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Last Updated: Sep 8th, 2009 - 08:07:52 |
SPARKLING ADULT EDUCATION POETRY
[UPDATED MARCH 1993 FROM THE NOV. 21, 1988 Adult & Continuing Education Today]
by John Ohliger
Want to add sparkle to your next brochure? Put some pizzazz in your spring bulletin? Spice up a press release? How about some poetry to give your courses a classy boost? Poems express volumes in just a few carefully chosen words. Their rhymes and rhythms enhance meanings; verse goes far beyond the ability of words alone to convey them.
Before you create your own poems, seek some inspiration from the many on adult education themes that poets throughout the ages already offer. One of the first appeared in the 12th century in Persia called THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS. It has just recently been revived as a verse play on the Broadway stage. Chaucer followed in the 14th century with THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS that begins with his oft quoted lines on tough love. Shakespeare did his modest bit in LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST: "Study is like the heaven's glorious sun;" and in THE TAMING OF THE SHREW:
No profit grows where no pleasure is taken:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
MODERN ADULT EDUCATION POETRY
Modern American poets like E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, and Marianne Moore have also created sparkling adult education poetry. The NEW YORK TIMES critic Brooks Atkinson says "It takes most people five years to recover from a college education, and to learn that poetry is as vital to thinking as knowledge." The great modern poet William Carlos Williams makes the point in one of his own works: "to bring you news of something that concerns you and concerns many," you will not find in "what passes for the new," he writes, "but in despised poems."
Some of the specific adult ed themes and issues that modern poets address include literacy (Maureen Duffy, D.J. Enright, Frances Harper, Phyllis McGinley), conferences (Cyril Dostal, John Frederick Nims, Vladimir Mayakovsky), community problem solving (Denis Detzel, Edgar Lee Masters, Alice Walker), and self-directed learning (Stephen Crane, Don Marquis, William Wordsworth).
RON GROSS, THE POP POET
Our own Ron Gross has written rhythmically of adult ed in his book POP POEMS. It's in the Andy Warhol "Campbell's-Soup-Can" Pop Art tradition. Ron's poem on adult learning in his book, called "Lesson I," is just one of many with the word "lesson" in the title including classic works by W.H. Auden, Robert Lowell, Christina Rossetti, and Robert Penn Warren.
Kahlil Gibran embodies the encouraging yet cautionary attitude toward adult teaching and learning of many of these authors in his prose poem THE PROPHET:
No one can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his faith and lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind.
Read some of these poems, use them to attract students, explore feelings, raise issues. Then let your head, heart, and hand create your own. You may be pleasantly surprised at the results!
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF ADULT EDUCATION POETRY INDEX BEGINS ON PAGE 20
KEY TO SYMBOLS:
{FAE} means the item is treated more fully on the page indicated in THE FICTIONAL ADULT EDUCATOR, a 225 page, 1000 item bibliography/syllabus prepared for seminars at The Universities of Wyoming, Northern Illinois, Southern Maine, and Maine/Augusta. In addition to poems, the syllabus covers films, plays, novels, biographies, short stories, television, cartoons, wit, humor, and songs. Includes {RCC} below.
{ROC} means the item is treated more fully on the page indicated in Really Creative Conferences, a 26 page article with a 150 item bibliography published in Media Audit Learning.
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI. W.H. Auden, in his Homage to Clio (Random House, 1960, pp. 85-90). Includes:
. . . William Blake Pound Newton hard to take, And was not enormously taken With Francis Bacon. . . .
No one could ever inveigle Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel Into offering the slightest apology For his Principles of Phenomenology.
. . . Sψren Kierkegaard
Tried awfully hard
To take the Leap,
But fell in a heap. . . .
When Karl Marx
Found the phrase "financial sharks."
He sang a Te Deum
In the British Museum. . . .
Whenever Xantippe
Wasn't feeling too chippy,
She would bawl at Socrates:
"Why aren't you Hippocrates?" . . .
T.S. Eliot is quite at a loss When clubwomen bustle across
At literary teas,
Crying, "What, if you please,
Did you mean by The Mill on the Floss?"
ADVERTISING AGENCY POEM. {RCC, p. 3}. Cyril A. Dostal in Poster. Christopher Franke, ed (Deciduous Press, 1977). Dostal can be reached % Poets' League of Greater Cleveland, PO Box 91801, Cleveland, OH 44101). Begins:
The first week I was there the Boss asked me what did you get done today I said nothing with eight meetings he said why say nothing that's a hell of a lot of meetings I said how can you write copy in meetings all day he said let's just sit down to discuss it first thing Monday.
ADVICE TO A TOT ABOUT TO LEARN THE ALPHABET. See A Pocketful of Wry below.
ALL IGNORANCE TOBOGGANS INTO KNOW. {FAE, p. 54}. E.E. Cummings haunting but hopeful work available in many places including his Complete Poems: 1913-1962 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) and The Pocket Book of Modern Verse (Pocket Books, 1972). Begins: All ignorance toboggans into know/and trudges up to ignorance again:/but winter's not forever,even snow/melts;and if spring should spoil the game,what then? . . .
