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Poetry Alive and Well (LONG)
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From: Barbara Tobin <barbarat>
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2003 03:27:26 -0400
Like Linnea, poetry has a special place in my university classes (where we are currently at a frenetic time of the semester, which may explain why many of us haven't made time to contribute to this important thread, Lee).
I always start my new classes with the poem of the relevant month from John Updike's A Child's Calendar, illustrated so autobiographically by Trina Schart Hyman. I try to scatter poetry throughout the course, but do a special workshop in April. That class starts with my 'pocket poem', Beatrice Schenk de Regniers' 'Keep a Poem in Your Pocket' (a copy of which can be found in Bobbye Goldstein's wonderful little collection, Inner Chimes: Poems on Poetry.
My students all bring a favorite poem (no Prelutskys/Silversteins, by virtue of definition) from home, or can look for one in the multiple collections I bring for them to browse. They write these out on a special piece of paper, roll it, tie it with a golden thread, and hang it on our little poeTree. At the end of class, we each select one of these gift poems to take home from our tree, a sort of a 'giving tree' that gives poems. This week one of my students who is student teaching invited his sixth graders to participate, and they sent in their gift poems to hang on our tree. We wrote them back thank you notes.
Like Linnea, we do choral speaking, and since I discovered to my horror a few years ago during Winnie the Pooh's 75th birthday that some of my undergraduates never knew there was anyone besides Disney behind these delightful verses, I have taken to using the 'hums of Pooh' to get them involved first hand in 'the real thing'.
We listen to musical versions of poetry, for example some of the tracks from the American Boychoir's haunting interpretations of children's poems from Terezin (I Never Saw Another Butterfly); and Loreena McKennitt's adaptation of Alfred Noyes' 'The Highwayman' (from her album The Book of Secrets), along with Charles' Keeping's wonderful illustrated edition of this long narrative poem.
This year we have studied the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye more closely than ever, and enjoyed both her own poems and some of those she has collected from a wide variety of Middle Eastern poets. Some of these poems are quite hard for us to unravel the unfamiliar cultural layers, but the more we read them, the more we learn about the people who have been so violently flung across our television screens lately. In one of my classes we were lucky to have a young man from Iran present his author study on Nye, and share with us his favorite poems of hers.
In my other class, I selected from Nye's edited collection, The Space Between Our Footsteps, several poems written by Iraqi poets. One was Sami Mahdi, who studied economics in Baghdad and became editor of one of Iraq's leading newspapers. His 'Awakening' could almost have been written about our own city here in the northeastern U.S. It begins:
<Darkness slowly lifts/ the yawning street/ shakes off the remnants of long sleep/ garbage still heaped at the corners/ the shops still closed/ and little trees search for their reflections/ in the shining window panes>. It ends <A little while, then quickly/ the earth goes crazy/ a bus appears/ then another/ then another/ and people rush forth in every street and ally>.
Then we read Saadi Youssef's 'Freedom' (translated by Khaled Mattawa). Youssef is one of Iraq's leading poets, well known throughout the Arab world, and now residing in Paris. It's a good one for me to finish this long winded post on, and to remind ourselves that our young people need to hear the universality of some of the things we prize and notice across our diverse cultures:
<Alone, now you are free You pick a sky and name it
a sky to live in
a sky to refuse But to know that you are free and to remain free you must steady yourself on a foothold of earth so that the earth may rise so that you may give wings to all the children of the earth>
A final quote from Nye:'I can't stop believing human beings everywhere hunger for deeper-than-headline news about one another. Poetry and art are some of the best ways this heartfelt 'news' may be exchanged'.
Barbara Tobin (barbarat at gse.upenn.edu)
Received on Sat 12 Apr 2003 02:27:26 AM CDT
Date: Sat, 12 Apr 2003 03:27:26 -0400
Like Linnea, poetry has a special place in my university classes (where we are currently at a frenetic time of the semester, which may explain why many of us haven't made time to contribute to this important thread, Lee).
I always start my new classes with the poem of the relevant month from John Updike's A Child's Calendar, illustrated so autobiographically by Trina Schart Hyman. I try to scatter poetry throughout the course, but do a special workshop in April. That class starts with my 'pocket poem', Beatrice Schenk de Regniers' 'Keep a Poem in Your Pocket' (a copy of which can be found in Bobbye Goldstein's wonderful little collection, Inner Chimes: Poems on Poetry.
My students all bring a favorite poem (no Prelutskys/Silversteins, by virtue of definition) from home, or can look for one in the multiple collections I bring for them to browse. They write these out on a special piece of paper, roll it, tie it with a golden thread, and hang it on our little poeTree. At the end of class, we each select one of these gift poems to take home from our tree, a sort of a 'giving tree' that gives poems. This week one of my students who is student teaching invited his sixth graders to participate, and they sent in their gift poems to hang on our tree. We wrote them back thank you notes.
Like Linnea, we do choral speaking, and since I discovered to my horror a few years ago during Winnie the Pooh's 75th birthday that some of my undergraduates never knew there was anyone besides Disney behind these delightful verses, I have taken to using the 'hums of Pooh' to get them involved first hand in 'the real thing'.
We listen to musical versions of poetry, for example some of the tracks from the American Boychoir's haunting interpretations of children's poems from Terezin (I Never Saw Another Butterfly); and Loreena McKennitt's adaptation of Alfred Noyes' 'The Highwayman' (from her album The Book of Secrets), along with Charles' Keeping's wonderful illustrated edition of this long narrative poem.
This year we have studied the poetry of Naomi Shihab Nye more closely than ever, and enjoyed both her own poems and some of those she has collected from a wide variety of Middle Eastern poets. Some of these poems are quite hard for us to unravel the unfamiliar cultural layers, but the more we read them, the more we learn about the people who have been so violently flung across our television screens lately. In one of my classes we were lucky to have a young man from Iran present his author study on Nye, and share with us his favorite poems of hers.
In my other class, I selected from Nye's edited collection, The Space Between Our Footsteps, several poems written by Iraqi poets. One was Sami Mahdi, who studied economics in Baghdad and became editor of one of Iraq's leading newspapers. His 'Awakening' could almost have been written about our own city here in the northeastern U.S. It begins:
<Darkness slowly lifts/ the yawning street/ shakes off the remnants of long sleep/ garbage still heaped at the corners/ the shops still closed/ and little trees search for their reflections/ in the shining window panes>. It ends <A little while, then quickly/ the earth goes crazy/ a bus appears/ then another/ then another/ and people rush forth in every street and ally>.
Then we read Saadi Youssef's 'Freedom' (translated by Khaled Mattawa). Youssef is one of Iraq's leading poets, well known throughout the Arab world, and now residing in Paris. It's a good one for me to finish this long winded post on, and to remind ourselves that our young people need to hear the universality of some of the things we prize and notice across our diverse cultures:
<Alone, now you are free You pick a sky and name it
a sky to live in
a sky to refuse But to know that you are free and to remain free you must steady yourself on a foothold of earth so that the earth may rise so that you may give wings to all the children of the earth>
A final quote from Nye:'I can't stop believing human beings everywhere hunger for deeper-than-headline news about one another. Poetry and art are some of the best ways this heartfelt 'news' may be exchanged'.
Barbara Tobin (barbarat at gse.upenn.edu)
Received on Sat 12 Apr 2003 02:27:26 AM CDT
