OMG, I'm done!

Woo hooo!

I had a lot of fun with this project. I cant wait to try it out on my own students!

Charles Bernstein Quote

“Many readers when they first encounter a difficult poem say to themselves, "Why me?" The first reaction they often have is to think that this is an unusual problem that other readers have not faced. So the first step in dealing with the difficult poem is to recognize that this is a common problem that many other readers confront on a daily basis. You are not alone!”

—Charles Bernstein

(Charles Bernstein, Harper’s Magazine, June 2003, Volume 306, Issue 1837; ISSN: 0017-789X)

Repentends

It's so funny. Originally, when embarking on this project, I had SO many grand plans for the repentend. Poet epitaphs. Poet obituaries. Children's poems (short ones). Nursery rhymes. Song lyrics that I loved.

But now none of those seem to fit. I can't explain it, because I am not even totally sure my paper makes sense, but the ideas I had before just don't seem to match.

And then I stumbled upon advice from poets to aspiring poets. There is loads of good, valuable, interesting stuff out there! So there we go. And off I go to add them in!

I am not sure adding the repetends in at the end is a good way to do this, but then again, this entire MGRP process has felt cobbled together. I have been working like a dog on it, had a blast writing the crots, enjoyed searching for quotes and other information to include, and now I am off to repentend. But none of it has felt fluid. Maybe I am just much more of a rule follower than this paper enforces. =)

NCTE References

As Lee Odell explains in “Assessing Thinking: Glimpsing a Mind at Work,” “[W]e continually find ourselves making value judgments about students’ work . . . . Where we run into trouble is in trying to articulate these value judgments, especially when we try to explain to students why one piece of writing meets a certain standard and another does not.

Odell, Lee. “Assessing Thinking: Glimpsing a Mind at Work.” Evaluating Writing: The Role of Teachers’ Knowledge about Text, Learning, and Culture. Ed. Charles R. Cooper and Lee Odell. Urbana: NCTE, 1999. 7–22.

***

Many of us wonder where we should begin poetry studies. Begin the year with poems to which students can personally relate—poems about going to school. Furthermore, rather than starting with the scary, technical elements, give students frequent exposure to poetry and personal writing experiences all year long. In considering such approaches, we might all be able to dismantle fears and poetic phobias from the first day of school.

Poetry, Schmoetry! A Potpourri of Resources to Generate Enthusiasm for the Genre
By Colleen A. Ruggiere Editor, Boardman High School, Boardman, Ohio
English Journal Vol. 96, No. 1 September 2006, Page 115

***

…a daily dose of poetry would be a potent elixir for students, and that genre would become a force in students’ lives if they were given the opportunity to make sense of it for themselves.

By Tamara L. C. Van Wyhe, Copper River School District, Glennallen, Alaska
English Journal Vol. 96, No. 1 September 2006, Page 15

As a teacher, I discovered poetry to be magic in many ways. It offered brevity, allowing a quick reading and discussion of a complete piece of text as a way to begin a class period. It offered variety, allowing students to discover a vast array of subjects and styles. It offered a myriad of companion pieces to the novels and nonfiction texts we encountered. It offered a powerful tool for teaching word choice, fluency, and the impact of conventions. It offered opportunities to investigate issues of speaker and audience. It offered questions with no answers, invitations to support assertions based on text, and it helped students understand what mood and tone and emotion really mean when it comes to writing. It offered them models to try on and wear around for a while, eventually helping them to tailor their writing styles. It offered students a genre for documenting their lives, one poetic snapshot at a time.

By Tamara L. C. Van Wyhe, Copper River School District, Glennallen, Alaska
English Journal Vol. 96, No. 1 September 2006, Page 15

Just Writing

Now I am just writing like a madwoman. I am not sure I am writing what I *should* be writing, but I have over 12 pages thus far. Once I finish the crots, I am going to work in repetends - advice to young poets from famous poets (in both poetic and prose form). Should be interesting!

Then I need to figure out where to apply my official sources, and hopefully I will be good to go.

This project is harder than I thought it would be. I don't know if that is because I am over-thinking it, or perhaps it is just a challenge. This is the first time during my Career Switcher inaugural semester that I am having a hard time balancing two young children, my contract work, my day-to-day life, and my school deadlines.

But nothing that's easy to get can be worth much, eh?

So get back to work!

