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

You Are At The Archives for May 2012

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.

Monday 21 May 2012 in , , , ,

New on Tues: 'Paradise', by Emma Jones

Every Tuesday I'll try to post a contemporary poem. I picked Tuesday so I could have that annoyingly assonantal title.



Up first is Australian poet Emma Jones, whose first collection The Striped World was published in 2009 by Big Deal publisher Faber & Faber. It promptly went on to win the Queensland Premier's Literary Award, and good thing too, because it is brilliant. The poems are particularly interested in place: places real and imaginary, places and the people that remember it. 'Paradise' has become one of my all-time favourite poems.

What you wanted was simple: What is your kind of paradise?

Paradise
Emma Jones

Faber & Faber

What you wanted was simple:
a house with a fence and a kind of gulled
light arching up from it to shake in the poplars
or some other brand of European tree
(or was it American?) you'd plant
just for the birds to nest in and so
the crows who'd settle there
could settle like pilgrims.
Darling, all day I've watched the garden make its way
down the road. It stops at the houses
where the lights are on and the hose reel is tidy
and climbs to the windows to look inside
like a child with its eyes of flared rhododendrons
and sunflowers that shutter the wind like bombs
so buttered and brave the sweet peas gallop
and the undergrowths fizz through the fences
and pause at some to shake into asters and weep.
The garden is a mythical beast and a pilgrim.
And when the houses stroll out it eats up
their papers and screens their evangelical dogs.
Barbeque eater,
yankee doodle,
if the garden should leave
where would we age
and park our poodle?
"This is paradise," you said,
a young expansive American saint.
And widened your arms to take it in,
that suburb, spread, with seas in it.

Source: Jones, Emma. The Striped World. (London: Faber & Faber), 2009.

Sunday 20 May 2012 in ,

Poetry Analysis Scaffold

A generic poetry-analysis scaffold organised in 6 steps according to Bloom's Taxonomy. Appropriate for stages 5 and 6 students. Take, adapt, borrow from liberally, etc.


Download .docx here

Adapted from Juliet Paine's great article on poetry, Bloom's and how to scaffold students' analysis.

Paine, J.A., 2010, 'Quality and Rigour int he Teaching of Poetry in the Senior School: Using a Series of Scaffolds for Years 9 to 11', Metaphor, 2, 81.
Find it in the archives of Metaphor online.

Check out too this super-cool Bloom's digital pyramid. Look forward to hours of time-wasting potential exploring it :)

Friday 18 May 2012 in , ,

Welcome

An appropriate poem about poetry for this blog about poetry:



















































The Apple that Astonished Paris (1996; University of Arkansas Press)
Source: Poetry Foundation