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[CCBC-Net] Being with a Poem
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From: Barthelmess, Thom <Thomas.Barthelmess>
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2008 15:16:22 -0500
Megan's post reminded me of a piece of my own family history, that also touches on the recent discussion about dissection vs. assumption. I know that personal accounts don't always merit a place in literary discussion, but I offer it, all the same.
We lost my mother to pancreatic cancer some four years ago. The disease is a horrible one, the "five hundred pound gorilla of cancers" her oncologist called it, and the pain it brought required heavy doses of morphine just to tolerate it. That meant that, from early on in the diagnosis, my mother, a classics professor, poetry maven, and something of an intellectual giant, was often lost to us. She lived in a frantic haze, preoccupied with hallucinated details of posted paper menus and hospital ceiling tiles. We spent a lot of time reading to her, and I'll never forget an afternoon when my father read aloud the first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty." My mother grabbed onto the familiar thread, and recited the poem herself, inflected with her distinct nobility, all of a sudden lucid as a mirror. I can never know to what degree the poem's meaning to her, however she might have arrived at it, offered some mitigation to her suffering. But I do know that its resonance pierced the pharmaceutical fog and
allowed her to touch for a moment a world otherwise out of reach.
I appreciate the intellectual stimulation of an academic approach to poetry. At the same time I, love losing myself to its spirit, reveling in the responses it brings without attention to its process. And I posit that the combination of the two, coming to poetry with our heads and our hearts, can plant indelible comfort. It certainly did for my mother.
Here's the poem, by the way:
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;
And ?ll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, sp?re, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckl?d (who knows how?)
With sw?ft, sl?w; sweet, s?ur; ad?zzle, d?m;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is p?st change:
Pr?ise h?m.
thom barthelmess youth services manager austin public library 800 guadalupe, austin, tx 78701 512.974.7405 - vox 512.974.7587 - fax http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/library
-----Original Message----- From: ccbc-net-bounces at ccbc.ad.education.wisc.edu [mailto:ccbc-net-bounces at ccbc.ad.education.wisc.edu] On Behalf Of Megan Schliesman Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 8:56 AM To: ccbc-net, Subscribers of Subject: [CCBC-Net] Being with a Poem
Last week I read a new short story collection called "Owning It: Stories about Teens with Disabilities" edited by Donald R. Gallo (Candlewick). The final story in the collection is by Robert Lipsyte and titled "Let's Hear It for Fire Team Bravo." The main character is a teenage boy named Michael who has been diagnosed with testicular cancer. He has a roommate, another teen named Eddie, who is refusing treatment for cancer and shuns attempts to connect. But Eddie likes poetry, and quotes cryptically from one particular poem.
The relationship of the story's narrator to poetry--and to a specific poem--reminded me of our entire discussion, going back to Ruth's initial question in response to the fact that some people dismiss poetry because the don't "understand" it. Ruth asked:
"Don't the words have their own songs, rhythms, surface? Is there a need to go under?"
In the story, when Michael first realizes Eddie is referencing a poem, he reveals, "I hated poetry. I didn't understand it. I thought people who said they did were fakers or people who looked down on me or both."
Later, in an attempt to have something in common with Eddie, he seeks out the poem and memorizes a line or two that he can quote back. But then he spends more time with the poem and discovers, "Maybe you have to be in the mood. After I read B.B.'s poem five or six times in the lounge on the roof, it began to make some sense."
And that's the thing about poetry. It demands that we slow down and spend some time with it. And if you read a poem several times I don't think there is a need "to go under," at least consciously. I think that meaning starts to take shape for the reader. Whether or not it is the author's meaning is a whole different dimension of being with a poem, but it starts by spending that time.
The question of meaning--including the author's meaning--is one that Michael and Eddie do argue about in the story, however. The poem is about sickness, and for Eddie, the poet is saying that you don't have to take it--you don't have to give in to the demands of doctors and others. You can choose to walk away. But Michael sees that one of the keys to getting Eddie to stick it out and agree to treatment is to get him to see that the poet was a fighter. "He didn't wimp out. He went the distance," he tells him.
So meaning matters, too, of course--the meanings we make of the poems we read, and the spaces we can create for discussing what we understand.
Megan
Megan Schliesman, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison
608/262-9503 schliesman at education.wisc.edu
www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/
_______________________________________________ CCBC-Net mailing list CCBC-Net at ccbc.education.wisc.edu Visit this link to read archives or to unsubscribe... http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/mailman/listinfo/ccbc-net
Received on Tue 08 Apr 2008 03:16:22 PM CDT
Date: Tue, 8 Apr 2008 15:16:22 -0500
Megan's post reminded me of a piece of my own family history, that also touches on the recent discussion about dissection vs. assumption. I know that personal accounts don't always merit a place in literary discussion, but I offer it, all the same.