AND YOU KNOW. John Ashberry, in his Selected Poems. Penguin, 1986. Ends: And so they have left us feeling tired and old./They never cared for school anyway./And they have left us with the things pinned on the bulletin board,/And the night, the endless, muggy night that is invading our school.
APRIL INVENTORY. W.D. Snodgrass, in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 250-252)."Since 1955 he has taught at various universities and is currently a professor at the University of Delaware," Originally in Selected Poems 1957-1987 (Soho Press, 1987):
The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for. The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.
The trees have more that I to spare. The sleek, expensive girls I teach, Younger and pinker every year, Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.
The girls have grown so young by now I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.
The tenth time, just a year ago
I made a little list
Of all the things I'd ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who's trusted me
I'd be substantial, presently.
I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.
And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book, or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.
I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, can choose to die.
I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body's hunger;
That I have forces, true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.
While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.
Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives, We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons. There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.
ARCHY ON THIS AND THAT. Don Marquis. In The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel (Doubleday, 1950 (c) 1916-1928. p. 443). Includes: ... a man who is so dull/that he can learn only by personal experience/is too dull to learn/anything important by experience. (Also see "conferences" on p. 282.)
ASPHODEL. William Carlos Williams in The William Carlos Williams Reader (New Directions, 1966). Ends: ... My heart rouses thinking to bring you news of something/that concerns you and concerns many men. Look at what passes for the new./You will not find it there but in despised poems. It is difficult/to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there. Hear me out for I too am concerned/And every man who wants to die at peace in bed besides.
AT WRITERS' CONFERENCE. John Frederick Nims in Light Year '84, edited by Robert Wallace (Bits Press, Case Western Reserve University, 1985).: "Well, love me, love my dog." I'll cuddle the mutt./"And love me, love my poetry." Love your what?/Look, I'm sweet Venus' champion. Not some nut.
BLACK SOAP. Sandra McPherson in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 505-507). "Currently professor of English at the University of California." Originally in Patron Happiness (Ecco Press, 1983). Begins: White lather on black soap/Maria's gift. It reminds me/Of when a woman died/And they handed me her ring./Then they left to divide the roots of her./Daylight went down there shining./By accident, cleaning the hearth/Of a house to leave it for good,/I learned hos to see/A star come out: work/My hand into the ashes. . . .
BOOK OF THE WORLD. {FAE, p. 62}. "The Lessons of Nature" (see below) is taken from this longeT'poem by William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649). Note the use of this phrase in Descartes' Discourse on Method (1633) around the same time: "Resolving to seek no other science than that which could be found in myself, or at least in the great book of the world, I employed the rest of my youth in travel. . . But after I had employed several years in this studying the book of the world and trying to acquire some experience, I one day formed the resolution of also making myself an object of study and employing all the strength of my mind in choosing the road I should follow (Great Books of the Western World, Volume #31, 44)."
COMMUNITY PROBLEM SOLVING. {FAE, p. 52}. Denis Detzel written after attending a conference of the same name in 1974. Ends: ... If then this new hypothesis withstands the test of time/The actual problem of the community/Is the need for someone to solve its problems. [Did your hypothesis withstand the test of time, Denis?]
CONFERENCE CRAZY. See "Lost in Conference."
THE CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS. {FAE, p. 10. RCC, p. 2}. The Persian Sufi poem was written in the year 1177 by Farid ud-Din Attar. It's available in English in two versions, one translated from the original by Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (Penguin Books, 1984) and another translated from the French version by C.S. Nott (Shambala Publications, 1970). For more on Attar and the poem which influenced Chaucer see Idries Shah's book The Way of the Sufi (Dutton, 1970).
DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN. {FAE, p. 52}. Robert Frost's poem in his collection Poetry and Prose (Rinehart & Winston, 1972) that contains the famous lines "Home is the place where, when you have to go there,/They have to take you in." Actually the lines refer to the fact that the hired man comes "home" to die after his spirit is crushed by an encounter with a college educated seasonal helper. Though the hired man wants to teach the boy how to build a hay-load, he never does because of the norm that says a college education is somehow superior to experience.
EDUCATION A FAILURE. In The Collected Later Poems of William Carlos Williams, Revised Edition (New Directions, 1967). Begins: The minor stupidities/of my world/dominate that world /as when/with two bridges across/the river and one/closed for repairs/the other also/will be closed by/the authorities/for painting! But then/there is heaven/and the ideal state/closed also/before the aspiring soul. ...
THE EXCURSION OF THE SPEECH AND HEARING CLASS. David Wagoner, in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Vintage Books, Random House, 1990, p. 227). Also in Wagoner's Through the Forest (Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987). Appears to be about a class of "retarded" adults.
THE FIGHT AGAINST ILLITERACY. {FAE, p. 112}. D.J. Enright in his collection The Typewriter Revolution (Library Press, 1971).
The wreckage of reviews, the offal of off-prints, litter my desk.
In the paddy-field an ancient woman spoons to each young plant its ration
Of hot harsh food. So small, so single, so delicate, her bowels melt with compassion.
The arrogant cobwebs shout out for humility,
The grave intellectuals are doing their strip-tease
I am told I resemble what the rice is reared on
Despair the well-fed writers cry Down, down on your knees
Down on her knees the ancient woman soothes her rice.
I shall teach her how to read what the gentlemen write.
