By now, you’re familiar with the Common Core standards. One thing we notice in them is an emphasis on some pretty impressive poetry. We would love to see teaching methods attend to the heart and soul of these poems, using what we call the How to Read a Poem approach.
Beyond that, we believe one great way to engage with a poem is with a dose of good humor. This partly explains our Common Core Picture Poems. What explains the rest? We’re Tweetspeak Poetry. We do have a reputation to uphold.
Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
—W.H. Auden
Read Icarus’ Gift by Anne M. Doe Overstreet, for another take on Icarus.
Try Your Hand?
Find something to love in Auden’s poem and explore it with a drawing or a found poem of your own.
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Illustration by LW Lindquist.
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L. L. Barkat says
I love this. The boy becoming part of the landscape in a way we can’t quite ignore.
It’s a ticklish counterpoint to Auden’s point about life going on without us, and, maybe in its way, it brings forward that surprising line in the middle of it all…
“They never forgot”
…a line which, because it stands alone, calls attention to itself and suggests maybe suffering and Icarus and so forth are not ignored after all if an artist (or a poet) take the time to paint it (cartoon it, write it) down.
Donna says
HA! Yes… the line that stands alone! The power of art can be so, so subtle.
L. L. Barkat says
And How to Read a Poem would have guided you seamlessly to that line, as it asked you to let the mouse travel the lines. I think when we have fun with a poem, we can find things we otherwise wouldn’t, in ways that are happily discovery-laden. I like that you found a mythical ship missing a mythical fall. I hadn’t seen that 🙂
Donna says
Funny. That little mouse sure gets around. That’s what I first thought of in the context of How To Read a Poem. If the CC wants to create a path to deeper meaning and/or complexity of the work teachers would be so wise to use Tania’s Book. Here’s the thing I just thought of – How to Read a Poem is unique because it demonstrates a profound trust in the reader. It doesn’t hit anyone over the head and say “so, did you find this most important element?” but rather “let’s see what we can see here – feel here – smell here. It builds a road, where other less appealing methods actually try to grab hold of the leg of the journeying reader and WALK their legs FOR them, hand over foot. Forcing. It makes people resist and, when they can break free, walk the other way.
L. L. Barkat says
It is an interesting question… why do we feel compelled to make people see certain things?
Seems more useful (and life-affirming) to me to simply help them *see.* Or hear, or smell, or feel. 🙂
Donna says
Much more useful, and life affirming, which is no small thing in relation to living AND learning.
Not many teaching tools or pedagogical styles trust the learners (or the teachers) anymore.
The way I see it, if folks can learn to drop it in and trust a mouse, they can learn to trust learners of all ages.
Donna says
I love this:
the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
He’s called them out… a mythical ship for ignoring a mythical fall… and in doing so captures the attentio of the contemplative (at the very least), shakes them awake on some level to say “He’s right – I hurry through life and miss life” and maybe even write a song – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOTRHoyXz78
Will Willingham says
It’s interesting to me as I begin to work out these drawings and the poems. In the case of Auden’s, it’s a drawing based on a poem which is about a painting which is based on a Greek myth.
What we’ve done here is really a little bit meta. 🙂
Donna says
So cool… I can’t wait for more.
Were there previous drawings. I’ve kind of been wrestling with a worm these last few weeks.
Maybe the mouse’s name is Meta. 🙂
Laura Brown says
The corner: the one behind my toilet, where the tub abuts the wall and where a small spider lives sometimes.
The lines of the found poem: some from in “A Perfect Mess: The Hidden Benefits of Disorder,” which I had to blow the dust off of when I pulled it from a bottom shelf, and some from the telling of the Icarus story in Edith Hamilton’s “Mythology.”
Anyhow in a Corner, Some Untidy Spot
Messy homes can provide a far
more inviting and nurturing environment
than highly ordered ones. Escape
may be checked by water and land,
but the air and sky are free.
Neatness tends to limit novelty
and the unexpected
However, as stories often show,
what elders say youth disregards.
Distraction can help, too. Most of us
have experienced the surprise thrill
the delight of this new and wonderful power
paying no heed
coming up with a solution to a conundrum
only after taking our minds off the problem.
The wings had come off.
