Fooling with Words with Bill Moyers: Lesson Plan

Read and describe the "plot" of five poems by modern and contemporary writers.
Compare and contrast the childhood experiences portrayed in each of the poems.
Examine the complex responsibilities and privileges of family.
Examine the role of memory in creating a poem.
Write and revise their own poems based upon a childhood memory.

Learn to use metaphors to describe the "truth."
Learn to use physical, concrete images to support their writing.

Procedures for Teachers is divided into two sections:
Prep -- Preparing for the Lesson.
Steps -- Conducting the Lesson.

Teaching poetry to high school students usually goes one of two ways. Either the students love it or they hate it. Rarely do they fall into the uncomfortable abyss of ambivalence. This series of lessons should provide you with strategies to have your students become engaged in reading poems with pleasure and writing poems that surprise them (and you!) because of the original way in which the poems manage to get to what the young authors find important.

The loose framework for teaching these poems can be described in the following steps:
1. Reading & Thinking
2. Writing
3. Revising
4. Realizing

Poet William Carlos Williams wrote in "The Descent":

"Memory is a kind of accomplishment . . . and no whiteness (lost) is so white as the memory of whiteness" (from SELECTED POEMS)

Memory has always been a useful resource for poets to excavate the subject of their poems. Rilke, in his LETTERS TO A YOUNG POET (Rainer Maria Rilke, Norton, 1934), writes:

"And even if you were in some prison the walls of which let none of the sounds of the world come to your senses -- would you not then still have your childhood, that precious, kingly possession, that treasure-house of memories? Turn your attention thither. Try to raise the submerged sensations of that ample past; your personality will grow more firm, your solitude will widen and will become a dusky dwelling past which the noise of others goes by far away. And if out of this turning inward, out of this absorption into your own world verses come, then it will not occur to you to ask anyone whether they are good verses."

In each of the five poems that follow, the adult poet looks back into his or her "treasure-house of memories" and finds an early experience which was troubling or important in some nonverbal way. The poet then finds the language and images to make the experience more tangible and meaningful now that it is understood. Using these poems as models, your students will first appreciate the "kind of accomplishment" of their authors, and then accomplish their own. They will also learn a basic technique for revising their new drafts of poems to rid them of lazy language and make them more original and satisfying.

First, let's look at the poems:

"Those Winter Sundays" by Robert Hayden, from COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT HAYDEN, Liveright, 1985.
"My Papa's Waltz" by Theodore Roethke, from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE, Anchor Doubleday, 1966.
"Flash Cards" by Rita Dove, from GRACE NOTES, Norton, 1989.
"The Portrait" by Stanley Kunitz, from THE POEMS OF STANLEY KUNITZ 1928-1978, Little, Brown & Co., 1979.
"When You Forget To Feed Your Gerbil" by Denise Duhamel, from GIRL SOLDIER, Garden Street Press, 1996.

"Those Winter Sundays"
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

from COLLECTED POEMS OF ROBERT HAYDEN, 1985

Robert Hayden chooses one moment of childhood to analyze the complex relationship he had with his adopted parents (see Lesson #2 - "Locked in with Loss ... the Poetry of Robert Hayden"). This widely anthologized sonnet is written in very clear, almost literal language until its beautifully mystifying abstract closing couplet. Hayden plainly tells us what the poem is about in the last line of stanza 1. The simpleness of this line is offset by "What did I know, what did I know of love's austere and lonely offices?" Your students should be able to understand the "story" of the poem, but they may need help understanding the depth of emotion that the poet conveys.

The word "office" is a surprising one, yet it works on many levels. Among its meanings are:
1. something performed or intended to be performed for another
2. a function or duty assigned as part of one's work or position
3. a position of authority or trust
4. the building or rooms where business is carried out

Office is also the name for the daily obligatory prayers said by a Catholic priest. It is a daily responsibility for him in order to earn the appellation "Father." I am sure Hayden had all these meanings in mind when he wrote the poem.

"My Papa's Waltz"
by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing is not easy.

We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.

from THE COLLECTED POEMS OF THEODORE ROETHKE, 1966

Roethke's simple poem is unsettling because of the tension set up between the lovely music of the poem and the difficult, perhaps disturbing scene which it describes. Of course, the waltz of the title is ironic, as the dance the father and his son are doing is more a drunken stumble that symbolically and physically disturbs the house and its residents.

