On Listening to Poetry

The New Yorker has launched a new free podcast series, The Poetry Podcast.  Each episode, hosted by Paul Muldoon, contains a New Yorker poet reading a poem that he/she has selected from the magazine, followed by a conversation about that poem.  The poet then introduces and reads one of his/her own pieces.  

What a powerful tool for the study of poetry!  In this age of poetry minimized as paired text, often read only thematically, it is important for teachers to locate and use tools that support the reading of poetry as essential, elemental, text - deserving of both a leisurely and a personal reading.  

I quote from my own Scoop of this announcement:

Muldoon writes, "the eye is not the only buyer into, and beneficiary of, the poem. The ear has been in the poetry business for much longer, given poetry’s origins in the oral tradition."  What a model for classroom reading of poetry as text!  Share this episode, in which Philip Levine reads and discusses "What did I love about killing the chickens" by Ellen Bass.  A sure winner.  Some students might want to just visualize, some to draw while listening.  The text of the poem is in the New Yorker archive: http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2013/02/04/130204po_poem_bass.  Connections are made to Whitman, Bishop, Harte Crane, Williams, Randall Jarrell and others during the discussion of the power of the poem's structure and diction.  Levine also reads and discusses his own poem, "In another country" :  http://www.newyorker.com/fiction/poetry/2013/02/11/130211po_poem_levine. You might discuss how much - what, if anything - Levine's introduction adds to a reading of the poem.  Perhaps some students should read the poem before listening to the poet. 

I would add now that a careful listening to the discussion reveals not "close reading" but a very personal closing in on what makes this poem special.  I discuss this a bit in a previous post called Close Reading and Poetry. Were Levine and Muldoon to methodically attack the poem's use of image or antithesis, the poem itself would lose its life.  

There are other apps for listening to poetry.  The Poetry Foundation currently lists 1165 Poems with "related content," which includes a reading of the poem by the poet.  I am listening to/reading Douglas Kearney's "Every Hard Rapper's Father" as I write this - a fascinating experience.  His recording brings sense to the inventive presentation of the text as well an an emotional depth that can be missed without audio.

The Poetry Archive of poets-reading-their-own-poetry is another great source. Students can create and share a favorites list and browse by theme, poetic element or form.  Did you know Margaret Atwood wrote poetry?  Try "The Immigrants" for a contemporary (and historical) connection every bit as powerful as most Holocaust YA novels.  

Poetry Out Loud is another good source of audio. Navigate to the Listen to Poetry archive of readings. Additionally, and perhaps more powerfully for the student, are the videos of the Poetry Out Loud contest winners and finalists.  This used to be housed on the web site, but is now found on a YouTube channel.  I have used this to engage middle schoolers in recitation, oral reading, and (for the feint of heart) choral reading.  It often opens the door to a poet's work.

Student readers, as soon as they can read independently or memorize effectively, can create their own audio and video recordings and discussions of poetry.  VoiceThread is a great tool for this, but there are now many, many others.  In fact, just about any "presentation" or whiteboard app will do the job. 

One interesting tweak, and a useful one for many students, is to charge them to play the role of Paul Muldoon.  Find an adult or older student reader who will select, read, and discuss a favorite poem.  You are moving toward a PBL unit!  

Close Reading and Poetry: Why Poetry and the Common Core Don't Mix

[update: In case you disagree totally with my premise, you can stop reading and click here to find three titles recommended for Meeting the CCSS Through Poetry.  Or perhaps head over to The OWL and follow their close reading of a Shakespeare sonnet. I have continued this idea in a post called On Listening to Poetry.]

There are times when a passionate and highly qualified ELA teacher needs to disregard the advice of experts. The teaching of poetry is one of these times.

To be blunt: Poetry should not be read using a Close Reading Method.  This will destroy for students both its beauty and its power.

