Cold
Posted on January 25, 2008
Filed Under Blogging, Poetry, River Notes, Teaching |
About 10° below last night. The river is frozen over except for the channel along the far bank where it runs the fastest. Low pearl-colored sky. Only a few chickadees at the bird feeder. Lucky for me, I don’t have to go farther than the post office today & not until afternoon. Friday is my rest & recovery day this semester & I typically don’t do much in the morning, then putter around the house & finally sit down & bring my teaching notes & grade book current. For the next month, as I mentioned before, I’m teaching a writing workshop to high school students on Saturday mornings. The first session, in which we sewed journals, went extremely well, but then Carole did all the work. Tomorrow I’m going to have to fill the whole three hours myself. My plan is to structure all the remaining sessions by beginning & ending with free writing while listening to music, with the time between filled with exercises and workshop / discussion. (Just picked the music for tomorrow: Count Basie, Moondog, Bach, John Coltrane — no words, very rhythmic.) Tomorrow, too, I’ll pick up on the first quick exercise I did on concrete language, particularly nouns, with a discussion of active verbs. Without talking about grammar as such, I want to have students work with moving the parts of a sentence around. I’m going to get them to do this by making metaphors & similes out of concrete nouns & then changing out the terms. Finally, I’m going to take a page right out of Kenneth Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams & ask students to write a ten line poem in which every line is a lie. Next week, more freewriting to music, but then I’m going to teach them how write blues & ballad stanzas. Hope I can find some blues that are not too profane for fifteen-year-olds (though I realize that, by themselves, many of them are more profane than me — & I’m pretty profane).
Later: Four fat starlings on the fence around the dog run. A flock of goldfinches at the feeder.
Comments
2 Responses to “Cold”
Peter Carleton a counselor/therapist here my age has been writing on the establishment of a model of the self based on metaphors. His renewed interest in this is because of cognitive revolution studies/science and had done 2 interviews when i talked with him last may 2007. posted on the internet i seem to recall. years, a decade or 2, back he created an illustrative series of artworks “like” paintings but not paintings using dyes and cloth mounted in to me abstract arrangements.
now if he had used the term ’simile’ instead of
‘metaphor’, these studies would be quite different. With simile everything it seems to me would be in a comparison, be ‘like’ this or that. metaphor jumps over any stile or frame.
so, is metaphor really in the same league with simile at all? oh my head hurts trying to think of what w.h.auden would have said. edward mycue
I just started a blog with just diary style entries on daily comparisons between Boulder CO, where I live now, and Potsdam, where I grew up, centered around the sandstones and the scientific orientation of the towns.