Poetry Friday: Remembering and Forgetting

This time of year, I'm thinking a lot about remembering and perhaps even more about forgetting. My students are taking tests, so I'm finding out what they did and didn't learn. Even in the act of administering the tests, I'm humbled about my ability to impart anything to my kids. I give instructions, hand out the test, then answer all the questions that my instructions already answered.

There are many things I want my students to remember about this year, and there are many I want them to forget. I want them to remember what I taught them about books and poems and about how they can move and excite and teach us. I want them to remember how wonderful it is to work on a piece of writing until it shines and expresses exactly what you meant to say. But I want them to forget the days I was sarcastic and impatient. I want them to forget anything I said that was discouraging or made them feel less than the creatures of infinite value which they are. But I can't choose what they will remember and what they won't.

Yesterday on Your Daily Poem, there was this poem:


Memory

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings,
And yet recalls the very hour—
’Twas noon by yonder village tower,
And on the last blue noon in May—
The wind came briskly up this way,
Crisping the brook beside the road;
Then, pausing here, set down its load
Of pine-scents, and shook listlessly
Two petals from that wild-rose tree.


This made me think of Billy Collins' poem on the same subject.



Forgetfulness

Billy Collins

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.


The capital of Paraguay is one of the things Billy Collins' persona has forgotten, and that's one thing I won't ever forget, because I've been there. My brother got married there, and it's part of my memory in a way those random facts he mentions are not. I hope the same for my students, that at least some of what they have experienced this year will be part of their memory even when the random facts have slipped away.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Mom Enough

It's Haitian Mother's Day. My friend Beth posted this photo on Facebook. It was taken right after the earthquake in Haiti in January 2010.

Recently Time magazine published a story about attachment parenting with a photo of a woman breastfeeding on the cover. The caption was "Are you mom enough?" Don't we all wonder that, deep down, as mothers? Are we doing enough, teaching enough? We know we love enough, but are we expressing it in the right way to help our children become the people they should be? Breastfeeding is wonderful, but being mom enough is not about how long you breastfeed (and I say this as a mother who breastfed a long time).

Is this woman, nursing her injured child while lying on the ground after an earthquake, mom enough? You bet she is. Because she keeps going and does what she has to do to care for her child. Haitian mamas are mom enough.

Here's my post for Haitian Mother's Day in 2010. It includes a song sung by a Haitian musician for her mother.

Poetry Friday: Poinciana

The flamboyant trees are in bloom here in Haiti, and I took this picture this week over the wall of the basketball court at school. I was thinking of a poem, but never got it written, what with all the grading I've been doing. I decided to browse Google and see if anybody else had written anything about this beautiful tree, and learned to my surprise that the other name for it is the poinciana. And sure enough, there's a song about it! (Don't ask me why this video has the photo that it does. I suggest you listen to the music while looking above at my photo. There you go, isn't that better?)



Here are the lyrics:


Poinciana

Blow...tropic wind...
Sing a song...through the trees.


Trees...sigh to me...
Soon my love...I will see.


Poinciana,
Your branches speak to me of love.
Pale moon is casting shadows from above.


Poinciana,
Somehow I feel the jungle heat
Within me, there grows a rhythmic, savage
beat.


Love is everywhere, its magic perfume fills the air.
To and fro, you sway, my heart's in time,
I've learned to care.


Poinciana,
From now until the dawning day,
I'll learn to love forever come what may.


Blow....tropic wind,
Sing a song through the trees.
Trees...sigh to me
Soon my love... I will see.



This song has been performed by many musicians (here's a sampling) but was written by Bernier and Simon, again according to Google. (How did I ever find anything out before Google?)

So what with the jungle heat and the rhythmic savage beat, our semester is jigging to an end. This time next week I'll have taught my last full school day of the year. Hooray!

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

Poetry Friday: Oceans

This week I listened to this program on a podcast. It's an interview with Sherry Turkle, who wrote Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Some of what Turkle said made me think about a poem I wrote a couple of months ago. It's about an experience a good friend had with technology.