Poetry as a Career: Advice

http://members.wizzards.net/~mlworden/atyp/advice.htm

I would not recommend poetry as a career. In the first place, it's impossible in this time and place — in this culture — to make poetry a career. The writing of poetry is one thing. It's an obsession, the scratching of a divine itch, and has nothing to do with money. You can, however, make a career out of being a poet by teaching, traveling around, and giving lectures. It's a thin living at best.
— Maxine Kumin

Horace, when he wrote the Ars Poetica, recommended that poets keep their poems home for ten years; don't let them go, don't publish them until you have kept them around for ten years: by that time, they ought to stop moving on you; by that time, you ought to have them right.
— Donald Hall

Poetry is a hazardous occupation, very hazardous. There may be bad things in there inside you that maybe you can't handle.
— James Dickey

On solemn asses fall plush sinecures,
So keep a straight face and sit tight on yours.
— X. J. Kennedy, To A Young Poet

A young poet must discover who he is, he must create himself as a poet. Even a genius must do this. It's a painful process, splitting out your own skin and squeezing your soul and body out of it, even, sometimes, before you know the shape of color of the new self you are going to become.
— Daniel Hoffman

A Poet never takes notes. You never take notes in a love affair.
— Robert Frost

The finest cowboy poems rarely cut it on the printed page. They must be recited the way they are written, from the noggin, with feeling. They're like fine wine. They must breathe, especially if they've been bottled up too long.
— David J. Swift

Poetry cannot breathe in the scholar's atmosphere.
— Henry David Thoreau  

Don't write love poems when you're in love. Write them when you're not in love.
— Richard Hugo 

A poet needs to keep his wilderness alive inside him. To remain a poet after forty requires an awareness of your darkest Africa, that part of yourself that will never be tamed.
— Stanley Kunitz

“You should have your head filled with poems all the time, until they almost get in your way.”

--Elizabeth Bishop

The art of poetry consists in taking the poem through draft after draft, without losing its inspirational magic: he removes everything irrelevant or distracting, and tightens up what is left. Lazy poets never carry their early drafts far enough: some even believe that virtue lies in the original doodle scrawled on the back of an envelope.
— Robert Graves

The poet's first rule must be never to bore his readers; and his best way of keeping this rule is never to bore himself—which, of course, means to write only when he has something urgent to say.
— Robert Graves

Virtually every beginning poet hurts himself by an addiction to adjectives. Verbs are by far the most important things for poems—especially wonderful tough monosyllables like “gasp” and “cry.” Nouns are the next most important. Adjectives tend to be useless.
— Donald Hall

Read over your compositions, and where ever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.
— Samuel Johnson

Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly— and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.
— Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch

If at the end of your first ten or fifteen years of fighting and working and feeling, you find you've written one line of one poem, you'll be very lucky indeed.

And so my advice to all young people who wish to become poets is: do something easy, like learning how to blow up the world— unless you're not only willing, but glad, to feel and work and fight till you die.

Does this sound dismal? It isn't.

It's the most wonderful life on earth.

Or so I feel.

—    ee cummings

More on Martin

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poet.html?id=81893

Obituary for a Poet Heretic

http://www.fictionaut.com/stories/finnegan-flawnt/obituary-for-a-poet-heretic

"He wrote poems too, some good some bad but they were passionate and his. He loved to read them out loud and his voice never wavered. A poetic dinosaur shedding tears for bards long gone, he sat on a leather couch in the nude, blew smoke rings shaped like wild animals and picked verses out of the thick air"

The Road Not Taken

I have always, always loved this poem - from the first time I read it in high school. I would love to find a way to include it in my MGRP... but how?

 

The Road Not Taken

Robert Frost
Mountain Interval
1916

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Road_Not_Taken_%28poem%29

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Difficult Poems

Difficult poems are normal. They are not incoherent, meaningless, or hostile. Wellmeaning readers may have suggested that "something must be wrong" with the poem. So let's get a new perspective. "Difficult" is very different from abnormal. In today's climate, with an increasing number of poems being labeled "difficult," this is an important distinction to keep in mind. 

Difficult poems are like this because of their innate makeup. And that makeup is their constructed style. They are not like this because of something you as readers have done to them. It's not your fault.

Difficult poems are hard to read. Of course you already know this, but if you keep it in mind, then you are able to regain your authority as a reader. Don't let the poem intimidate you! Often the difficult poem will provoke you, but this may be its way of getting your attention. Sometimes, if you give your full attention to the poem, the provocative behavior will stop.

