Layering Instruction: Text Selection

ENGLISH 1A: Non-Fiction Reading and Writing
Fall 2020 Readings/Viewings:

All of the texts feature models of effective writing and present learning as a key theme. As the students are reading about rowing solo across an ocean or about octopuses and shellfish navigation, they are also reading about learning. Resilience (through preparation and practice) is another underlying theme. Four layers of instruction through text selection.

And I haven't started talking yet.

Martin Wells, Civilization and the Limpet

Tori Murden McClure, A Pearl in the Storm

Tim Severin, The Brendan Voyage

Laurence Gonzales, Deep Survival

Films: Heart of the Sea and Fish People

and a collection of short essays on related topics.

Thunder, Free, Curse: Three Poems from Brendan Kennelly

SPECIAL THUNDER

He had to reach the island in the winter gale.
From Saleen Quay he pushed the little boat
Over the rough stones till she came afloat;
You'd swear he could see nothing when he hoisted sail
And cut the dark.  Once a grey shape blurred
Above his head while pitchblack water slapped
And tried to climb over the side but dropped
Into the sea, thwarted.  In time, he heard

The special thunder of the island shore,
He hauled the boat in, sheltered near a rock
And smiled to hear the sea's defeated roar;
Breathing as though the air were infinitely sweet,
He watched the mainland where the hard wind struck.
The island clay felt good beneath his feet.


FREE

Once ever a boat capsized on Red
So simply he couldn't tell why.
One moment the sun caressed his head,
The next, his world was water.  His eyes
Opened, closed, hurt by the urgent green
That pressed him down, down into the mud
Until his face touched the obscene
Slime.  Strange, though, how foul touch calmed his blood.

His grey head about to split in pieces,
He kicked free, free till he broke into the air.
Breathing hugely, he righted his craft in time,
Clambered aboard.  Ghoulish faces
Of water haunted him, seemed to stare
At his repose.  The sun tasted of green slime.


CURSE

They said a curse was on the boat.
It would never put to sea again
Because two men were lost from it.
Red bought it from a fisherman
For thirty pounds and four tides later
Headed it out into the Shannon.
'There's no such thing as luck,' we heard him mutter
'There's but the skill and strength of a man

With sure hands and sense in his head.
And one thing more.  Luck was never known
To drown the living or raise the dead
But many a cocksure man went down
Because his trust was not where it should be.
Out there, forget your brothers.  Trust the sea.'


--BRENDAN KENNELLY,
from his Love Cry sequence,
collected in Breathing Spaces: Early Poems,
Bloodaxe Books, 1992.

Lighting By Bushmills -- And Brendan Kennelly

Self-Portrait #52.

"We are all occasionally turned to stone by what we witness, think and feel.  Out of that same selfstone, the imagination moulds and coaxes a persona who, entering poems and animating them by his presence, is seen and felt to be a creature of flesh and blood.  The cold of stone is imaginatively caressed into human warmth, surely one of the transfiguring graces of poetry.  (It can happen the other way round too, and be no less a transfiguring grace.)"

--Brendan Kennelly, from his Islandman,
quoted in his Breathing Spaces: Early Poems, 
which I'm excerpted, respectfully, here, among other places in this blog.

I've felt like an Islandman, an enisled "selfstone", and I have wanted others to feel like islandmen or personae too, though I certainly didn't quite have the words for it until this passage from Kennelly.

Kennelly: "My Heart Is Jacked From Writing"

COLUMKILLE THE WRITER

(from the Irish)

My heart is jacked from writing.

My sharp quill shakes.

My thin pen spills out

blood from my stormy lakes.

A stream of God's own wisdom

flushes my hand.

It blesses the waiting page.

It blesses where holly is found.

My thin pen is a traveller

in a world where books are waiting.

Who dares to see? Say? Who bothers to listen?

My heart is jacked from writing.

--Brendan Kennelly

WHAT ELSE?

Be with me Brendan of Ardfert when I

Question words. Song and speech like mine were cast

Aside when, stung by treachery,

You killed a man. Brendan, was it remorse

Made you confront the problematic sea,

The gruff distraction of the wind until

You breathed the cold air of sanctity?

I see you searching with a passionate will

The changing waste at feet and head,

The constant abyss. What reassured you?

Glint of leaping fish? Arrogance of birds?

The sea's tempers? All that has been said

About your lonely strength and rage is true.

What else subdues the sea or masters words?

--Brendan Kennelly