Prompt: Poetry in School

Most of us were introduced to poetry in school. As a teacher, I hope it was a kind introduction, but there are many people whose introduction to poetry in school seems to have been unpleasant.

Billy Collins' poem "Introduction to Poetry" is one that is often used to make a point about poetry in the classroom. The teacher asks the students to "take a poem / and hold it up to the light / like a color slide / or press an ear against its hive." Though the teacher wants the students to simply enjoy the poem - "to waterski / across the surface of a poem / waving at the author's name on the shore" - the students have been trained in school about how to read a poem, so they want to "tie the poem to a chair with rope / and torture a confession out of it. / They begin beating it with a hose / to find out what it really means."

You may have more pleasant memories of your introduction to poetry or a good classroom encounter with poetry in a classroom. I can recall how Mrs. Cavico read and spoke about Keats' "Ode to a Grecian Urn" with such love and appreciation - and how she recognized that I "got it" while most of the class looked out the window at kids in gym class.

Having met her and heard her read and talk about writing, I imagine poet Naomi Shihab Nye would be a great teacher to have for poetry. In one of her poems, "The Young Poets of Winnipeg,"
scurried around a classroom papered with poems.
Even the ceiling, pink and orange quilts of phrase…
they introduced one another, perched on a tiny stage
to read their work, blessed their teacher who
encouraged them to stretch, wouldn’t let their parents
attend the reading because parents might criticize

These very confident young poets had not been taught to tie down a poem or beat it.

They knew their poems
were glorious, that second-graders could write better
than third or fourth, because of what happened
on down the road, the measuring sticks
that came out of nowhere, poking and channeling
the view

For our September, back-to-school prompt, write a poem about poetry in school. I'm guessing we have positive and negative tales to tell, from our own experiences as students and teachers or from imagined classrooms.

Submission guidelines.        Submission deadline September 30, 2018

         

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Listening

Not everyone has the opportunity to attend poetry readings in their local area, but thankfully there are many available online. One source I was browsing and listening to today is the PoetryFoundation.org which has almost 3000 audio files.

I was just browsing and clicking and listening - the audio equivalent of doing that through an anthology.

I will admit to clicking on poems just because a title caught my attention - like 

"On Wanting to Tell [ ] about a Girl Eating Fish Eyes" by Mary Szybist, which begins:

 

—how her loose curls float 

above each silver fish as she leans in 

to pluck its eyes— 

or listening to "How to Love Bats" by Judith Beveridge:

open your mouth, out will fly names

like Pipistrelle, Desmodus, Tadarida. Then,

listen for a frequency

lower than the seep of water, higher

than an ice planet hibernating

beyond a glacier of Time.

As with browsing a poetry anthology or journal or an open reading, you will encounter poets you have never read before, which is always a good thing. 

I also subscribe/listen to the Poetry Foundation's podcast in which the editors talk to poets published in Poetry magazine and critics to discuss in more detail the issue. Conversations about poems are also something you might get at a reading. For example, I listened to a discussion about Terrance Hayes’s poem “How to Draw a Perfect Circle” and then promptly sat down to write a how-to poem of my own.

Some people say clicking these links leads you into a rabbit hole of more and more clicks. That is sometimes true for me. After listening to the Haye's podcast, I did click deeper into the prose selections on the site and read an essay "Another Life - Terrance Hayes and the poetics of the un-thought" by Joshua Bennett Hayes’s latest collection, American Sonnets for my Past and Future Assassin. It is a collection from the 200 days between President Trump’s election and the early summer of 2017. He wrote 70 sonnets which come from that time but are more about what led up to Trump's election.

After that though, I needed to return to some poetry to cleanse my poetry palate - perhaps William Blake's "The Ecchoing Green."  After too much reality, Blake sounds so happy that we might view him as naive. That would be a mistake.

...laugh away care,

Sitting under the oak,

Among the old folk, 

They laugh at our play, 

And soon they all say.

‘Such, such were the joys. 

When we all girls & boys, 

In our youth-time were seen, 

On the Ecchoing Green...’

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Prompt: Science and Love

We don't normally associate love with science. Long ago, it was thought that love was centered in the heart, and that misconception still holds a place in our culture - just take a look around you when Valentine's day approaches. Later, we found that the emotions of love were centered in the brain and involved chemical reactions in our bodies.

In Sara Eliza Johnson's poem, "Combustion", we begin with the science of the body that we can enumerate.

If a human body has two-hundred-and-six bones
and thirty trillion cells, and each cell
has one hundred trillion atoms, if the spine
has thirty-three vertebrae—

But numbers can't explain love.

When I read articles about scientists studying love, it always seems so cold and dry. For example, when researchers measured hormone levels in young people who reported recently falling in love, they found "that the lovers had higher levels of the stress hormone cortisol than people who hadn't lately been bitten by the love bug. They also found that the men who were in love had less testosterone than their single counterparts, and the women in love had more. The researchers speculated that falling in love may reduce some of the differences between the sexes, making men softer and women more aggressive."

That last piece of scientific conjecture is the most interesting: falling in love makes us more like each other.

Johnson's poem moves from the facts of the body to the body itself.

When our skin touches
our atoms touch, their shadows
merging into a shadow galaxy.

