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Volume 5, Issue 5

Poetry in The Post

Langston Hughes, the busboy, on his way to becoming a great poet.

INSIDE Poet’s A Poetry in What Do Choice in Simile Motion, but NASCAR and 6 The Post 7 Is … 14 Punctuated 22 Poetry Share? April 18, 2006 © 2006 THE WASHINGTON POST COMPANY Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

Poetry in the Post Poetry Collections

Lesson: Poetry, whether found Several articles from that issue and The Best-Loved Poems of Jacqueline or written hard-sought word by previous columns are gathered in Kennedy Onassis word, allows a multitude of voices, this guide for your convenience and Caroline Kennedy, editor expresses many emotions and inspiration. Suggestions are made provides insight into history and for their use, but are only a few of A Family of Poems: My Favorite Poetry contemporary life. the ways this material might be used for Children Level: Low to high in your classroom. Caroline Kennedy, editor; Jon J. Muth, Subjects: English, Language arts illustrator Related Activity: Art, History Talk About Poets and Poems Which poems do students like? For Laughing Out Loud: Poems to Whether preparing students to Do they know the names of any Tickle Your Funnybone enter the KidsPost poetry contest, poets? Mother Goose, Dr. Seuss, or Jack Prelutsky, Marjorie Priceman, to celebrate National Poetry Month ones written by a poet laureate? Do illustrator (April) or to study the works of students like poems that rhyme, that particular poets before writing their tell a story or paint a picture? Poetry Speaks to Children own poems, this guide provides Do any of your students write Editors Elise Paschen, Dominique teachers with activities and poetry? In “A Way with Words” Raccah , Nikki Giovanni, X.J. Kennedy, background articles from the pages (July 8, 2004), The Post reported Billy Collins, and illustrators Wendy of The Washington Post. results of a poetry contest at James Rasmussen, Judy Love, Paula Zinngrabe One doesn’t usually think of a F. Oyster Elementary School. All Wendland newspaper as a textbook or resource poems were written and recited in for poetry study, but they share Spanish. Jeneffer Lopez, the 11-year- The Random House Book of Poetry for many of the same characteristics: old recipient of first prize stated, “I Children brevity, conveyance of human read poetry and that inspires me to Jack Prelutsky, Arnold Lobel (Illustrator) experience and a framework for write. I like to write poetry because history as well as perspective on I can express my feelings. My uncle contemporary life. used to tell me that whenever I The Washington Post actually couldn’t talk to Mom about my offers many resources. Book World, feelings, I could write them down in found in the Sunday Post, might a poem.” first come to mind. Since 1996, Review “The Top Ten Poets” in “Poet’s Choice” has appeared in the sidebar of this guide. This list Book World, an innovative idea appeared in the April 16, 2006, Book for contemporary newspapers World. You might provide students but a reminder of the poetry with a representative poem of found in the very first American each poet that is listed or form ten newspapers. In the Style section groups, one per poet. What qualities works of non-fiction, fiction and make this poem appealing? What poetry are reviewed and authors idea is the poet presenting? Tone are interviewed. The Metro and used? Why would they want/not Weekend sections have featured want to read other poems by this poets and provided listings of poetry poet? If you have formed groups, readings. If one reads carefully you might also have students go enough, one can find the poetic online to www.poets.org to read devices, poetry in prose, throughout more about their poet and his or her the pages of the daily Post. works. Introduce their poet to the On April 16, 2006, Book World class through life, poems and critics’ featured poets and poetry in celebration of its tenth anniversary. continued on page 

 April 18, 2006 Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page  Students should read or skim The Top Ten Poets articles in the day’s newspaper to evaluations. Select one poem to find an example of each. According to Percy Bysshe Shelley, represent the poet and explain why After cutting out the examples, “Poets are the unacknowledged it was selected. they should label each. Students legislators of the world.” For poetry With older students, you might might be asked to answer the lovers everywhere, a great stopping-off share the poets and their works following questions: place on the World Wide Web is the mentioned in this excerpt from • What is the comparison? official site of the Academy of American Susan Shapiro’s article. In her • When is a direct statement of Poets. Founded in 1934, the Academy August 30, 2000, book review of comparison most effective? supports “American poets at all stages of Ah, Poetry, How Do I Love, Shapiro • What quality is emphasized their careers” and works “to foster the gives readers a peak into the book’s through the simile/metaphor? appreciation of contemporary poetry.” content and which poems and poets • How does the metaphor/simile Its Web site, poets.org, is a trove of inspired other writers. How do your help readers to understand the information on famous and lesser-known students evaluate the choices? subject better? poets, offering essays, biographical “For those keeping score, [Wallace sketches, photos, interviews, audio clips Stevens] wins as top inspiration Explain Simile and Metaphor — a total poetry resource. More than a — three of his other poems were Edward Hirsch in the Poet’s million visitors sign on to the site each chosen by James Tate, Daniel Bin Choice weekly column, explains month, with the tally of hits resulting in Ramke and Star Black. (William simile and metaphor with examples. the following top ten list of most popular Butler Yeats gets second place.) Give students a copy of “A Simile Is poets (popularity in this case defined Many of the featured poets admit ....” Discuss the difference between purely by traffic data): to young flirtations with Mother the two devices as well as the works Goose, though nobody officially used to illustrate the power of using 1. Langston Hughes votes for her. Lawrence Raab and them. Wanda Coleman, however, salute You might put different topics, 2. Emily Dickinson Lewis Carroll’s ‘Jabberwocky.’ items or concepts on slips of paper Pulitzer Prize winner W.S. Merwin in a container. Have students draw 3. Robert Frost confesses to early adoration for and write their own similes. These Robert Louis Stevenson’s ‘Where might include “first day of vacation,” 4. Walt Whitman Go the Boats?’ (Full disclosure: I “spoonful of one’s favorite ice myself was quite partial in my youth cream,” “walking home” and “ride on 5. e.e. cummings to Stevenson’s ‘The Shadow.’) Two the Metro.” Share either in groups choose popular songs: E. Ethelbert or with the class. Do other students 6. Sylvia Plath Miller was moved by Leonard understand the comparison being Cohen’s ‘Suzanne,’ sung by Judy made? 7. Maya Angelou Collins, while Eleanor Wilner was You might also have students draw entranced by ‘The Lady Is a Tramp,’ from the container two slips of paper 8. Dylan Thomas by Rodgers and Hart — the sole or a slip with two ideas, objects, shared credit here.” concepts. Some of these may come 9. Shel Silverstein from poems that they will read later Thinking Metaphorically or Like a during a study of poetry. Challenge 10. William Carlos Williams Simile them to write a metaphor either in After defining and explaining prose or poetry form. simile and metaphor, give students a copy of “Comparable to What?” Use of simile and literary conceits Review the ways in which we in can also be approached with Robert our daily life and writers in their Pinsky’s March 2006 Poet’s Choice works make comparisons. Why are column, “A Stock Idea.” Through comparisons made? continued on page 

