Bervin, Jen and Marta Werner. Emily Dickinson: Envelope Poems. NY: New Directions, 2013.
Bervin, Jen and Marta Werner. “Studies in Scale,” Poetry Magazine, 1 Nov. 2013. Excerpts from Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, New Directions, 2013.
Bretzing, Burke H. and Raymond W. Kulhavy. “Note-Taking and Depth of Processing,” Contemporary Educational Psychology, Vol. 4, 1979, pp 242-250.
Bretzing, Burke H. and Raymond W. Kulhavy. “Note-Taking and Passage Style,” Journal of Educational Psychology, Vol. 73, No. 2, 1981, pp 242-250.
Miller, Laverne. “Teaching Visual Literacy with Films and Video, ‘the Moving Image.’” Educational Medial International. No. 31, pp.58-61.
Pei-Luan, Patric Rau, Chen Sho-Hsen, and Chin Yun-Ting. “Developing Web Annotation Tools for Learners and Instructors.” Journal Interacting with Computers, Vol. 16, 2003, pp. 163-181.
Selfe, Cynthia L. “The Electronic Pen: Computers and the Composing Process.” Writing Online: Using Computeres in the Teaching of Writing. Upper Montclair, NJ: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1985, pp. 55-66.
Ukrainetz, Teresa A. “Sketch and Speak: An Expository Intervention Using Note-Taking and Oral Practice for Children with Language-Related Learning Disabilities.” Language, Speech, and Hearing Services in Schools, Vol 50, 2019, pp. 53-70.
Williams, Luanne. “Txt This: [Take] Gd Notes.” Empire State College Distance Learning Conference. Apr 26, 2013. SUNY Empire State College, Saratoga Springs, NY, 2013. Print.
Recently, I found a program that was compiled by Billy Collins published on the Library of Congress Web site. The plan is to have a Poem a Day for High School Students. https://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/
I posted the first poem on the wall in an alternative classroom with Billy Collins’ intended audience of high school students. In my own recent experience, there were several group activities to get to know the students and teachers on 9/6/17. The group shared what was interesting to each person. I stated that poetry interesting. After this, I posted the first poem “Introduction to Poetry” on the wall in my classroom. My observation is that there was no response from the students. I could interpret this as unresponsiveness to poetry or disinterest.
I like the three dimensional point of view of this poem. It makes me think of the latest technological advancements of adding facets to an object so that the observer can see it through a cell phone viewer as virtual reality. It could have significance in terms of the most recent STEM projects where art and science are combined. It also resembles some of the impulsiveness and perspective shifts of poets to try to understand the world.
Collins examines “Introduction to Poetry” as a scientific object. “Hold it up to the light” is reminiscent of science experiments like chromatography where “true colors” are examined. The “color slide” suggests scientific activity using a microscope where the light is shown beneath the specimen and enlarged 10x. In all of these activities, the notes are recorded for later analytical reports including hypothesis, summary, methods, and observations just as ELA modules require evidence based discussions and writing based upon the text.
The second stanza conjures imagery of scientific studies with mice, “I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out.” Younger students may relate this part of the poem to the song, “Three Blind Mice.” The poem is enlarged again to “room size,” where the actor in the poem needs to “feel the walls for a light switch” to illuminate and “see” the contours and dimensions of the space. The reader may feel a transformation in this quick perspective change from small to large. The point of view shift allows the writer to impart drama and shapeshifting. How can a mouse “feel the walls for a light swith”? Can the specimen have human goals and traits?
The imagery of “people” and “life” continue into the middle of the poem, “Introduction to Poetry.” There is definitely a shift to experience the poetry as a sportsman or as a live audience watching the skier balance on two 86mm fiberglass skis on a wavy platform. “I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author’s name on the shore.” If the student becomes the water skier, then the author is the audience. This strongly reveals Collins’ poetics of “experiencing” the poetry at more than one level.
