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.

Burning to Learn

Great literary capture of the burning desire to learn?

Don Winslow’s “California Fire and Life”: Chapters 10-15.  

I will excerpt that section for a college class someday.  

When I asked Winslow if he’d mind, he seemed damned delighted.

Viking Wisdom: "Fire Kindles Fire"

Flames from one log leap to another;
      fire kindles fire.
A man learns from the minds of others;
      A fool prefers his own.

--from "Words of the High One"--
one of the many Poetic Edda poems
translated from the Old Norse
by Patricia Terry

There are many reasons why I like this stanza and why I've quoted it to many a class.  I like to discuss with the class the governing concerns and imagery, the communal intelligence and the kindling fire.  And, I like to ask my students what happens if you substitute "tree" in place of "log" in that first line.  This stanza and that juxtaposition of wild vs. domesticated "fire" provides a foundation for worthy discourse in the classroom and out.

"The Sea In The Head": Two More From Kennelly's "Islandman"

When will we permit the sea in the head

To flow as it will?

The moon has laws but no theories.

It sends out a cold, golden call

And hangs in suspense for the answer

We fear to give.

I would release the sea in the head.

I would let it live,

Pour through the brain's darkest caves,

Out through the eyes,

Touching the distant skin of other 

Minds and bodies.

Who will say which is more real --

My hands on the sea,

The strange flesh or the hurt roar

That is part of me?

Who will say which is more felt --

Loneliness

Or the desolation written on stones

When the sea withdraws?

I have learned to live both night and day

Uncertain of day and night.

This beautiful island is poised forever

In a dubious light.

--Brendan Kennelly,

Two poems from his "Islandman," a book or sequence of poems that  I've pointed to and quoted from before here and here.

Borrowed, with respect, from this volume:

Brendan Kennelly, Breathing Spaces: Early Poems, 
Bloodaxe Books: Newcastle upon Tyne, 1992.

Happy Mother's Day!

Dear Mom,
      Thanks for the magic.  I try to use it almost every day.
Your son,
      Matthew David.




Frog: sculpture mix; green glazing, layered.
(This was one of my first guided sculptures, in a class, and my model was a toy frog.)

Seamus Heaney's "Reed Music"

GIFTS OF RAIN

I

Cloudburst and steady downpour now

for days.

Still mammal,

straw-footed on the mud,

he begins to sense weather

by his skin.

A nimble snout of flood

licks over stepping stones

and goes uprooting.

He fords

his life by soundings.

Soundings.

II.

A man wading lost fields

breaks the pane of flood:

a flower of mud-

water blooms up to his reflection

like a cut swaying

its red spoors through a basin.

His hands grub

where the spade has uncastled

sunken drills, an atlantis

he depends on. So

he is hooped to where he planted

and sky and ground

are running naturally among his arms

that grope the cropping land.

III.

When rains were gathering

there would be an all-night

roaring off the ford.

Their world-schooled ear

could monitor the usual

confabulations, the race

slabbering past the gable,

the Moyola harping on

its gravel beds:

all spouts by daylight

brimmed with their own airs

and overflowed each barrel

in long tresses.

I cock my ear

at an absence--

in the shared calling of blood

arrives my need

for antediluvian lore.

Soft voices of the dead

are whispering by the shore

that I would question

(and for my children's sake)

about crops rotted, river mud

glazing the baked clay floor.

IV.

The tawny guttural water

spells itself: Moyola

is its own score and consort,

bedding the locale

in the utterance,

reed music, an old chanter

breathing its mists

through vowels and history.

A swollen river,

a mating call of sound

rises to pleasure me, Dives,

hoarder of common ground.

--Seamus Heaney

from his volume Wintering Out (1972)

Note: I came upon this poem and its music of water, geography, and sensibility by chance last night. I was "reading around," picking up this volume and that, this poetry, that novel, the other bit of non-fiction, and so forth. I was thinking of the storm hitting the East Coast and the friends who live there, even as I was listening to Dougie Maclean's fine voice and compositions (The Essential Dougie Maclean, in this case).

This poem held me, so I typed up part of it. Let the poem linger in my mind overnight. Now, as I sit here, having typed up the whole of it, I'm reminded how often in the past, especially as an undergraduate and then graduate student, I would write out whole poems, type out whole poems, to get the writer's flow into my head. I used to do this with my own essays if I were working from draft to draft, writing out the polished opening paragraphs from that very first word to put me into the voice of the essay, to put me into the flow of thoughts and feelings and verbiage, the foliage of language, for continuity's sake.

I recommend this practice: write it out. Write out--however that makes sense to you--a poem (or short story!) from start to finish. Don't analyze as you write it out. Enter the flow of words as you would a river. Later, you'll be a better navigator of that river. With "Gifts of Rain," for example, only the "writing out" of this poem led me to notice the deliberate variations in versification, the shift in stanza-patterns from portion to portion. There's purposeful composition there, and listening for the music came in part because I allowed myself, made myself, pay attention stanza by stanza, line by line, word by word.

Maybe I should have noticed those things just from reading. Maybe. But I'd rather emphasize how the act of writing out this whole poem led to more and better than to play the blame game. Find a poem that tugs on you just a bit--not a favorite poem, no--and see what happens when you ride that river.

