In the past few weeks, I've really tried to add more creative elements to my classroom writing standards. Last week was the first, and I thought the translation went pretty well. So, this week I attempted the confessions of __________. I gave them all kinds of characters and even game them examples of a poem I wrote to get them started. I wanted to show them a difference between language and I had hoped they would choose my second poem as one to model.
My first draft went like this:
Confessions of Barney
Each day stupid kids watch TV
Snot drips on
their upper lips.
Happiness is gone
A purple dinosaur could
never be happy.
I wish I wasn't famous
and nobody love me.
I felt like it was boring enough that the second draft would wow them. Yeah, not so much. Almost universally, the classes all chose my first draft instead of the second that is listed on my free write this week. Needless to say, I was shocked at this revelation. I come to find out, they said they liked the first one because it was easier to understand. It seems they didn't understand apparatus in the second draft and it lost them. This is an important lesson on language, and it is one of the main problems facing teachers. My students have terrible vocabulary skills, and they seem to be unwilling to deal with those limitations. Both poems have serious flaws, but I was also just trying to model something that I thought they could do and see relatively easy. I'm not sure what to do if students aren't willing to take responsibility for learning language, because their writing will be very limited if this trend continues.
Have you seen Laura Kasischke's poem "Barney" in our textbook, yet? Here it is:
ReplyDeleteBarney
I love you. You love me. (epigraph)
He is the true Zero in his cap & bells, in the terrible
lizard of his skin. I see him
crossing the tundra in snowshoes like a big
hug coming, lost
on Earth
in a body. Consider: if I become him
what kind of suffering? This
afflicted creature, dancing
for the hostile, the costumed. Venus
loves him. He loves me, has given
himself to the whole world without
mortification, given
himself to the landscape
of sap and snow and cloud, come
unto the world
and made it pregnant, singing
to the invisible family before him, swallowing
the sorrow of children—innocent, curious, extinct.
A narrow stream of tears runs right through him.
When the beloved
is in everyone, in the excited
imbecile, the timid
orgy of sleep, who
can help but think of Christ
with this sandals & lambs? Why
all of us? Why not just some? Oh
the emptiness of so much. The everlastingness. This
hug. Quivering, endured. A purple
ballon like our hearts, naked
and blown up
without flesh, wrinkles, fur. It loves
without an object of it, and how
we long to keep
the beast of t
stuffed down inside us
along with the little saints & fools
who sing pitiful songs in our chests.
We have a bit of commentary on the poem, but you might even try THAT one in class, too.
I see a great deal of frustration in you and Zac and Darren, and many of the secondary-eductation teachers 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 it 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 utencil 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 need to temper the highly elliptical language in our drats 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; teaches them about cliche and convention; illustrates 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?