Difficult poems are not popular. This is something that any reader or writer of difficult poems must face squarely. There are no three ways about it. But just because a poem is not popular doesn't mean it has no value! Unpopular poems can still have meaningful readings and, after all, may not always be unpopular. Even if the poem never becomes popular, it can still be special to you, the reader. Maybe the poem's unpopularity will even bring you and the difficult poem closer. After all, your own ability to have an intimate relation with the poem is not affected by the poem's popularity. 

http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors/bernstein/essays/difficult-poem.html

-----------------------

Article

"In Praise of Difficult Poetry"

http://www.slate.com/id/2164823/

Difficulty, after all, is one of life's essential pleasures: music, athletics, dance thrill us partly because they engage great difficulties. Epics and tragedies, no less than action movies and mysteries, portray an individual's struggle with some great difficulty. In his difficult and entertaining work Ulysses, James Joyce recounts the challenges engaged by the persistent, thwarted hero Leopold and the ambitious, narcissistic hero Stephen. Golf and video games, for certain demographic categories, provide inexhaustible, readily available sources of difficulty.

William Butler Yeats, in contrast, implies that what's really difficult for him is not poetry but committee meetings, administration, dealing with jerks, and group undertakings like plays:

THE FASCINATION OF WHAT'S DIFFICULT
The fascination of what's difficult
Has dried the sap out of my veins, and rent
Spontaneous joy and natural content
Out of my heart. There's something ails our colt
That must, as if it had not holy blood,
Nor on Olympus leaped from cloud to cloud,
Shiver under the lash, strain, sweat and jolt
As though it dragged road-metal. My curse on plays
That have to be set up in fifty ways,
On the day's war with every knave and dolt,
Theatre business, management of men.
I swear before the dawn comes round again
I'll find the stable and pull out the bolt.

The winged horse, ancient symbol of poetry, offers the "spontaneous joy" the speaker misses. Notably, though, Yeats does concede in his title that all that business of production and collaboration is fascinating, more or less because it is difficult. But what he really wants to do, he says at the end, is free the winged horse of poetry from its confining stable. The colt has been made into too much of a workhorse, when it should be leaping from cloud to cloud.

Pete Townshend lyrics

All songs from:
"All the Best Cowboys Have Chinese Eyes," 1982
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Best_Cowboys_Have_Chinese_Eyes

"The Sea Refuses No River"
The sea refuses no river
And right now this river's banks are blown
The sea refuses no river
Whether stinking and rank
Or red from the tank
Whether pure as a spring
There's no damned thing stops the poem
The sea refuses no river
And this river is homeward flowing

"Slit Skirts"
I was just thirty-four years old and I was still wandering in a haze
I was wondering why everyone I met seemed like they were
Lost in a maze

I don't know why I thought I should have some kind of
Divine right to the blues
It's sympathy not tears people need when they're the
Front page sad news.

The incense burned away and the stench began to rise
And lovers now estranged avoided catching each others' eyes

And girls who lost their children cursed the men who fit the coil
And men not fit for marriage took their refuge in the oil
No one respects the flame quite like the fool who's badly burned
From all this you'd imagine that there must be something learned

Slit skirts, Jeanie never wears those slit skirts
I don't ever wear no ripped shirts
Can't pretend that growing older never hurts.

"Exquisitely Bored"
The tissue box is empty
No coffee for my cream
Dogs howl in the alley
Crazy women scream
Some kids shout from there pick up truck
There stoned on life and beer
Fifty radios playing in this street
But I'm still hardly here

Bits to Include

Poetry has long been part of the lore and history of cultures around the world. But as information has become more readily available and more disposable, more and more people find poetry difficult not only to write, but also to understand. While it has retained its importance as an art form, it has consequently become undervalued as an effective form of communication and expression of true emotion. Indeed, in many circles, poetry is viewed as a tacky and unnecessary form of communication created by few and enjoyed by fewer. But what really makes poetry difficult for many people to enjoy and understand has less to do with poetry’s perceived value and more to do with how people receive information today.