 April 18, 2006 Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page  Review the resources mentioned Read It to Me in The Post feature. Students might David Rivard’s poem “A Real, Right also be interested in reading the Audio Archive Anthology, Volume III Thing,” students move from stock poems of the article’s author, Mary American Academy of Poets, $12, cars, to similes and speed to stock Quattlebaum, author of children’s www.poets.org ideas. poems. More than 20 poets reading from their own works in recordings made over Find a Poem Address a Poet the last 50 years. Includes Gwendolyn Give students “It’s a Poem. I Would just the mention of “poem” Brooks, Allen Ginsberg, Anthony Hecht Found It in The Post.” This handout or “poetry” cause many of your and Robert Pinsky. provides students with basic students to look for the nearest guidelines to write a found poem exit? Why not ease them into Poetry on Record: 98 Poets Read Their and a practice exercise. This exercise understanding the devices and Work, 1888-2006 suggests that students write a haiku. nature of poetry through automobile Shout! Factory, 5 hours, 4 CDs, $48.98, The form of the found poem is left to reviews. Warren Brown, Post cars www.shoutfactory.com the teacher to assign. columnist, writes a letter to e.e. Begins with Alfred, Lord Tennyson cummings in “Poetry in Motion, but whaling away at “The Charge of the Focus on Whitman Punctuated.” Light Brigade” on one of Edison’s wax In 2005, the 150th anniversary If your students have not been cylinders. ... of Leaves of Grass was honored introduced to e.e. cummings, you With William Butler Yeats, recording with readings and recollection of may wish to share one to three of quality achieves the relative clarity of the Walt Whitman. D.C. is very much a his works before and after reading 1930s. Known for his incantatory delivery part of his personal life. Read “Walt this article/letter addressed to him. and criticized for it, Yeats seems a little Whitman: Celebrating the Poet’s Perhaps, Brown and cummings put out, saying that the poems he will History — and Washington’s.” After are both capturing the spirit of read gave him “a devil of a lot of trouble students have read this Weekend experience: “since feeling is first/ to get into verse ... and that is why I will feature, the following questions for who pays any attention/to the not read them as if they were prose.” consideration and activities may be syntax of things” (From “since There are innumerable small revelations used. feeling is first” by e.e. cummings). in the manner in which the poets • Why did Walt Whitman come • Poets make use of such devices speak their own words, sometimes in to Washington, D.C.? After he as simile, metaphor and allusion. an intensifying of sensation, as when succeeded in finding his brother, Find an example of each in this Seamus Heaney says “warm thick why did he remain? prose selection. slobber of frogspawn” in “The Death of a • What jobs did he hold while • Poetry requires concise Naturalist” or, in an unexpected stress or living in D.C.? For which two D.C. expression. Give two examples of lack of it, as when James Weldon Johnson newspapers did he freelance? sentences that are more like lines of reads “The Creation.” • Walt Whitman is today a poetry than sentences. celebrated American poet. Was • Why do you think Warren At Blackwater Pond: Mary Oliver Reads his poetry appreciated during his Brown chose to address his letter to Mary Oliver lifetime? By whom? e.e. cummings? Beacon Press, 1 hour, 1 CD, $19.95, • On The Post NIE site (www. www.beacon.org washpost.com/nie), select from According to Mary Oliver, a “poem is lesson plans “Civil War and the Read Book World meant to be given away, best of all by the Capital City” to review life in In addition to “Poet’s Choice spoken presentation of it; then the work Washington, D.C., 1861-1865. in The Post,” an essay written is complete.” In her first-ever recording, • In the next guide, “Capital especially for this guide by Book Oliver reads 40 poems, all about nature Transformed,” a street map of World’s poetry editor Jabari Asim, and its wonderful creatures, in a sweet, downtown D.C. in 1886 is included. “A Decade of Poet’s Choice” is neat, compact voice. Give it to students to locate addresses associated with Walt Excerpted from Katherine A. Powers, Whitman. continued on page  Book World, April 16

 April 18, 2006 Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program continued from page  • Does Ward consider Langston Poetry on the Web Hughes an admirable poet? What included. This article appeared in details bring you to this conclusion? www.poets.org the anniversary special issue of Book • What does she say that places Academy of American Poets World. Through the excerpts from this anthology within context? As one would expect, the site includes previous Poet’s Choice columns, you • How many of Hughes poems are poems, poets, interviews and recordings; meet the poets who have served as included in the collection? also find essays on writing, American editors and you clarify the definition • Ward focuses on three Poetry magazine and “Poetry Near You.” and potential of poetry. Introduce poems. Explain how she handles students to the column and honored commenting on each one. www.nea.org/readacross/index.html American poets through this article. • Does Ward consider Jack Read Across America An extension might include Prelutsky an admirable poet? What Among the Teachers’ Top 100 Books are reading more works by one or more details bring you to this conclusion? several poetry collections. Search the of the poets and writing a review. • How important is the illustrator site for “poetry” to find “How I Staged Students might be asked to get to the impact and success of a book? a Poetry Slam,” “National Poetry Month acquainted with the role of the poet — Resources” and more than 20 lessons laureate and the current holder of “Reviews of Poetry” is also for integrating poetry into classrooms. this honorary position. Students provided to give students some might read the works of highly guidelines for writing a review of www.rif.org/educators/books/Top40_ regarded contemporary American a poem or a collection of poems. poetry.mspx poets and nominate their choice for Two excerpts from recent reviews Judy Freeman’s 40 Favorite Poetry Books poet laureate. are included. The current issue of for Children Book World and daily Style sections Each book on this Reading Is Review a Collection of Poems may provide additional examples of Fundamental site has a “germ,” an idea “Poetry for All Seasons” is reviews to serve as models. for using the poems with children. meant as a resource for teachers and parents of young readers. In Write a Double Dactyl www.gigglepoetry.com/ “Poetry for All Seasons” from Book For teachers who want their Giggle Poetry World’s For Young Readers column, students to explore poetry and How to for students and teachers as well March 26, 2006, Elizabeth Ward form further, “The Poet Who Found as plenty of poems, by category, to read, also provides an example of how to His Metier” is included. This rate and recite. comment on anthologies of works appreciation piece was written by by one or more authors. Teachers Michael Dirda on the death of poet www.favoritepoem.org/ may wish to read from Langston Anthony Hecht at the age of 81. Favorite Poem Project Hughes, another of the Poetry for Hecht is given credit for having A project of the Library of Congress, Young Readers collections, or a helped to invent the double dactyl, Boston University and the Poetry Society Prelutsky work. Ask students to “the amazingly complicated light of America, founded by Robert Pinsky, write what they think about the verse form,” as described by Dirda. the 39th poet laureate, in 1997. More three to four that you read to them After reading this selection, you may than 18,000 Americans shared their and the illustrations that accompany introduce students to the double favorite poems; videos, books, lesson them. Group students to share dactyl and have them experiment plans. their opinions and ask each group with writing in this form. to select one person’s evaluation to This appreciation essay could also share with the class. Do students inspire an assignment in writing an agree or disagree? Do they support appreciation piece for a deceased or their opinion with an example? living poet after some reading and research. Read “Poetry for All Seasons.” Questions that you may ask include: • Why is she writing about poets in this column?

 April 18, 2006 Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Poet’s Choice in The Post

Jabari Asim, Book World’s Poet’s Choice and children’s books editor, provides a brief history of the Poet’s Choice column — and insight into the nature of poetry.

Poet’s Choice, the only column of its kind in a major American newspaper, was launched on Dec. 3, 1995. It was written by Robert Hass, the nation’s poet laureate at the time. The column’s mission has always been to share the pleasures of poetry with our Book World readership while tearing down the stereotypes that often intimidate those unfamiliar with the genre. The tone that Hass established also made clear that the nation needs poetry as much as it always has. In his first column he pointed out the seldom- remembered fact that poetry appeared in newspapers “as soon as the newspapers themselves appeared in the young American republic.” Hass introduced poems from a remarkable range of poets, not just from the United States but from all over the world. He included well-known legends such as William Carlos Williams, Langston Hughes and Stanley Kunitz, and younger talents such as Dean Young and Heather McHugh. Hass optimistically noted “a kind of boom under way in JULIA MALAKIE — ASSOCIATED PRESS American poetry,” an observation borne Washington Post poet columnist Robert Pinsky out in subsequent years. (By November 2002, rhyme-spitting, as the young folks Edward Hirsch, an acclaimed poet and Our current columnist is Robert call it, occupied center stage as “Def professor at the University of Houston, Pinsky, a former poet laureate who took Poetry Jam on Broadway.”) followed Dove in January 2002. His over Poet’s Choice in January 2005. Hass’s successor was Rita Dove, skills as a teacher often came through in His grand vision of poetry incorporates another poet laureate with a string of his patient, illuminating way of taking both the rugged vigor of Whitman and honors to her name. Poetry, in Dove’s a poem apart for readers and showing the subtle luminosity of Dickinson, who view, “can be a direct transfusion of hope them how it all came together. “Poetry wrote of verse as a “vital light” enduring or calm or compassion — a sort of I.V. for connects us to what is deepest in our through the ages. Pinsky’s range is both the soul.” At the same time, she wrote “a selves,” according to Hirsch. “It gives us extensive and robust, tirelessly charting poem can remind us to stop and breathe, access to our own feelings … and engages poetry’s path through the modern era. just for a moment, and take in the world us in the art of making meaning.” Hirsh Major Jackson, Linda Gregg and Dana we walk through.” She often emphasized often addressed the revelatory power Goodyear are among the talents he the calming, contemplative function of of poetry, its ability to make the unseen has introduced to Book World readers. poetry while showcasing such gifted recognizable and deeply felt. Poets Like his predecessors, Pinsky helps our talents as Linda Pastan, Lucille Clifton featured during his tenure include A. Van readers to understand and enjoy poetry and Dennis Sampson. Jordan, Amy Lowell and Kevin Young. as a valuable source of enlightenment, sustenance and uplift.

