Origin Story — Eduqas GCSE English Literature C720
Eduqas GCSE English Literature · C720
Origin Story
The poems
What you need to know
The speaker's account of how her parents met and loved, compared to a comic book that is read until it falls apart.
How Ewing's Chicago family and her work as a comics writer shape the poem, and how its free verse, lower-case lines and extended metaphor work.
How to use the lesson's key quotations in an essay, with a short worked paragraph.
Key quotations: 'my mother and my father / met at the Greyhound bus station', 'in the mid-eighties in Chicago', 'all thick glass and afro puff', 'played tambourine in a Chaka Khan cover band', 'all sleeveless and soft eye', 'mimeographed communist newspapers', 'love is like a comic book. it’s fragile', 'it never saw polyvinyl, never felt a backing', 'memorized, mishandled, worn thin, staples rusted', 'a love like that doesn’t last / but it has a good ending'.
Form: free verse in two stanzas, how the parents met and then love as a comic book, with lower-case sentence openings; the parents shown in matching portraits; lists of what happens to a well-read comic; and a title borrowed from the stories of how heroes began.
Context: Ewing, born in 1986 and raised in Chicago by a mother who worked in radio and a father who was an artist; her collection Electric Arches (2017), based on her own life; and her work writing Marvel comics.
Compares well with: Sonnet 29 and Dusting the Phone on love; Catrin on family; Blackberry Picking on things that do not last; Cousin Kate on love that ends.