If you are one of those people who find poetry difficult to understand or enjoy, try approaching a poem from a different angle. No one will argue that meaning is often hard to come by in a poem, but instead of seeking out meaning, try enjoying the rhythm of a poem, or the sound of the words. Poetry can be musical in a sense, but more so, it can be fun simply to combine words in a new and different way. Seeking meaning can make poetry difficult, but enjoying the poem for its rhythmic qualities can be less daunting and immediately rewarding.

http://www.wisegeek.com/why-is-poetry-difficult.htm

--------

http://www2.scholastic.com/browse/article.jsp?id=3360

How to Read a Poem
Scholastic

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Reading poetry can be very frustrating if you don't know what it means. So many poems are perplexing, paradoxical, and just plain hard to understand. And yet it is often the poems that are the most difficult to crack open that can offer us the richest reading experiences — if we know how to read them and what to expect from them. With this activity, you can offer your students reading strategies that will allow them to enjoy sophisticated and subtle writing of all kinds.

Begin by explaining to your students that poems don't have answers. Instead, they have possibilities. They point toward feelings, capture contradictions, awaken our understandings. Sometimes they leave us with questions and no answers at all. One day we notice something new about a poem, another day something else. The good news is you can't get a poem right or wrong. A good poem has many, many possible meanings.

Offer your students the following strategies for reading a poem.

A poem with rich layers of possible meanings that students might enjoy talking about is Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening."

• Tell them first that they shouldn't try to explain the poem or figure out its message or "point." They should begin by just noticing the poem: "I notice that the poet repeats the last line of the poem. I notice he only 'thinks' he knows whose woods these are; he's not certain."

• They should ask questions of the poem: "Why does he repeat the last line? Why is he so tired?"

• They should let the poem remind them of things in their own lives: "This reminds me of when I am so tired at the end of the day and the bus ride seems to be taking forever and I just want to go home."

• Remind students that they are under no obligation to "understand" the poem. They just have to be able to notice things, ask questions, and make connections.

• Have students read and respond to the poem on their own and then talk about it as a class. Be careful that they don't try to arrive at a single interpretation of the poem but explore all the possible meanings it might have.

• When students feel that they don't have to understand everything about a poem right away, you may notice them reading more and more difficult pieces! Encourage them to read and respond to all kinds of poems in their journals.

How to Format a Bibliography in APA Style

How do you format a bibliography in APA Style?

APA Style calls for a list of references instead of a bibliography.

The requirements of a reference list are that all references cited in the text of a paper must be listed alphabetically by first author's last name in the list of references and that all references listed must be cited within the text.

A bibliography, however, typically includes resources in addition to those cited in the text and may include annotated descriptions of the items listed.

In general, the list of references is double-spaced and listed alphabetically by first author's last name. For each reference, the first line is typed flush with the left margin, and any additional lines are indented as a group a few spaces to the right of the left margin (this is called a hanging indent).

For example:
APA Publications and Communications Board Working Group on Journal Article Reporting Standards.(2009). Reporting standards for research in psychology: Why do we need them? What might they be? American Psychologist, 63, 839–851. doi:10.1037/0003-066X.63.9.839

http://www.apastyle.org/learn/faqs/format-bibliography.aspx

Children's Poems as Repetends

Rock a Bye Baby
by Anonymous

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock-a-bye_Baby

Rock-a-bye baby, on the treetop,
When the wind blows, the cradle will rock,
When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall,
And down will come baby, cradle and all.

Thumbs
Shel Silverstein
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Sidewalk-Ends-30th-Anniversary/dp/0060572345/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1266552037&sr=8-1

Oh, the thumb-sucker's thumb
May look wrinkled and wet
And withered, and white as the snow,
But the taste of a thumb Is the sweetest taste yet
(As only we thumb-suckers know).

Thirty Days Hath September
by Anonymous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thirty_days_hath_September

Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
February has twenty-eight alone,
All the rest have thirty-one,
Excepting leap-year, that’s the time
When February’s days are twenty-nine.

Humpty Dumpty
by Anonymous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_dumpty

Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
Couldn’t put Humpty together again!

Little Miss Muffet
by Anonymous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_miss_muffet

Little Miss Muffet
Sat on a tuffet
Eating her curds and whey;
Along came a spider,
Who sat down beside her
And frightened Miss Muffet away.

Fee! Fi! Fo! Fum!
by Anonymous
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fee-fi-fo-fum

Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum!
I smell the blood of an Englishman.
Be he alive, or be he dead,
I’ll grind his bones to make my bread.

