Life. Loss. Love. Tears. Vomit.

Image by comedy_nose on Flickr. Obtained via cc license.

It was never my intention to make two of the girls in the class cry.  All I’d asked was that they write and share a poem.  But there we were, sitting in a circle on the auditorium stage and listening to them choke up as they struggled to get through stories of pain, anger, and fear.

We’d spent the last couple of weeks working on reciting others’ poetry, performing for the national Poetry Out Loud competition, and I had thought that it would be a good idea for students to share their own voices, as they had just shared someone else’s.  There, of course, was the potential for a couple of problems:  tell a teenager you want them to write poetry and they flinch; and I’m the world’s worst poet.

Now, I solved the first problem right away.  Despite having been exposed to free verse much earlier than high school, many students still have this tendency to think that poetry has to rhyme.  I made a point to read, analyze, and discuss a ton of free verse poetry during the previous three weeks so that I could remove the “Does it have to rhyme?” question from the room and hopefully tamper down some of their trepidation toward writing poetry*.  Then, I dug up a bad poem I wrote in high school and read it, promising that on the day when we would all read our poetry to one another, I’d read the worst poem I had ever written.  After all, I told them, you may think your poem isn’t great, but it’s nothing compared to what I will unleash upon you.

The second problem–my being pretty terrible at writing poetry–was a little tougher to solve because it drove to the heart of my actually being qualified to teach.  If I am horrible at writing poetry, then how could I evaluate it?  Am I completely wrong for trying to cover it or even assessing it?  After all, poetry, like any other form of writing, is subjective, and therefore if I have no true expertise on the matter my opinion has no leg to stand on.  Or is this one of those perfect cases of those who can’t, teach?

On power found in poetry

Eight hundred students sit silently in an auditorium as she approaches a spotlight that is focused on the empty microphone at center stage.

“The Windhover,” she says, “by Gerard Manley Hopkins.”

For the next minute or two, she bounces through the alliteration, striking the right notes in the right places, playing the lines with appropriate tone, adding a crescendo where there must be one and putting  a fine point on the ending.  Then, eight hundred students applaud while four teachers sit in the front row and circle numbers on scoresheets.  Their opinion, she knows, is what matters most of all.

Such is Poetry Out Loud.

How’s that for a nice dramatic intro?

Hey, I’m still pumped from yesterday because a good two months’ worth of work came to fruition as we held our fifth annual Poetry Out Loud championship.  It’s a competition that I look forward to every year because it is, at its core, based on a basic idea–that you can learn to love and appreciate the written word through memorization and recitation.

I’ll give a little background here just in case the word “memorize” made the hairs on your student-centered, guide-on-the-side, innovative-educator neck stand on end.  Poetry Out Loud is a national competition sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation.  Students who participate choose poems from the program’s online database (or a copy of the Poetry Out Loud anthology) and are tasked with memorizing and then reciting them.  The performances are then judged not only on accuracy but physical presence, voice and articulation, the difficulty of the poem being recited, dramatic appropriateness, understanding of the chosen poem, and the overall performance.  Ultimately, there are winners chosen from each state and they compete for a grand prize of $20,000 in Washington, D.C. in April.  But way before that, in schools like mine, competition begins in classrooms with students sitting at computer lab stations trying to find the poem that suits them best.

Now I’d be lying if I said that this is met with 100% buy-in from all of the teachers in my department as well as every student, but that’s to be expected when anything of this nature is concerned.  Poetry doesn’t exactly set every student’s world on fire and the idea of speaking in front of a group of people might send chills right up his or her spine.  But the program is an option for teachers and while those of us who participate do make it an assignment, we try to make it as easy as possible–I, for instance, allow the students in my general-level classes read their poems instead of having to memorize them (although my advanced students memorize).  Still, if it’s something that not everyone wants to do, why do it?

Short, But Sweet: Anthem for Doomed Youth

Ever sigh and say, “I wish I could teach poetry but I … a) can’t find anything good, or b) don’t have the time.”? This occasional series of posts will focus on specific poems that I like and have even used that I find to be both engaging and amazing.

Anthem for Doomed Youth
By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

I’ve written before about my affinity for Wilfred Owen’s poetry, and seeing that today is the anniversary of the end of the First World War, I thought it appropriate to contemplate another.  ”Anthem for Doomed Youth” isn’t a poem that I’ve used in class, at least not yet, but I think that in the great struggle we seem to have with the ability to make texts “relevant” for our students, this is another that wins out.  Well, depending on where you teach.