While some readers at first think that the father is assaulting his son, he is actually "roughhousing" with him, holding him close as he stumbles around the kitchen, probably perched atop his own feet ("At every step you missed / My right ear scraped a buckle") in his intoxicated dance. The mother, looking on, is furious. Is she angry because this happens every night when the old man finally comes home after stopping off at the local bar for a few drinks? Or is she angry because he doesn't come home most nights, but when he does, he disrupts the kind of normalcy that she has been trying hard to create?

And what do we know of "Papa"? Like Hayden's father, he works with his hands, but his are "battered on one knuckle." And what does the young boy feel as he holds on "like death" to his father who beats "time on [his] head"? Isn't this really what all parents pass on to their children?

"Flash Cards"
by Rita Dove

In math I was the whiz kid, keeper
of oranges and apples. What you don't understand,
master, my father said; the faster
I answered, the faster they came.

I could see one bud on the teacher's geranium,
one clear bee sputtering at the wet pane.
The tulip tree always dragged after heavy rain
so I tucked my head as my boots slapped home.

My father put up his feet after work
and relaxed with a highball and The Life of Lincoln.
After supper we drilled and I climbed the dark

before sleep, before a thin voice hissed
numbers as I spun on a wheel. I had to guess.
Ten, I kept saying, I'm only ten.

from GRACE NOTES, 1989

Like the other poets in this selection, Rita Dove chooses a moment from her childhood which conveys more about the relationship than just a particular incident. She says in an interview with Bill Moyers (THE LANGUAGE OF LIFE: A FESTIVAL OF POETS. Bill Moyers, James Haba, ed., Doubleday, 1995): "There was stress there for me mainly because flash cards never end, but I didn't realize that [my parents] were preparing me for life, where things don't end either." This experience, like most in life, is bittersweet. Notice the second stanza which is not set in the living room, but out of the house. The young child is curious, a student of life, and her "inner poet" is studying the sounds and images of the world as it sputters, drags, and slaps about. The last line is surprisingly ambiguous as "Ten" works both as an answer to the flash card, and as a way of protesting the pressure her father puts on her.

In that same interview, Dove tells Moyers that "Flash Cards" is "my daughter's favorite poem because I made her do flash cards, too, and I had sworn I would never do that to a child."

"The Portrait"
by Stanley Kunitz

My mother never forgave my father
for killing himself,
especially at such an awkward time
and in a public park,
that spring
when I was waiting to be born.
She locked his name
in her deepest cabinet
and would not let him out,
though I could hear him thumping.
When I came down from the attic
with the pastel portrait in my hand
of a long-lipped stranger
with a brave moustache
and deep brown level eyes,
she ripped it into shreds
without a single word
and slapped me hard.
In my sixty-fourth year
I can feel my cheek
still burning.

from THE POEMS OF STANLEY KUNITZ, 1928-1978

"The Portrait" might be read as a snapshot of three separate people, the father, son, and mother, each of whom is troubled and flawed. Kunitz, in an interview with Bill Moyers, says "[His mother's] anger was directed at him, not at me. She wanted to expunge his memory. No mention of him ever crossed her lips." The young boy, pleased with his unearthing of the "long-lipped stranger with a brave moustache," learns that discovery creates risk. The poet feels his cheeks still burning, even after most of a century has passed. This is the kind of accomplishment to which William Carlos Williams alludes.

"When You Forget to Feed Your Gerbil" by Denise Duhamel

the mother eats her newborn babies.
Pink furless heads without traces of blood
lie on the newspaper with droppings and wood chips.
Mother-gerbil sucks at a cloudy dry water-bottle
that you also forgot to fill as though she is dragging on a cigarette.
When you finally notice, you finally provide
with the terror and guilt of a prisoner's guard,
imagining the sound of tin cups like mad scales against her bars.
Your gerbil doesn't try to scramble away when you open the metal door,
toss in pellets and an old leaf of lettuce.
And after she eats, she seems almost happy on her exercise wheel,
the one she's gnawed a little plastic off of. You can't bring yourself
to clean her cage, tip out the babies' remains. You can't bring yourself
to do your homework. It's always your fault
when you're a child taking care of a mother.

from GIRL SOLDIER, 1996

Duhamel takes a surprising turn in the last line when the true subject of her poem is revealed. She painfully recounts the details of the cage with the remains of its tiny casualties. The ambience is guilt, especially as she compares herself to a prison guard. What shakes things up is the suggestion that she has neglected the gerbil because she is taking care of her own mother. You can almost hear her mother screaming at her, "You lazy, irresponsible little girl. Look what you've done!" What isn't said, only suggested, is what the mother has been doing, and why the mother couldn't take care of herself.