As you know, The Method recommended and now being modeled for teachers all over the country and in numerous videos requires a 3-step read:

1. What does the text say? (may include teacher read-aloud - some recommend marginal and in-text notation, although these are generally discouraged)
2. How does it say it? (reread, focus on structure and language, tone, mood, symbol, POV, etc.)
3. What does the text mean? (relate to other texts, to me and my life maybe, author's purpose, support ideas or thesis with textual quotations)

Shanahan argues that not all texts require a close reading, because they are not deserving of it. I would hate to have poetry lumped into this category and therefore disregarded in ELA classrooms.  

I argue that no poetry requires a close reading because poetry deserves something else.  What?  My thoughts are captured (and better expressed) by poet James Dickey. His (selected) thoughts can be found in this piece from Brain Pickings, "How to Enjoy Poetry."  In sum, he is saying that poetry must be made intensely personal from the first reading. A poem does not mean in the same sense as a narrative, argument, or informational text.  That is not to say that any meaning is OK. A reader can be totally wrong about a poem. 

For example, Frost's wonderful poem "Spring Pools":

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect
The total sky almost without defect,
And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver,
Will like the flowers beside them soon be gone,
And yet not out by any brook or river,
But up by roots to bring dark foliage on.
The trees that have it in their pent-up buds
To darken nature and be summer woods---
Let them think twice before they use their powers
To blot out and drink up and sweep away
These flowery waters and these watery flowers
From snow that melted only yesterday. 

The poem can be grossly over-read (as it is here), over-simplified (as it is here), and definitely it can be confounding (as it is here).  As is true of much of Frost, dichotomy obscures meaning; dichotomy often, in fact, is the meaning.  Not at all simple. Not at all impersonal. All of the images are open to a dichotomous interpretation. Students asked to parse this poem will find it easy to support a simple meaning (nature is violent, for example) without grappling with the deeper questions embedded in the poem.  

Should students be asked for meaning when the poet does not offer it?  

Many poems require feeling deeply - in the sense of using all of the senses as a reader rather than emotion - rather than finding meaning.  That is Dickey's point. To teach poetry, then, it is important to examine the text itself (How does it work? What is the effect of...) for the purpose of understanding and translating the feelings aroused in the reader. In Dickey's words, "You will come to understand the world as it interacts with words, as it can be re-created by words, by rhythms and by images."  

The reading of poetry can not reduced to a formula with accompanying organizer. I am afraid this will mean that fewer and fewer ELA teachers will teach poems that do not have a clear thematic relationship to another text - less complex poems that Shanahan and I would agree do not merit a close reading.  What will be lost is the joy of the single word, the moment of clarity when a reader makes a personal and deeply realized connection to...something.  

ELA teachers need to fight to keep great poetry in the classrooms.

Ballads Anyone? Try Dylan Thomas

Angry Sea (Creative Commons license to reuse)

OMG!  What a wonder the digital world is for re-learning!  I am an avid reader of Open Culture, a fabulous site conserving, curating, distributing and indexing free materials that are more useful to ELA middle and high school teachers than YouTube.  Subscribe to the feed.

Today my feed reader brought me Richard Burton reading Dylan Thomas "Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait."

I have included many online audio ballads in my Calameo ebook.  This will link be included in the next version.  What a fabulous way to explore figurative language, compare/contrast of subject matter in literature, compare/contrast the experience of experiencing literature.  It is the perfect raw material for a flipped lesson about either ballads or figurative language (metaphor, symbolism, allusion...).  Or just plain have students listen to the reading.

I have revisited my own ebook with this ballad in mind, leading me to reread many old friends and to find more Dylan Thomas.  Alas, I have lost contact with the vinyl Dylan Thomas Reads... I carted around for over 30 years.  But several editions of this recording and Richard Burton Reads Dylan Thomas (CD) are still available from Amazon.

Or try YouTube.  You will find some mediocre student productions, but also some probably illegal video that includes biographical information about Thomas, readings by other British readers (Anthony Hopkins is no Burton, but he is good), and an amusing reading by Rodney Dangerfield (not of a ballad - the ballads are too long).

