Prompt: What You Missed In School

All of us missed some things when we were in school. Maybe you are still in school. From kindergarten through graduate school, we all have been absent in body and mind sometimes, and other times you were there in body but not in mind.

When I searched on "what you missed in school," I got more than 40,000 hits, so we must have missed a lot of stuff.

There are two poems I like that deal with this topic. One is "What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade" by Brad Aaron Modlin (from Everyone at This Party Has Two Names).

Modlin's poem begins:

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark...

and concludes with

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.​

Modlin touches on a number of things that may not be listed in any curriculum, but are the kinds of things I found myself dealing with in my teaching days. Of course, teaching fourth grade or kindergarten is very different from teaching high school or college. And yet, school is a place where we learn many things not in the books or lesson plans.

When you are done with your schooling, you often realize that there were things you were taught, but that you never learned, and there were things you just missed for some reason or another.

The Modlin poem is a good companion to another popular-with-teachers poem "Did I Miss Anything?" by Tom Wayman which I discovered when I was teaching middle school. (It is in his Selected Poems and also appears in the anthology edited by Billy Collins when he was our Poet Laureate for teachers to use, Poetry 180)

I used Wayman's poem several times for back-to-school nights with parents. There were some puzzled looks from the parents of kids who also frequently had puzzled looks in class. But most kids and parents get the point.

Wayman's poem is a series of answers to the title question that alternate between "nothing" and "everything." He starts by answering:

Nothing. When we realized you weren’t here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

and he concludes with a big Everything:

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human experience
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered
but it was one place
And you weren’t here

For our prompt this month, the topic is what you missed in school.  Was it something important? Was it all irrelevant? Do you even know what it is that you missed? Did you know it at the time, or have you realized it many years later?

SUBMISSION DEADLINE:  March 7, 2018


                   

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Thoughts on Winter

Although Henry David Thoreau wrote little poetry, I find his essays and journal to be inspirational. He advised in his journal that we should “Take long walks in stormy weather or through deep snows in the fields and woods, if you would keep your spirits up. Deal with brute nature. Be cold and hungry and weary.”

I am a fan of winter walks and I especially like going out after a snowfall. The woods are whitewashed clean, and the snow muffles sounds. I like to follow the tracks of animals who have walked there before me that day.

Adam Gopnik's book Winter: Five Windows on the Season  is a meditation on the season via artists, poets, composers, writers, explorers, scientists, and thinkers, who have created our modern idea of winter. It goes to unlikely places, such as thinking about how snow science leads to existential questions of God and our place in the world.

Do I love the winter season? No, it is my least favorite season. (Autumn is my favorite.) I often say that i want to retire to a place without winter, or at least with a much milder winter than my New Jersey ones. But I suspect i would miss winter after a time.

The Brain Pickings blog had a post about Thoreau finding inner warmth in this cold season, but here is a section from his journal that isn't about going for a walk in the snowy woods.

The wind has gently murmured through the blinds, or puffed with feathery softness against the windows, and occasionally sighed like a summer zephyr lifting the leaves along, the livelong night. The meadow-mouse has slept in his snug gallery in the sod, the owl has sat in a hollow tree in the depth of the swamp, the rabbit, the squirrel, and the fox have all been housed. The watch-dog has lain quiet on the hearth, and the cattle have stood silent in their stalls. The earth itself has slept, as it were its first, not its last sleep, save when some street-sign or wood-house door has faintly creaked upon its hinge, cheering forlorn nature at her midnight work, — the only sound awake twixt Venus and Mars, — advertising us of a remote inward warmth, a divine cheer and fellowship, where gods are met together, but where it is very bleak for men to stand. But while the earth has slumbered, all the air has been alive with feathery flakes descending, as if some northern Ceres reigned, showering her silvery grain over all the fields.

I identify with Thoreau's suggestion to walk in winter, but I also identify with curling up under a blanket inside and just observing the winter outside.

