One of my last pictures of our last two days.
The thing about
cleaning my room up after the year ended Thursday (I am a 1st grade teacher with 25 plus years of experience K-6) is that I return again to wishing for
the time to write a fitting statement on all the books from my book boxes. I have thousands to be sorted and held, looked at fondly, and to "remember" to bring me closure. Plus they need cleaned which I sort of accomplished Friday as I moved and sorted and got he room ready for my summer school job. I'll be teaching Pre-K. In about two weeks. After a week math training. These beautiful books once were the heart of my work. This one just did not fit n the boxes I have over there. And "poetry" is in storage.
Rainbows Are Made: Poems by Carl Sandburg Now, in my teaching, there is ticking, standard, bomb and bust, and "the education politics." But this book was one I used in 4th grade a good deal many years past as a transition teacher in a migrant town, teaching very wise thoughtful children, very serious ones. I used it because it carries poems I'd put up on the board each AM in my Sandburg weeks, or distribute to them to be copied in something I called "The Poem Opener" or in some years the weekly poetry books, and from that each child developed a poetry portfolio of collected work.
Sandburg bloomed out of this volume, as other weeks held Hughes or other poets that I selected to use with them. Beyond that, of course, were the room requirements for one weekly recitation.
Memorization. It was just part of the day. Our day.
I did the same in 1st teaching quite proudly until NCLB described the contents
of all the minutes in its demanded "new curricular fix" in an under-performing school take -over....which really was narrowing, omitting literature and poetry, art and pretty much anything I once knew as content. Replacing it with things they call "explicit instruction.."
That's what they did. It's not what
they say they did. It's what they did.
And few are willing to lay it on the line and tell you.
Don't look in my world to interface with meaning. With literature.
With how critical thought might develop there.
However as is happening nowadays, it was what was done, while denying that was the "intention." But in 1st we once memorized and recited together as a group poems like "My Shadow," or some other piece, that usually wasn't nonsensical, not written by a textbook company to be sold, and actually pointed you into thought, language and the power of the "word." Believe me, that's gone in my world now. We selected work that fit the themes. (Ones I invented by knowing just a little.)
All that said, let me describe the book. It's printed on a thick slightly cream paper set with woodcuts or wood engravings. I grew up in lino-cut classes with Darryl Gray -an artist in my hometown of Morgantown, WV- so I developed VERY early a vast appreciation for this kind of printing.Plus Sharon Goodman my art teacher printed. And her teaching printing expanded my understanding of printing as an art but as the basic way print was transmitted to audience. There is something very important in teaching printmaking both as an aesthetic but as an understanding of that media.
These prints by Fritz Eichenberg in this book are not on every page but they do occur in the book in a meditative fashion as sections change, and they really enhance the work. So striking me first, as I have that visual nature coming from a background in art, is my reaction to what a great way to present his poetry against a backdrop of artwork that is strong, textured, black and white, powerful, hard and clean. Each print has a corresponding Sandburg quote like: "Poetry is a shuffling of boxes of illusions buckled with a strap of facts."
Or perhaps " Poetry is a phantom script telling how rainbows are made and why they go away." This frames the poetry that follows in the section.
That last quote is shown with a print of a tree in a forest with a sleeping old man. Father Time, Methuselah, it calls out to connection to your own interpretive wits. Just as so much of the poetry inside might ask you to build that ability, over the telling of the critic. Or as is hapening now the silence of the dead.
In schools at one time, and probably today, I've been trained and told that we are not developing critical thinkers or interpreters of literature/life/text which set against a backdrop of insistance on lock step teaching, proscribed curriculum, the deflowering of literature allowed to kids, and the move to workbook sounds like the shell game dialog. It still alarms me when I see the wonderful, rich poetry gone. It's so marginalized as to be invisible. But what, I ask does poetry do?
You should ask it with me i think because it is your world that is losing that connection for a significant number of children that need to have the vision.
Sandburg's work here for kids is not silly. It isn't Shel Silverstein either, it doesn't bounce and slip slide, it isn't snide and it can't really be taken as comparable to these pieces I do see available to kids in bought approved stamped state books where over thought the child is given a piece of alliterative cotton candy. It dwells in a different place.