He Seeks Oceans

Testing the new software,
He says, "Oceans" into his smart phone.
What will the cheerful, pleasant female voice suggest
To this man in a landlocked state,
Six hundred miles from surf, sand, and mermaids?
Will she counsel a ten-hour road trip
To the closest seaside town?
Or a ten-minute drive to a lobster restaurant?
Will she bring up alternative swimming experiences
Such as creeks, lakes, and public pools?

But no. She immediately replies,
"Ocean View Liquor Store," and gives the address and helpful directions.
The liquor store is surely no substitute for the ocean,
Any more than a lightbulb substitutes for the moon,
Or a one night stand for true, eternal love,
Or a cleverly designed smart phone,
However brilliant the virtual advisor,
For a much-loved human voice
Proposing a walk on the beach,
The shallow edge of endless ocean depths.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com


Early morning at the ocean (the real thing). Taken at Jacmel, Haiti, last December.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

If I Had $120 Million...

Photo Credit

Earlier this month a version of the Munch painting "The Scream" sold for $120 million. Here is an interesting New York Times article entitled, "If I Had the Cash, I Wouldn't Buy That." The author, Holland Cotter, details some other artwork he would buy if he had that kind of money, and concludes the article this way:

"Of course I never will start a museum, or, apart from an odd or end, an art collection. Part of me doesn’t warm to owning precious things. I’m glad there are museums where art can be kept, dusted and safe and out of my apartment. Personally I love ideas as much as objects, not that I can separate them: I feel ideas are as sensuous as things.

What I collect are experiences — traveling, seeing, being there, anywhere. For me “The Scream” will always mean the memory of a moody Oslo twilight from decades ago. The value of that experience to me is beyond price. When I hear $120 million, I think of how many experiences, for how many people, that might have bought."

Experiences. Yes, I agree with Cotter. I think the experiences are worth more, too. But I also think about a world where hunger is the #1 health risk and one out of seven people goes to bed hungry. A world where every 20 seconds, a child dies from a water-related illness that could be prevented by access to clean water. A world where measles still kills about 380 children per day. And I wonder, $120 million dollars for one painting? Is this really justifiable?

I love art, music, poetry; many people consider these things frills or luxuries. To me they are not. In Haiti they are not. Haiti may be poor, but it is full of all three; art flourishes here. I'm not saying that nobody should enjoy beauty. I know that art saves lives, as my friend Jess always says. I know that beauty has a way of changing things, as my friend Shelley says. (One could argue about whether or not "The Scream" fits anybody's definition of beauty, but clearly it expresses something about being a human being.)

But, really, $120 million? How can the world be such a lopsided place, where one painting goes for that much money, and children die for the lack of basic necessities like food, water, and vaccines? How can we put more value on a piece of canvas than on human life? Yes, that money could have bought a lot of experiences for a lot of people, as Cotter says. But it could also have saved countless lives. To me, that is something to scream about.

Poetry Friday: The Color of Lost Rooms

A couple of weeks ago, I won a copy of Irene Latham's book The Color of Lost Rooms in a blog giveaway. I was amazed at how quickly it got here; I received it last Friday. I've read it through, most of the poems more than once, but I know I'll be reading it many more times.

Yes, this is our very own Irene Latham, who's hosting Poetry Friday today and who initiated our Progressive Poem last month. She's a wonderful writer, of course; we all know that already. And these are beautiful poems, full of visual images. Several are ekphrastic, and although I haven't looked for all of the paintings they are based on, I've found all the ones I've searched for online. I like seeing what the basis of the work was, whether the poem sticks pretty closely to what's there on the canvas, like "Blue Still Life," or takes the painter's work in a completely unexpected direction, like "Alligator Pears in a Basket."

Other poems are based on historical figures, like Audubon's mother and Abe Lincoln and Audrey Hepburn, or characters from stories, like Hester Prynne (whom I'll never see in the same way again) and Guinevere. And still others seem more personal, like "Love Poem with Christmas Lights" or "Simplicity 8953," in which a mom sews her daughter a princess dress:

...I pack away

the scissors but keep thread in my needle
should white steeds dissolve into skittering mice,

the royal coach to a pumpkin, the prince caught
dancing with someone else.

"Living Room" is my current favorite in this collection, but every poem has some special touch, something that will bring me back to reread. You have to read these; you can get the book in paperback or in e-book format.

Here's today's Poetry Friday roundup.