Slut-shaming Helen of Troy

“She was a whore.”

He was referring to Helen of Troy.  We had been reading Edgar Allen Poe’s poem, “To Helen,” which may or may not be about the woman whose face launched a thousand ships–of course, the subject of poems rarely are that clear cut.  Here’s the text:

To Helen
By Edgar Allan Poe

Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicéan barks of yore,
That gently, o’er a perfumed sea,
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home
To the glory that was Greece,
And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche
How statue-like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah, Psyche, from the regions which
Are Holy-Land!

I was using the Helen of Troy reference in class to contrast his putting her, the “most beautiful woman in the world,” on a pedestal, with the woman described in Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 130″ (“My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun …”), who, well, like Bill said, when she walks treads on the ground.  We read the poem, talked about what the narrator thinks of his subject, and then I brought up Helen and asked if the class knew the story of Helen of Troy.  They knew the gist of it–mainly, that she was taken to Troy and the Trojan War started as a result–but when I asked, “Do you know how or why she wound up there?”

“She was a whore,” said one student.

A week later, with my advanced class, we read the same poem and I asked the same question.

“She was a slut,” said a student.

Short, But Sweet: These Poems, She Said

Ever sigh and say, “I wish I could teach poetry but I … a) can’t find anything good, or b) don’t have the time.”? This occasional series of posts will focus on specific poems that I like and have even used that I find to be both engaging and amazing.

These Poems, She Said
By Robert Bringhurst

These poems, these poems,

these poems, she said, are poems

with no love in them. These are the poems of a man

who would leave his wife and child because

they made noise in his study. These are the poems

of a man who would murder his mother to claim

the inheritance. These are the poems of a man

like Plato, she said, meaning something I did not

comprehend but which nevertheless

offended me. These are the poems of a man

who would rather sleep with himself than with women,

she said. These are the poems of a man

with eyes like a drawknife, with hands like a pickpocket’s

hands, woven of water and logic

and hunger, with no strand of love in them. These

poems are as heartless as birdsong, as unmeant

as elm leaves, which if they love love only

the wide blue sky and the air and the idea

of elm leaves. Self-love is an ending, she said,

and not a beginning. Love means love

of the thing sung, not of the song or the singing.

These poems, she said….

                                       You are, he said,

beautiful.

                That is not love, she said rightly.

One for Memorial Day

At the Vietnam Memorial

By George Bilgere

The last time I saw Paul Castle

it was printed in gold on the wall

above the showers in the boys’

locker room, next to the school

record for the mile. I don’t recall

his time, but the year was 1968

and I can look across the infield

of memory to see him on the track,

legs flashing, body bending slightly

beyond the pack of runners at his back.

He couldn’t spare a word for me,

two years younger, junior varsity,

and hardly worth the waste of breath.

He owned the hallways, a cool blonde

at his side, and aimed his interests

further down the line than we could guess.

Now, reading the name again,

I see us standing in the showers,

naked kids beneath his larger,

comprehensive force—the ones who trail

obscurely, in the wake of the swift,

like my shadow on this gleaming wall.

by jinguangw. Used with permission under creative commons license.

I’ve never known why I have always been so interested in the Vietnam War and the Vietnam War-era.  It’s probably some combination of the fact that my father and uncle were both in ‘Nam back in the mid-1960s and I am a kid of the 1980s, the decade where it seemed that every other movie being made was about the war.  Or maybe it’s because I’ve always known that this war was different than the others that we’d fought in the 20th Century, especially when it came to the homefront and since I’m the product of a couple of Baby Boomers, I have always had an interest in the history of post-WWII America and the rise of the suburbs to prominence in our society (I also watch Mad Men).

Alas, I don’t teach much literature about the Vietnam War, or about America, because being a sophomore English teacher, my curriculum’s focus is on “world” literature (though I admit to playing fast and loose with that).  I do, however, teach one of the best war novels of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front, and when I do, I not only bring out poetry from the World War I era, but I make sure to share the above piece by George Bilgere, which was introduced to me by a student a couple of years ago who read it for our Poetry Out Loud competition (and killed it, too).  It is a great way for me to link to literature about war that involves my students’ own country and relatively recent history and also drives home the point I repeatedly make about Paul Baumer–he is only a couple of years older than the students in my class who are reading the book.  Plus, there’s the fact that Paul Castle is the big man on campus … THE guy.

“That’s who wound up going to war and dying,” I tell them, trying to toe the line between getting the point across and saying anything that would get me accused of “liberal indoctrination.”  For some of them, this helps get the point across, especially since I teach in a school where the idea of the “big man on campus” is still a concept that’s very alive and well; for others, it’s in one ear out the other, as it is with everything, I guess.