These are poems of shirts, mothers, the earth, the solidity of man, the infinity of everything else. These are dust and push, lurch and tree, good works. You are clearly within the hands of an able father that is defining the pieces he might wish to share with a child as their roots. The soil, water, the ideas that a child might like to wonder with him about.
It talks about time, people, nation, Dreams, drums, crabapples, Astubula, but really it's his voice , the voice of an observer, telling of as Hopkins says in his Introduction it's telling of moments. Sandburg asks questions, ones that echo the child asking of ice and time, mothers and math.
Sandburg was the son of Swedish immigrants so his work carries this flavor too somehow. He was born in Galesburg, Illinois which is west of Chicago. His work and life and times took him into labor, writing, reporting, touring, singing. I connected to this book having recently listened to the story of one of his guitars on NPR and hearing him sing a folktune.
Boy, I hope this works:
Carl Sandburg’s Guitar
Listen
Everyone knows Carl Sandburg the poet, but did you know he was also a folk singer and went to parties with Marilyn Monroe? A New Jersey man has the photos to prove it. He also owns a guitar that Sandburg once owned. Ken Lelen is now selling that guitar and all the Sandburg material that comes with it. He joins us to talk about Carl Sandburg, the folk singer.
He was a folk musician/singer. A great writer. And I recall Lyndon Johnson's epitaph for him, recall his passing as those times wrote our many goodbyes. He was speaking to this book in saying:
"Carl Sandburg needs no epitaph. it is written for all time in the fields, the cities, the face and heart of the land he loved and the people he celebrated and inspired. With the world we mourn his passing. It is our pride and fortune as Americans that we will always hear Carl Sandburg's voice within ourselves. For he gave the truest and most enduring vision of our own greatness."
And what of the poetry. Well I like particularly a few that I did put into the binders of living children and I hope the hearts and minds of former students are able to recall it. (Back when, heaven forbid, I did "Whatever I wanted" over what I am assigned to do)
Ones like this one I put here in consideration of Father's Day:
From The People, Yes A father sees a son nearing manhood
What shall he tell that son?
"Life is hard; be steel; be a rock."
And this might stand him for the storms
and serve him for humdrum and monotony
and guide him amid sudden betrayals
and tighten him for slack moments.
"Life is a soft loom; be gentle; go easy."
And this too might serve him.
Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.
The growth of a frail flower in a path up
has sometimes shattered and split a rock.
A tough will counts. So does desire.
So does a rich soft wanting.
Without rich wanting nothing arrives.
I really love this one.
Soup I saw a famous man eating soup.
I say he was lifting a at broth
Into his mouth with a spoon.
His name was in the newspapers that day
Spelled out in tall black headlines
And thousands of people were talking about him.
When I saw him,
He sat bending his head over a plate
Putting soup in his mouth with a spoon.
On war, on time, on history and memory:
Grass Pile the bodies high at Austerlitz and Waterloo.
Shovel them under and let me work-
I am grass; I cover all.
And pile them high at Gettysburg
And pile them high at Ypres and Verdun.
Shovel them under and let me work.
Two years, ten years, and passengers ask the conductor:
What place is this?
Where are we now?
I am grass.
Let me work.
How about this one for those I read of late that speak to so much:
Said the scorpion of hate: "The poor hate the rich. The rich hate the poor. The south hates the north. The west hates the east. The workers hate the bosses. The bosses hate their workers, The country hates the towns. The towns hate the country. We are a house divided against itself. We are millions of hands raised against each other. We are united in but one aim-getting the dollar. And when we get the dollar we employ it to get more dollars."
Amen.
I'll stop with this because I took it to heart first reading this book as a child and it has been one of my frames:
Little Girl, Be Careful What You Say Little girl be careful what you say
when you make talk with words, words-
for words are made of syllables
and syllables, child, are made of air-
and air is so thin-air is the breath of God-
air is finer than fire or mist,
finer than water or moonlight,
finer than spider-webs in the moon,
finer than water-flowers in the morning:
and words are strong, too,
stronger than rocks or steel
stronger than potatoes, corn, fish, cattle,
and soft, too, soft as little pigeon-eggs,
soft as the music of hummingbird wings.
So little girl, when you speak greetings,
when you tell jokes, make wishes or prayers,
be careful, be careless, be careful
Be what you wish to be
This is a book that a child carries into thought.
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