She will scream and run off, trampling the rice to jelly. And the spiders shall cease to spin,
As the pain in the neck descends to the belly where lessons begin.
HAIKU. Ron Gross' monthly column for Adult & Continuing Education Today (Vol. 20, No. 32, Dec. 3, 1990, p. 4) is titled "Sharing Great Moments, With 'Haiku'." Ron say's "I've found that writing haiku makes a wonderful conference-opener, and I often use it to conclude a keynote speech." He offers quick instruction on how to incorporate haiku into your conferences, and concludes with a few examples, including this one from a conference of meeting planners: Like Brigadoon, my/conference springs to life for/two days, then vanishes!,
HOMEWORK FOR ANNABELLE. {FAE, p. 53}. Parent education with a vengeance in this poem by the humorist and satirist Phyllis McGinley (in her collection Times Three. Viking Press, 1961). Includes: ... So there I sit at Annabelle's side,/Learning my lessons over./. . . Oh, high is the price of parenthood,/And daughters may cost you double./. . . Here I go learning it all again:/. . . Tomorrow will come and today will pass,/But the hearts of the young are brittle as glass.
HYACINTH. Jane Munro, in Addressing the Needs of Returning Women. Linda H. Lewis, editor. Jossey-Bass, 1988, pp. 96-97. Includes: What did she mean, reentry woman? I never had the chance/to be here before. Too many shadowy hours they'd never dream/it cost to clean, care, cook, cope. . . .
I'D RATHER LEARN FROM ONE BIRD HOW TO SING/THAN TEACH TEN THOUSAND STARS HOW NOT TO DANCE. {FAE, p. 54}. Two lines that conclude a poem by E.E. Cummings, "You Shall Above All Things Be Glad and Young" published in many places including his Complete Poems: 1913-1962 (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972) and The New Pocket Anthology of American Verse (Pocket Books, 1955). Used in article by David C. Williams opposing mandatory continuing education (MCE) titled: "From Wanting to Learn to Learning to Want."
IDA CHICKEN. {FAE, p. 54}. In Edgar Lee Masters' Spoon River Anthology (Collier, 1962, (c) 1915). Asks the question. Whose knowledge is power?: After I had attended lectures/At our Chautauqua, and studied French/For twenty years, committing the grammar/Almost by heart,/I thought I'd take a trip to Paris/To give my culture a final polish./So I went to Peoria for a passport /(Thomas Rhodes was on the train that morning.)/And there the clerk of the District Court/Made me swear to support and defend/The constitution yes, even me /Who couldn't defend or support it at all I/And what do you think? That very morning/The Federal Judge, in the very next room/To the room where I took the oath,/Decided the constitution/Exempted Rhodes from paying taxes/For the water works of Spoon River!
THE ILLITERATE. William Meredith in The Vintage Book of_ Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Vintage Books, Random House, 1990, pp. 118-119). Also in Partial Awards:
New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 1987):
Touching your goodness, I am like a man
Who turns a letter over in his hand
And you might think this was because the hand
Was unfamiliar but, truth is, the man
Has never had a letter from anyone;
And now he is both afraid of what it means
And ashamed because he has no other means
To find out what it says than to ask someone.
His uncle could have left the farm to him,
Or his parents died before he sent them word,
Or the dark girl changed and want him for beloved.
Afraid and letter-proud, he keeps it with him.
What would you call this feeling for the words
That keep him rich and orphaned and beloved?
IN RE CONFERENCES. See "Lost in Conference."
THE INSTRUCTION MANUAL. John Ashberry, in his Selected Poems. Penguin, 1986. Begins: As I sit looking out of a window of the building/I wish I did not have to write the instruction manual on the uses of a new metal.
JULIAN AND MADDALO. Percy Bysshe Shelley. (1818). Includes: Most wretched men/Are cradled into poetry by wrong:/They learn in suffering what they teach in song.
THE LADIES. Rudyard Kipling. 1895: Includes: Am " I learned about women from 'er!/. . . So be warned by my lot (which I know you will not),/An' learn about women from me!
THE LADY'S NOT FOR BURNING. {RCC, p. 5 & 14}. Play in verse by Christopher Fry (Dramatists Play Service, 1953). Includes: O tedium, tedium, tedium. The frenzied/Ceremonial drumming of the humdrum!/Where in this small-talking world can I find/A longitude with no platitude?
LAO TZU. From We Make the Road by Walking; Conversations on Education and Social Change. Myles Horton & Paulo Freire. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990). The book ends with: "MYLES: I'm going to read a short little poem here. You can figure out who wrote it. "Go to the people. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. But the best leaders when the job is done, when the task is accomplished, the people will say we have done it ourselves." Who wrote that? who could have written it? "THIRD PARTY: You could have written it. Paulo could have written it. "MYLES: It's taken a long time for people to come to these ideas hasn't it? This was written in 604 B.C. by Lao Tzu. Isn't it wonderful? That's a translation, of course, but the ideas are exactly what Paulo and I've been talking about. That's wonderful (247-248)."
Note this by Horace M. Kallen in his Philosophical Issues in Adult Education. (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Publisher, 1962): "Replacing 'leader' with 'teacher,' we may invoke Lao Tzu:
A leader is best.