IRA Conference Highlights

I got back from the IRA conference on Thursday, and it's now Tuesday as I'm starting to write this post. As expected, real life has hit hard, and I've been consumed with getting caught up on grading all the extra work I left for my kids to do while they had subs. I have a pile of books behind my desk in my classroom, waiting for me to put them into the computer so that I can put them on the shelf. My mind is full of undigested ideas and I don't have time to process them.

So, while they are still semi-fresh in my mind, here are some highlights from the conference:

• Dr. Steve Perry spoke at the opening session. He seemed a bit of a quirky choice for a room full of teachers, since he seemed to hold teachers responsible for most of the ills of education. I completely agree with him that we can't use any of our students' challenges as excuses not to teach them the very best we can, and it's hard to argue with his interpretation of the conference theme, "Celebrate Teaching," that we should celebrate teaching by getting rid of the teachers who aren't doing a good job. He's absolutely right that it's a disgrace that in some parts of the United States, nearly 50% of the adults can't read. At the same time, there's definitely a place for mentoring and developing teachers, since reaching his standard of "amazing" every single day doesn't come instantly. In fact, in May in middle school, I'm frequently not feeling the amazing. It's a little hard to make a slogan out of Perry's words: "If it's too hard for you, find something else to do." But here, watch his talk for yourself. And here's a great quote from it: "Teaching...is the single greatest act of defiance, ... encouraging children to snap reality in half."

• I went to a great session about teaching poetry. (More information here.) There were lots of useful ideas, but what sticks in my mind the most is that we need to stop summarizing what the text says for our students. I find myself doing that a lot, instead of letting them get to it themselves.
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• Cynthia Levinson wrote a book about the Birmingham Children's March, and I got to hear her talking about it. She put it in the framework of Joseph Campbell's ideas about the hero's quest. This was fascinating, and of course I bought the book to explore the history further.
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• The main thing on everybody's mind right now is the new Common Core Standards, and I went to a session on how all this homogenization affects ELLs, or English Language Learners. I felt a bit out of my depth here among the ESL experts and linguists, but I was introduced to many concepts for more research.
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• A session on revision discussed a new paradigm (to me) for helping students revise their work. Instead of beginning with what is wrong and what we can fix, we can encourage students to focus on what is strong about the piece. Then we can give a structured revision assignment, asking the student to write several more sentences in the part that we have identified which works.
  
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• ELLs can have their sense of themselves reinforced and enhanced when they are taught with a Writer's Workshop approach. Here's more information about that.
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• I attended a session on teaching essay writing using an hourglass graphic organizer.
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• I was privileged to get to hear Matt de la Peña speak. This was one of the two best sessions I went to. I hadn't read any of his work, but I bought several of his novels after hearing his presentation. He talked about what a powerful act it is to hand a kid a book, and the way we may never know the effects one book can have.
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• The other best session I attended was a panel of YA authors who spoke about bullying. The participants were Rita Williams-Garcia, Heather Brewer, Siobhan Vivian, and Jay Asher. I guess it's an emerging trend that the sessions I liked best were the ones with authors of YA books. It was wonderful to hear so many of them.
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• At a very expensive lunch, I got to hear Christopher Paul Curtis speak. He was funny and self-deprecating and made the very expensive price very worth it. Plus, my seventh grade boys were impressed.
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• At the closing session, there was a panel of four authors, who seemed sort of randomly chosen (as in, they didn't go together very well) but who were each interesting. The four authors were Esmé Raji-Codell, Laura Numeroff, Rita Williams-Garcia, and Linda Sue Park. The moderation was well done, excellent questions were asked, and if you could just imagine this session as four different sessions, it was great.
  

I started writing this post on Tuesday and I'm finishing it on Thursday afternoon. Blogger has been giving me fits and my internet connection has been slow (and I'm especially noticing it after just being in the States), but I hope this summary of my conference will have something in it that's helpful to someone.

I had never been to a conference this large, and I felt a tad overwhelmed by all the opportunities. There was no way to see everything. You could spend the entire time just going to book-signings if you wanted to. I felt that I wanted to be several people, so that I could experience multiple sessions during each time slot. It was exciting and energizing to be around so many people who care about reading, teaching kids, and great books. I highly recommend that you attend the conference next year in San Antonio!