PRETENTIOUS LATIN TITLE. DOWN TO EARTH POETRY, TEACHING & LEARNING

Friday, 1 June 2012 in , , , , ,

Samuel Wagan Watson, 'jaded Olympic moments'

Cathy Freeman carries the Australian and Indigenous flags on her
victory lap after winning Gold at the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games.
Image credit: Allsport va Getty Images: Nick Wilson.

Samuel Wagan Watson was born in 1972, of Irish, German, Bundjalung and Birrigubba descent. His dad is novelist and political activist Sam Watson. Watson has published six books of poetry; 2004's Smoke Encrypted Whispers won the NSW Premier's Literary Award and the Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry.

Watson writes vividly of everyday experience in imagistic yet tactile language, is brilliantly intertextual and postmodern, with a sharp understanding of postcolonial politics and the nature of the Australian identity. He is also my favourite contemporary Australian poet.

Many of Watson's poems are easily accessible to high school students, and allow scope for talking about the Big Issues of contemporary Australia. His is a richly textured voice that is nevertheless relatable - a voice kids can talk to, rather than just about.

'jaded Olympic moments' takes place on the eve of the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, and juxtaposes a recent break-in and theft with the pageantry and patriotism of the Opening Ceremony to make a point about the place of Indigenous Australians in the Australian identity and its history. A good comparison text is unofficial Olympic poet's Mark O'Connor's 'Coming Home Strong', written for Cathy Freeman after her Gold medal win at the Games. I've included links to questions, a scaffold of themes and an annotated copy of the poem below the text.

jaded Olympic moments
for Jennifer Cullen



they made their way through the sliding-door
and stole the lot
                        video, mini-disc equipment, fly-fishing reels, my
                        son’s piggy bank
and my literary award
                                    all on the eve of the Games
capping off a sterling period of post-funeral melancholy
after my young cousin’s passing

then, sitting on Jen’s couch
as the ochre-kissed women came out
and did their thing in the center of the stadium
we had tears in our eyes
                                    thinking, that’s our mob!
but no,
only a romantic would think that
it’s still very much an US and THEM kind of deal in this
            modern dreaming,
we’re city people without a language
                                                            and some of us have even less
but then the coppers rang
            said they’d caught them
                                                three smack-head white boys
                                                                                             18, 19, 20
the gear was gone without a trace
                                    the video, the piggy bank, the literary award
and it made sense
                           ‘cause if blackfellas had broken into the house
they would have taken Dad’s 10ft Landrights flag

‘cause it was worth just as much
                                                    as Cathy Freeman’s gold


Questions

Annotated poem

Themes scaffold

Wednesday, 30 May 2012 in , , , , ,

J.D. Salinger says True Things about poetry

True that, J.D. 

Beautiful artwork by Obvious State on Etsy. Go buy what I am too poor for.

This quotation always makes me think of 'February' by Margaret Atwood, which despite its Northern hemisphere name, is really quite appropriate for this time of year:

FebruaryMargaret Atwood


Winter. Time to eat fat
and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,
a black fur sausage with yellow
Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries
to get onto my head. It’s his
way of telling whether or not I’m dead.
If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am
He’ll think of something. He settles
on my chest, breathing his breath
of burped-up meat and musty sofas,
purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,
not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,
declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,
which are what will finish us off
in the long run. Some cat owners around here
should snip a few testicles. If we wise
hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,
or eat our young, like sharks.
But it’s love that does us in. Over and over
again, He shoots, he scores! and famine
crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing
eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits
thirty below, and pollution pours
out of our chimneys to keep us warm.
February, month of despair,
with a skewered heart in the centre.
I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries
with a splash of vinegar.
Cat, enough of your greedy whining
and your small pink bumhole.
Off my face! You’re the life principle,
more or less, so get going
on a little optimism around here.
Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

Source: Morning in the Burned House, 1995, Houghton Mifflin Company.

