Courtesy of Peter
Wallack's Birds of Sanibel
Watching the moon
at midnight,
solitary, mid-sky,
I knew myself completely,
no part left out.
--Izumi Shikibu, (974-1034?)
|
Courtesy of Peter
Wallack's Birds of Sanibel |
without us so that when the Pulitzer Prize winning poet, Mary
Oliver,ends her poem, "Egrets"
with the words: they opened their wings/softly and stepped/over every dark
thing" we know she is no longer describing just what she sees, but
what she feels and that she too, like us now, is stepping over the dark things
of this world? And how can words of an ancient Japanese poet reach out to us
across the centuries and become our voice too?
Poetry is more than description. Poetry is finding the connection of all things
in the here and now. In this lesson, your students will have an opportunity
to revisit their "spots" in Lesson One, and this time begin to connect
the dots between the natural world, the human world and its culture, and their
inner world of fleeting emotion and epiphany. We will use the wonderful exercise,
"The Web of Life," created by Sandford Lyne, poet and educator, for
the River of Words K-12 Educator's Guide. The Web of Life leads
students from the outside to the inside, from what they observe to what they
feel. It asks them to think about the personal world around them: its history,
its weather, its landscape, its people, its customs. Students then begin to
write lines of poems answering questions that lead them through the web
of life, following two rules of the Chinese poets: to be in the here and
now and to be honest.
As part of their journey, your students will revisit and expand their journal
entries from Lesson One, learn the lessons of the Japanese haiku that "shows
rather than tells" by using sense imagery, connotation, and the juxtaposition
of images to impart meaning, and get a taste of what it feels like to follow
"directions" for writing a poem, as they would if they were writing
formal poetry.
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