In the classroom or in a critical space, the analytical process of placing poetry in front of the reader is sometimes painful and tortuous. “But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.” For a teacher and a poet, this could set forth a relationship between students and peers during a feedback process of a poem in the spotlight. A thoughtful and beautiful poem can become ugly and beaten after targeted inspection.
These are the complexities of the examination and drama of a poem. Deus ex machina can be applied as a literary device that illuminates the analysis required when reviewing and writing about a poem. In a drama, a divine character may be introduced miraculously and leave as quickly to provide a solution. In poetry, the illustration and context represents the magic of words to be visual and allow for quick perspective shifts and resolutions. A poem that shifts from a scientific experiment to a fun sport of sunshine and water, and back to a “tortured” figure is disheartening to someone who loves poetry, but it may be the impulsive and horrific scene that can capture a teen’s interest. This is the significance of a poem to stand alone or to be a part of a larger web of life.
“I am thinking ahead. I want to make it a good poem…you can begin by expressing yourself but if you mature as a poet you no longer think ‘I am expressing myself’ what you are doing is you are making it for a reader. You are making it…”
Zibby interviewed literary legend Joyce Carol Oates as part of Temple Emanu-El Streicker Center’s ‘Women on the Move’ series. Their recorded conversation, released here as a podcast, touches on Oates’s two newest releases, American Melancholy and The (Other) You, as well as how she has approached writing during the pandemic. — Read on zibbyowens.com/transcript/joyce-carol-oates-the-other-you
Noonie Fortin Promotes Her Website
Noonie Fortin, the author of Mom Wears Combat Boots, The Sarge’s Thoughts, and Martha Raye has a website that tributes the contributions of Martha Raye in her military tours! https://m.facebook.com/MarthaRayeScrapbook/videos/a-salute-to-col-maggie/10150447331484953/. In this video key film is shared with an interview by Noonie Fortin about Martha Raye’s commitment to the troops on tour. She states that everyone thought she was a nurse because she stayed and comforted the troops by playing cards and sitting with individuals during parts of encampment that were dangerous and imperilous.
Billy Collins with NPR
Billy Collins shares his review of poetry never published in “The Writer’s Best Friend” with the question, “How often do you write poems that are never published or seen publicly?” from December 2016 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QuS36q9wrVU
With my review of work I am remembering teachers of the past. Bruce Butterfield was a remarkable teacher. I did not look forward to seeing the red marks on my paper, but I did enjoy his teaching style. I took American Literature with him so you could say that he influenced my concentration into graduate school! December 2017 Obituary | Bruce A. Butterfield | R. W. Walker Funeral Home (rwwalkerfh.com)
I recall my research 1600s and 1700s elegies. Tracing women and their representations on tombstones was haunting and puzzling. “Searching” through these markers to find a beloved to pay respects and to honor their presence on this earth is always a journey, a walk with the dead, a close encounter of life and death, a discovery of what is constant and infinite compared to brief and elusive. This elegy remembers David Olney, a new musical artist to me, but certainly an artist! I am getting to know Mark Wagenaar too. twitter.com/rattlemag/status/1221461122504478720
This image can be found at Emily Dickinson Archive (EDA). The original can be found at Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
Bibliography
Bervin, Jen and Marta Werner. Emily Dickinson: Envelope Poems. NY: New Directions, 2013.
Bervin, Jen and Marta Werner. “Studies in Scale,” Poetry Magazine, 1 Nov. 2013. Excerpts from Gorgeous Nothings: Emily Dickinson’s Envelope Poems, edited by Jen Bervin and Marta Werner, New Directions, 2013.
Chiasson, Dan. “Emily Dickinson’s Singular Scrap Poetry.” New Yorker, 5 Dec 2016.
Dickinson, Emily, Martha Dickinson Bianchi, and Alfred Leete Hampson. Unpublished Poems of Emily Dickinson. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1935. Print.
Dickinson, Emily, Marta L. Werner, and Jen Bervin. The Gorgeous Nothings. New York: Christine Burgin/New Directions, in association with Granary Books, 2013. Print.
