[New-Poetry] Draft of a Schoolwide Blog Entry

[Bob Grumman]

I've bnen working on a blog entry for the Schoolwide Website.  I'm 
dissatisfied with what I've so far said, mostly with the expression 
rather than the content, although I'm not sure the content is all that 
great--especially as something intended to appeal to K-12 teachers.  Any 
feedback would thus be especially appreciated.
 
*The Layers of a Poem*

                           
                                          balloon!





                    Hold on to your

(formatting probably off)                   

I often have dumb thoughts.  I treasure them, because sometimes they 
ignite Brilliant Thinking.  (Or, more likely, put me in the manic part 
of my insanity.)  This happened recently when I was thinking about the 
poem above by Adam Gamble, intending to write another commentary on it.  
My dumb thought was that the poem's characters, the balloon (escaped or 
lost), the child who lets go of it, and the parent (or other grown-up) 
who makes the futile warning, comprised a layer of the poem--its 
meaning.  It was on top of the layer consisting of the words on the 
page, or, to be more detailed, how the words look to the eye, because 
this is a visual poem, and how they sound and are felt when pronounced.  
What the eye, ear and mouth making them (and the mouth should be 
involved even in silently reading a poem; poems are not for the Evelyn 
Wood variety of reading).  In other words, a poem is something perceived 
by the senses plus what the brain makes of it.  Two layers.

A dumb thought because everybody knows that about anything piece of 
readable printed matter.  The Brilliant Thinking resulted when it 
occurred to me that the second layer, what the poem meant in the brain, 
should be two layers, one concerned with what the poem directly 
means--in this case, a child holding a balloon, while warned to hold on 
tight, and the balloon escaping, and one concerned with the emotional 
meaning of that meaning, empathy for the parental concern for the child, 
and for the child with a wonderful bright-
hued balloon--and for the balloon, leaping free, or tumbling fearfully away.

The fact that the balloon was either gaining freedom or losing the 
security of a home suggested my scheme was not yet cojmplete: the poem 
had a fourth (and, I now believe, final)  layer, its symbolic layer.  
For the little scene the poem depicts, taken from the balloon's 
viewpoint (and in poems a balloon can have a viewpoint!), can symbolize 
either the joy of freedom or the despair of loss of security.  From the 
child's viewpoint, it can symbolize Loss, Failure--but maybe something 
else, maybe elation at letting go of the balloon and watching it climb 
the sky!

So, a poem has the layer of what's there; the layer of what that 
directly means; the layer of how it makes one experiencing it feel; and 
the layer of what grander, generalized meaning it can symbolize, without 
forcing things.  My tentative names for these are concrete, literal, 
emotive, and archetypal layer, incidentally.

Apprehending a poem as four layers is pretty abstract, and far from the 
unified experience of a poem any normal person would have (or should 
have initially), but I believe presenting it as one way to connect to a 
poem (after the natural way) might prove useful as a teaching tool.  A 
teacher should try every way the teacher knows to capture students for 
poetry.  Its main value, however, would be to provide a clearer, more 
detailed idea of what poems are, and what they do.  Where they may not 
be fully successful, too, many poems not having much of an emotional 
layer, or too vague a literal layer, or little or no archetypal layer.  
Or a student having trouble with a poem might be more easily help to
enjoy it if a particular layer that's not working for the student is 
identified.

--Bob
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