My advice?  Go with Burton and let your students explore YouTube on their own.  And have a discussion with students about the ethics and legality of posting to YouTube a cut from a purchased or borrowed copyright-protected video...

Make an e-Book: from those old instructional files

Thanks to Richard Byrne's ↬ Free Technology for Teachers, I have found a way to archive and distribute the many rubrics, lesson plans, and original materials I created for ELA (and kept, which is not most of them) over the years.

It takes a bit of time, as I have used Pages, not Word, for 8 or more years, and Calaméo will only accept .doc files.  I also decided to combine individual files, for this exercise, instead of uploading multiple files, so I created a Pages mega-file and saved it in .doc format.  I had some problems with appearance and recognition of page breaks, but images, links and tables worked just fine.

So, experienced teachers, give Calaméo a try - it might be an ELA teacher's ticket into the flipped classroom experience while at the same time providing a back-flipping archive.  I don't know about you, but I find that the more I make available in plain sight on the web, the better.

Here is a private link to my text, Ballads for Middle School Study. To access a private C, you need either to be on an approved Contacts list (can be imported) or provided with a "private URL" like this one. 

Below is the iPad compatible miniCalaméo of the text. The size can be increased, in case you want students or educators to actually read the mini-version without expanding it to full screen (this is an option at creation).  The miniC can be embedded in a web-based document (blog, wiki) that accepts .html code.  The larger file, if you give permission, can be embedded in a Glog or other visual web-pin tool.  It would be possible then to create and digitally archive entire units.

The first time I tried this, I specified that clicking on the miniC would send the viewer to the publication. This seems to have been a loop - when I clicked on the published miniC, I was denied access to the file.  So I uploaded the .html with the "read directly in full screen" button clicked (see screenshot below).

Ballads for Middle School Study

Publish at Calaméo or browse others.

I can see the miniC on my iPad, but it does not appear as the text itself.  Instead, the viewer is told to Read this publication.  It also works on my iPhone 4. I like that.  As students, especially HS students are not only fully smartphoned but also able to use the tools in the classroom, this might be a great tool for e-teachers.

The Monsters & Marvels of Metafiction

I have just finished reading Down the Mysterly River, and after reading it, I read reviews. All reviews crowed about the voice, premise, character development, dialogue, and settings, and I join this chorus.  But almost all reviewers expressed disappointment with the ending, including a reviewer Cory Doctorow (so you know it is a noticed YA title...).  I disagree.  I loved the ending.

I suspect that the reviewers (you can find them with a Google) did not understand that this is not just a fantasy; it is metafiction fantasy.  The ending is entirely appropriate to the genre. 

According to Pastoral Metafictional Action by John Ottinger III, "metafiction [is]— aware of itself yet also enjoyable as a simple quest fantasy."  In otherwords, metafiction writers work on two levels: they write in their genre, and they and/or their characters are aware of their roles within the play of the genre at the same time.  I add another dimension that I like and enjoy to this definition: Metafiction authors comment on some aspect the world in which they live, and this comment is often a strong statement.  As metafiction texts (fiction, movies, images) move up the scale in difficulty/grade level, these comments become more and more critical.  For example, a theme of a the children's book Chalk might be "Watch out! The story you make is REAL!"  An adult metafictional title might have the theme "Watch out! The story you make can also make you."

Watch this fabulous introduction to metafiction in children's books, Metafiction for Children: A User's Guide, from Phlip Nel.  Metafiction is NOT, Nel says, a form of postmodernism. It is its own genre.  He defines it as a book that reflects on what it means to be a book, or that has pictures that reflect on the nature of pictures - it is a book that self-consciously plays with its form.  His definition thus embraces pop-up books, interactive books, many classic picture books, very old, slightly old, and  contemporary pieces.  