Here is Hank expanding on that winter walk:

There is nothing so sanative, so poetic, as a walk in the woods and fields even now, when I meet none abroad for pleasure. In the street and in society I am almost invariably cheap and dissipated, my life is unspeakably mean. No amount of gold or respectability would in the least redeem it, — dining with the Governor or a member of Congress!! But alone in distant woods or fields, I come to myself, I once more feel myself grandly related, and that cold and solitude are friends of mine. I suppose that this value, in my case, is equivalent to what others get by churchgoing and prayer. I thus dispose of the superfluous and see things as they are, grand and beautiful.

Poets have had much to say about winter. Mr. Shakespeare wrote:

Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
   Thou art not so unkind
      As man’s ingratitude;
   Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
      Although thy breath be rude. 

I feel more akin to the "Winter Trees" of William Carlos Williams and like them in this cold month I am protecting my buds from the season and sleepily waiting for spring.

All the complicated details
of the attiring and
the disattiring are completed!
A liquid moon
moves gently among
the long branches.
Thus having prepared their buds
against a sure winter
the wise trees
stand sleeping in the cold.

         

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Poem Inspires Oscar-nominated Animated Short Film

With all the Oscar buzz this week, a nominated animated short film this year has a poetry connection. Max Porter and Ru Kuwahata's Academy Award Nomination for Best Animated Short with "Negative Space" is based on a poem of the same name by Ron Koertge.

Ron's prose poem (flash fiction?) begins:

My dad taught me to pack: lay out everything. Put back half. Roll things
that roll. Wrinkle-prone things on top of cotton things. Then pants, waist-
to-hem. Nooks and crannies for socks. Belts around the sides like snakes.

You can see how the filmmakers use the poem for their animated short. Here is the trailer for the film:

Ron Koertge's poem was published in his collection, Sex World  (2014, Red Hen Press).

The film's website is at www.tinyinventions.com/main/negative-space

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Piyar Poetry in Urdu and Hindi | Love Shayari

Looking for Piyar Poetry in Urdu and Hindi to make your love wealth, pickpoetry.blogspot.com is the unique-stop search for you it comes with a wide collection of Pyar poetry images and Love Shayari. In this post, I’ll be going to share my collection which will absolutely be going to make you understand that you are in the Love? So check the below images that seems easy by scrolling this article.

So, this was my greatest ever post on pick poetry about Pyar Bhari Shayari in urdu., Don’t overlook to share it with your friends if you truly love my little efforts. Don’t ignore to share your ideas using comments.
I’m actively waiting for your comments. Thank You

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Prompt: Poems and Song Lyrics

Having gone through high school in the late 1960s, several of the younger English teachers brought popular song lyrics into our poetry lessons to entice us beyond Keats, Frost and the rest of the anthology club.

One of my teachers was a big Simon and Garfunkel fan, as was I. I still recall a lesson reading  "Richard Cory" by E.A. Robinson and then listening to their song version.  My first thought in seeing the original poem was that Simon had basically plagiarized the poem. But Mr. Reece, my teacher, talked about how Paul had changed the point of view to one of Cory's workers, and how that changed the poem for a reader.

In the following weeks, I wrote several terrible songs with my guitar based on poems that I liked. (Never ask me to sing my Frostian "Miles to Go" song.)

The other poem/song combination in that class session was Simon's "I Am a Rock" along with Donne's poem "No Man Is an Island." Here the differences were more obvious. It was more that the Donne poem, and really just one image, acted as a writing prompt for Paul Simon.

Our teachers probably hoped that beyond sparking our interest in poetry, we might make the leap to read more of Robinson or Donne beyond what was in the anthology. I did, though most of my classmates did not.

I liked Robinson's poems, many of which were like short stories.

Songs based on poems are fairly common. There are a good number of direct interpretations as when Natalie Merchant uses poems, such as Emily Dickinson's "Because I Could Not Stop for Death." 

