[New-Poetry] Draft of a Schoolwide Blog Entry

[Anny Ballardini]

I would avoid the use of 'dumb.'

I particularly enjoyed your twist here:
it can symbolize Loss, Failure--but maybe something else, maybe elation at
letting go of the balloon and watching it climb the sky!

the reading here is lovely, and the exclamation mark that follows 'balloon'
marks as a matter of fact a wonderful detachment. The formatting got lost,
but we can see that 'balloon' stands out there, up high, on its own. The
same word: balloon, with its double light 'L's and its double 'o's conveys a
certain lightness and joyfulness.
Further down, weighing down, the admonishment: 'Hold on to your"

*Yessir, I will, too late though, because it already escaped, :-)
brilliant red/or blue/or yellow dot in the sky.
*

On Sun, Jun 7, 2009 at 11:39 PM, Bob Grumman <bobgrumman at nut-n-but.net>wrote:

>  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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>


-- 
Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.lulu.com/content/5806078
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing
star!
Friedrich Nietzsche
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