Hemingway's Show-and-Tell

Here's a favorite passage from Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. I like what the young Hemingway is learning about the Russian writers in general and about reading and writing in particular. I like how he recognizes the mixing of elements and the finding of treasure. He celebrates these great authors and celebrates Paris and the way of life that always moves me with a touch of envy. As the passage finishes I like how Hemingway presents this moment of conflict between mentor and mentee. He explains how he felt about Russian literature and how he admired Ezra Pound, but when Pound's advice doesn't match with what he feels . . . we get this moment of defensiveness and disappointment. Hemingway is scrupulous about pointing out the integrity of the "straight answer" and yet . . . . We can see the student leaving the teacher behind here, not very happily, and how conflicted Hemingway was in that moment. He tells us the "facts," you could say, but the drama beneath the telling is the real heart of the last paragraph.

Hemingway recounts how his world expanded, and expanded again.

Well, that's plenty of telling, so now I'll turn the show over to Hemingway himself. From "Evan Shipman at the Lilas" in A Moveable Feast . . . .

In Dostoyevsky there were things believable and not to be believed, but some so true they changed you as you read them; frailty and madness, wickedness and saintliness, and the insanity of gambling were there to know as you knew the landscape and the roads in Turgenev, and the movement of troops, the terrain and the officers and the men and the fighting in Tolstoi. Tolstoi made the writing of Stephen Crane on the Civil War seem like the brilliant imagining of a sick boy who had never seen war but had only read the battles and chronicles and seen the Brady photographs that I had read and seen at my grandparents' house. Until I read the Chartreuse de Parme by Stendhal I had never read of war as it was except in Tolstoi, and the wonderful Waterloo account by Stendhal was an accidental piece in a book that had much dullness. To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you. You could take your treasure with you when you traveled too, and in the mountains where we lived in Switzerland and Italy, until we found Schruns in the high valley in the Vorarlberg in Austria, there were always the books, so that you lived in the new world you had found, the snow and the forests and the glaciers and their winter problems and your high shelter in the Hotel Taube in the village in the day time, and at night you could live in the other wonderful world the Russian writers were giving you. At first there were the Russians; there there were all the others. But for a long time there were the Russians.

I remember asking Ezra once when we had walked home from playing tennis out on the Boulevard Arago, and he had asked me into his studio for a drink, what he really thought about Dostoyevsky.

"To tell you the truth, Hem," Ezra said, "I've never read the Rooshians."

It was a straight answer and Ezra had never given me any other kind verbally, but I felt very bad because here was the man I liked and trusted the most as a critic then, the man who believed in the mot juste --the one and only correct word to use-- the man who had taught me to distrust adjectives as I would later learn to distrust certain people in certain situations; and I wanted his opinion on a man who almost never used the mot juste and yet had made his people come alive at times, as almost no one else did.

"Keep to the French," Ezra said. "You've plenty to learn there."

"I know it," I said. "I've plenty to learn everywhere."

Alexandra Teague's "Language Lessons"

LANGUAGE LESSONS

The carpet in the kindergarten room

was alphabet blocks; all of us fidgeting

on bright, primary letters. On the shelf

sat this week's inflatable sound. The Th

was shaped like a tooth. We sang

about brushing up and down, practiced

exhaling while touching our tongues

to our teeth. Next week, a puffy U

like an upside-down umbrella; the rest

of the alphabet deflated. Some days,

we saw parents through the windows

to the hallway sky. Look, a fat lady,

a boy beside me giggled. Until then

I'd only known my mother as beautiful.

--Alexandra Teague,

from her recent --and recently award-winning-- volume

Mortal Geography.

I love this book of poems.

"Language Lessons" catches more than a moment of childhood, I think.

My Mother Taught Me To Hunt

She did, indeed. "What did you learn in school today, Matthew?" she started asking when I was five. She made me feel I should learn things, so I pursued learning, sometimes relentlessly. Learning something (or, better, multiple "things" ) to bring home and share became proof of my prowess: a string of trout for the pan after a day of fishing for knowledge. And, she listened to my answers for so many years that I think about reporting what I've "caught" at the end of each day, still, even now.

(We didn't get along all the time, but those were absolute gifts.)

When I think of her, I now often think of the ending to Ted Kooser's poem "Mother":

But the iris I moved from your house

now hold in the dusty dry fists of their roots

green knives and forks as if waiting for dinner,

as if spring were a feast. I thank you for that.

Were it not for the way you taught me to look

at the world, to see the life at play in everything,

I would have to be lonely forever.

The poem's ending catches my sense of debt, of appreciation, and while I don't think I ever feared the spectre of loneliness the way the poem's speaker seems to have done, perhaps the gifts of seeking knowledge, of seeking life, and of reporting it, of sharing it, have protected me in their own way.

My mother died on a Friday, December 5th, back in 1997.

You should have quit smoking the day I turned eleven, Mom, the way you promised you would; I quit sneaking sips of beer that day, just as I said I would, and I didn't start again until years later when it became quite clear you weren't going to keep your part of our bargain. I know you had your reasons, but I'm still angry about that. Can you blame me?

Rest in peace, Mom. You need it, and you deserve it.

Your son,

Matthew David