Donna says
Love this… especially this:
the surprise thrill
the delight of this new and wonderful power
paying no heed
(and I love that you are kind of making me feel a little bit proud of my dust bunnies, or at least less guilty for paying them no heed!) 😉
Marcy Terwilliger says
Art School, Art School, years of art, the Masters and their dark days. W.H. Auden took a walk in a museum gallery by the old Masters. He was inspired like all poets by looking at paintings in a gallery. This painting is about Christ’s life and early Christendom, miraculous birth going on and dreadful martyrdom. The painting captures the moment when having flown too close to the sun on wings held together by wax, Icarus plunges into the sea. Yet this is still not the focal point. What view of life and death is conveyed as we see the painting through Auden’s eyes? This is when the tone of the poem actually appears and if you read through it again you’ll notice the poem appears nonchalant in many places. The painting was “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus” 1560. About the indifference of the world to suffering, how everything turns away. This is so true even of today. Then he sticks in something so irregular like the life about the dog. You guys got much more amusement out of this poem than I. Poet yes, trying to understand what he writes, that’s a hard road to reality.
Will Willingham says
Marcy, yes, indifference is clear in the painting, and in Auden’s poetic reflection on it. I think there isn’t much to be amused about in either, and yet sometimes, finding a way to see a somber thing through a bit of whimsy can help us.
I was struck by the ordinary life going on all around while Icarus falls into the sea, and isn’t that just like life around us? Tragedy happens, and life continues on. It’s hard.
For me, the story of Icarus is a strangely happy one. I find hope, despite the loss, in his fall and his release from things that had kept him in some ways. Laura shared a poem by Anne Overstreet with me that seemed to align at least in some ways with my response to the myth, the painting, and the poem. It ran in Every Day Poems a couple of years ago:
Icarus’ Gift
Upon waking, above me a sky so open,
half stunned I stretched beneath
constellations; Amelia was humming
over a small campfire meal.
There was no father I wanted
to please, in my memory, no mother.
This woman knows no other man
who has survived such falling. Whatever
was damaged is attributed
to the envious sun, is now
ash. To remember that rising and the flail
of wings failing
did not wake me last night for once.
(http://us2.forward-to-friend1.com/forward/preview?u=9e5e4dd4731a9649c1dd1cf58&id=c252a87854)
Marcy says
sit this one out.
Donna says
no soul
is ever lost
tho
many are
penned
by
fear
This post reminds me of that plane that crashed in the pacific last week – It made me think about how joyous he must have felt to be reaching for his dream. I was of course not happy for the earthly outcome, but I was happy for his joy.
When we lived in Buffalo we knew a 5 year old boy who used to say the most incredible things. One day the news reported someone fell off a tall building and he said “that would be fun… until you hit the ground.” It was funny (and no he wasn’t suicidal) but there was something very profound in that.
Marcy says
Every morning I read the bible, it gives me hope, a greater understanding as to why we struggle here on earth. To some degree it falls in with what you guys have been discussing. From “On Eagle’s Wings” by Dave Veerman Why? we struggle to put back broken relationships. Why? we read of a devastating earthquake halfway around the world. Why? we cry as we stand at the grave of a loved one. Life is short and tragic, each day we are reminded of our finiteness. We don’t know the future, we don’t know the relationship between events and we certainly don’t know why. But we do know that God is good and all-knowing-nothing catches him by surprise, not the car out of control, the malignant tumor, the hurricane, or the disease. So even as we wonder and question the reason and cause for each event, we can be confident that God knows and that in everything, even the senseless tragedy, He is working. When I read this this morning it made me cry, Why? Because I sometimes forget God is my Comfort.
Marcy says
It would have been so grand,
If this gentle, fool of a man.
Hung from rainbows,
Never falling to the sea.
He would wait for the evening,
Throwing stars at you and me.
Maybe he would have decided to fly,
Much like the softness of the butterfly.
Flinging moon dust in our eyes,
Throwing a star across the sky.
Yes, indeed I like to see,
Him hanging from the rainbows.
Throwing coins at you and me.
Antonio Ferre Andrade Flores says
Who wrote that:
It would have been so grand,
If this gentle, fool of a man.
Hung from rainbows,
Never falling to the sea.
He would wait for the evening,
Throwing stars at you and me.
Maybe he would have decided to fly,
Much like the softness of the butterfly.
Flinging moon dust in our eyes,
Throwing a star across the sky.
Yes, indeed I like to see,
Him hanging from the rainbows.
Throwing coins at you.
il.orso.bruno@gmail.com
L. L. Barkat says
I especially like “throwing coins at you.” 🙂
Antonio Ferre Andrade says
Who wrote that poem?
Prasanta says
Thank you for another interesting prompt. I eventually landed on this:
http://pathoftreasure.wordpress.com/2014/08/11/unclaimed/