When looking through some of the great projects that have recorded and revealed the “secret of poetry writing,” I found some favorite recordings that I passed on to family and friends.
I ran across this poem in Many Waters from SUNY Empire State College 1996. It is cleverly written under a pseudonym of Tom Harmon, who “no longer exists.” The name is a pseudonym taken from a friend who died years ago.”
In 1992-1993, I was writing alot about a recurring theme of women and landscape found in early American literature.
Celia Thaxter was very captivating for me because I loved the ocean and she “lived” it. Changing from a secure home life to living on my own heightened my senses. Thaxter’s writing reflected a keen observation and commentary. I had quite a few notes on the original version of my “Note from the Ocean” essay that developed into this essay:
Women as American Landscape
The language within the many stories that we have read in American Literature characterizes the landscape as female. Does applying a gender to the landscape make it more acceptable to cultivate, dominate, and prostitute the land? How does this ‘mindset’ affect the various women writers from the past and in the present? Is their approach quite different?
In Annette Kolodny’s The Land Before Her, she points out the instances in which the “American husbandman was cast as both son and lover in a primal paradise where the maternal and erotic were to be harmoniously intermingled” (Kolodny 4). In Samuel Purchas’ “Virginias Verger,” the land is characterized as “her”: “thus Virginia hath roome enough for her own” and “Virginia is Daughter of the same Heavens, which promise no lesse portion to this Virgin, then those Matrons had for the foundation-stock of their wealth and glory” (Lauter 141). In naming Virginia the ‘virgin land, these “psychosexual” fantasies of domination over women are being encultured.
Annette Kolodny also points out that this fantasy of male domination is “reincarnated” in such male heroes as Daniel Boon, Natty Bumpo, and Davy Crockett with the fantasy components of a strong man and a feminine terrain (Kolodny 3). The woman writers seem to approach the difference of both ‘the other’ (Native Americans) and landscape quite differently than these other heroic tales.
In the Journal of Madame Knight, Madame Knight does not approach her journey and the people with her on her journey with an omnipotent attitude. Although she is frightened of the “very Dark,” she speaks highly of John, her traveling companion, who “had encountered a thousand and a thousand such Swamps, having a Universall Knowledge in the woods; and readily Answered all my inquiries wch. were not a few” (Andrews 90). Madame Knight questions what is going on around her, but her questioning is not without the religious implications of Nature:
the dang’ros River could entertain my Imagination, and they were as formidable as varios. . .Sometimes seing my self drowning, otherwhiles drowned, and at the best like a holy Sister Just come out of a Spiritual Bath in dripping Garments (Andrews 92).
Although Madame Knight is a woman traveling into the wild(her)ness when many women did not dare to travel in the wild, she has been conditioned to be afraid of that wild(her)ness and to believe that it will destroy her.
The attitude of the hovering wilderness is an ominous characterization of the land; however, during this time period, people were still dying due to the roughness off the landscape. This is quite a different view of the landscape than in the “Virginias Verger.”
In Hobomok, written a century later, the “other” is looked at through the eyes of a woman. In chapter 1, the narrator addresses the changes in how the people in the novel approach the landscape and the reader approaches the landscape. In 1824, the “thriving villages of New England” associate the previous wilderness with “her picturesque rivers, as they repose with peaceful loveliness. . .two centuries only have elapsed, since our most beautiful villages reposed in the undisturbed grandeur of nature” (Child 5). The land which was once peaceful has been conquered not only by “commerce,” but also with religion, “fearful worship of the Great Spirit of the wilderness, was soon to shed its spendor upon the altars of a living God” (Child 6). This religious tone, which also ties in with the patriarchal view of women has been a “rationalization” for not learning to approach “the other.”