When people barely know he exists
Not so good when people obey and acclaim him,
Worst when they despise him.
'Fail to honor the people,
They fail to honor you;'
But of a good leader, who talks little,
When his work is done, his aim fulfilled,
They will say, 'We did it ourselves.'
"Because of diversification of teacher-pupil relations freedom and authority are chronic issues for a philosophy of adult education (45)."
LEARN TO LABOR AND TO WAIT. A poem by the industrialist John D. Rockefeller as quoted in The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power. By Daniel Yergin. Simon & Schuster, 1991, p. 62: John D. Rockefeller himself, exasperated with the slowness of decision, even wrote a chiding poem to the Executive Committee [of Standard Oil] in 1885: We are neither old nor sleepy and must 'Be up and/doing, with a heart for any fate;/Still achieving, still pursuing, learn to labor and/to wait.'
LEARN TO LIVE, AND LIVE TO LEARN. {FAE, p. 107}. Bayard Taylor written in the mid-1800s. Found in The Riverside Song Book: Containing Classic American Poems Set to Standard Music (1893). It could be the anthem of the "Learning Never Ends" crowd, which usually means "Earning Never Ends." The first and last verses: Learn to live, and live to learn./Ignorance like a fire doth burn,/Little tasks make large return;/Learn to live, and live to learn. . . ./Live to learn, and learn to live,/Only this content can give;/Reckless joys are fugitive I/Live to learn, and learn to live.
A LEARNED MAN. {FAE, p. 55}. One of the few poems by the American novelist Stephen Crane T1871-1900) in A Little Treasury of American Poetry. Oscar Williams, ed (Scribners, 1948):
A learned man came to me once.
He said, "I know the way come."
And I was overjoyed at this.
Together we hastened.
Soon, too soon, were we
Where my eyes were useless,
And I knew not the ways of my feet,
I clung to the hand of my friend;
But at last he cried, "I am lost."
LEARNING BY DOING. {FAE, p. 55}. By the present Poet Laureate of the United States Howard Nemerov in The Now Voices. Angelo Carli & Theodore Kilman, editors (Scribners, 1971). About a tree that was unnecessarily cut down because the "experts" incorrectly said it was rotten. Includes: . . . The wood/Looks sweet and sound throughout. You couldn't know,/Of course, until you took it down. That's what/Experts are for, and these experts stand round/The giant pieces of tree as though expecting/An instruction book from the factory/Before they try to put it back together./. . .
LEARNING THE TABLE. John Burt in his collection The Way Down (Princeton U. Press, 1988). Begins: What we cannot grasp/We get by heart,/Repeating our/Misgiving's part/
LEARNING THE TREES. Howard Nemerov in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry. J.D. McClatchy, editor (Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 128-129):
Before you can learn the trees, you have to learn The language of the trees. That's done
indoors,
Out of a book, which now you think of it
Is one of the transformations of a tree.
The words themselves are a delight to learn. You might be in a foreign land of terms
And learn as well, maybe, what language does
And how it does it, cutting across the world
... And think also how funny knowledge is: You may succeed in learning many trees
And calling off their names as you go by, But their comprehensive silence stays the same.
LEARNING TO READ. {FAE, p. 55}. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911), a Black poet and anti-slavery lecturer, wrote this soon after the Civil War. In Black Sister. Eriene Stetson, editor. (Indiana University Press, 1981). Includes: Very soon the Yankee teachers/Came down and set up school;/But, oh! how the Rebs did hate it, /It was agin' their rule./. . . And said there is no use trying,/Oh! Chloe, you're too late;/But as I was rising sixty,/I had no time to wait./. . ,
LESS INFORMATION PLEASE. See A Pocketful of Wry below.
THE LESSON (Auden). {FAE, p. 56}. Written by W.H. Auden sometime before 1936. In The Faber Book of Modern Verse. Michael Roberts, ed (Faber & Faber, 1951). Ends: I woke. You were not there, But as I dressed/Anxiety turned to shame, feeling all three [dreams]/Intended one rebuke. For had not each/In its own way tried to teach/My will to love you that it cannot be,/As I think, of such consequence to want/What anyone is given if they want?
THE LESSON (Holub). {FAE, p. 56}. Miroslav Holub. Translated from the Czech by lan Milner and George Theiner in Living Poets (John Murray, 1974). Ends:
Under the classroom door
Trickles
For here begins
The massacre
A thin stream of blood,
of the innocents.
THE LESSON (Lowell). {FAE, p. 57}. By the contemporary American poet Robert Lowell. In New Modern Poetry. M.L. Rosenthal, editor. (Macmillan, 1967). Includes: No longer to be reading Tess of the D'Urbervilles./While the high, mysterious squirrels/Rain small green branches on our sleep!/.". The barberry berry sticks on the small hedge,/Cold slits the same crease in the finger,/The same thorn hurts. The leaf repeats the lesson.
THE LESSON (Lucie-Smith). {FAE, p. 57}. Edward Lucie-Smith, born in Jamaica in 1933, educated in England where he works as a free-lance writer, art critic, anthologist, and translator. In Living Poets (John Murray, 1974). Begins: "Your father's gone,' my bald headmaster said,/His shiny dome and brown tobacco jar/splintered at once in tears. It wasn't grief./I cried for knowledge which was bitterer/Than any grief. For there and then I knew/That grief has uses that a father dead/Could bind the bully's fist a week or two;/ And then I cried for shame, then for relief. . . .
