CCBC-Net Archives
[CCBC-Net] CCBC-Net Digest, Vol 33, Issue 9: Poetry
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From: Jean Hildreth <jhildreth>
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:04:53 -0500
The letter from Thom Barthelmess struck a chord with me. I was raised on so much oral poetry, from Miilne's James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George DuPree to Shakespeare's, "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue..." that for years I honestly thought my father had made it all up. In his final year, confined to a nursing home, legally blind and frequently quite deaf when callously deprived of his hearing aids, he sustained his sanity, heart, and soul with the poetry he had committed to memory over countless years as an avid, passionate reader and lover of language. He also, with his recitals, shook more than one M.D. out of his/her demeaning ignorance after the M.D. casually confused deafness with dementia. (Egad.) I frequently suggest to friends and colleagues that we begin adding to our memory banks NOW; one cannot always depend upon having either book or pc close at hand.
When it comes to teaching poetry, I have the pleasure of doing it one-on-one, with Forensics participants. I suggest that they begin by thinking of it as prose "with all of the crap left out" -- bare, essential language, vibrating with life.....the nearest thing in human language to music, a resonance. And no matter how sure I am (before we begin work on a poem) of the "meaning" of that particular piece, by the time the student is performance-ready, I have always been shown some additional (and often astonishingly wonderful!) nuances in the poem! Perhaps in order to "teach" poetry, one must be careful to remain open to learning, to following one's students where the poem takes them. Prepare them to travel somewhere unexpected with a good poem, to be surprised, delighted, somehow enlightened....and never forget to pack your own suitcase.
Jean Hildreth Luxemburg-Casco Middle School Casco, WI
P.S. Please, could someone advise me how NOT to have my CCBC comments re-run, several times in the same volume or issue? I must do something wrong in addressing my reply, and find it quite mortifying to appear multiple times!
Received on Wed 09 Apr 2008 01:04:53 PM CDT
Date: Wed, 09 Apr 2008 13:04:53 -0500
The letter from Thom Barthelmess struck a chord with me. I was raised on so much oral poetry, from Miilne's James James Morrison Morrison Weatherby George DuPree to Shakespeare's, "Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounc'd it to you, trippingly on the tongue..." that for years I honestly thought my father had made it all up. In his final year, confined to a nursing home, legally blind and frequently quite deaf when callously deprived of his hearing aids, he sustained his sanity, heart, and soul with the poetry he had committed to memory over countless years as an avid, passionate reader and lover of language. He also, with his recitals, shook more than one M.D. out of his/her demeaning ignorance after the M.D. casually confused deafness with dementia. (Egad.) I frequently suggest to friends and colleagues that we begin adding to our memory banks NOW; one cannot always depend upon having either book or pc close at hand.
When it comes to teaching poetry, I have the pleasure of doing it one-on-one, with Forensics participants. I suggest that they begin by thinking of it as prose "with all of the crap left out" -- bare, essential language, vibrating with life.....the nearest thing in human language to music, a resonance. And no matter how sure I am (before we begin work on a poem) of the "meaning" of that particular piece, by the time the student is performance-ready, I have always been shown some additional (and often astonishingly wonderful!) nuances in the poem! Perhaps in order to "teach" poetry, one must be careful to remain open to learning, to following one's students where the poem takes them. Prepare them to travel somewhere unexpected with a good poem, to be surprised, delighted, somehow enlightened....and never forget to pack your own suitcase.
Jean Hildreth Luxemburg-Casco Middle School Casco, WI
P.S. Please, could someone advise me how NOT to have my CCBC comments re-run, several times in the same volume or issue? I must do something wrong in addressing my reply, and find it quite mortifying to appear multiple times!
Received on Wed 09 Apr 2008 01:04:53 PM CDT
