A Patchwork Life

Sunshine

07 Mar 2009 3 Comments

by Jackie in authors, poetry, teaching

Frequently students complain to me that they would like poetry more, really they would, if they just didn’t have to analyze it, if we teachers didn’t make them sit there and pick at each little piece of it, if we didn’t make them dissect it and they could just enjoy it.

Today, the weather was balmy and lovely, so I took my junior class outdoors to one of our courtyards with a handful of odes by Pablo Neruda. We had been doing a small unit on the Romantics (Shelley and Keats) and the Metaphysics (Donne and Marvell), and after reading Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind, we started talking more about odes and villanelles. So we took a little detour, and read Dylan Thomas’s Do not go gentle into that good night and Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, two legendary villanelles, and then I gave them Neruda’s Ode to Tomatoes, which they enjoyed and I’ve always loved. I asked them to go home and write an ode, a villanelle or both, about a natural force or object, and they returned with odes to stars, grass, water, a pet rabbit, and trees.

Today we had one of those 40-minute periods, and I decided to do some more Neruda and give them a chance to just experience the poems and react without having to be too analytical. I was partially thinking of the class where we’d had such success with Hills Like White Elephants, so we read the poems aloud and then I asked them to tell me something they noticed or liked. I had made copies of his odes to a cat, a dog, apples, some yellow flowers, and french fries, from his Odes to Common Things. I was also thinking of Dana Huff’s entry about the “I noticed” technique, and overall the lesson was just right for this afternoon. We read some lovely poems, they relaxed and laughed under the rare sunshine, and I got to introduce new people to some of my favorite poems, which is always a delight.