 April 18, 2006 Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Poet’s Choice: A Simile Is . . .

• Originally published March 26, 2006 All good similes depend upon a Rosanna Warren’s moving and learned By Edward Hirsch certain essential heterogeneity between new collection of poems, Departure. Speical to the Washington Postt the elements being compared. The simile asserts a likeness between unlike As when her friend, the crack A simile is the explicit comparison of things, but it also draws attention Austrian skier, in the story one thing to another, using the word to their differences, thus affirming a she often told us, had to face “as” or “like” — as when Robert Burns state of division. Here is Pablo Neruda his first Olympic ski jump and, from famously declares: thinking in similes in his magisterial the starting ramp over the chute that early poem “Solo la muerte” (“Only plunged My luve is like a red, red rose, Death”): so vertiginously its bottom lip That’s newly sprung in June: disappeared from view, gazed My luve is like the melodie, Death arrives among all that sound on a horizon of Alps that swam and That’s sweetly play’d in tune. like a shoe with no foot in it, like a dandled around him suit with no man in it, like toy boats in a bathtub, and he The essence of simile is similitude; comes and knocks, using a ring with could not it is likeness and unlikeness, urging a no stone in it, with no finger in it, for all his iron determination, comparison between different things. comes and shouts with no mouth, training and courage “You smell of time as a Bible smells with no tongue, with no throat. ungrip his fingers from the railings of thumbs,” the Irish poet Medbh Nevertheless its steps can be of the starting gate, so that McGuckian writes, thus comparing the heardand its clothing makes a his teammates had to join in prying odor that clings to someone aging to hushed sound, like a tree. up, finger by finger, his hands the smell imprinted on a holy book that to free him, so has been paged through by hundreds of In this sequence, Neruda repeatedly people over the years. presents a human object but withdraws facing death, my Similes are comparable to metaphors, the human presence from it. He posits a mother gripped the bedrails but still but the difference between them is shoe, but takes away the foot that wears stared straight ahead — and not merely grammatical. Metaphor it; he presents a suit, but withdraws the who was it, finally, asserts an identity. It says, “A poem man who would inhabit it. Death comes who loosened is a meteor” (Wallace Stevens). It and knocks, but uses a ring without her hands? asserts that A equals B and so relies a stone or finger. The progression on condensation and compression. — death shouts “with no mouth, with (The lines from Robert Bly’s translation of By contrast, the simile is a form of no tongue, with no throat” — mimics Pablo Neruda’s poem “Solo la muerte” can analogical thinking. It says, “Poetry is a process of taking a voice away in be found in his edition Neruda and Vallejo: made in bed like love” (Andre Breton). stages. These images all incarnate the Selected Poems. Beacon Press. Copyright It asserts that A is like B, and thereby paradox of a presence — the arrival 1971 by Robert Bly. Rosanna Warren’s poem works by opening outward. There is a of death — that suggests a permanent “Simile” appears in her book Departure. W. W. digressive impulse in similes that keeps absence. It is left to the reader to Norton and Co. Copyright 2003 by Rosanna extending out to take in new things. decide how aptly and fully they work. Warren.) “The embrace of poetry [is] like the Here is a one-sentence poem that embrace of the naked body” (Breton). hinges on a single extended simile in

 April 18, 2006 Comparable to What?

Have you ever had to explain a concept and wondered how you could convey it to someone who had never heard of it? Or tried to relate a personal experience, a vacation destination, a sound or the taste of a new dish? How about the feel of playing a sport or the results of a season of play?

A direct statement In the following excerpts from articles covering the Patriots vs. Gators Final Four game, put a box around any Attributes, actions, qualities are stated in order to make a similes, underline any metaphors and circle any direct, literal comparison. comparisons. Many times it is best to directly state actions and qualities. The reader understands Item A because of what it does and 1: Lede from “Surprising Ride Comes to an End as Gators how it moves and what qualities it possesses. Dominate Inside, Out” by Washington Post Staff Writer Dan An example written by Kathy Orton, special to The Steinberg: Washington Post: BOSTON, April 1 — See if you can identify the women’s basketball team with these qualities: a dominant INDIANAPOLIS, April 1 — George Mason’s basketball post player surrounded by strong front-court players; steady guard play; a highly efficient three-point shooter; strong team collected as many metaphors as victories during its rebounding and even better shooting; and a chip on its shoulder since receiving a No. 2 seed in the NCAA tournament. remarkable three-week trip to the Final Four. The Patriots Sound familiar? No, it’s not Maryland. It’s last season’s Baylor team, the one that won the national championship. were kryptonite. They were Cinderella. They were on a

magic carpet ride. They were David, registering blow after A simile blow against Goliath. A simile makes a comparison using the word “like” or “as.” Other times, a comparison communicates more effectively It was dreamy stuff, and it left the school’s Fairfax campus if Item A is compared to a familiar object, experience, sound or food. forever changed. But the imagery dissolved Saturday night, For example: Kuznetsova moves across the court like a gazelle, a powerful mix of muscle and grace. and what was left was a basketball game against a Florida

squad that was taller, more athletic and more poised than A metaphor An implicit comparison is made so that something becomes George Mason. So Florida coasted to a 73-58 win and a berth or designates another item. Sometimes, Item A can most effectively be understood in Monday’s national championship game, and the Patriots by stating that it is Item B. Through the comparison, the applicable characteristics and qualities shared by Item B and packed up the metaphors and calmly reflected on the best Item A allow the writer to succinctly and directly explain Item A. If Item B is carefully selected, the reader or listener basketball season their school had ever produced. understands the comparison and Item A. For example, this comment after the George Mason team lost: Cinderella will not dance the last dance, but 2: “Clock Strikes Midnight as the Time of Their Lives Ends” this previously unnoticed charmer has no need to fear her Sports columnist John Feinstein begins his lede: homecoming. “With 47 seconds left in the game, Jim Larranaga conceded With practice, you will know when to use a simile, a metaphor, a direct statement and when to mix them. it was midnight.” Seven sentences later he states, “Midnight

officially came for Cinderella a moment later, at 8:07 p.m.

EST, and it was difficult for the George Mason players to

accept.” (Published Sunday, April 2, 2006) Name ______Date ______

It’s a Poem. I Found It in The Post

The essence of writing a found poem is to discover your own order, message, tone and theme within the words of others. Rearrange words and phrases that you select from the writing of others. You may drop words, but you may not add words.

The Assignment Use The Washington Post as your resource to compose a found poem about contemporary life, your perspectives and values. Select parts of headlines, ledes, sentences written by Post reporters or quoted sources. Pull from advertisements or editorials, from any section of the newspaper. Put them together in your own order to convey your own idea.

Clip your source. Be sure to record section and page number.

Get the Idea Write a haiku using headlines and subheads found on the front page of the April 9, 2006, Metro section. For example, “Blanketed with Friendship” could become your title or “Blanketed friendship” could become the first line of your poem. Or, what would you write if this were the second line of the poem: “Youths lesson in persistence”?

Senate Campaign Is a Yawner No Longer Oak Hill’s Evolution As the Troubled Juvenile Facility Plans Changes, It’s Still a Grim Rite of Passage for Some Youths New Orleans Students Blanketed with Friendship Potomac’s Lesson in Persistence Linking People Pays Off in Loudoun Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Celebrating the Poet’s History — and Washington’s