Children's books, of course, are not the only - or the main - platform for metafiction.  The literary discussion/explanation online is fairly dense, but it amounts to this: metafiction is fiction that looks back upon itself, or that it out at itself from a fictional inside space. Periodically, and certainly in the endgame, the author/character connection is revealed to the reader and that character steps out of the story.  It is this intellectual fun-side that make metafiction especially appropriate to the classroom.  Students must engage in analysis and discussion, they must explore roots and connections, in order to fully grapple with the text.

These are not easy texts, precisely because the adult/creator voice and sensibility are omnipresent.  The vocabulary and syntax can be challenging.  To the student who does not enjoy fantasy, the narrative voice in a fantasy metafiction can be cloying.  There is, however, a metafictional text and movie accessible to every reader k-12.  Not all metafiction is fantasy; horror, mystery, historical and psycho-fiction also often fall into this genre. It is useful, however, for children to have a background in the most well-read fairy tales and fantasy before they dive into metafiction.  Readers of the more adult titles will benefit from having read widely in fiction. 

The best interactive books written especially for the iPad or Android tend to be metaphysical in nature. Some even transform a classical book or rhyme, like Pat the Bunny and Itsy Bitsy Spider, into a metaphysical experience.  After all, choice is a metacognitive act, and when that choice has been limited to elements of a text by the writer of that text...  The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore would be a good place to start the app experience.  For the most part, apps are not fully there yet, but those that truly take advantage of the interactive experience will push the metafiction genre forward.

I have listed below my suggestions.  Add to these the titles highlighted by Philip Nel and those listed in his companion web post (see below).

Resources 

Philip Nel has a blog post, Nine Kinds of Pie - More Metafiction for Children, that lists all of the titles highlighted in the video AND many of the titles not mentioned but displayed behind him.  He also includes a list of graphic novels. If you read the Comments, the list goes on.

Below are the titles that I especially like.  Wikipedia has quite an extensive list, which I have drawn from, and there is some overlap with Nel.  An interesting aspect of metafiction is how personal the reader's response is. It is possible, in fact, to debate the metafictionalism of any one of these titles.

Picture books - a large list is also on Nel's site - my list includes highly recommended apps

• The Book With No Pictures (B.J. Novak) - must be read aloud
• Chalk (Bill Thomson)
• It's a Book (Lane Smith)
• A Coyote Columbus Story (Thomas King and William Kent Monkman)
• There's a Monster at the End of This Book (Jon Stone) - also Another Monster at the End of This Book - also the iPad apps of the same name
• Flotsam (David Wiesner) 
• There's a Hair in My Dirt; A Worm's Story (Gary Larson) - perhaps best for the MS lovers of Far Side
• Press Here (Herve Tullet) 
• The Incredible Book-eating Boy (Oliver Jeffers)
• There Are No Cats in This Book (Viviane Schwarz)
• The Fantastic Flying Books of Morris Lessmore - app
• The Artifacts - app - MS and up
• Roxie's Doors - app
• Don't Let the Pigeon Run this App - app

Fiction - MS = probably not for middle school but you can guide this - in approximate order of age-interest, but any of these is appropriate for YA level study.  I have not includes Lexiles because they are often misleading with this genre, due to the importance of narrative voice and stylistic elements. Metafiction is wonderful for attacking those persnickity POV, narrator, narrative voice standards too, so test-prep can be done at any level of reading.