I don't think you need to read about the neuroscience of love in order to understand that falling in love and being in love does things to our brain and our bodies.  The challenge of this month's prompt is to use some science as a way to understand an aspect of love in a new way.

Submission deadline: August 31, 2018 

As always, POETS ONLINE offers you the opportunity to submit your poetic response to this current prompt. All submissions that address this prompt will be read and considered for posting on our main site. Before your first submission, you should read some poems in our archive to get a sense of the types of responses people have had to previous prompts. Remember, we will only consider publishing poems that are in response to the current writing prompt.

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Restoring the Walt Whitman Neighborhood in New Jersey

Whitman's home is second from the left on the busy street now-named Martin Luther King Blvd.

I was glad to see a recent article about Walt Whitman's home (a National Historic Landmark) in Camden, New Jersey. It is still there, but the home and the surrounding neighborhood have needed some work.  A $895,730 contract for design work was awarded this month by the NJ Department of Environmental Protection, which owns the structures, to upgrade this historical, literary, and architectural gem.

The Walt Whitman Association is an all-volunteer association that goes back to friends and fans who knew and supported Whitman and his work during his lifetime. The organization has encouraged Whitman studies and promoting the house for the past hundred years. The association diligently lobbied for the “Whitman’s neighborhood” project.

The new plans call for the exteriors of the three houses, including the former home of noted architect Stephen Decatur Button at #332, to be restored to their original appearance. The three interiors are to be re-purposed as exhibit areas and other facilities for visitor and educational programs, as well as association and state park offices.

Whitman bought the house in 1884 and lived there until his death in 1892.

Whitman's surprisingly grand tomb is also in Camden.

The Mickle Street home and its neighbors - other adjoining homes have since been demolished. Image Library of Congress, 1890

Camden & Mickle Street History

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More People Are Reading Poetry

I like finding surveys that say that more people are reading poetry. 28 million American adults read poetry this year according to a survey of arts participation conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) and the U.S. Census Bureau. That is the highest percentage of poetry readership in more than 15 years.

“We’ve never seen an increase in poetry reading. If anything there had been a decline — a pretty sharp decline — since about 2002 at least,” said Sunil Iyengar, NEA director of research and analysis."

The full arts participation report won’t be released until later this year, but they thought the results were too significant not to share early.

Young adults and certain racial ethnic groups account for a large portion of the increase. U.S. poetry readers aged 18 to 24 more than doubled, jumping from 8 percent in 2012 to 17 percent in 2017. Among people of color, African Americans and Asian Americans are reading poetry at the highest rates — which more than doubled in the last five years — up 15 and 12 percent, respectively.

Other notable increased readership groups include women, rural Americans and those with only some college education.

This kind of data is of interest to the NEA’s mission of increasing participation in the arts, and they have found in other studies how reading tends to be a portal to other types of participation and other types of engagement, in the arts and outside the arts.

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Prompt: Summer Haiku

Oiran in Summer Kimono - Attributed to Hosoda Eishi (Japan, 1756-1829) - via Wikimedia

While we are on vacation this month, we are offering a different prompt and submission option. Here we are going to give you a brief summer haiku prompt and ask that if you write a poem to the prompt that you post it below as a comment. All comments on this blog require approval, so there will still be some gentle screening of submissions, but let's assume that everyone can follow the simple rules, will post and will be approved.

We have written here in the past about haiku more than a dozen times, and had specific posts and prompts about spring, autumn and winter haiku. Somehow, summer was overlooked. This month we remedy that.

The haiku form doesn't get the respect it deserves. It seems so simple that it is often used with children as a first formal poetry assignment. But good haiku is not that easy to write.

People notice that many famous haiku poems don't seem to follow the rules we usually hear for haiku verse: three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. That is both because the classic Chinese and Japanese poets of haiku were not working with syllables and because in translation to English the syllabication is usually ignored.

We will ask you to follow that 5-7-5 in your poems, but perhaps more importantly are some of the other "rules" for haiku.

Most classic haiku follow the culture and influence of Buddhism in the way that the poems emphasize a single moment.

Most haiku focus on something in nature.

In the traditional form, they contain either a direct or indirect reference to a season that turns the reader's attention to the passage of time. They often do this by using a seasonal word rather than naming the season. That seasonal word is called kigo (KEY-GO). In the examples below, the cricket and firefly suggest summer.

Here are a few examples:


The cool breeze.
With all his strength
The cricket.
      ~  ISSA


This warm river
I walk across it
holding my sandals
      ~  BUSON


This hot summer night.
The dream and real
are same things.
     ~  TAKAHAMA KYOSHI


Even a woodpecker
wouldn’t crack the tea hut.
in the summer grove.

Their own fires
are on the trees
fireflies around the house with flowers.
     ~  BASHO


Post your own summer haiku as a comment to this post.

Firefly by  Shoen Uemura - via Wikimedia

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When Poets Go On Vacation

POETS ONLINE is taking the month of July off for summer vacation. No new writing prompt this month. Even our web server seems to be vacationing lately, so we will try to rest everyone for a few weeks and hopefully return in August refreshed.

Tomorrow, we will post a kind of prompt alternative that doesn't require any coding on our part.

We will also try to stay offline, but the laptop will be there with us, and we will check in on the blog and our Facebook pages during the month.

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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