• Originally published March 25, 2005 maturity,” says Murray, an economist residences still stands, though his first is By Mary Quattlebaum by profession and Whitman historian now the site of offices for the American Washington Post Staff Writer by passion, with scholarly papers on Medical Association (1101 Vermont the local people and places that formed Ave. NW). Roberts combed Whitman’s But each man and each woman of the poet’s world. (Murray’s work can correspondence, biographies and city you I lead upon a knoll, be read at the academic site www. directories to pinpoint the houses’ My left hand hooks you round the whitmanarchive.org.) “Whitman’s locations. “It was a lot of work,” Roberts waist, experience here, especially nursing admits, “but I like driving or walking My right hand points to landscapes Civil War soldiers, helped inform his past some of those areas and thinking, of continents, and a plain public road. revisions,” Murray says, and spurred ‘Walt lived here.’” — Walt Whitman, untitled version of essays, newspaper pieces and new The massive government structures “Song of Myself” poems on the war and President where Whitman worked still loom, in Leaves of Grass, 1855 Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. though. One of the most important is the National Portrait Gallery (Eighth In 1855, an itinerant printer and I hear the tramp of armies, I hear and F streets NW, closed for renovation journalist self-published those lines in the challenging sentry . . . until 2006), formerly the U.S. Patent his first volume of verse — and the Surgeons operating, attendants Office and a temporary hospital during raw, rich land of which he wrote found holding lights, the smell of ether, the the war. Here, Whitman cared for the its national poet. Breaking with tidy odor of blood wounded and attended Lincoln’s second English verse, Walt Whitman let his long — Whitman, “Drum-Taps,” 1865 inaugural ball in 1865. The “beautiful lines roll across the pages of Leaves of women, perfumes . . . and waltz” Grass, lines that embraced carpenters, Washington was in turmoil when contrasted sharply with “the groan . . . shoemakers, sewing girls, flax, black Whitman arrived in December 1862, the clotted rag, the odor of wounds and bears, buckwheat, ants, even “the searching for his younger brother blood” of his previous experience, he alligator in his tough pimples” — all the George, a wounded Union soldier, wrote in 1865 for the New York Times. vast sprawl that was his native country. in one of the city’s many makeshift After the war, Whitman toiled as a This year, America celebrates the 150th hospitals. Like poets past and present, clerk for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, anniversary of that book with readings Whitman had kept day jobs — teacher, located in the building’s basement. He aplenty, especially in Washington, journalist, printer, government clerk was soon fired, though, when newly Whitman’s home from 1863 to 1873. — throughout his life. But in finding appointed secretary of the interior Even today’s frantic pace and high-tech George (slightly injured on the front James Harlan seized upon Leaves of gear don’t dull the “jolt of excitement” lines in Virginia), Whitman also found Grass and declared its author immoral. many people feel when reading works an important calling: nursing. Whitman Part of Harlan’s larger purge, which by the 19th-century poet, says David stayed through the war’s end to tend, included female workers, Whitman McAleavey, director of the creative on a volunteer basis, “these thousands was quickly transferred to the Attorney writing program at George Washington . . . of American young men, badly General’s Office (15th and F streets NW, University. … wounded, languishing, dying with fever, now the site of Hotel Washington). This “Few people realize that Whitman pneumonia,” as he described in a letter marked a return for him to the building lived and worked here for 10 years,” says to New York friends. that housed his wartime job as a copyist Martin Murray, founder in 1987 and “The city really is suffused with for the Army Paymaster. The last year of president of the Washington Friends of Whitman’s presence,” says Kim Roberts, his Washington working life was spent Walt Whitman, which spearheaded the local editor of Beltway, an online journal as a Justice Department clerk at the U.S. festival. Though publishing Leaves of with historic essays on prominent area Treasury (Pennsylvania Avenue and 15th Grass in New York, his home state, the poets, including her own “Whitman Street NW). poet continued to revise and expand the in Washington,” and map of attendant Whitman’s firing from the Bureau of volume throughout his life, releasing sites (www.washingtonart.com, click Indian Affairs galvanized his champions. two new editions while in the nation’s on “Beltway: A Poetry Quarterly”). Abolitionist William O’Connor, a friend capital. “Washington was the time of his None of the poet’s many boarding-house since his earliest Washington days,

10 April 18, 2006 Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program defended Whitman in a pamphlet (Seventh Street and Pennsylvania titled “The Good Gray Poet,” picked Avenue NW, now the site of the National up by newspapers at home and abroad. Archives), where Whitman bought small Whitman himself sometimes burnished gifts for hospitalized soldiers. For Ford’s his own image. The first edition of Theatre (511 10th St. NW), the guide Leaves of Grass named no author provides lines from “When Lilacs Last in or publisher but did carry a poet-of- the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Whitman’s great the-people likeness: Whitman in work poem of mourning for the assassinated shirt and casually cocked hat. While Lincoln. in Washington, the poet freelanced for The guide takes walkers down part two local newspapers, the Evening of Pennsylvania Avenue where in 1865, Star and Morning Chronicle, and Whitman, riding the streetcar, met sometimes contributed letters to the Peter Doyle, the conductor and a former New York Times. “He especially liked Confederate soldier. Doyle became the to cover himself,” says Friends of Walt poet’s dear friend and, many biographers LIBRARY OF CONGRESS Whitman’s Murray, with a laugh. Some believe, his lover, according to Murray. Poet Walt Whitman of Whitman’s pieces, which ran without English professor McAleavey agrees: bylines, as was usual then, glowingly “Though there is no hard evidence, the Walt Whitman High School bears his describe his own readings in the third tenor of the correspondence” strongly name and Freedom Plaza (Pennsylvania person, says Murray, who has carefully suggests Whitman was gay. McAleavey Avenue between 13th and 14th streets analyzed Whitman’s writing style to sees Whitman, in poems celebrating the NW) his words. The Whitman-Walker determine authorship. body, as a “kind of early advocate for gay Clinic honors his role as nurse and pride.” the skills of his contemporary, Mary If you want me again look for me Edwards Walker, an assistant surgeon under your boot-soles . . . I am with you, you men and women during the Civil War. Missing me one place search of a generation, or ever so many And another Whitman honor may another, I stop somewhere waiting for generations hence soon come to pass. Murray and the you. — Whitman, “Sun-down Poem,” 1856, Friends of Walt Whitman have been ­— Whitman, untitled version retitled “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” 1860 working toward a city designation of of Song of Myself, 1855 Walt Whitman Way, the one-block strip Whitman can also be found in his outside the National Portrait Gallery. In 1873, Whitman suffered a influence on the writers that followed A bill is being considered by the D.C. debilitating stroke and had to leave the him. Ralph Waldo Emerson famously Council. Rather than a monument, city for the care of his family in Camden, praised his “free and brave thought” a simple plaque noting his popular N.J. He died there in 1892. To this day, in a letter to the poet dated July 21, route seems most appropriate, Murray though, the poet can still be found in 1855. And that example still shines. says, “since Whitman was such a great Washington, especially when your “boot- “Whitman broke open the forms and walker.” soles” stroll the same streets and places. subject matter of poetry,” Roberts says. How to best find Whitman today? That path has even been traced for “We can date the beginning of modern The clue lies in his groundbreaking you, thanks to Murray, poetry editor American poetry to ‘Leaves of Grass.’ “ book. “I loafe and invite my soul,” he Roberts and Mark Meinke, co-authors For McAleavey, Whitman, “as a spiritual wrote. “I lean and loafe at my ease.” of a self-guided walking tour published and intellectual guide, is never far from Take a cue from him: Lean and loaf by the Rainbow History Project, of what’s important” to the professor’s own with his verse. With Whitman, you which Meinke is founder and chair. poetry. McAleavey’s tender, humorous might contemplate “a spear of summer Launched this week, their “Whitman “Invention of the Sonnet” joins poems grass,” embrace contradictions, “contain in DC” brochure (available at www. by 38 local writers in Beltway’s tribute multitudes,” sing. rainbowhistory.org/whitman-web. to Whitman, online through April 1 (and pdf) presents Whitman sites and then available in the site’s “archives” Mary Quattlebaum is a frequent contributor poems for the journey. In addition to section). to Weekend and author of several books of the aforementioned places, the guide The national bard makes his influence poems for children, including the forthcoming highlights the former Center Market felt in things modern as well. Bethesda’s Winter Friends (Doubleday).

