School starts back today.
I'm ready to go. No soul-sucking P.D. (Professional Development) this time before the students' return. The District took our day(s) of winter holiday teacher meetings away from us this year because so many teachers failed to take advantage of the opportunity in years past. Awww...
Timeout. Idea: I will compile a list of acronyms in education for you. We're [they're] getting worse than the military. You're not going to believe it. I hate acronyms. Obama, can you criminalize acronyms in education? Executive order? That's CHANGE I can believe in!
We have a week until semester exams, time for intensive, style analysis, writing workshops. Then we get down to the business of Poetry. Dead white dudes first: John Donne (DUN!), George Herbert, Andrew Marvell; Ben Jonson, Suckling, Lovelace, Herrick (We laugh at him. Probably shouldn't, but we do.); Thomas Gray, Robbie Burns, William Blake (My favorite.); William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (My other favorite.); Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats. I've never made it any further than this. But this year, I sit poised to hit some modern American poets. Wallace Stevens, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Roethke, Ginsberg (I had wine and cheese with him after a reading at UNC Asheville and gave him my poem, "Ginsberg Wears Gap Khakis." We were both obviously out of our elements at the time. He read the title and folded it in thirds and put it in his tweed jacket-pocket [over his heart]. He was kinda cross-eyed up close. I think he threw it away. It wasn't mean. Not nice. (See Rolling Stone advertisement, mid-90's.) As he was tucking it away, he half-smiled and took time to tell me a story about two times that he visited with W.C. Williams. In hindsight, the point of the story must have been that he didn't use the precious time to criticize W.C. He was mumbling awful all night, like the whole right side of his face wouldn't work, so I might have missed something.), Michael Harper. Gimme some women, please some diversity. Elizabeth Bishop, Gwendolyn Brooks, Marianne Moore, Sylvia Plath, Dorothy Parker, Anne Sexton, Nikki Giovanni, Margaret Atwood. And I'd love to find time for Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, Yeats, W.H. Auden, Henry Reed, Dylan Thomas, e e cummings, D.H. Lawrence, John Crowe Ransom, Anne Sexton May Swenson, Jean Toomer, Richard Wilbur!, James Wright, Hart Crane, Countee Cullen, Philip Larkin, Archibald MacLeish, Rita Dove, Billie Collins, Jorie Graham, Gary Soto, Robert Penn Warren, Adrienne Rich, Cathy Song, Lawrence Ferlenghetti, Raymond Carver, Sandra Cisneros, and Louise Erdrich!
I can't wait, but I need help; I need to cull the list, and I'd love specific suggestions. How can I group those guys after the Romantics to get them all in?
Influential poets and poems from your own secret educations?
Y'all have a great new year now. I may vanish like peanut butter fudge.
--MJF
2 comments:
Oh my! I cannot imagine being in high school again and having to digest all of these poets in such a short time. I know I did not (and still do not) fully appreciate or comprehend the greatness of it all. You have your work cut out for you, but I know you will do it all justice. Here are two not in your list: Jane Kenyon, who is more contemporary (but unfortunately dead) http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=175711 and Stephen Spender "I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through corridors of light where the hours are suns
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.
What is precious is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.
Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they traveled a short while towards the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor."
I have no advice on how to group all those poets...maybe let each kid "become" a poet of their choice or yours. Let them become the expert and let them teach their peers. Kids tend to listen to other kids. They speak the same language. As young as you and I feel, we are not kids and we do not entirely speak their language. Just a thought. I teach elementary though. May be totally different from high school.
can i swipe my finger in the peanut butter?
robert frost. did i miss him on the list? his poetry was written on the ground at 'the wall.' in a circle. i loved it.
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