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod
by Eugene Field
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wynken,_Blynken,_and_Nod

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
Sailed off in a wooden shoe—
Sailed on a river of crystal light,
Into a sea of dew.
“Where are you going, and what do you wish?”
The old moon asked the three.
“We have come to fish for the herring fish
That live in this beautiful sea;
Nets of silver and gold have we!”
Said Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
As they rocked in the wooden shoe,
And the wind that sped them all night long
Ruffled the waves of dew.
The little stars were the herring fish
That lived in that beautiful sea—
“Now cast your nets wherever you wish—
Never afeard are we”;
So cried the stars to the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

All night long their nets they threw
To the stars in the twinkling foam—
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
Bringing the fishermen home;
’T was all so pretty a sail it seemed
As if it could not be,
And some folks thought ’t was a dream they’d dreamed
Of sailing that beautiful sea—
But I shall name you the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
Is a wee one’s trundle-bed.
So shut your eyes while mother sings
Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
As you rock in the misty sea,
Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:
Wynken,
Blynken,
And Nod.

The Cat in the Hat
by Dr. Seuss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cat_In_The_Hat

The sun did not shine.
It was too wet to play.
So we sat in the house
All that cold, cold, wet day.

I sat there with Sally.
We sat there, we two.
And I said, "How I wish
We had something to do."

Too wet to go out
And too cold to play ball.
So we sat in the house.
We did nothing at all.

So all we could do was to
Sit!
Sit!
Sit!
Sit!
And we did not like it.
Not one little bit.

And then
something went BUMP!
How that bump made us jump!

We looked!
Then we saw him step in on the mat!
We looked!
And we saw him!
The Cat in the Hat!

Why Kids Love Poetry

Poems don't have to be long and wordy. They don't have to rhyme, though children's poetry often does, which makes it easy to memorize (at least for my kids).

Here are Rory (4.5) and Fiona (newly 3) chanting two stanzas from an alphabet poetry book. The words are:

"Bad baby bubbleducks beat up his bed
With bashed up bananas and moldy old bread."

You can see we were on the "B" page.

Break time is over!

Dear Diary,

It has been a week since my last entry. OK, OK, this isn't a diary, it is my process journal for the MGRP, but you get the idea. I don't even remember which book I was imitating - maybe, "Are You There God, it's Me, Margaret?" Flashback central! Maybe I should have done this paper on adolescent lit. Or not.

If I write anything inane during this blog, it is because I am ensconced on the couch with my two young girls, watching Tinkerbelle. I apologize up front.

So I have been thinking a lot about what to use as a thread in my piece - my repetend - and I think I have settled on something. I am going to write a series of classroom lessons, from the initial introduction to 9th grade poetry through to the semester's end. The repetend will be written like a play, and will show the development of the students as time passes. I will, as crots, feature poem bits I like, and mostly self-written stuff. 

Off to start on the play!

Research questions

• Why do people fear poetry?
• Are these fearers big readers otherwise?
• What magazines/publications do fearers read?
• Are fearers music/song fans?
• Did these people have a bad experience with poetry?
• Did they have NO experience with poetry?
• How does the creative process behind it work?
• Do they relate to it as a form of expression?
• Does it seem related to songwriting to fearers?
• Do fearers only think poems rhyme?
• How does rhythm fit into the whole thing?
• Does poetry seem like an abstract form of writing?
• How much does someone need to know about poetry to "get" a poem's inner meaning?

Initial research

Metrophobia

http://phobias.about.com/od/phobiaslist/a/metrophobia.htm

Sample text: "Metrophobia, or the fear of poetry, is surprisingly common. Many people first develop this phobia in school, when overzealous teachers encourage them to rank poems according to artificial scales, break them down and search for esoteric meanings. Others simply feel that poetry is somehow “beyond” them, belonging only to the realm of the pretentious and highly educated."

OMG - who knew it had an actual name?? I would have guessed this was a fear of the D.C. Metro system, which - given the number of accidents recently - would be justified. There HAS to be a comic strip hidden in there somewhere. If only I had that ability.

The fear of poetry on the subway in the city: metrometrometrophobia. That was my husband's contribution to this little sidebar. =>

-----------------------------

First poems: classic nursery rhymes

http://poetry.about.com/od/nurseryrhymes/a/nurseryrhymes.htm

The oldest English nursery rhyme, according to this About.com page, is "Jack Sprat," which they date to 1639. Wikipedia confirms this (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_sprat). Zowie.