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An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

For Young Readers

Sunday, March 26, 2006 Poetry for All Seasons

The American Academy of Poets obviously didn’t consult children when it decided in 1996 that poetry deserved the kiss of death as much as black history or crime prevention and gave it its own official month. The result has been a decade of Aprils reinforcing the idea of poetry as broccoli: You’d like it if you’d only try it, kids, and besides, it’s good for you! But what is “it”? As National Poetry Month proves annually, poetry is as protean as music. The challenge is to sift through the schmaltz and doggerel to find poems good for any season. Here are three places to start looking:

Langston Hughes, edited by David Roessel and Arnold Rampersad ($14.95; ages 9- 12), is the latest volume in Sterling’s estimable, if uneven, “Poetry for Young People” series, which matches individual poets’ work with illustrations by notable artists. It has taken a while for Hughes (at right), perhaps the greatest African American poet, to get the nod. He clocks in at No. 20, after even such lesser poetic lights as Edna St. Vincent Millay and Rudyard Kipling. But the wait has been worth it. The poems were selected and annotated by two top Hughes scholars, and the pictures were entrusted to Benny Andrews, the 75-year-old painter and printmaker whose sinuous, spiky images are like jazz on paper. Of the 26 poems here, many may be familiar even to kids (“The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” the much-quoted “Harlem”), but some less famous efforts are equally piercing. This is the first stanza of “Homesick Blues,” unfurling a Southern dialect like a mournful sax: “De railroad bridge’s/A sad song in de air./De railroad bridge’s/A sad song in de air./Ever time de trains pass/I wants to go somewhere.” Pair this beautiful book with Langston Hughes: American Poet, a 1974 biography by Hughes’s friend Alice Walker, warmly illustrated by Catherine Deeter and recently reissued in paperback (HarperTrophy, $7.99; ages 7-10). Jack Prelutsky is as capable of doggerel as the next man, but he’s at his playful, sparkling best in this paperback reprint of 2002’s Scranimals (HarperTrophy, $6.99; ages 4-8). Or perhaps it’s the solemnly meticulous drawings of Caldecott honoree Peter Sis that do the trick, imbuing Prelutsky’s nonsense rhymes about the mixed-up creatures of Scranimal Island with an unexpected gravity: “On a bump beside a road/Sits a lowly POTATOTOAD,/Obviously unaware/Of its own existence there.” Prelutsky also compiled one of the most attractive anthologies of 1997, The Beauty of the Beast: Poems From the Animal Kingdom, reissued this month by Knopf ($19.95; ages 8-up). Divided like a learned nature tome into sections for insects, fish, reptiles, birds and mammals, the book is packed with little jewels of poems by more than 200 animal-loving word wizards, including Basho, Milton, Ted Hughes and Randall Jarrell. But it’s watercolorist Meilo So who really makes the book soar, catching the essence of butterfly, bat or basset hound with just a few color-laden swoops of her brush.

Elizabeth Ward [email protected]

12 April 18, 2006 Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Like Walter de la Mare and Edward Lear

• Originally published Dec. 11, 2005 When I was sick and lay a-bed wonderful sixth line “leaden.” I like By Robert Pinsky I had two pillows at my head, the way the child’s body, almost as part Special to the Washington Post And all my toys beside me lay of the immobilizing illness, becomes To keep me happy all the day. an immense landscape in imagination. Like Walter de la Mare and Edward Throughout, simple words generate Lear, and like their descendant Dr. And sometimes for an hour or so subtle, not-so-simple kinds of feeling. Seuss, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850- I watched my leaden soldiers go, For example, at the end, the poem 1894) wrote poems that both adults With different uniforms and drills, changes from the imaginary past tense and children can return to with Among the bed clothes, through the (“was the giant”) to the present tense pleasure. hills; (“sees” and “sits”). That unshowy Anyone who has read to small change makes the world of imagining children knows that the words “return And sometimes sent my ships in large, real and permanent. The sick to” can be full of pain for the adult. fleets child in the poem experiences worlds Children can attach themselves to All up and down among the sheets; through imagination. The poem itself maddeningly stupid material. And Or brought my trees and houses does something similar. they love repetition. Reading for the out, hundredth time about Hush and Brush And planted cities all about. Cadences and small variations can the Color Kittens, or about Bobby suggest depths, pointing toward and Martha helping Mother, can make I was the giant great and still realities and dreams beyond the grown-ups all but cry tears of protest That sits upon the pillow hill, surface. That is why we can return and boredom. And sees before him, dale and again and again to short, plain-looking Poetry itself involves repetition: plain, poems by the likes of William Blake and that’s what form is, and that is part The pleasant land of counterpane. Emily Dickinson. Some gifted children of why most children like poetry. An will not feel any great difference in artist like Stevenson knows how to I like the way “happy” at the end making the transition to those poets counter the repetition with variation. of the first stanza and “pleasant” at from Stevenson and de la Mare. Lucky He also knows that good poems are the end of the last stanza mean what children familiar with all of these inexhaustible because they confront they say but also have a slightly blank poets will have a great head start in mysteries. For example: or melancholy overtone. The words understanding the power of sentences. are just a bit — to borrow from the

13 April 18, 2006 Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Poetry in Motion, but Punctuated

• Originally published June 6, 2004 doing? What do you think I am?” Then, headlamps, now available as high- By Warren Brown she just quit, stopped cold — left me intensity lights for both the GT-S and GT. Washington Post Staff Writer sitting there with green light turning Her tail is a high, radically winged amber then red at the corner of North thing, which is a part of the mostly A letter to poet e e cummings, not Harrison Street and Lee Highway in cosmetic Action Package that enhances the first I’ve written, but this on test- Arlington. her cost but seems to add little to her driving the 2004 Toyota Celica GT-S I cursed her. Then, I begged. She overall excellent performance. with “Action Package.” responded to my more humble entreaty. But I’m getting ahead of myself. But I was wary of her and tried to avoid Besides, her cabin isn’t all that, you Dear e e: doing anything that would upset her know. The materials are second-rate, She being not quite brand new, and further as we proceeded up Lee toward unusual for a car from Toyota. And I perhaps having been abused by drivers the District. don’t at all get what’s going on with before me, was a tad uncooperative in There were more stoplights, of that dash-mounted center console, the first gear. course; and they caused me tremendous top of which is shaped like a cathedral’s She stalled twice, once at an trepidation. It was hard to guess her ceiling. I laughed at that but probably intersection in Northern Virginia and mood. Should I go hard or soft, quick shouldn’t have. again at a corner in the District of or slow? I sought a happy medium, We’d gone all the way to the District, Columbia. gently pressing the clutch with my left having one heck of a spirited romp Of course, this was embarrassing. foot, but then pushing it in more firmly along George Washington Parkway I thought it was a matter of touch. as my right foot worked the accelerator and over the Roosevelt Bridge, shifting You know how these things are. No two and right hand found its rhythm on the her six-speed gearbox to third as we clutches are the same. No two manual gearshift knob. exited the bridge ramp that leads to gearshifts mesh quite the same way. Celica GT-S responded, e e! And, E Street NW. And Celica GT-S was Some, like those in the devilish oh, what a joy that was! She is a tight, okay with that, really okay. But then Dodge Ram SRT-10 pickup truck, light, front-drive runner, weighing we got stuck in traffic; and I looked at require tremendous force of foot and 2,500 pounds, and extremely well her center console and laughed and hand. Others, such as those in almost balanced front to rear. She is more wondered aloud why anybody would any Honda, are compliant to the point sporting than her sister, Celica GT, have designed a console that way. of being the mechanical equivalents of who is something of a homebody You know, e e, there are so many Stepford Wives. with a mild-mannered 1.8-liter, 140- stupid things we say and do to ruin a But Celica GT-S (she insists on the horsepower engine. good time or spoil a relationship; and I suffix) was neither hard nor easy. She Celica GT-S has way more horses surely was being stupid. simply was untrusting, maybe sensitive. — 40 more, in fact. And corresponding Anyway, traffic started to move. I I’ll explain. upgrades to her suspension and braking stomped the clutch, snapped the gear I went with the heavy foot and quick- systems make her far more fun on the lever from neutral to first and slammed shift at first. You know, wanting to get run. Curiously, although she demands the accelerator. Celica GT-S did a her up to speed and all of that, caring humility and sensitivity from her driver, face-slap thing, accompanied by what only about how she responded to my she displays none of those qualities in sounded like a squeal, and stopped. input, which I considered expert at the demeanor or decorum. It seemed like an eternity before moment. A guy thing. She wouldn’t Instead, at first glance, Celica GT-S we got going again. But I apologized. have it. seems quite the tart — a drag-strip Things slipped back into gear. We’re She started to move. I got excited, tuner if ever there was one. Her okay now. prepared to quick-shift to second. But front end is outrageously low and Cheers, she hesitated, like, “What are you seductive and affixed with come-hither W.B.

Washington Post Cars Columnist Warren Brown writes the On Wheels column. Brown, has been covering the automobile industry for the Washington Post since 1982. Brown, who joined the newspaper in 1976, has what many people think is a particularly cool job: He gets to test drive all manner of cars, from top-of-the-line Mercedes sedans and the newest sports cars to Volkswagen Beetles and SUVs.

