So, I attempted a confession poem with my class. I'm still working on it on it some, but here it so far:
Confessions of Barney
Each day mindless drones
file in front of the box.
Liquid dripping down
caverns to find a new home
on top of the talking apparatus.
Who can smile wearing
fuchsia shaped like a
puffed pastry. Wishing
fame would slip past like
empty caskets heading to homes.
There is a lot more to story that I will cover in the pedagogy forum in a few minutes.
Have you seen Laura Kasischke's poem "Barney" in our textbook, yet? Check it out. We have a bit of commentary on the poem, but you might even try THAT one in class, too.
ReplyDeleteI see a great deal of frustration in you and Zac and Darren, and many of the secondary-education teachers whom I have taught. Partly, you're justifiably anxious and worried, dour about the future. Perhaps, though--and this is especially true with poetry--they're just not surrounded by literature enough. The key here is probably frequency. Get them looking at poems, writing poetry, more often. Make it part of the classroom culture. Nativize it. Slowly, that may just help out. I'm not claiming to have solved the problems. Hardly. Just trying to alleviate your frustrations so that we keep smart, sensitive teachers in our classrooms. We need you in there, and I want to ensure that--at the very least--you're learning, you're enjoying it, you're ready to come back the next day.
Okay, on to your poem. I might be the devil's advocate here and agree with your students on one point. Though "apparatus" is a stranger choice than TV, it also might be "overdone," and they're noting that. Let me give you an egregious example:
He clenched the cylindrical writing utensil in his five asymmetrical and opposing digits.
Fancy? Perhaps. Overdone? Overly elaborate? Definitely. This is what we mean:
He picked up the pen.
I know that this might run the risk of sounding counter to all that we have been discussing: surprise, unlikeliness, strangeness. Still, knowing WHEN to do that is important, too. As we saw with, say, Michael's draft, we probably want to temper the highly elliptical language in our drafts with tamer language, which in turn acts as a palliative, a counterpoint.
How about trying this in class: You offer the abstract concept and have them generate concrete examples.
Not "Fear" but "white knuckles." Then, you can ask about the freshness of that image. Haven't we heard it before? It's sort of conventional. It's become tired from overuse. What about "a bird in a closet"? Fresher. What about "an upended gecko?" Good, too. I have a rather scaredy cat named Starsky. How about a cat image: not "fear" but "the black cat slinking into the hasta"? (He did that this morning, and he was definitely frightened by a big truck.)
That might be useful to them. Show them how much more engaging images are than abstracts; teach them about cliche and convention; illustrate the power, too, of the auditory dimension. (some are not that original in terms of image but sound interesting, like that "black cat" one.)
What say you?