated. Then, when she was fourteen, Alegría read Rainer Maria Rilke's, Letters to a Young Poet. Rilke's letters, written in 1903, had a profound effect on Alegría's young life. In virtually every interview ever given, she has recounted how, upon reading Rilke's letters, she suddenly knew that she wanted to be a poet. By the time she was sixteen, Alegría was writing poetry with

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