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An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Poet’s Choice • Originally published Dec. 4, 2005 over the North and the South. The Nor did it occur to one of us there By Robert Pinsky “deep and dreamless sleep” of death To doubt they were kneeling then. Special to the Washington Post permeates the stanza and reflects those years of public, political “hopes and So fair a fancy few would weave Christmas nostalgia can come to fears” as well as personal ones. The In these years! Yet, I feel, even the most secular people, even language of the stanza gains power If someone said on Christmas Eve, to a secular Jew like me. The eerie from those invisible hopes and fears “Come, see the oxen kneel beauty of “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and that implicit silence of the dead. impressed me mightily in grade school, Paradoxically, the “everlasting light” of “In the lonely barton by yonder our high voices soaring, in the little his Christian belief shines in Brooks’s coomb town where I grew up: “dark streets.” Our childhood used to know,” In contrast, Thomas Hardy (1840- I should go with him in the gloom, O little town of Bethlehem! 1928), in his Christmas poem “The Hoping it might be so. How still we see thee lie, Oxen,” chose to write about a folk Above thy deep and dreamless sleep, belief. He treated the legend that the The “fair fancy” that “childhood used The silent stars go by; beasts kneel at midnight on Christmas to know,” the meek mild oxen kneeling Eve with a wistful, skeptical dignity. at midnight, comes ultimately from a Yet in thy dark streets shineth The loyalty to old ways manifests itself world of animal myth — a world older The Everlasting light; in the regional dialect terms “barton” than the religions that incorporate its The hopes and fears of all the years (a farmyard) and “comb” (a valley). images. This particular myth, like the Are met in thee tonight. stanza by Phillips Brooks, expresses a The Oxen yearning for peace. Years later I learned that this is the first stanza of a poem by Phillips Christmas Eve, and twelve of the Phillips Brooks’s poem “O Little Town of Brooks (1835-1893), written on a visit clock. Bethlehem” can be found in the Library to Bethlehem in 1868. “Now they are all on their knees,” of America’s “American Poetry: The 19th Brooks was famous in his time for An elder said as we sat in a flock Century.” Copyright 1993 by Literary Classics a sermon he delivered on the subject By the embers in hearthside ease. of the United States. Thomas Hardy’s poem of the Civil War dead. The silent, “The Oxen” can be found in Thomas Hardy: dark streets he describes in the poem We pictured the meek mild The Complete Poems. Copyright 1976 by call to mind the silence of the young creatures where Macmillan London Ltd.) men missing from little towns all They dwelt in their strawy pen,

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An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program The Poet Who Found His Metier

and Joseph Brodsky, and regularly evoked in The scene simmers with Paris and women • Originally published Oct. 22, 2004 verse the sensual heat and beauty of the Italy he in heat, By Michael Dirda visited throughout his life: Darkened and airless, perhaps with a faint Washington Post Staff Writer hum This is Italian. Here Of trapped flies, and a strong odor of musk. Book World’s Michael Dirda in his Is cause for the undiminished bounce For whom do they play at this hot commentary masterfully critiques an Of sex, cause for the lark, the animal spirit indolence author’s work, weaves in examples to support To rise, aerated, but not beyond our reach, And languorous vassalage? They are alone his opinions and places the author in context. to spread With fantasies of jasmine and brass lamps, On October 20, 2004, poet Anthony Hecht Friction upon the air, cause to sing loud Melons and dates and bowls of rose-water, died at the age of 81. In his appreciation for the bed A courtyard fountain’s firework blaze of piece, “The Poet Who Found His Metier,” Of jonquils, the linen bed, and established prisms, Dirda illustrates inclusion of comment and merit Its basin sown with stars and poissons d’or, content, punctuation and flow of idea. Of love, and grandly to pronounce And a rude stable smell of animal strength, Pleasure without peer. Of leather thongs, hinting of violations, Anthony Hecht, who died Wednesday at the — From “The Gardens of the Villa d’Este” Swooning lubricities and lassitudes. age of 81, was often described as courtly and elegant, both in his person and his poetry. Pleasure without peer — that might describe Lest this seem a mere Orientalist fantasy, He wore beautifully cut suits, spoke with the experience of reading Hecht. His poems “The Deodand” then shifts to a horrible vision meticulous precision and practiced the are never half-finished or rough-hewn; they of the torture meted out during the Algerian war gentlemanly manners of a better age than ours. are shaped, carefully molded, almost chiseled to a young French legionnaire, who is mutilated He could quote Shakespeare at will — and W.H. in their concordant, harmonious beauty. They and made to beg for his food — while dressed Auden (about whom he wrote a superb study), can be stylishly literary, whether alluding in women’s clothes as Marianne, the symbol and Elizabeth Bishop, and George Herbert, or to Byron’s love for animals (“a menage that of hated France. One distorting myth replaces virtually any poet of merit in English. He also was a menagerie”) or deftly parodying — in another. greatly enjoyed wit and literary gossip, and at that anthology standard, “The Dover Bitch” For all his intensity and elegiac vision, Hecht his lively Washington dinner parties, presided — Matthew Arnold’s most celebrated lyric. Yet is nonetheless often quietly deliciously wry. over by his beloved wife, Helen, one might find Hecht might also write about his experiences Sometimes the humor is fairly learned, as in distinguished classicists, famous writers and as a soldier in World War II, or the Holocaust, such titles as “The Hanging Gardens of Tyburn” critics, noted scholars and mere journalists. Tony or even generate a suite of poems about death. (Tyburn being the site of public executions) Hecht possessed not only a gift for poetry but Certainly no one is better at showing us “long and the punning “Le Masseur de Ma Soeur,” also an equal one for friendship. inventories of miseries unspoken, / appointment or in the amazingly complicated light verse He seems to have known everyone in the books of pain, / attars of love gone rancid, / form called the double dactyl, which he helped literary world. During conversations — we met the pitcher broken / At the fountain” (from invent. In one poem, Hecht’s protagonist neatly in 1982, shortly after he became the consultant “Circles”). describes a painting of Jesus: “Behind / The in poetry at the Library of Congress — I learned Still, Hecht can also celebrate, in one of altar He appears / Two fingers raised / In that he had been in school with Jack Kerouac, several beautiful late poems about his wife, “a benediction, in what seems two-thirds / Of the been friends with Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, quarter century of faultless love.” This isn’t Boy Scout salute, wishing us well.” studied with John Crowe Ransom at Kenyon. surprising, for although Hecht is properly Over the years, Anthony Hecht received As the years passed, he would frequently send regarded as a master of the high style, of a numerous awards for his work, including the me meticulously typed notes about my weekly classical tact and delicacy, few modern poets Pulitzer Prize. He presented the distinguished reviews in Book World, praising some but even can write more sensuously, more gorgeously. Bollingen Lectures at the National Gallery more often gently pointing to factual errors or Consider these lines from “The Deodand,” (gathered together as “On the Laws of the mistakes in judgment. Anthony Hecht believed which depict Parisian women pretending to be Poetic Art”), and he taught for many years at the in criticism as the correction of taste, and he harem girls in a painting by Delacroix or Ingres: University of Rochester and then at Georgetown helped correct mine. until his retirement in 1993. He was honored by That generosity of spirit can be found in all his peers, was a mentor to the young and was an his writing. Much of his oeuvre — and the old exemplary man of letters and a teacher. But he word seems right in his case — takes the form was, above all, an irreplaceable poet, and readers of homage. He translated Aeschylus, Horace, everywhere will mourn his passing even as they Goethe and Baudelaire, composed elegies for celebrate his lasting, permanent achievement. departed friends such as the poets James Merrill

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An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program WORD SEARCH P O E T R Y M B L Z O O P S S O N N E T E F E C R O M T R A M B D F E E R F C B W R I T E R V F I M E G N I N W O R B C M G N I D A E R M O Y E G I K U K I A H H N O S N I K C I D R L T E L P U O C D

17 April 18, 2006 Reviews of Poetry

There is not time to read every poem published. How does one decide what and whom to read? Recommendations given by friends and book reviews are two main sources. When Michael Dirda, a Book World columnist and author of several books, writes “In the years since his death in 1933, Constantine Cavafy has come to be honored as the finest Greek poet of the century. In critical esteem, his reputation in America rivals that of Rilke and Neruda,” the reader wants to learn more about Cavafy (information which Dirda provides in his April 2006 review) and to read Cavafy’s poetry to see if he agrees (Dirda includes lines from Cavafy’s poems). Dirda has helped individuals who are interested in discovering European poets.

The following are excerpted from The headline and subheadline on the • How does the reviewer include reviews that appeared in the April 16, Collins’ review reads: American Idyll: the author’s life, past works and time 2006, issue of Book World. Read them An elegiac poet who knows baseball as period? to meet poets. Study them to learn well as death. • Does it improve/not improve the how to approach the task of writing a • Why should one include publisher, review to “hear” lines from the poems? review. length and price in addition to book • Do you know the reviewer’s opinion Some questions to consider: title and author? of the poet? Of his current work? • How does The Post subheadline • To what extent is it important draw the reader to the review and help to have a little information about the to prepare the reader for the review? reviewer?

