Padagogy Forum Week 6

A glance at the moon is not eerie,
when a little one sleeps in a barbie bed,
near your rocking chair.
no vampires, or werewolves approach,
when you recline easy late through the night.
fatherhood is best, and the moon is finest of nightlights.

So having unknowingly written an "emo poem" for my improving, filled with some pretty awful  emotional memories. I am now pondering the idea of poetry as pedagogy and its schools of thought.

Dr. Davidson reminds us of the lighter side of poetry, regularly, along with it's seriousness. He speaks of it's simplicity, it's clarity (The Red Wheelbarrow), and how fun it can be when the imagination shapes the work.

The exercises we did this week are just such an example. They show just how easily we might take ourselves too seriously. In many ways starting out this semester, I was just as close to those freshman composition students in my misconceptions of the art form of poetry, particularly in how it is created. The principal difference between the freshman and myself  was I have a larger vocabulary, allowing me to mask angst with perhaps  more interesting and cloudy language. The first poems I wrote were nevertheless as self indulgent as an emo poem. I hope now I am moving past that trap, although it just caught me again in my last post. This time the feeling after writing was not catharsis, but very unpleasant. So I have begun this forum with a happy little verse rooted in the now. And, I can't wait for the opportunity to use some lighter side of poetry to help my students with their skit writing when we return to school next week.

Let's just examine the verse I wrote above, it is no less compelling or filled with possibility than the improving poem I labored over based on dark memories.That is not to say that it is any good, but it happens in the now, is primarily composed of imagination and has no particular hold on me, it can easily be shaped in fact going back to expand or contract it should be quite fun. I think it might be good to try doing just that.

A glance at the moon is not eerie,
when a little one sleeps in a Barbie Bed,
near your rocking chair.
No vampires, or werewolves approach,
when you recline easy, and late through the night.
fatherhood is best, and the moon is the finest of nightlights.

Now this is a sweet little verse, worthy of a hallmark card. I gathered it's essence quickly while stepping outside for a moment and glancing at the moon. If you change the vampires and werewolves to unicorns it would be perfect for Spears. But for this time of year, Halloween approaching, maybe a change in the whimsy of night creatures is not what we want, so I will leave in the vampires and werewolves and maybe that will color it.

I will start as advocated with jobs; Japanese English teacher, cheese sprayer, fortune cookie writer, chimney sweep, rodeo clown, dice inspector, these are actual jobs.

I think I like fortune cookie writer best: researching this will also likely provide some good junkyard quotes.
some quotes I found for fortune cookies are infused in the expansion below:

If you want the rainbow, you must to put up with the rain,

but the moon never leaves you blue in good company.

you will find Good company comes from children and dogs.

boy I am getting tired of this crap, how about Confucius say

Confucius say, when a little book sleeps (in bed) you are

happy by the rocking chair (in bed)

no vampires, or werewolves approach, for You are talented in many ways.

You should be able to undertake and complete anything,when you recline easy late through the night Any rough times are behind you.

fatherhood is best, and the moon is finest of nightlights (in bed)

(in bed) is no inside joke I am certain, but just in case you are wondering, in my youth that is what you always put at the end of a fortune cookie reading.

Now for some creative erasure:

You want the rainbow, but the moon won't relent.
So you are up all night with good company,
  a blue dog and your tween's cliff-hanger.

You recline through trite vampires and werewolves. 
Fatherhood: rough times now become the smiling fantasies of 
you, and the gentle moon shape shifts into the fieriest of night lights, howling.

You are galvanic with the reinvention of a dark youth
to undertake and complete anything is possible while,
brushing off your intellect, the old soggy leather
brain, you are guiltless, knowing all the rest
are peaceful (in bed).

this is a more interesting piece, and came out of nowhere specific. It might be a bit funnier with a title like "Closet New Moon" or "Confessions of a late Night Trash read. The interesting thing about it is I have no interest in these things,my students read the new moon books, my wife watches some vampire show, but
 my daughters are small and suddenly through the imagination, I am able to create a speaker very unlike myself by using these techniques. I like that. I like having a poem that I know comes from an imaginary place and has somewhere to go. Even if the poem is poor at lease it has a place to go without hurting my sense of duty to a memory. If I had time I might try rewriting it in a good triggering town as hugo suggests.


In the modern American theater there a number of schools of thought for pedagogy. The two most prominent are the Method by Lee Strasberg and the Meisner technique. The latter teacher Sandy Meisner advocated using the imagination coupled with experience. Imagination and instinct coming first and then being shaped by experience. From class and reading his book I gather that Dr. Davidson encourages the same approach, until tonight I had not really thought much about  why, and now I am intrigued. Strasberg, on the other hand, liked to use memories, what he coined the Affective Memory,very psychological and involving a lot of sense memory recalling of past traumatic events. Generally I am very discouraging of my own students falling into this trap for acting, for a number of reasons.

One reason is that, at least in acting, art steaming from pain or psychological wounds is a twentieth century myth. Yet, it is inevitable that many students newly discovering an art form want to start bleeding out their soul through it.

A second reason for discouraging this is  approach, is that it brings about self indulgent acting that basically stays in the actors head and never lends itself to a partner.The same process in poetry lends itself to trite writing, as we discussed this week. Additionally over time, psychologically it becomes an unhealthy way to work. Also, it hinders the amazing possibilities of imagination, for experiences are limited. No matter how many interesting experiences one may have, everyone has their limit. I believe that is what Hugo and Dr. Davidson are trying to help us see that if we write primarily from the unfettered imagination, experience will always shape the writing but the work will be unlimited. the possibilities boundless.

Are there schools of thought for teaching poetry that influenced these ideas, other than Hugo's book was there another poetry writing guru who advocated working primarily from experience and memory?I would be very interested to learn more about this. The twentieth century was really a battle ground between these two schools of thought, Meisner's and Strasberg's, there were other major teachers but these two had the most influence, and each produced enormously successful students directly or indirectly. Besides Hugo, I wonder, who were the guru teachers or poetry in the twentieth century?