Comments on: Letters Upon an Arc of White

By: anonymous person

anonymous person — Wed, 02 Feb 2011 18:03:49 +0000

chanterelle…Cantharellus cibarius is misspelled.

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 22:10:44 +0000

In reply to marly youmans. Yes, that is not only flattering but amusing to contemplate.

By: marly youmans

marly youmans — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 20:32:22 +0000

In reply to Luisa A. Igloria.

Peter will have to make an arc of white to hang those comments from…

Seems so natural to think of Miss Compression-and-Surprise for a title.

By: marly youmans

marly youmans — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 20:29:18 +0000

In reply to Dave Bonta.

Exclamatory comments:

1.
Parlor games are fun!

2.
The Federalist Papers! I love that!

3.
It makes a great little sequence, and I like the way Peter is turning it into a further game (!)

By: Luisa A. Igloria

Luisa A. Igloria — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 18:02:58 +0000

Dave asked me for a title suggestion and I thought of Emily Dickinson’s poem, “The Spider” (#27) — hence, “Letters Upon an Arc of White”; here is Dickinson’s poem:

A spider sewed at night
Without a light
Upon an arc of white.
If ruff it was of dame
Or shroud of gnome,
Himself, himself inform.
Of immortality
His strategy
Was physiognomy.

By: Luisa A. Igloria

Luisa A. Igloria — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 05:27:51 +0000

In reply to Dave Bonta. Sounds like fun, Peter :)

By: Dave Bonta

Dave Bonta — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 02:56:31 +0000

In reply to Peter.

You’re free to use my contributions to the series however you want under the terms of my CC licence, which would certainly permit that sort of thing. I can’t speak for Luisa and Bob. (9th graders might also appreciate my poem about F, not included here, if it isn’t too risqué.)

I’m flattered by your enthusiasm for the chain, but I think comparing our parlor game (Marly Youman’s term, but I think she’s right) to the Federalist Papers is just a bit of a stretch! But perhaps Madison, like me, found himself struggling to keep pace with a brainier colleague.

By: Kathleen Kirk

Kathleen Kirk — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 02:55:26 +0000

Fascinating chain–and love the teaching ideas and observations, too!

By: Peter

Peter — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 01:53:22 +0000

This would go so well with my stages-of-metaphor lessons. As it is, I use Sylvia Plath’s poem “Metaphor” to have the kids experience each stage (1. the literal stage: disorienting. 2. The realization stage: it’s a metaphor! Whew. 3. The deeper understanding stage: seeing the poem’s object in new ways.). (I invented the stages. I hope it’s true; I teach it with as much certitude as my wife does in teaching the water cycle.)

The kids almost never get what Plath is talking about. When I finally tell them she’s pregnant and about ready to deliver, they’re in stage two. Then, without saying more, I have them discuss in groups what each line means. In the process, they discover that they get a deeper appreciation for what it’s like to be pregnant. And there are no mothers in the room to point out that we can never know what it’s like short of being mothers ourselves.

So I would remove the letter designation on your poems, maybe make some poems’ associations with their letters less obvious, cut the poems into separate cards, shuffle them, and have them try in groups of four to put them in alphabetical order. When they’re done, I’d come up with some activity to have them share what they’ve learned about some of the letters.

May I have your permission to do that?

I was also struck by how your collaboration in writing this chain of poems resembles the collaboration involved in writing the Federalist Papers with respect, at least, to the relative proportion written by each of its three contributors:

John Jay (5 articles: 2–5 and 64)
Alexander Hamilton (51 articles: nos. 1, 6–9, 11–13, 15–17, 21–36, 59–61, and 65–85)
James Madison (26 articles: nos. 10, 14, 37–58 and 62–63)