DISTRICT AND CIRCLE WHITE APPLES AND THE TASTE OF STONE By Seamus Heaney Selected Poems 1946-2006 Farrar Straus Giroux. 78 pp. $20 By Donald Hall Reviewed by Anthony Cuda Houghton Mifflin. 431 pp. $30 Post subheadline: In his exhilarating 12th book, Nobel Reviewed by Billy Collins laureate Seamus Heaney returns to the poetry of memory and work. Since 1995, Donald Hall has been so closely associated with the untimely passing of his wife, the poet Jane Kenyon, It was in “Digging”— that much-anthologized lyric from that his long life’s work in poetry, arcing over six decades, his remarkably confident first volume, Death of a Naturalist may be said to have become partially eclipsed by the shadow (1966) — that the future Nobel Prize-winner Seamus of her death. His tributes to her in Without (1998) and Heaney first caught the timbre of his own unique music. The Painted Bed (2002) created for Hall a reputation as a With an ear tuned to the “squelch and slap/Of soggy peat” primarily elegiac poet. But Hall, as his loyal readers know, is and an eye focused on the rough-edged and rustic figures that and more. that loomed over his youth in rural Ireland, he struck The publication of 226 selected poems in White Apples something solid, and the clear ring of his spade against it and the Taste of Stone comes, then, as a welcome and soon became his celebrated, signature sound: dense clusters needed reminder of the expansiveness and weight of this of consonants, athletic jumps and jolts, a delight in verbal poet’s output. It is also an opportunity to enjoy the delightful heft and clang. Heaney’s themes deepened in the following variety of his work and the sheer charm of his voice. This years, but the expansion of his imaginative scope brought hefty book, accompanied by a CD of Hall reading some with it a thinning of his verbal density. Now, five years since of his work, is a physical and literary manifestation of his his last volume and 40 since “Digging,” Heaney returns to importance, not only as an authority on grief but as a major the rag-and-bone shop of his earliest creative stirrings with figure in the canon of contemporary American poetry. District and Circle . The result is a book as original, startling Hall has long been placed in the Frostian tradition of the and aesthetically compelling as any since his magisterial plainspoken rural poet. His reliance on simple, concrete 1984 sequence, Station Island. diction and the no-nonsense sequence of the declarative sentence gives his poems steadiness and imbues them with a tone of sincere authority. It is a kind of simplicity that succeeds in engaging the reader in the first few lines. “In October of the year,” one poem begins, “he counts potatoes dug from the brown field.” Another opens: “Looking through boxes/in the attic of my mother’s house in Hamden,/I find a model airplane.” Many poems are further stabilized by Hall’s love of storytelling, a narrative exuberance that produces Billy Collins’s latest collection of poetry is “The Trouble With Poetry anecdotal poems as well as longer, more complex weavings. and Other Poems.” He is a former U.S. Poet Laureate. ... Volume 5, Issue 5

An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program A Decade of Poet’s Choice

• Originally published April 16, 2006 to get the news from poems This chorus of voices — “so many yet men die miserably every day uttering tongues,” Walt Whitman wrote This year marks the 10th anniversary of for lack — gave a shared language to American Poet’s Choice on our pages. The column of what is found there — readers all through the 19th century. And was hatched, appropriately we think, at in Whitman himself, a newspaperman a family birthday party in September William Carlos Williams wrote. These from his teens, there is an attitude toward of 1995. My sister was celebrating a are lines that poets know. They help us reading and toward poetry that is hard round, stately number of years, and to remember that what we do matters, even to imagine in the last years of the her colleagues — English professors at especially when we are feeling that the 20th century. Howard University — had gathered in world has not fathomed its importance. my house to raise a glass. One professor, But on this particular morning, I RITA DOVE ON ROBERT HASS Alinda Sumers, approached me and remembered that Williams had spent suggested that Book World feature a his professional life practicing family For many years, Robert Hass has column by the current Poet Laureate. medicine in Rutherford, N.J. His lines buoyed our spirits with a weekly tonic I was flabbergasted. Why hadn’t we were a prescription. What I needed to of poetry: Syndicated in newspapers thought of that ourselves? We invited do was apply Dr. Williams’s dose to the across the country, “Poet’s Choice” has Robert Hass to lunch and the rest, as they body politic. In a form, of course — this become a national respite. I have met say, is poetry. is a free country — in which people could lawyers, tennis players and cashiers who Book World is very proud to take it or leave it. read “Poet’s Choice” and ask my opinion publish this ongoing tribute to verse Poetry appeared in newspapers almost on the poems selected. Just recently and versifiers; the column is simply as soon as the newspapers themselves a woman in my ballroom dance class unparalleled in any other American appeared in the young American republic. stopped in the middle of a syncopated newspaper. Over the years, it has featured There are famous instances. Our national waltz turn to say how much she enjoyed ancient as well as contemporary masters, anthem saw the dawn light as a poem opening The Washington Post Book the famous and the virtually unknown, entitled “The Defence of Fort McHenry,” World each Sunday for her “little the homegrown and the foreign, and published in the Baltimore American surprise,” like biting into a chocolate it has seen republication in two books in September of 1814, and Clement without knowing which delicious filling by the same name. To honor the Moore, a professor of Hebrew at the — raspberry cream, nougat, coconut? distinguished writers who have hosted Columbia Theological Union, wandered — she’d discover. Poet’s Choice, three of whom are former from his scholarly chores to publish Of course, the catch-22 of writing U.S. Poet Laureates, we offer here a “A Visit from St. Nicholas” — the one such a column is that we have never bouquet of excerpts — a representative American poem, I’ve read, that almost been treated to a poem by Robert Hass. smattering of writing by them and about everyone can recite a little of — in the A pity, because his is a distinguished them in Book World through the years. Troy Sentinel on the night before literary career: In addition to publishing ­— The Editor Christmas in 1823. Abraham Lincoln four volumes of his own poems, he has first saw print as a poet in a newspaper, been an essayist (Twentieth Century ROBERT HASS and the few poems Emily Dickinson Pleasures) as well as an editor (of published in her lifetime appeared in the poetry collections by the late Californian From Robert Hass’s inaugural column: Springfield Register, touched up by Robinson Jeffers and the Swedish poet the editor for popular consumption, and Tomas Transtromer, and of the charming So, I was sitting in my new office in the Henry David Thoreau wrote aphoristic “wedding anthology” Into the Garden). attic of the Jefferson Library, watching couplets for a country paper. Toward We’ve been treated to selections from his the October sun through a handsome the end of the century another widely recent haiku translations (The Essential open window glisten on the Capitol dome loved American poem, Ernest Lawrence Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson and and wondering what a poet laureate Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat,” was printed Issa); as the primary translator of Nobel could usefully do. in the new paper of his college classmate Laureate Czeslaw Milosz, he continues to William Randolph Hearst, the San perform an incalculable service to world It is difficult Francisco Examiner. literature.

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An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