When presenting poems to students, do not try to teach them what a poem means. Instead, have them explore the universe of each poem and return with the treasures they can bring back. Try to guide them into the poem and around the poem and help them evaluate the feelings and ideas that they have.

While a poem may have more than one meaning, it does not mean that a poem can mean anything you want it to. A useful question to ask the student who says that a particular poem is about Martians landing is "Gee, where in the poem do you see that?" or "What details suggest that?" Encourage thinking about metaphor and non-literal language, but you also want your students to learn that structure is important and that anything does not go!

Copy and paste the poems from this Web page onto a word-processing document to distribute to your students. I usually put Hayden and Roethke on one page, Kunitz and Dove on another, and Duhamel alone.

"Those Winter Sundays"

Start with Hayden. After passing out the poem and instructing students to read it quietly, ask for several volunteers to read it aloud. Encourage them to pay attention to punctuation and line breaks, especially in the first stanza, where it's easy to lose one's breath around "then with cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather made / banked fires blaze."

To get a discussion going, ask the following questions, depending on the response:
"What's the story of this poem? What's the plot?"
"What's going on here?"
"Who is the speaker (or narrator? or persona?)"

Eventually, ask "What do you know about the father?" which should evoke lots of responses. When answering, encourage students to refer to details like "cracked hands that ached / from labor in the weekday weather" and what that suggests about the kind of work he did.

Ask what they think about words and phrases like "blueblack cold" (the color before dawn? bruising like black and blue?), "the cold splintering, breaking" (sounds of an old house? losing its power or authority because of the rising heat?), "chronic angers of that house" (the father is angry at his ungrateful kid? a mother who is not mentioned?)

Ask the students which the most literal line of the poem is and what it means. ("No one ever thanked him.") Ask them why the father polished his "good shoes" as well (Sunday is get-dressed-for-church day).

Then we get to the last two lines, "What did I know, what did I know / of love's austere and lonely offices?"

Ask the meaning of "austere" as well as "office." Eventually, the teacher should try to get at some of the definitions which the students did not come up with, particularly the religious one. If needed, ask what Hayden might be getting at, but usually, the class has articulated enough so that we can go on to the next poem.

"My Papa's Waltz"

Ask students to read the poem silently, then aloud; listen to the sounds and talk about slant rhyme ("dizzy/easy"; "pans/countenance"; "wrist/missed"). Ask them to tell the "story" of the poem, and have students work their way through the images which lead some students to believe the father is beating his son. Ask, "What do you know about the father?" and hope that someone will compare him to the father in Hayden's poem. If not, ask what the two have in common and how they are different. This leads to other comparisons. Why is the mother in this poem angry? How does that compare to the "chronic angers" of the house Hayden described? Somewhere in the discussion, the hope is that a student will mention that the narrator is also an adult looking back on his past and focusing on one event to raise, as Rilke suggested, "the submerged sensations of that ample past."

At this point, consider taking a poll. How many students like "My Papa's Waltz" better than "Those Winter Sundays"?
How many students like "Those Winter Sundays" better than "My Papa's Waltz"?
Ask why and field the responses; students often say, "I liked ... better when I read it, but now I don't know," or "I like the other better," or "I can't decide."

Proceed to Step 2: Writing. If time permits, proceed to the next poems.

"Flash Cards"

By now, you and your students should be into the swing of things, and I bet they will make connections with Dove's poem with less prodding from you. Here are some useful questions to promote the discussion and enjoyment of the poem.

What is the setting of the poem?
What is the story? What is happening?
Who is the narrator?
What do we know about the father? What specific details show us what he is like?
Look at Stanza 2. What is unusual about it?
How does the young girl's perspective change? What tickles her? How do the verbs reinforce her interest?
What does the first "Ten" mean in the last line? How does its meaning change when it is repeated?

And finally, "How many really like this poem?" "Why?" "Why not?" This should lead into more discussion.

"The Portrait"

Here again are some questions to promote the discussion and enjoyment of the poem.

Who is the narrator?
What is the story? What is happening?
What is the setting of the poem?
Why does the mother slap the little boy?
What do we know about the father? What specific details show us what he is like?
What does the title mean? Who is this a portrait of: the father, the mother, the boy?
What do you think the following lines mean: "deepest cabinet," "a long-lipped stranger / with a brave moustache."
Why is the narrator's face still burning?