Tuesday, 29 May 2012 in , , ,

I saw the best minds of my generation...

Allen Ginsberg reading “Howl” in Washington Square in 1966. Associated Press
'Howl' is quintessential. Quintessentially American. Quintessentially Beat. Quintessentially poetic. Fun fact: fellow poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of the famous Beat bookshop City Lights Books, was charged disseminating obscene literature after publishing Ginsberg's poem. In 1957, Judge Clayton W. Horn ruled that the book had 'redeeming social importance' and was thus not obscene. Thank god for that redeeming social importance, hey? Yet, in 2007, a planned broadcast of the poem was pulled for fears its content would see the station fined by the FCC. Yes, in 2007.

Did you also know that 'Howl' is now an amazing graphic novel by Eric Drooker?

 The mood and atmosphere of Drooker's artwork is perfect.
Copyright E. Drooker http://drooker.com/books/howl_pages.html
Buy Howl: the Graphic Novel by Eric Drooker at Fishpond.

Monday, 28 May 2012 in , , ,

Poetry and VoiceThread


VoiceThread is a cool little online application that lets you record via your computer's mic and upload the audio along with accompanying images, video and documents. It practically screams oral poetry recitation. Talk to the kids about poetry slams and then get them to upload a reading - of their own or someone else's work. Maybe someone would like to conquer Lewis Carrol's indomitable 'Jabberwocky':


`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe:
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
  The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
  The frumious Bandersnatch!"
He took his vorpal sword in hand:
  Long time the manxome foe he sought --
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
  And stood awhile in thought.
And, as in uffish thought he stood,
  The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
  And burbled as it came!
One, two! One, two! And through and through
  The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
  He went galumphing back.
"And, has thou slain the Jabberwock?
  Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!'
  He chortled in his joy.


`Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
  Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
  And the mome raths outgrabe.

From Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, 1872

Friday, 25 May 2012 in

to live poetry


Wednesday, 23 May 2012 in , , , , , ,

W.H. Auden, 'Musee Des Beaux Arts'

The Fall of Icarus, as depicted by artist Frank Wright.
Icarus. 1971. 15/16x5. Engraving.
http://www.gwu.edu/~fwright/graphics/icarus.html

Most people have some knowledge of Greek mythology. It's almost impossible not to, what with everything from summer blockbusters to children's novels borrowing from the old stories. There are endless fun things to do tracking the development of those seminal stories over time, from Ovid's Metamorphoses to Percy Jackson. W. H. Auden wrote 'Musee Des Beaux Arts' in response Brueghel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which is obviously about the Ovidian story of Icarus, the boy who flew too close to the sun. One day someone will do a musical based on the poem based on the painting based on the story, and then we'll really be cooking with gas.

Read Ovid's retelling of the myth of Icarus and Daedalus from Metamorphoses. Notice the juxtaposition between the everyday and extraordinary - this is Ovid's twist on the tale and the element Breughel focused on in his painting.

Both painting and poem are beautiful meditations on tragedy and the cyclical nature of human life.

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. Held at the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of
Belgium. Fun Fact: the painting we know is in fact most probably a very good
copy of Brueghel's original, completed sometime in the 1560s.
Musee Des Beaux Arts
W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Source: Another Time, 1940.

Tuesday, 22 May 2012 in , , , ,

Three Little Pigs Get Poetic



"Little piggy little piggy, let me in!"
"Not by the hair of my chinny chin chin!"

Fractured fairytales are awesome. Fractured fairytales and poetry are better. Roald Dahl's Revolting Rhymes are great read-aloud material. The recent, brilliant Guardian Three Little Pigs commercial made me think of Dahl's take on the pigs and their wolfish antagonist.

Find Roald Dahl's 'Three Little Pigs' Revolting Rhyme here.



The Guardian Open Journalism: how would The
Three Little Pigs hit the press today?


                                        
Roald Dahl's Three Little Pigs animated.