We lost my mother to pancreatic cancer some four years ago. The disease is a horrible one, the "five hundred pound gorilla of cancers" her oncologist called it, and the pain it brought required heavy doses of morphine just to tolerate it. That meant that, from early on in the diagnosis, my mother, a classics professor, poetry maven, and something of an intellectual giant, was often lost to us. She lived in a frantic haze, preoccupied with hallucinated details of posted paper menus and hospital ceiling tiles. We spent a lot of time reading to her, and I'll never forget an afternoon when my father read aloud the first line of Gerard Manley Hopkins' "Pied Beauty." My mother grabbed onto the familiar thread, and recited the poem herself, inflected with her distinct nobility, all of a sudden lucid as a mirror. I can never know to what degree the poem's meaning to her, however she might have arrived at it, offered some mitigation to her suffering. But I do know that its resonance pierced the pharmaceutical fog and
allowed her to touch for a moment a world otherwise out of reach.
I appreciate the intellectual stimulation of an academic approach to poetry. At the same time I, love losing myself to its spirit, reveling in the responses it brings without attention to its process. And I posit that the combination of the two, coming to poetry with our heads and our hearts, can plant indelible comfort. It certainly did for my mother.
Here's the poem, by the way:
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)
Pied Beauty
Glory be to God for dappled things-
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced-fold, fallow, and plough;
And ?ll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, sp?re, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckl?d (who knows how?)
With sw?ft, sl?w; sweet, s?ur; ad?zzle, d?m;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is p?st change:
Pr?ise h?m.
thom barthelmess youth services manager austin public library 800 guadalupe, austin, tx 78701 512.974.7405 - vox 512.974.7587 - fax http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/library
-----Original Message----- From: ccbc-net-bounces at ccbc.ad.education.wisc.edu [mailto:ccbc-net-bounces at ccbc.ad.education.wisc.edu] On Behalf Of Megan Schliesman Sent: Tuesday, April 08, 2008 8:56 AM To: ccbc-net, Subscribers of Subject: [CCBC-Net] Being with a Poem
Last week I read a new short story collection called "Owning It: Stories about Teens with Disabilities" edited by Donald R. Gallo (Candlewick). The final story in the collection is by Robert Lipsyte and titled "Let's Hear It for Fire Team Bravo." The main character is a teenage boy named Michael who has been diagnosed with testicular cancer. He has a roommate, another teen named Eddie, who is refusing treatment for cancer and shuns attempts to connect. But Eddie likes poetry, and quotes cryptically from one particular poem.
The relationship of the story's narrator to poetry--and to a specific poem--reminded me of our entire discussion, going back to Ruth's initial question in response to the fact that some people dismiss poetry because the don't "understand" it. Ruth asked:
"Don't the words have their own songs, rhythms, surface? Is there a need to go under?"
In the story, when Michael first realizes Eddie is referencing a poem, he reveals, "I hated poetry. I didn't understand it. I thought people who said they did were fakers or people who looked down on me or both."
Later, in an attempt to have something in common with Eddie, he seeks out the poem and memorizes a line or two that he can quote back. But then he spends more time with the poem and discovers, "Maybe you have to be in the mood. After I read B.B.'s poem five or six times in the lounge on the roof, it began to make some sense."
And that's the thing about poetry. It demands that we slow down and spend some time with it. And if you read a poem several times I don't think there is a need "to go under," at least consciously. I think that meaning starts to take shape for the reader. Whether or not it is the author's meaning is a whole different dimension of being with a poem, but it starts by spending that time.
The question of meaning--including the author's meaning--is one that Michael and Eddie do argue about in the story, however. The poem is about sickness, and for Eddie, the poet is saying that you don't have to take it--you don't have to give in to the demands of doctors and others. You can choose to walk away. But Michael sees that one of the keys to getting Eddie to stick it out and agree to treatment is to get him to see that the poet was a fighter. "He didn't wimp out. He went the distance," he tells him.
So meaning matters, too, of course--the meanings we make of the poems we read, and the spaces we can create for discussing what we understand.
Megan
Megan Schliesman, Librarian Cooperative Children's Book Center School of Education, University of Wisconsin-Madison
608/262-9503 schliesman at education.wisc.edu
www.education.wisc.edu/ccbc/
_______________________________________________ CCBC-Net mailing list CCBC-Net at ccbc.education.wisc.edu Visit this link to read archives or to unsubscribe... http://ccbc.education.wisc.edu/mailman/listinfo/ccbc-net
Received on Tue 08 Apr 2008 03:16:22 PM CDT