LESSON (Ludvigson). Susan Ludvigson in her collection Northern Lights (Louisiana State University Press, 1981). Begins: My father said quicksand/might be hidden in the tall swamp-grass,/would suck me down, down/to the center of the earth. . , .
THE LESSON (Peterson). {FAE, p. 57}. Elizabeth Peterson wrote this for the Kansas Quarterly in 1980. In Anthology of Magazine Verse, Alan Pater, ed (Monitor Book Co., 1980). Begins: One thing you taught me I'm grateful for /To judge a man by the place he's most at home.
A LESSON (Rossetti). {FAE, p. 57}. Christina Rossetti, appearing in a children's anthology, Rainbow in the Sky, Louis Untermeyer, ed (Harcourt Brace, 1935). A toadstool comes up in a night /Learn the lesson, little folk:/An oak grows on a hundred years,/But then it is an oak.
THE LESSON (Rubin). {FAE, p. 57}. Larry Rubin, published by the Poetry Society of America in The Golden Year (Fine Editions Press, 1960). Includes: I was stung by a man-of-war/when I was four;/. . . And though I cried/I know royalty/when I see its barbed embroidery . . .
LESSON (Thwaite). {FAE, p. 57}. Of his poem with this title the contemporary author Anthony Thwaite says, "It is not an attack on teachers." In Here & Human, F.E.S. Finn, compiler (John Murray, 1976).: In the big stockyards, where pigs, cows, and sheep/Stumble towards the steady punch that beats/All sense out of a body with one blow,/Certain old beasts are trained to lead the rest/And where they go the young ones meekly go./Week after week these veterans show the way,/Then, turned back just in time, are led themselves/Back to the pens where their initiates wait./The young must cram all knowledge in one day./But the old who lead live on and educate.
THE LESSON (Wagoner). {FAE, p. 58}. When David Wagoner wrote this he was a professor of English at the University of Washington. In Modern Poetry of Western America, Clinton Larson & William Stafford, editors. (Brigham Young University Press, 1975). Includes: That promising morning/Driving beside the river,/ I saw twin newborn lambs/still in a daze/. . . I found myself in a rage/two-thirds up haystack mountain/being buzzed and ricochetted/by metallic whir.
A LESSON (Wordsworth). {PAE, p. 58}. Also titled "The Small Celandine," this brief item by the English poet William Wordsworth (1770-1850), has been anthologized many times. Ends: 0 Man! That from thy fair and shining youth./Age might but take the things youth needed not!
LESSON FOR A BOY. {FAE, p. 58}. Part of a longer poem, "Metrical Feet," by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834). Lessons in rhyming and rhythmic schemes spondees, dactyls, and the like.
A LESSON FOR MAMMA. {FAE, p. 58}. Sydney Dayre (Mrs. Cochran. fl. 1881). In The Oxford Book of Children's Verse, lonia & Peter Opie, editors. (Oxford University Press, 1973). Begins: Dear Mamma, if you just could be/A tiny little girl like me,/. . . I'd let you stop your lessons too;/I'd say, "They are too hard for you, . . .
THE LESSON FOR TODAY. {FAE, p. 59}. As in "Death of the Hired Man" (see above), this work by the American poet Robert Frost (1874-1963), has a line that has become a cliche and is torn from its context. It ends the poem, which includes: ... 0 paladins, the lesson for today/Is how to be unhappy but polite./. . . I would have written of me on my stone:/I had a lover's quarrel with the world.
A LESSON FROM VAN GOGH. {FAE, p. 59}. By the modern American poet, author, scholar, and for over 20 years Poetry Editor of The New Yorker, Howard Moss. In Modern American & Modern British Poetry, Louis Untermeyer, ed (Harcourt Brace, 1955). Ends: . . . "Take my ear,"/One painter said, who painted out his fear./Madness has a poetry that comes too near/Truth for comfort: Though the mind goes numb,/Thinking of that severance, the deaf and dumb/Communicate by signs, and everyone/Can follow the plain meaning: "Talk to me,"/Van Gogh was saying, "I'm an not a tree,/A fish, a serpent, lion, pig, or jay."
LESSON I. By adult ed's own Ron Gross in his book Pop Poems (Simon & Schuster, 1967). Explanatory note on back cover: "An astonishing literary experiment to turn the language of popular culture into poems just as pop artists turn Campbell's Soup cans and comic strips into visual art. Ronald Gross takes the words from Brillo boxes, from such things as tax forms, headlines, mass circulation magazines, and casts them into sonnets, odes, epigrams, haiku and modern free verse so they stand out as language. Suddenly the continuous undertone of mass culture is turned up full volume. . . . The words make a new kind of sense irreverent or satirical or exhilarating or horrifying. As pop art made us really see what's all around us. Pop Poems will make us really hear and read what's happening to our language and experience today." Poem begins: A doctor taps your knee (patellar tendon) with a rubber/hammer to test your ./Reflexes . . .