High time to rectify this omission. To the clean flame of her gaze that night when Thomas rolled over bookend the conclusion of the old year carved by a camera flash. and and the flowering of the new, here’s a lurched into her, she would open her sampling of Robert Hass’s poetry. . . . the How she stood up eyes beginning to his marvelous poem-within- when they bent down to retrieve and think of the place that was hers a-poem, “January” (Human Wishes, her purse. That courtesy. for an hour — where Ecco): she was nothing, This stunning small poem does so pure nothing, in the middle of the Three clear days much to capture the spirit of the time and day. and then a sudden storm — of great-souled Rosa Parks in a few words. the waxwings, having It made me think how much Rita Dove’s EDWARD HIRSCH feasted on the pyracantha, poems are about the right to a vivid inner perch in the yard life. One of her most moving poems on Poetry connects us to what is deepest on an upended pine, and face this subject comes from her Pulitzer in ourselves. It gives us access to our own into the slanting rain. Prize-winning collection, Thomas feelings, which are often shadowy, and I think they are a little drunk. and Beulah (Carnegie-Mellon Univ.), engages us in the art of making meaning. a sequence of narrative poems about It widens the space of our inner lives. “I was making this gathering,” Hass an ordinary and remarkable African- It is a magical, mysterious, inexplicable adds, “which pleased me, the waxwings American family. Beulah, in this poem, is (though not incomprehensible) event in that always pass through at this time of neither saint nor activist, but a woman language. It is “a revelation of words by year, the discarded Christmas tree they in a life full of the demands of nurturing, means of the words” (Wallace Stevens), a perched in, and the first January storm, trying to hold onto some corner of herself form of “stored magic” (Robert Graves), as if I had finally defined a California that belongs to her. “a room of marvels” (AndrŽ Breton). It season — when Rachel came down the has a strong kinship to prayer. I consider walk and went into the house. I typed out Daystar it a verbal transaction, a bodily art form the poem — the birds giddy with Janus, that opens up our spiritual selves. the two-faced god — and then went in to She wanted a little room for thinking: It is a great privilege for me to take say hello.” but she saw diapers steaming on the up Book World’s Poet’s Choice column, line, which was so insightfully inaugurated and ROBERT HASS ON RITA DOVE a doll slumped behind the door. shaped by Robert Hass over many years, and so handsomely carried forward by When Rita Dove was a young poet So she lugged a chair behind the Rita Dove. They have set a light tone and living in Europe, she wrote several garage a high standard, which I hope to emulate poems about women saints. They are to to sit out the children’s naps. in the weeks and months to come. be found in her second book, Museum As a writer and an avid reader — all (Carnegie-Mellon Univ.). I thought of Sometimes there were things to watch writers are readers who have spilled over them when I read a poem from her most — — I have been inspired by many poems recent book, On the Bus With Rosa the pinched armor of a vanished over the years and I am eager to share Parks (Norton). cricket, these poems with others. My idea is to a floating maple leaf. Other days introduce and present a broad spectrum Rosa she stared until she was assured of poets and poems from America and when she closed her eyes around the world. Now she sat there, she’d see only her own vivid blood. Poetry is an ancient and international the time right inside a place activity — it precedes prose in all so wrong it was ready. She had an hour, at best, before Liza literatures, and there has never been a appeared culture without it. This suggests how That trim name with pouting from the top of the stairs. deeply we need the knowledge — the its dream of a bench And just what was mother doing wisdom — that poetry carries in its body. to rest on. Her sensible coat. out back with the field mice? Why,

Doing nothing was the doing: building a palace. Later

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An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program

EDWARD HIRSCH ON ROBERT PINSKY their favorite poems and then reading in certain phrases — above all in the past them aloud. The original meaning of the tense of “loved.” Air an instrument of the tongue. word “anthology,” which derives from The tongue an instrument the Greek, is “a bouquet of flowers,” Fast Break Of the body. The body and these books compose a surprisingly In Memory of Dennis Turner, 1946- An instrument of spirit, diverse and colorful garden. They give us 1984 The spirit a being of the air. a strong sense of how single poems reach A hook shot kisses the rim and — Robert Pinsky, from “Song” individual readers. hangs there, helplessly, but doesn’t drop, Here is one of my favorite poems by and for once our gangly starting center This is my next-to-last Poet’s Choice Pinsky. I once had the life-changing boxes out his man and times his jump column. It’s time for me to move on. experience of teaching poetry to a group perfectly, gathering the orange leather My regret at leaving the column is of deaf children, and thus this poem has from the air like a cherished possession tempered by my delight that it will be special relevance to me: and spinning around to throw a strike taken over by Robert Pinsky, one of our to the outlet who is already shoveling very finest poet-critics, whose work I’ve If You Could Write One Great Poem, an underhand pass toward the other been reading avidly for 30 years. I was What Would You Want It To Be About? guard lucky to start out with his first book, (Asked of four student poets at the scissoring past a flat-footed defender Sadness and Happiness (1975), which Illinois Schools for the Deaf and Visually who looks stunned and nailed to the brought to contemporary poetry a rich Impaired) floor discursiveness, a compelling new way in the wrong direction, trying to catch of thinking and a refreshing sense of Fire: because it is quick, and can sight other people. I’ve followed him through destroy. of a high, gliding dribble and a man his book-length poem An Explanation Music: place where anger has its place. letting the play develop in front of him of America (1980), a remarkable Romantic Love — the cold or stupid in slow motion, almost exactly meditation on being a citizen in our ask why. like a coach’s drawing on the republic; History of My Heart (1984), Sign: that it is a language, full of grace, blackboard, which shows him to be an omnivorous both forwards racing down the court thinker working at full power; The Want That it is visible, invisible, dark and the way that forwards should, fanning Bone (1990), which initiated a strange clear, out new lyricism into his work; The Figured That it is loud and noiseless and is and filling the lanes in tandem, Wheel: New and Collected Poems: contained moving 1966-1996 (1996), an essential gathering Inside a body and explodes in air together as brothers passing the ball that included 21 new poems; and, most Out of a body to conquer from the between them without a dribble, recently, Jersey Rain (2000), a work of mind. without mid-life reckonings. “Now near the end a single bounce hitting the hardwood of the middle stretch of road/What have ROBERT PINSKY ON EDWARD HIRSCH until the guard finally lunges out I learned?” he asks in the title poem. Edward Hirsch’s justly celebrated and commits to the wrong man “Some earthly wiles. An art.” poem “Fast Break” (from his book while the power-forward explodes By now everyone should know that in Wild Gratitude, Knopf) captures and past them 1997 Pinsky founded the Favorite Poem epitomizes the speed and brilliance of an in a fury, taking the ball into the air Project during his tenure as poet laureate inspired moment when things go right by himself now and laying it gently of the United Statest (1997-2000). — in the rhythms of a sport or in the against the glass for a lay-up, This project, a huge national resource, charmed exertions of sentences and lines. but losing his balance in the process, has culminated in three anthologies, Hirsch’s single long sentence courses inexplicably falling, hitting the floor which he has edited with Maggie sure-footedly to its ultimate goal: the with a wild, headlong motion Dietz: Americans’ Favorite Poems; noun “net.” The movement through for the game he loved like a country Poems to Read; and, most recently, the couplets, unfettered and purposeful, and swiveling back to see an orange An Invitation to Poetry: A New demonstrates what it describes: the blur Favorite Poem Project Anthology, grace of improvisation working through floating perfectly through the net. which includes a DVD of people from a plan. The elegiac dedication in the all walks of life saying something about subtitle emphasizes charges of mortality

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An Integrated Curriculum For The Washington Post Newspaper In Education Program Poet’s Choice: A Stock Idea • Originally published March 26, 2006 By Robert Pinsky Washington Post Staff Writer

What might poetry have in common with NASCAR? The appeal of speed. And since the “SC” in that acronym stands for “Stock Car,” we can add the appeal of speed as a challenge met by ordinary means — the stock material, though applied and transformed with extraordinary skills and resources. David Rivard’s marvelous new book, Sugartown, moves through familiar material, like the way a good mood and a good memory can make life seem rich and even death nearly acceptable. Rivard’s poems move through such subject matter with an exhilarating, smart pace of association and evocation. The speed of mind, compressing details and emotions, covering the maximum distance in the least time, gives this writing its thrill:

A Real, Right Thing HAROLD HINSON — ASSOCIATED PRESS Like a green ludicrous tow truck Could poetry and NASCAR have something in common? with yellow stripes & naked chrome bulldog like a silver belt buckle in a Decay as a reason to seize the day atop the hood, my pleasure’s darkened church is one of the most traditional notions obvious and seeing her face then, so calm in — a stock idea. Rivard’s quickness watchful wary arrogant & pure sleep dramatizes the idea with a fresh the smell of warm December early I’ll be in sympathy with a car alarm urgency and also with fresh images. the sixth forever The idea of being in sympathy even day the city men come to the park so long as it never goes off again with a car alarm recalls the giddiness to gather leaves half-disintegrated and when I die finally it’s certain of a lover in some Shakespeare already compost, that smell the house flies comedy, and the afterthought “so there for the asking, those leaves will love having this sick man long as it never goes off again” has a few the color of her skin around. a Shakespearean light irony to it, at the end of summer, sweet present expressed in an idiom as American and blown against my lips- The phrase “naked chrome bulldog” feisty as that Mack bulldog. (“Speak Oh, that is fun to say, but, as the ampersands American, OK?” says the crew boss in was a good moment to be born in, imply, the poem has no intention of another Rivard poem, “and then shut serendipitous lingering on such moments. Decay, the hell up.”) for how the color set off her exemplified by the decomposing leaves, These street-wise, book-wise, collarbone will not wait for extended, prosey eloquent poems have a bracing sureness musings or explanations. and scope.

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