-----------------------------

Poetry in Movies: Dead Poets Society, Shakespeare in Love, Poetic Justice, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Bull Durham, Quiz Show, and more (see link below)

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19359

-----------------------------

Poetry reviews

• http://www.aprweb.org/
• http://poetry.about.com/od/periodicals/Poetry_Journals_Reviews.htm
• http://www.world-class-poetry.com/poetry-book-reviews.html
• http://www.cprw.com/
• http://www.poetry.org/
• http://www.boxcarpoetry.com/main.html

-----------------------------

Poetry publications

• http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/index.html
• http://dir.yahoo.com/Arts/Humanities/Literature/Poetry/Magazines/

-----------------------------

Types of poetry

• http://www.types-of-poetry.org.uk
• http://www.poemofquotes.com/articles/poetry_forms.php
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poetry#Forms

-----------------------------

Crot ideas:

• Write a deleted scene from one of the above movies, working in another poem
  
• Write a review of a poetry book
• Autobiography of a poet/obituary/eulogy of a poet (could base on recent articles re: Salinger in New Yorker)
• Advertisement for a poetry slam
• Student poetry on a "hot" topic
• Greeting card
• Song lyrics
• Children's book
• Shopping list (poetic shopping?)
• Interview with a dead poet
• Job application/poetry award application
• Letter exchange to/from famous poet
• Map of famous Irish poets burial places
• Menu (poetic menu? Maybe a poetic place has a theme pub)
• Newspaper article
• Quiz
• Recipe (how to "cook up" the perfect poet - the one who touches all)
• Travel poster (learn poetry while imbibing with the greats)

-----------------------------

NCTE ideas

• 2010 African-American Read-in: http://www.ncte.org/action/aari/packetinfo
• Downloaded LOADS of poetry-related articles! Yay!

-----------------------------

Repetend ideas

• Poems on a theme (new life, death, love, love lost)
• Obituaries for major poets
• Song lyrics
• Children's poems/nursery rhymes
• Poets writing about poetry phobia (such as: http://www.martinespada.net/advice.htm)

-----------------------------

Getting started

Start to brainstorm how crots might be interrelated: http://www.graphic.org/brainst.html

English gone wild!

Welcome to the Zany English Teacher blog! I created this blog, initially at least, to help guide me down the path toward completing my first multi-genre research paper (heretofore known as MGRP) for my "So you wanna teach English" course at GMU with Dr. Horvath. I stole the idea of doing a blog from a classmate, so thank you, classmate! This will be a far more productive forum for me than carting around a notebook and pen.

For my MGRP topic, I have chosen "Poetry Phobia" and how a student's fear of poetry affects their ability to read, enjoy, and write the medium. After Dr. Horvath approved the topic, I ran up to my bedroom, ripped the tape off an un-stored box of books, and dug like a hungry chipmunk in winter until I pulled out one of my all-time favorite poet's (I dug out his book, not him).

Martin Espada. Born in Brooklyn of Puerto Rican parents, Martin teaches primarily at UMASS Amherst and was once a good friend's poetry teacher at Emerson College in Boston. Following is a picture of Martin, and a picture of a copy of my favorite of his books, Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands. He autographed my copy to me, writing simply, "To Laura, Companera writer, love, Martin."



Following is a Martin poem I am considering using in my MGRP:

Federico's Ghost

The story is
that whole families of fruitpickers
still crept between the furrows
of the field at dusk,
when for reasons of whiskey or whatever
the cropduster plane sprayed anyway,
floating a pesticide drizzle
over the pickers
who thrashed like dark birds
in a glistening white net,
except for Federico,
a skinny boy who stood apart
in his own green row,
and, knowing the pilot
would not understand in Spanish
that he was the son of a whore,
instead jerked his arm
and thrust an obscene finger.

The pilot understood.
He circled the plane and sprayed again,
watching a fine gauze of poison
drift over the brown bodies
that cowered and scurried on the ground,
and aiming for Federico,
leaving the skin beneath his shirt
wet and blistered,
but still pumping his finger at the sky.

After Federico died,
rumors at the labor camp
told of tomatoes picked and smashed at night,
growers muttering of vandal children
or communists in camp,
first threatening to call Immigration,
then promising every Sunday off
if only the smashing of tomatoes would stop.

Still tomatoes were picked and squashed
in the dark,
and the old women in camp
said it was Federico,
laboring after sundown
to cool the burns on his arms,
flinging tomatoes
at the cropduster
that hummed like a mosquito
lost in his ear,
and kept his soul awake.

from Rebellion is the Circle of a Lover's Hands