• Walter: the Story of a Rat (Barbara Wersba) - high-reading elementary
• Down the Mysterly River (Bill Willingham) -  high-reading elementary
• A Whole Nother Story (Dr. Cuthbert Soup)  -  high-reading elementary
• Archy and Mehetable (Don Marquis) - high-reading elementary
• The Name of This Book is Secret (Pseudonymous Bosch) -  high-reading elementary
• A Series of Unfortunate Events (series by Lemony Snicket)
• A Tale Dark and Grimm (Adam Gidwitz)
• The Last Unicorn (Peter S. Beagle) - film also 
• The Neverending Story (Michael Ende)
• Inkheart Trilogy (Cornelia Funke)
• Haroun and the Sea of Stories (Salman Rushdie)
• The Bartimaeus Trilogy (Jonathan Stroud)
• Fablehaven series (Brandon Mull)
• The Amazing Maurice and His Educated Rodents (Terry Pratchett) - another of my personal favorites
• Unwritten (Mike Carey) - graphic novel series follows Tommy Taylor through time and space, a hero of a book written by his own father...
• Not Everything Brainless is Dead (Joshua Price) - new series of mock-horror - exclusive on the Kindle
• The True Meaning of Smekday (Adam Rex)
• Before I Fall (Lauren Oliver) - late middle
• Once (Morris Gleitzman) - Holocaust
• My Name is Mina (David Almond) 
• Sophie's World (Jostein Gaarder) - often a GT book in MS
• Cosmicomics (Italo Calvino) - often used as GT text in grade 8 
• Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglass Adams) - often a GT book in MS
• "The Tunnel Under the World" (Frederick Pohl) - short story available for Kindle
• The Plague Dogs (Richard Adams) - MS
• House of Leaves (Mark Danielewski) - MS
• Thursday Next Novels (series by Jasper Fforde) - MS - also his Nursery Crime series
• A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (Dave Eggers) - MS
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveler (Italo Calvino) - MS
• Grendel (John Gardner) - one of my personal favorites - MS
• Atonement (Ian McEwen) - MS
• The Toyminator (Robert Rankin) - MS
• In the Night Room (Peter Straub) - MS
• Riverworld: To Your Scattered Bodies Go and The Fabulous Riverboat (Philip Jose Farmer) - MS  -  another personal favorite
• Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut) - MS
• Fables (Bill Willingham) - graphic novel/comics - wide-ranging series - MS
• The French Lieutenant's Woman (Jonathan Fowles) - MS
• The USA Trilogy (John DosPassos) - classic experimentation with form creates metafiction - MS

Arts tie-in (visual, film)

• M.C. Escher
• Found Art - there are great materials online for a student creative unit (I did it) - begin with Wikipedia, links to local museums and visits to local installations
• Hugo
• The Purple Rose of Cairo (Woody Allen)
• The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
• The Neverending Story
• Shrek movies
• The Last Unicorn
• The Matrix films - great to use and reference, if your students have a background already
• The Truman Show
• Hamlet & A Midsummer Night's Dream (many film productions of both)

Poetry & Drama - it can be argued that all drama and most poetry is metafictional in nature, but here are some titles that are more directly so (drama within drama, drama about life as fiction, poetry about poetry, etc.)

• Mirror, Mirror; a Book of Reversible Verse (Marilyn Singer) - concrete metapoetry
• Hailstones and Halibut Bones (Mary O'Neill) - poetry of color about color with color
• Robert Frost - most of his well-known poems - I like his "Design" read with "Design" (Billy Collins)
• "Ars Poetica" - links to poems on poetry from Poets.org
• Ted Nellen has a personal list of Poems on Poems - I like this list for its contemporary bent and its range of poets
• Waiting for Godot (Samuel Beckett) - MS
• Deathtrap (Ira Levin) - MS
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare) - can be read in MS (editing recommended)
• The Skin of Our Teeth (Thornton Wilder) - MS
• Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead (Tom Stoppard) - MS
• Hamlet (Shakespeare) - MS

Informational Text

• Zen in the Art of Writing (Ray Bradbury)
• On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (Stephen King)
• Characters & Viewpoint (Orson Scott Card) - available for Kindle
• "Writers on Writing: Carl Hiaasen" - find more essays in this NYTimes series
• "Why We Make Art" (short personal statements by artists in various media)
• Augmented Planet (blog) - short pieces on augmented reality (AR) apps, shows, creative ideas - I like the angels at Victoria station - this is a growing use of technology that will appeal to kids in a metafictional way

Activities - If you have to ask, you don't understand the genre.  But students might: imitate & update, create, self-question