A LESSON IN DETACHMENT. {FAE, p. 59}. The American poet Vassar Miller wrote this. Published in an anthology called New Poems by American Poets, Rolfe Humphries, ed (Ballantine Books, 1957). Begins: She's learned to hold her gladness lightly,/Remembering when she was a child/Her fingers clenched a bird too tightly,/And its plumage, turned withered leaf,/No longer fluttered wild. . . .
A LESSON IN HANDWRITING. {FAE, p.59}. Alastair Reid. In The New Yorker Book of Poems (Viking, 1969). Includes: . . . The pen abandons a whole scaffolding/Of struts and braces, springs and balances,/. . . Tomorrow, words begin.
A LESSON IN LOVE. {FAE, p. 60}. Philip Hobsbaum, born 1932. In The Oxford Book of 20th Century English Verse, Philip Larkin, ed (Oxford University Press, 1973). Ends:
Which is the truer? I speaking of Donne,
Calling the act a means not an end,
Or at your sweet pudenda, sleeking you down:
Was there no other way to be your friend?
None, none. the awkward pauses when we talk,
The literary phrases, are a lie.
It was for this your teacher ran amok:
Truth lies between your legs, and so do I.
A LESSON IN OBLIVION. {FAE, p. 60}. By the modern American poet Dabney Stuart. In A Geography of Poets,~ Edward Field, ed (Bantam Books, 1979). Includes: One afternoon as I was wandering around/The ground I happened on my keeper,/. , . And I posed some hoary questions:/. . . If you had the chance/Would you do it the same way/All over again/Without changing a thing? And he said/Yes. Except I'd have your tongue cut out.
LESSON OF LOVE.{FAE, p. 61}. Simon Browne. In Sourcebook of Poetry, Al Bryant, ed (Zondervan Publishing House, 1963). Ends: . . . May we with humble effort take/Example from above;/And thence the active lesson learn/Of charity and love!
A LESSON OF MERCY. {FAE, p. 61}. George Murray, a Victorian poet from Canada. In A Victorian Anthology, Edmund Stedman, ed (Houghton Mifflin, 1895). Includes: . . . Exclaimed the prophet, "I spare thy life, I give thee back thy steel:/Henceforth, compassion for the helpless feel."/. . .
LESSON OF THE MASTER. {FAE, p. 61}. By the modern American poet William Dickey. In Contemporary Poetry in America, Miller Williams, ed (Random House, 1973). Includes: . . . As much as he could learn has done no good./Logic of Aristotle fills his brain;/Non-Aristotelian monkey noises reign/. . .
THE LESSON OF THE WATER-MILL. {FAE, p. 61}. From the longer poem "Man O'Airlie" by Sarah Doubney, born 1843. Much anthologized. Includes: Listen to the water-mill;/Through the live-long day/. . . Take the lesson to thyself/True and loving heart;/. . . "The mill cannot grind/With the water that is past."
LESSON OF WATER. {FAE, p. 61}. Adapted by Witter Bynner from The Way of Life According to Lao Tzu (Perigee Books, 1944). The excerpt with this title appears in 1001 Poems for Mankind: As the soft yield of water cleaves obstinate stone,/So to yield with life solves the insoluble:/To yield, I have learned, is to come back again./But this unworded lesson,/This easy example,/Is lost upon men (#43).
LESSONS. {FAE, p. 62}. Helen Weber. Appears in the section on "Armistice-World Order Day" in an anthology of Poems for the Great Days, Thomas & Robert Clark, editors. (Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1948). Strange lesson taught by war/Is this, its legacy:/Wrecked homes, bare fields, sick hearts/And thwarted destiny./Stranger still the lesson/If brotherhood increase/In ratio to our hunger /Hunger for bread and peace.
LESSONS FROM THE GORSE. {FAE, p. 62}. Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Includes: Mountain gorses./Do yes teach us to be strong,/Mountain blossoms,/Do yes teach us to be glad/
LESSONS IN HISTORY. {FAE, p. 60}. Robert Penn Warren, a recent Poet Laureate of the United States. First published in 1980. In Anthology of Magazine Verse, Alan Pater, ed (Monitor Book Co., 1980). Includes: How little does history manage to tell!/Did the lips of Judas go dry and cold on our Lord's cheek?/. . . And who will ever guess how you, night-waking,/See a corner of moonlit meadow, willows, sheen of sibilant stream?/And know, or guess, what long ago happened there?/ Or know what, in whisper, the water was trying to say?
LESSONS IN LIMERICKS. {FAE, p. 62}. David McCord. In Innocent Merriment, P.P. Adams, ed (McGraw-Hill, 1942). Includes: . . . The British in branding their betters/Distinguish them chiefly by letters:/F. R. C. P. E../M. O. H. K. C. B. /But after their names, not on sweaters./. . .
THE LESSONS OF NATURE. William Drummond of Hawthornden (1585-1649). {FAE, p. 62}. In Golden Treasury of the Best Songs & Lyrical Poems in the English Language, Francis Pal grave, ed (Oxford university Press, 1929). From "The Book of the World," see above at title. Begins: Of this fair volume we world do name/If we the sheets and leaves could turn with care,/Of him who it corrects, and did it frame,/We clear might read the art and wisdom rare:/. . .