Again, "How many really like this poem?" "Why?" "Why not?"

Optional (if time permits):
"When You Forget to Feed Your Gerbil"

Here again are some questions. Feel free to use your own questioning technique and know which kinds of questions work best with your students.

Who is the narrator?
What is the story? What is happening?
What is the setting of the poem?
Why does she compare herself to a "prison guard"?
What do you think the following line means: "It's always your fault/ when you're a child taking care of a mother." What does it suggest about the narrator's mother?
What emotions does the poem evince? Which is the most powerful? Why?

Finally, ask students to rank the poems from most to least favorite and have one last discussion/argument about their lists and what they say about the poems and the people who ranked them.

This exercise is designed to have your students engage in a process of discovery through writing that should, in most cases, encourage them to write better than they or you thought possible.

Try to create a classroom atmosphere that encourages your students to experiment and take linguistic and, perhaps, emotional risks. Encourage them to say what they didn't know they could say in a way that is both original and engaging. Encourage them to not settle for the first things that they write down. Poetry, like all arts, is a process, and no serious poet would expect her first or second draft to evince the depth of emotion, thought, and language that comes forth only after revision (see below). But first, let's get them writing.

Prewriting:

1 - In a journal or writing notebook, have your students draw a horizontal line across the top of the page with a dot on each end.

2 - Next, have them draw 3 slashes near the left-hand side of the line.

3 - Now, explain that this is a lifeline which represents the 15 (or 17 or so) years they have spent on the planet. The dot on the left is their birth; the one on the right is the present; the three slashes represent the following: A - earliest memory, B - an important or favorite memory, C - a confusing or unresolved memory.

4 - Now, have them free-write for 5 to 10 minutes about each one of their three memories. (You could assign this part for homework if you like.) Emphasize that they should describe what happened using as many physical details as they recall. Encourage them to use their five senses -- Sight, Sound, Smell, Touch, and Taste (SSSTT) -- to give their memories body. If students are unsure of details or reluctant to "reveal" certain things, tell them it's okay to exaggerate, distort, or exclude whatever they like. Urge them to make their description of their memory as active as possible. Start this off by sharing some early memories of your own, and then invite students to offer their own.

Memories B and C should be from before the age of 10 or 12 or so. Otherwise, you will have some students writing about what they did last weekend. Explain to the students that you will not read what they write, nor will they be required to read it aloud.

When done (or the next day), talk about the experience of "remembering" and what it felt like. Were there any students who originally said, "I can't remember," or "I have no favorite memory," who managed to find one? How did they feel about this discovery?

Have students form small groups, and have them share what they wrote. If you are uncomfortable with groups or find that your students do not work well in them, allow a few volunteers to read theirs to the whole class.

5 - After students have shared, have them transform their memories into poems to help in this process. Refer them back to the five (or two or four) poems they have already read.

Explain that poems are "fictions," small stories that may be based upon "factual" events in their lives, but are not necessarily "true." Students are to embellish them through exaggeration and metaphor in order to make them "true" for the reader. Mention that, according to Edward Albee, fiction is fact, distorted into truth; structure the next part of the assignment to encourage students to complete it in the following way:

"Write a poem based on one of your memories. Try to include in your first draft as many of the following variables as possible."
Variables:
- Include water or liquid of any kind (tears, Coke, melting ice, etc.).
- Mention a piece of furniture (bed, car, TV, etc.).
- Include a sound, smell, or taste.
- Tell a secret & tell a lie (and never tell anyone which is which!).
- Surprise yourself! Try to write something you didn't know you knew.

This may seem like a strange list, but is important for young writers to use it as it forces them to "let go" of what "really happened" and to add physical details that, as in the poems they have already read, give a physicality to the ethereal memory, a body of words which makes the experience visceral and real. It also acts as a ploy to distract the writer from trying to "tell what really happened" and allows elements from the subconscious to work their way into the poem. Like a string in a mixture of sugar and water which will eventually form rock candy, these (or other) variables act as a wick around which a surprising poem may crystallize.

Ask students not to use end rhyme, which they tend to do without much care or thought. When they protest, tell them that a poem must be original above all else, or why bother writing it? (And besides, so many good rhymes have been taken.) Encourage the uses of other sounds in poetry, such as alliteration, onomatopoeia, internal rhyme, etc.; encourage them to use these as well as figurative language such as metaphor, simile, personification, hyperbole, symbol, and imagery.

