Poetry Friday: Atlas

This poem seems appropriate for the rotten week I've had.  People try to help, and do help, but there are some things you just have to carry yourself.  Next week will be better...

Atlas

by Kay Ryan

Extreme exertion

isolates a person

from help,

discovered Atlas.

Once a certain

shoulder-to-burden

ratio collapses,

there is so little

others can do:

they can’t

lend a hand

with Brazil

and not stand

on Peru.


I found this at the Poetry Foundation website, and here are more Ryan pieces they have over there.

Here's today's roundup.

Reading Update

Book #110 of 2016 was The Secret History, by Donna Tartt.  This is a brilliantly done book, with not a single appealing character in it.  It's about murder; you find that out on the first page, and then spend the rest of the book learning the details.  Shudder.  I somehow couldn't put it down.

Book #111 was Me Before You, by Jojo Moyes.  I had heard a lot about this book, and the movie based on it, so I wanted to read it and see what I thought.  It reads as though it was written to be made into a movie.  Sort of a rom-com with euthanasia.  I didn't really like it, but I also found it pretty forgettable, and a few weeks after finishing it, I'm not able to summon many details about it.

Book #112 was a reread, one of my favorite books ever: The Peacock Spring, by Rumer Godden.  I read this as a teenager and loved the anguished cross-cultural dynamics of it.  I recommended it to my daughter this summer, and after she read it, I reread it, for the first time in many years.  I still love it.

Book #113 was We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, by Karen Joy Fowler.  This was an amazing book, written by the author of The Jane Austen Book Club, which I liked well enough but which was very conventional.  This book, though, was so wildly inventive and unconventional.  The plot is such that you can hardly say anything about it without giving away the story, so I'll just say that it's about love, attachment, siblings, and loss.  It's written in a nonlinear and extremely clever way.  It grabbed my heart and pulled me in completely.  I think it's best read knowing only that much.

Book #114 was Have Mother, Will Travel, by Claire and Mia Fontaine.  This is the true story of a pseudonymous, privileged, psychologically aware mother and daughter and the trips they take together.

Book #115 was Beachcombers, by Nancy Thayer.  It's a story of sisters on Nantucket and their widower father.  Light and airy.

Book #116 was the third of the Passage Trilogy, The City of Mirrors, by Justin Cronin.  I'm really not sure why I liked this trilogy, since it's so very much not my kind of book - post-apocalyptic vampire fiction? - but I did like it. 

Book #117 was The Course of Love, by Alain de Botton.  This is the story of a marriage.  The narrator tells us that in fiction, and in real life, we focus too much on the beginning of a relationship, when the actual story is everything that comes after the beginning.  Although the text I read was borrowed on my Kindle from the library, I found myself underlining passages.  Here's one.  The two people, we are told, "feel a giddy loyalty to what they have built up together: their disputatious, fractious, laughter-filled, silly, beautiful marriage that they love because it is so distinctly and painfully their own."   Here's another: "Compatibility is an achievement of love; it shouldn't be its precondition."  This is a really fascinating book, and someday I'd like to read it again, but right now it's due back at the library. 

Poetry Thursday: For My Sub

I am having some surgery tomorrow, and any teacher knows that being out of the classroom is always more trouble than it's worth, with all the list of things you have to set in place for while you're gone.  I've prepared the quizzes and the sub plans and I'm lining up details, and one of the things on my list was to put up a Poetry Friday post early.  This, which I first posted back in 2013, seemed appropriate.

Sonnet for my Sub

 I'm writing down the mysteries of my class
All that I do, and why and how and when
The intricacies of a bathroom pass
Which students you can trust (but even then
You must be on your guard, and watch your back),
And here is the procedure for the roll
And don't let those kids get you off the track,
Make sure you let them think you're in control.

Sub, I've tried to give you foolproof lessons,
Easy instructions, here's how to be me,
And yet I'm (this is such a lame confession)
Not thrilled by interchangeability.

I wish my absence filled the world with sorrow
But failing that, please teach my class tomorrow.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's the roundup.

Poetry Friday: This Week in my Classroom

This was a great week for poetry in my classroom.  In eighth grade, we're reading The Language Inside, by Holly Thompson.  I really enjoy reading this book with my students; there are so many things they can relate to.  The protagonist, Emma, goes through an earthquake, adapting to a new culture, her mother's breast cancer, a confusing relationship with a boy.  She also reads, writes and shares poetry.  For our daily poems this week we read some of Emma's choices: "Introduction to Poetry," by Billy Collins ; "Otherwise," by Jane Kenyon ; "The Legend", by Garrett Hongo ; and "Mermaid Song," by Kim Addonizio.  (In the text of the novel, these poems are referred to but not reproduced in full.)  Such wonderful stuff!

In seventh grade, we're working on memoir, and the poems we read were all about identity.  For three days we read poems from Nancie Atwell's Naming the World, including, on Wednesday, George Ella Lyon's "Where I'm From," beloved of English teachers the world over.  There's not usually a writing assignment in my classes where absolutely everyone is writing the same thing at the same time, but the "Where I'm From" is an exception; everybody writes one, and I just love them.  Especially early in seventh grade, when I'm just getting to know my new students.  There are so many heart-tugging moments, such as a conversation with a student who is originally from Syria; when I asked her what she remembered about that country, she waxed lyrical about how peaceful it is, and how you can walk the streets without anybody bothering you.  (Here's the "Where I'm From" poem that I wrote back in 2006.)