LESSONS OF THE WAR. {FAE, p. 62}. Henry Reed, born 1914. In The Heath Introduction to Poetry, Joseph de Roche, ed (D.C. Heath, 1975). Of all the poems cited here, this is probably the most anthologized one. Ends: . . . While awaiting a proper issue, we must learn the lesson/Of the ever-important question of human balance./It is courage that counts.
LESSONS OF THE YEAR. {FAE, p. 63}. An anonymous poem anthologized in The Best Loved Religious Poems, James Lawson, ed (Fleming Revell Co., 1933). Begins: For I learn as the years roll onward/And I leave the past behind,/That much I have counted sorrow/But proves that our God is kind;/. . .
LETTERS TO AN ADMINISTRATOR: THE GHOST JEN THE MACHINE. May Sarton, in her The Silence Now:
New and Uncollected Earlier Poems:
So you have made your peace with the machine;
It is a masterly ingenious one,
Resolving hard equations and serene,
Through the long days of gifted, clear attention.
Only pure music could give you the lie,
Music, angelic silence but not I.
After the word "machine," I became still,
Living next day suspended on one thought,
To sharpen spirit back, knit up the will
To meet your courage, so steadfast and so caught.
But only music, Mozartian and stable,
Could make an answer now. I am not able.
Words become heavy in a total dark,
And who is strong enough to bear their weight?
What you gave me was generous, though stark.
That gift I learn slowly to contemplate.
But only music at its most clear and noble,
Could answer you with truth. I am not able.
After that word, I lost the power to speak.
I know even machines take loving care.
Complex computers have been known to break:
The ghost in the machine is always there.
But I am silenced, because I am ashamed
That here so little warmed, for all that flamed.
LITERACY CLASS. Maureen Duffy in her Collected Poems; 1949-1984. (Hamish Hamilton, 1985). Begins: They didn't believe the page would turn easy for them/so they licked a forefinger and took it at the bottom/between damp index and thumb. . . .
LOST IN CONFERENCE. {FAE} Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Russian futurist poet and playwright, literary star of the post-Revolution period of the 1920s and later canonized poet laureate of the revolution by Stalin. Other translations of the poem are titled "Meeting Addicts" (Woroszylylski-Taborski), "In Re Conferences" (Marshall), and "Conference Crazy" (Rottenberg). Before this poem appeared Mayakovsky was in eclipse, after it came out his star ascended because Lenin praised it with these words, "In this poem [Mayakovsky] laughs at conferences and makes fun of Communists because they are always in meetings and conferences. I don't know about the poetry, but as for the politics, I can vouch for it that he is absolutely right." From: I Love by Ann & Samuel Charters (Farrar Strauss Giroux, 1979, pp. 164-166): The poem was published in Izvestia on March 5, 1921. ... In the poem Mayakovsky tries to see someone in an office, saying he's "been there since once upon a time,' but the official is tied up in conference. Even the younger members of the office staff disappear for a conference of the Young Communist League. When they come back he still is kept waiting, and at the end of the day he's told the man is still in conference: '. . . Furious/I throw myself like an avalanche/into a meeting/throwing out wild curses on my way./And I see:/halves of people sitting./Oh the Devil!/But where are the other halves?/"They've been slain!"/"They've been killed!"/I run on shouting./This terrible picture has driven me mad./And I hear/the calmest little voice of the secretary:/"They're at two meetings at the same time./We have to go to/about twenty conferences/in a single day./Whether you want to or not you have to split yourself in two./Down to the waist is here,/and the rest/there."/Can't sleep for worry./Early morning./I meet the early dawn with a dream:/"Oh, just/one/more conference/concerning the extermination of all conferences!"
A LITERARY LESSON. Robley Wilson, Jr., in his Kingdoms of the Ordinary (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987). Ends: Elizabeth's careful words/teaching me to love patience.
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. Shakespeare's play (Act I, Scene 1, line 84): . . . Study is like the heaven's glorious sun/That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks. ...
THE LOW ROAD. Marge Piercy. In her The Moon Is Always Female. Knopf, 1981. Art Ellison, Director, Office of Adult Basic Education, New Hampshire State Department of Education, says this poem "speaks to me of hope and gives support to go on with the struggles."
What can they do to you?
Whatever they want.
They can set you up, they can bust you,
they can break your fingers, they can burn your brain with electricity,
blur you with drugs till you cant walk, cant remember,
they can take your child, wall up your lover.
They can do anything you cant stop them from doing.
How can you stop them?
Alone, you can fight, you can refuse,
you can take what revenge you can but they roll over you.
But two people fighting back to back can cut through a mob,
a snake-dancing fine can break a cordon, an army can meet an army.
Two people can keep each other sane,
can give support, conviction, love, massage, hope, sex.
Three people are a delegation, a committee, a wedge.
With four you can play bridge and start an organization.
With six you can rent a whole house, eat pie for dinner with no seconds, and hold a fund raising party.
A dozen make a demonstration.
A hundred fill a hall.
A thousand have solidarity and your own newsletter;
ten thousand, power and your own paper;
a hundred thousand, your own media;
ten million, your own country.
It goes on one at a time,
it starts when you care
to act, it starts when you do
it again after they said no,
it starts when you say We
and know who you mean, and each
day you mean one more.