Tell the students they will have 15 minutes or so to write their first drafts down, and get them writing. When time is about up, give them a few more minutes to finish, then ask them to reread what they wrote and mark or highlight any words, phrases, or images which they particularly like. Have a discussion about the process of writing the poem and ask who has written anything that surprised them. Ask what they thought of the variables, if they were helpful or distracting, and how they managed to work them into their drafts. Finally, ask who would like to read all or part of their drafts and allow them to do so, encouraging those who would read only a line or two.

Now begins the most important part of the process, revising their drafts into mature, original poems. Share with them quotations from writers on revision, such as John Updike ("Writing and rewriting are a constant search for what one is saying") and the French poet Paul Valery ("A poem is never finished, only abandoned"), and then pass out and discuss the Style Sheet for Revising Poetry.

Instruct students to review their drafts through the framework of the style sheet and then to write a second draft which has eliminated clichés, increased the ratio of concrete nouns over abstract ones, and strengthened the action verbs.

Then -- usually the next day -- have students meet in groups (which can be called families) and read each other's poems aloud, concentrating on several things. First, students must find something to praise in this first draft. Then they should assess draft #2 in terms of the first three items from the Stylesheet. When this step is completed, students are to write draft #3, in which they change the clichés, nouns, and verbs which their peers have pointed out, and, in addition, try to compress the poem as much as possible. Compression is, for some, the hardest step, but it is necessary. When these drafts are written (and stapled on top of the earlier drafts), collect them, read them, and comment using the Stylesheet as a guide. Circle excess abstractions and weak verbs that could be stronger. Write a big C next to lines that need compression, and encourage the writer to find original images for the clichés that still remain.

Some students might be miffed that "you didn't like my poem"; defuse this charge beforehand by encouraging them to strive for the goal of writing original, concrete poems that show, rather than merely tell.

Many young people begin to write poems in order to express themselves. This is a natural inclination, and many fine poets have started there. However, there's the rub. Expression is only a place to start and most young writers who do not go beyond discovery do not continue to write as adults. It's the same with inspiration. When it works, it works fine, but most people who continue to write poetry become interested in a more complex relationship between themselves and the material they are working on, and this has less to do with expression and inspiration and more to do with uncovering something which they did not previously know or understand.

Perhaps the greatest service you can do for your students is to encourage them to learn from their writing. Frost said that if there was no surprise in the writer, there could be no surprise in the reader. The variables in the above writing exercise are intended to add spontaneity to writing, and the revision suggestions are used to make the drafts more artful. Combined with imagination and a half-decent sense of the language, your students should be able to surprise themselves in poems. Ask them which lines or images dazzled them. Nudge them to stay with a poem through even more revision to reveal more about the experience or emotion that they didn't know they knew. When they learn that their poems can teach them things, then they will be on the way to becoming poets who continue to read and write poetry throughout their adult lives.

Peter Murphy teaches English and creative writing at Atlantic City High School. His poems have appeared in numerous journals, including THE ANGLO-WELSH REVIEW, THE ATLANTA REVIEW, THE BELOIT POETRY JOURNAL, COMMONWEAL, THE NEW YORK QUARTERLY, THE NEW YORK TIMES, WITNESS, and YELLOW SILK. His essays and reviews have been published in THE AMERICAN BOOK REVIEW, THE CORPORATION FOR PUBLIC BROADCASTING TEACHERS' DIGEST, THE SHAKESPEARE QUARTERLY, THE TEACHERS & WRITERS GUIDE TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS, WORLD ORDER and elsewhere. He has received awards and fellowships for writing and teaching from The New Jersey State Council on the Arts, the Corporation of Yaddo, The Folger Shakespeare Library, The National Endowment for the Humanities, The Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, and the White House Commission on Presidential Scholars. In addition, he was the first recipient of the Robert Hayden Poetry Fellowship at the Louhelen Bahá'í School in 1986. He is a consultant to the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation's poetry program and has been an educational advisor to five PBS television series on poetry, including FOOLING WITH WORDS WITH BILL MOYERS. He is also the founder/director of the Winter Poetry & Prose Getaway (www.wintergetaway.com), a writing and arts conference for teachers and others held annually in Cape May.

Photos by Lynn Saville