During the 1880’s, regionalist women writers began to look at the approach of the landscape and of others in order to begin defining themselves. In looking at difference and in trying to communicate across the difference, such women as Celia Thaxter and Mary Austin made connections with the landscape and how they could redefine difference. In Among the Isles of Shoals, Celia Thaxter longs to “speak these things that made life so sweet, to speak the wind, the cloud, the flight, the sea’s murmur” (183). As Thaxter describes the islands off the New Hampshire coast, Thaxter also tells her story of approaching the nature around her. Through the use of detail in her descriptions of the island and her experiences on the island, Thaxter acts as an interpreter of nature. Thaxter’s methods of approach strengthen her relationship between herself and nature, and allow her to “mingle” with the natural world.
Thaxter arrives “among the Isles of Shoals” when she is five years old. Although she is “unaccustomed to these new surroundings, she admits, “even then I was drawn, with vague longing, seaward” (174). Yet, Thaxter approaches the island as a stranger. She objectifies the island as “the other.” She does not know how the language of this new region nor how to communicate with island. Therefore, her first impression is what identifies the region for her: the “masts of ships” and sailing (174). Her first approach is as an outsider who is immersed into new surroundings.
As a child, Thaxter studies the different relationships that others have with the surroundings of the island. She mentions a “Star-Islander,” an outsider to the her island, who lays waiting for wild-fowl “with his gun” (175). Thaxter notices the inequality of this approach when she mentions the seal: “A few are seen every winter, and are occasionally shot; but they are shyer and more alert than the birds” (175). Thaxter notices that the hunter has no intention of communicating with these animals. Yet, just by watching the hunter in his pursuit of wild-fowl, she has begun to see the differences in many human approaches to nature; however, she does not choose to experience the island in the same way.
Thaxter’s winters are spent indoors in which she feels “one gets close to the heart of these things” (166). Although Thaxter feels that “Books. . .are inestimable,” she finds communication is important also (166). An example of this is her “delight of letters” which she receives only once a month (166). “Reading” is not enough for Thaxter. Thaxter begins to see that communicating with one’s surroundings not only requires “reading,” but also listening. Thaxter attempts to communicate with nature by using the language which is familiar to her, human language. She begins to illustrate the “heart” of these things through her “reading” or interpretation of the island. Since Thaxter considers nature “precious and dear” as humans, she personifies the world around her, as in her description, “The whole aspect meditative and most human in expression” (169). The island and the sea are depicted as having “voices.” The sea “whispers” (162), and “The wind wailed sorrowfully. . .” (168). Thaxter’s similes also reflect human experience, “stairways cut as if by human hands. . .” (161). Thaxter attempts to communicate nature through human experience. Yet, she finds she cannot communicate nature fully , it is only a “step” in her descriptions and urge to communicate, “who shall describe to me that wonderful noise of the sea among the rocks, to me the most suggestive of all the sounds of nature?” (162) Thaxter finds that human language does not fully describe what she has “read” in nature. Thaxter finds that nature has a different language, perhaps even a dialect of the region. Knowing this, she attempts to bridge the language of nature and the language of humans.
Thaxter takes everything she knows as a human and everything she has “read” in nature and compares them. She finds a conflict between the the continuity of nature and the “intrusion” of humanity. The lighthouse is haven for the inhabitants of the island, yet “imposes” upon nature; “the lighthouse, beneficent to mankind, is the destroyer of birds” (170). She also sees the destruction of the human inhabitants when they fail to “read” the world around them. “The weather becomes of the first importance to the dwellers on the rock” (165). This is the transition in which Thaxter realizes that communication with nature, i.e.”reading” and listening to nature, is vital to all the inhabitants’ survival, human and non-human.
Thaxter sees it as not only human to communicate. Her first “contact” is with the birds who “beat the boat with their beaks” and “come when you wave a white handkerchief. . .” (169). By using and “reading” this different language, she discovers that even Hog Island moans when a storm is approaching: “No one knows how that low moaning is produced. . .” (172). Thaxter’s triumph is learning how “to imitate their [the birds] different cries” (171). In this way she cannot only “read” and hear the language of the island, she can also communicate with the island itself.