But on a holiday like this, it’s important to remember what’s lost in war and the last stanza of the poem speaks to that “larger, comprehensive force” in a way that is so succinct and yet so complex.

Patriotism vs. Reality and Edgar Guest vs. Wilfred Owen

"At close grips with the Hun, we bomb the corkshaffer's, etc." Two United States soldiers run past the remains of two German soldiers toward a bunker. File from Library of Congress via Wikimedia Commons

By the time I have a substitute this coming Tuesday, my advanced class will have hit the halfway point of our latest novel, Erich Maria Remarq’s All Quiet on the Western Front.  This is the fourth year I’ve taught the novel (though the first time I’ve taught it to an advanced-level class) and I’ve always done the same thing when we hit the halfway point, which is take a short break and cover some World War I-era poetry and some other material from the period–both literary and historical.

The reason for the break is practical because chapters seven and eight of the novel are massive and while I gave the class a reading schedule when I passed out copies of the book a few weeks ago, you can’t assume that everyone sits down and goes and read the novel that very night.  It’s also a break designed to be helpful to better understand the war itself, as while Remarque’s voice is virtually unmatched, I always like to show other perspectives.

Enter the poetry of World War I, which has gotten a bit of the short shrift in recent years, especially as there are many high school English classes that barely touch poetry at all, and those that do tend to go with the classic Brits or modern Americans.  Don’t get me wrong, I love modern American poetry–a couple of weeks ago, this same class made a valiant effort at breaking down Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy”–but what I love about some of the poetry I use from the First World War is that quite a bit of it comes not from people who had MFAs from Ivy League schools are were part of the Iowa Mafia, but from actual soldiers (much like Remarque and his novel).

On Tuesday, I’ll have the class complete a worksheet that goes along with five poems.  The first is what I consider requisite when reading the poetry of the First World War:  Lt. Col. John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields.”  The other four I picked because they are by two poets who are in direct contrast with one another:  British soldier and author Wilfred Owen and American “People’s Poet” Edgar Guest.  The specific poems I’ve chosen are Owen’s “Dulce Et Decorum Est” and “The Last Laugh,” and Guest’s “The Things That Make a Soldier Great” and “Thoughts of a Soldier.”

Now, I’m sure that the word in the last paragraph that made some people recoil in horror and maybe even go all Scanners was “worksheet.”  It is the bane of every “forward-thinking,” “technology-enabled,” “living in the 21st Century” teacher who would see a day off as an opportunity for learning and would set up a lesson wherein their classes watch their appendectomies live than run off 120 worksheets and leave them for a substitute.  I actually see the value of the worksheet here, however.

The class that will be reading these poems is extremely discussion-based.  We talk.  A lot.  And that’s awesome.  But sometimes I think that sitting quietly and writing down your thoughts on something is just as valuable as the back-and-forth with a classmate or a teacher.  The questions on the worksheet involve the expected exploration of literary devices  and how well they either get the poem’s message across or affect the audience, but toward the end I have a couple of questions about whether or not my students like the poems, as well as their opinions on war and patriotism.

Walt Whitman vs. Public Enemy

Walt Whitman is also the recipient of New Jersey's highest honor.

One of the more notable features of any English textbook teacher’s edition is what I like to call the “monkey margins.”  These are the notes and guides that are placed in the margins of the pages that are designed to make teaching that particular piece of text so easy that a monkey could do it.  I’ll admit that there are times when I have found the monkey margins useful, like last week when I was able to use them to answer a student’s question about a story’s historical context.

But most of the time, the monkey margins are ridiculous and seeing them reminds me of a time four years ago when I was in my third year of teaching and was at the beginning of my Harlem Renaissance unit in my eleventh grade English class.  I started with Walt Whitman.  Which to someone unfamiliar with the Harlem Renaissance seems to be an odd place to start, but since one of my featured poems was Langston Hughes’s “I, Too,” I felt that it would be great to start with the “source material” so to speak.  Besides, “I Hear America Singing” was in the eleventh grade textbook that every student had so there was no copying necessary.

As textbook publishers often do (in this case, it was Prentice Hall), there were a few poems next to Whitman’s in a “compare/contrast” type of thing and some of the questions the book asked students had to do with looking at the different messages the poems were sending.  I had this in mind anyway when I came up with the idea to use those two poems; after all, so many of us look at the same piece in different ways that I thought it would be good to see different interpretations of the same idea before opening students up to making interpretations themselves.