This month we are going to try writing a poem from an existing song. But we are not looking to imitate the song or even use lines from the song. A better model, though in the reverse direction, might be Paul Simon's "I Am a Rock" which takes inspiration, but does not merely imitate John Donne's poem.

I AM A ROCK

A winter’s day
In a deep and dark December
I am alone
Gazing from my window
To the streets below
On a freshly fallen, silent shroud of snow

I am a rock
I am an island

I’ve built walls
A fortress, steep and mighty
That none may penetrate
I have no need of friendship
Friendship causes pain
It’s laughter and it’s loving I disdain

Don’t talk of love
Well, I’ve heard the words before
It’s sleeping in my memory
And I won’t disturb the slumber
Of feelings that have died
If I never loved, I never would have cried

I have my books
And my poetry to protect me
I am shielded in my armor
Hiding in my room
Safe within my womb
I touch no one and no one touches me

I am a rock
I am an island

And a rock feels no pain
And an island never cries

- Paul Simon





NO MAN IS AN ISLAND

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man's death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

- John Donne


For this prompt, select any song as your inspiration. Indicate at the top or bottom of your poem what song/composer/artist you used. You might select some lines to repurpose. You might use themes from the song in your own poem. The original should serve as a contrasting view or extension to your poem, rather than being just another version of it.

Submission deadline: February 7, 2018 

http://poetsonline.org for poetic inspiration

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Parveen Shakir Sad Poetry in Urdu

Let's have a look a new collection of Parveen Shakir Sad Poetry in Urdu with images and Parveen Shakir Shayari images on pickpoetry.blogspot.com.

   Parveen Shakir Sad Poetry

Woh Apni Aik Zaat Mein Kul Kainaat Tha,
Duniya Kay Har Faraib Sey Milwa Diya Mujhe..

Thak Gaya Hai Dil-e-wahshi Mera Fariyaad se Bhi
Jee Bahalta Nahin Ai Dost Teri Yaad se Bhi..!!

Kon Jane Naye Saal Mein Tu Kis Ko Pahrhay
Tera Meyar Badalta Hai Nisabon Ki Tarah..!!

Kabhi Kabhaar Usse Dekh Lain Kahein Mil Lain,
Yeh Kab Kaha Tha K Woh Khush Badan Hamara Ho..!!

Tu Badalta Hai to Be Saakhta Meri Ankhain,,
Apne Hathon Ki Lakeron Se Ulajh Jati Hain.

Aisa Kuin Kah Janay Say Sirf Aik Insaan K,,
Sari zindgani Hi Bay sbaat Ho Jae..!!

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Best Parveen Shakir Poetry in Urdu

Hello friends, in this post I have share Parveen Shakir 2 line love poetry and Parveen Shakir romantic poetry to express your love feelings. Seem the following images that you can easily get and share with your besties from this page of pickpoetry.blogspot.com.

Pehron Ki Tishnagi Mein Bhi Sabit Qadam Rahon,
Dasht e Bala Mein, Rooh Mujhe Karbalai Day..!!

KhuShboo Ko Tark Kar Ke Na Laye Chaman Me Rang.
Itni Tou Souj, Bouj Mere Baghbaan Mein Hai.

Wo Naam Haasil-E-Fun Ho Ke Merey Fun Mein Raha,
Ke Rooh Ban Ke Meri Soch Ke Badan Mein Raha.

Sakoon-e-Dil Ke Lye Mein Kahan Kahan Na Gayi,,
Magar Ye Dil, Ke Sadaa Oski Anjuman Mein Raha

Us waqt Tak Kinaroun Say Nadi Charhi rahay
jab tak samundar kay badn main utar na jaye

Onchi Awaaz Me Uss Nay Tou Kabhi Baat Nah Ki,,,*
Khafgioun Main Bhi Woh Lehja Raha Komal Ki Tarah..!!

If you like this post please hit like button and also don't forget to hit share button as well.

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