Yesterday we read a poem from The Poetry Friday Anthology for Middle School.  (If you don't have this one yet, middle school teachers, you have to get it.)  The poem was Mary Quattlebaum's "What I Want to Be."  I love how the poem plays with your expectations.  You think it's going to be about a kid's career aspirations, but the first stanza reads: "I want to be/free to eat lunch/whenever I want."  She goes on to detail exactly what she is going to eat in this far-off, longed-for adulthood.  Mostly not school food.  My students could relate to this poem so well.  I had them write in their notebooks what they were most looking forward to about adulthood, and many of their answers had to do with freedom in just the way this poem does.  My students are looking forward to watching whatever they want on TV, staying up as late as they want to, not having to go to school any more, and yes, eating whatever and whenever they want.  I told them about the time right after my husband and I were first married when we decided to eat brownies and ice cream for dinner because we were grown up and we could!  After our discussion about the poem, we finished up reading Edwidge Danticat's novel, Behind the Mountains, and talked about how adulthood isn't all fun, as we realized how hard Papa in the novel had to work to provide for his family and to bring them to the United States from Haiti. 

I love the way words buoy me up, make me laugh, touch my heart, heal me, crack me open.  I want my students to have as many of that kind of experiences as I can possibly engineer, so that words, beautiful, wonderful words, words that connect them to the lives of people in other places and other times, can do all those things for them, too, not just now, but for the rest of their lives.  That's why I teach.

Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Bathtime

One day in seventh grade this week, in connection with our reading of Behind the Mountains, by Edwidge Danticat, my students were sharing family traditions.  It was a sweet discussion.  One student, whom I had seen crying earlier that week over family issues, talked about a beautiful memory that took my breath away.

As parents, we hope those happy memories outweigh the sad ones in our kids' lives.  All families have plenty of both kinds.  As I think about my own family, I realize that the ordinary everyday moments are often the happiest ones.

In eighth grade this week, we read Naomi Shihab Nye's poem "Valentine for Ernest Mann."  (You can read it here.)  It contains the words: "Poems hide."  I told the class to look around in their lives for places where poems hide, and to illustrate, I pulled up my own list on my laptop and projected it on the screen.  I started the list a few years ago, and had forgotten that one of the first things on it is my son's baby bath, a large blue washtub.  That baby son is now an eighth grader, and he was in that very class that morning.  He was embarrassed, and I quickly took down the list, but it got me thinking.

The combination of both those class discussions resulted in this poem last night.  My son didn't want me to read it to his class, but he gave his permission to post it here.  Hope you enjoy it.

Bathtime

When my son was a baby,
Every morning I would fill up a royal blue washtub
And set it out in the sun.
By noon it would be so hot
I’d have to add cold water to it.
I’d carry him outside and give him a bath.
Oh, we’d have splashy fun together
And then I’d towel him dry
And then nurse him to sleep,
Smelling his still-damp, fragrant head.

So many joyful gifts I didn’t have to deserve:
The tropical sun, free for the taking;
The water, saved from the rain
Or bought in trucks 3,000 gallons at a time
And stored in the cistern,
But as much as I really needed.
Best of all, that little blond boy
Who loved me so much,
So much that he would grin and grin
Until it seemed he would burst like a soap bubble
Every afternoon when I went to get him up from his nap.

Ruth, from thereisnosuchthingasagodforsakentown.blogspot.com

Here's today's roundup.

Poetry Friday: Beannacht

This is a busy day, with a full day of teaching and planning, plus an Open House in the afternoon.  Still, I don't want to let this week pass by without posting for Poetry Friday, and I've chosen to share a poem I read on Monday, the day we dropped our daughter off at the airport for her flight - alone this time - to college for her sophomore year.  That day, at a most appropriate moment, this poem appeared.

Beannacht
by John O'Donohue

On the day when
The weight deadens
On your shoulders
And you stumble,
May the clay dance
To balance you.

And when your eyes
Freeze behind
The grey window
And the ghost of loss
Gets into you,
May a flock of colours,
Indigo, red, green
And azure blue,
Come to awaken in you
A meadow of delight.

Here's the rest of it.

I hope this poem fills you with as much happiness as it gave me on a difficult day, and if not, you can maybe find something in the roundup that will.  I see Heidi has an Open House today, too! 

Poetry Friday: Color

I love the color poems in Hailstones and Halibut Bones: Adventures in Poetry and Color, because they talk about the smell of a color, the sound of it, the emotion of it.  I always share some of these with my seventh graders at the beginning of the year, as we talk about literal and figurative language. Here's one that I'll be sharing next week, since purple is one of our school colors.

What Is Purple?

Time is purple

Just before night

When most people

Turn on the light –

But if you don’t it’s

A beautiful sight.

Asters are purple,

There’s purple ink.

Purple’s more popular

Than you think….

It’s sort of a great

Grandmother to pink.

There are purple shadows

And purple veils,

Some ladies purple

Their fingernails.

There’s purple jam

And purple jell

And a purple bruise

Next day will tell

Where you landed

When you fell.

The purple feeling

Is rather put-out

The purple look is a

Definite pout.

But the purple sound

Is the loveliest thing

It’s a violet opening

In the spring.

Mary O’Neill

(from Hailstones and Halibut Bones)

Dori has the roundup today.