Resurrecting Poetry

Robert Bly at the Minnesota Poetry Out Loud finals. Photo by Nic McPhee. Used under creative commons license

Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine cover, titled “Rhyme and Reason” was an attempt to answer a question that I’m sure has been asked a multitude of times in the last few decades: Is poetry dead (Online at: “Is poetry dead?  Or in the age of the Internet, does it offer us what nothing else can?”, WaPo, 1/6/12)?

The answer, almost immediately, is no.  The story starts with a description of a reading and meet-and-greet given by W.S. Merwin at the Library of Congress and goes on to spend a decent amount of time showcasing an after-school creative writing workshop at Hart Middle School in Anacostia.

What I find amazing about the piece is not just that middle (and then high school students) in what’s one of the worst areas of Washington, D.C. are actively seeking out a writing workshop where they create poetry, but this paragraph:

The program’s approach to creative writing is surprisingly traditional. It teaches poetry the way poetry has been taught for nearly a century, the way it is taught in MFA workshops across the country: by studying a poem and then writing one. The program’s teachers are published writers who either have or are working on degrees in creative writing. The best of the student work is published in the school’s literary journal, hArtworks.

Now it’s not that the “surprisingly traditional” approach gets me fired up because I tend to be a skeptic when it comes to brand new bells and whistles in the classroom, but because I have always loved the idea of getting one’s hands dirty when it comes to writing.  Maybe it’s just because that’s how I learned how to write–scribbling in a notebook until I felt it was good enough to type up–or because having a poem in one hand and pen and paper in the other and digging deep for a good poem is one of the hardest things you can do.

Trust me, I majored in writing in college and when I had to declare my concentration I chose fiction partly because I had discovered, after two semesters of poetry, that I was pretty bad at writing poetry.

But that was college and this is middle and high school where these students are finding their voices and consequently discovering the voices of others.  So the idea that you might, at 16 years old, write crappy poetry isn’t that big of a deal.  Besides, getting students interested in the idea of poetry in the first place is a step in the right direction.

Because let’s face it: we ask if poetry is dead because it if it isn’t dead in English class, it’s dying a slow, painful death and has been for a very long time.

I remember when I first realized poetry was great.  It was elementary school, when I read A Light in the Attic and Where the Sidewalk Ends.  But while I did go on to read the poems of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven”, I can’t remember anything else beyond epic poetry such as Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales until I took creative writing my senior year of high school.  And even then, I wasn’t reading anything that was too monumentally great and didn’t really get into some of the heavy-duty poets (both Dead White Males and non-Dead White Males) until I hit college.

Poetry isn’t a high priority when it comes to high school English.  It’s rarely on standardized tests and while it is sprinkled throughout your average Prentice-Hall/McGraw-Hill/McDougall-Little/Hyphen-Hyphenated textbook I am going to be the first to admit that I’m not really sure how much reading, analyzing, or writing poetry is actually taught.

After all, it’s kind of tough.  When reading poetry, you have to find poems that grab students’ attention and that at first aren’t too challenging.  Then, you have to keep everyone going while you break it down.  It winds up being kind of a risk.  And writing?  Uh … I got some great stuff out of an advanced English class earlier this year but to be honest, the only advice I gave was that it didn’t have to rhyme and they didn’t have to worry if it was bad.

I do want to explore more poetry with my students and I can say that there are a few things I have done that have worked so far.  First, I do take the time to try to tie poetry into whatever novel or play we may be reading.  While teaching All Quiet on the Western Front for instance, I’ve trotted out everything from the obligatory “In Flanders Fields” to the poetry of Edgar Guest, Wilfred Owen (“The Last Laugh” is a personal favorite of mine), and even George Bilgere’s “At the Vietnam Memorial”.  I’ve done sonnets by Shakespeare, odes by Poe … whatever might work well.

Additionally, my classes have participated in Poetry Out Loud, the National Poetry Foundation’s annual recitation contest.  The purpose of that contest is the discovery and memorization of a poem.  They choose whatever they would like from a large database of poetry and then present it to the class, with the best presenter in the school going to regional, state, and perhaps national competition.  I love the competition just because their poetry database is a wonderful resource but I also like how it allows my students to dive into poetry and find out what they like.

But I’d like to do more, of course.  The dream, I guess, is to get them to seek it out and even write it on their own and bring it in to share or workshop.  I intend to do more creative-minded activities in the last couple of months of this year so I will see what I can do and what works.