Thaxter’s communication with the island is astounding; yet, she admits that she does not have the words to completely communicate the language of the natural world. It is a “vain longing” to describe such things as “a sudden rainbow, like a beautiful thought beyond the reach of human expression” (174). Her description of nature is only a partial translation of natural expression; no “human” words nor “expression” can describe the “language” of the island. Among the Isles of Shoals ends in an acceptance of the inability to “speak” the narrator’s surroundings; however, this does not end her longing or her attempts to describe nature.
I was fain to mingle my voice with her myriad voices, only aspiring to be in accord with the Infinite harmony, however feeble and broken the notes might be (184).
Although she considers it a “vain longing” as a human to be able to describe the relationship between herself and nature, Thaxter’s voice and the “voice” of the ocean blend together, rising and falling like the sound of the waves. The mingling voices are very similar to that heard in a sea-shell, very strong and reminiscent; yet, only a very small “note” from the ocean.
Another regionalist author, Mary Austin, links her story “The Basket Maker” to create a text which approaches “the other” (Seyavi) by including the narrator’s relationship to the region and by preserving some of Seyavi’s Paiute culture through written language. The narrator “weaves” together two cultures in a “regionalist basket.” Austin begins by re-telling the his(story) of the Paiutes in the Bannock War of 1878. The reader is urged “to understand” Seyavi’s culture and to weave together the “coarse” relations between the “overlording whites” and their “rape” of the Paiute women and land. “The technical precision” of Seyavi’s baskets “warns of humanness in the way the design spreads into the flare of the bowl” (Fetterly & Pryse 574). This “humanness is woven into Seyavi’s baskets and is part of the basket; even the “humanness” of the “overlording whites” is woven into the basket. Yet, the common thread holds them together: “The weaver and the warp lived next to the earth and were saturated with the same elements” (Fetterley & Pryse 574). The materials of Seyavi’s basket can extend further into a metaphor of Austin’s story itself. This regionalist “basket” is an effort to connect and hold Seyavi, her story and her culture together including all elements of humanness. Austin does not conclude that this story about one Paiute woman will replace the time that needs to be spent listening and re-reading “the other’s” stories’ rather it is a prompting text which preserves some of Seyavi’s Paiute culture through written language. Austin’s “The Basket Maker” bridges the spoken Paiute culture and the written culture together hoping to encourage the usefulness of weaving a “regionalist basket.” Perhaps, these regionalist “approaches” can help mend and weave together the cultures and the lands that have been separated and othered for so long.
Bibliography
Andrews, Williams L., Sargent Bush, Jr., Annette Kolodny et al. Journeys in New Worlds. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.
Austin, Mary. “The Basket Maker.” In American Women Regionalists 1850 – 1910, edited by Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1992.
Child, Lydia Marie. Hobomok. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991.
Kolodny, Annette. The Land Before Her. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984.
Thaxter, Celia. “Among the Isles of the Shoals.” Excerpt in American Women Regionalists 1850-1910, edited by Judith Fetterley and Marjorie Pryse. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1992.
In the Summer 2021 after a long hibernation from the COVID 19 Pandemic and my July wedding, I was able to visit my mother who was housebound. They had closed the borders between states, due to the pandemic, so breaking free to just travel to another state was important.
After visiting, I pushed forward driving to the New Hampshire and Maine coast. I have often found solace and peace in the New England coast. The ocean was large and vast. I finally found parking along a public beach surrounded by private beaches.
Source Luanne Williams
To my surprise, I found a site commemorating Celia Thaxter, Isle of Shoals, on a historic marker. I will go again. Here again a note from the ocean…
In “Hope , Canyonlands, Utah” a leafy branch juts out of a shadowed crevice of a stone. The offshoots of the branch expose tawny, dry roots; however, the sunlight highlights the green leaves, which have miraculously grown from this barren rock. This manifestation of hopefulness seems to name itself, and inspires a belief in miracles to be a common theme for both nature and humanity.
I wrote this essay with the intentions to publish and support my friend, Pamela Morgan.
I wrote this essay with the intentions to publish and support my friend, Pamela Morgan.
Work in Progress 