LUCRETIUS VERSUS THE LAKE POETS. Robert Frost. "Nature, _I loved; and next to Nature, Art." Dean, adult education may seem silly./What of it, though? I got some willy-nilly/The other evening at your college deanery./And grateful for it (let's not be facetious!)/For I thought Epicurus and Lucretius/By Nature meant the Whole Goddam Machinery./But you say that in college nomenclature/The only meaning possible for Nature/in Landor's quatrain would be Pretty Scenery./Which makes opposing it to Art absurd/I grant you if you're sure about the word./God bless the Dean and make his deanship plenary.
THE MAGICIAN. One of 38 poems in a privately printed collection of poetry by Budd Hall, General Secretary of the International Council for Adult Education in Toronto. The collection is called Of course I don't know why!. This poem begins: Step right up/Ladies and Gentlemen/What you are about to see/Will astound you, confound you and compound you./We are privileged to have with us today/A mental magician of marvelous moves/Whose feats of cellular prestidigitation have/Given pleasure and concern to the minds of millions.
MAN O'AIRLIE. {FAE, p. 61}. "The Lesson of the Water-Mill" is part of this. See above.
MEETING ADDICTS. See "Lost in Conference."
MEN AT FORTY. Donald Justice, in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Vintage Books, Random House, 1990, pp. 211-212). Also in Night Light (University Press of New England, 1966). Begins: Men at forty/Learn to close softly/The doors to rooms they will not be/Coming back to. ...
MESSAGE FROM MARS. See A Pocketful of Wry below.
METRICAL FEET. {FAE, p. 58}.. "Lesson for a Boy" is part of this. See above.
MODERN ODE TO THE MODERN SCHOOL. {FAE, p. 63}. Professor John Erskine of Columbia University, who in 1917 proposed what came to be known as the first "Great Books" class. In Yankee Doodles, Ted Malone, ed (McGraw-Hill, 1943). Begins: Just after the board had brought the schools up to date/To prepare for your life work/without teaching you one superfluous thing,/Jim Reilly presented himself to be educated. . . .
MOVEMENT SONG. Audre Lorde in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Vintage Books, 1990, pp. 414-415). "'I am,' Audre Lorde has written, 'Black, Woman, and Poetall three are facts outside the realm of choice.' . . . Since 1981 she has been professor of English at Hunter College." Originally in Chosen Poems, Old and New (W. W. Norton, 1982). Begins: I have studied the tight curls on the back of your neck/moving away from me/beyond anger or failure/your face in the evening schools of longing/through mornings of wish and ripen/we were always saying goodbye/in the blood in the bone over coffee/before dashing for elevators going/in opposite directions/without goodbyes.
MWIZI. Another poem by Budd Hall in his privately printed collection (see THE MAGICIAN above) includes these lines: "They will kill him," says the driver/Our calm and reasoned/Semi-philosophical talk about/Illiteracy in the world/Dramatically contextualized/By clumps of suddenly/Passionate youths in/Pursuit of one of them who has/Fallen prey to need,/To empty-stomach-no-job/No cloths-no-drearns/Need.
MY PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION. A poem by Jo Van Loo in Rich and Vibrant Colours. Poems by Budd Hall & others. Toronto: A Firefly Publication, 1990.
School as it should be
A gathering of
Students invited to share
Stories, interactions, language
Experiences
Successes
School as it is
Desks in rows
Papers and pencils
Exams
Quiet
THE NAVEL TRAINEES LEARN HOW TO JUMP OVERBOARD. David Wagoner in his Through the Forest. Atlantic Monthly Press, 1987. Also in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Vintage Books, Random House, T990, pp. 226-227). Ends:"".T Upright, blue-lipped, no longer breathing, already/Drowned, they commit their bodies to the deep.
NIGHT SCHOOL (Lieberman). {FAE, p. 63}. Elias Lieberman, appearing in The New York Times Book of Verse (Macmillan, 1970), edited by Thomas Lask. Begins: What draws you here at night, gray-headed many/Whose back is bent as by the weight of stone? . . .
NIGHT SCHOOL (Rosenberg). {FAE, p. 63}. This is also the title of a book of poetry by David W. Rosenberg (Wivenhoe Park, Essex, England: Ant's Forefoot, 1970) which I've been unable to obtain. The dust jacket of another of his books of poems says Rosenberg was born in Detroit in 1943, was a catcher for the Detroit Stars, and moved to Canada in 1966 (in opposition to U.S. participation in the Vietnam War?).
NOSCE TEIPSUM. Sir John Davies. 1599. Includes: Skill comes so slow, and life so fast doth fly,/We learn so little and forget so much.
OSAGE COUNTY STATE PARK LAKE IN THE FALL OF 1971. Tom Page, in Dream of the Highway; 5 Kansas and Missouri Poets. Cambridge, MA: West End Press, 1979: Before we found jobs in Topeka, and later/on Saturday, her day off, we would take the/two dogs, and drive south to the lake,/34 and 19 are wonderful years to be in love,/and the eastern Kansas countryside was in love with us, and still is./. . . On those days when she/could go with me, though,/reality became immediate,/and the eastern Kansas countryside/let us forget and learn/to give life to our love.
THE OUTCAST. See A Pocketful of Wry below.
PARADIGM APARTMENTS. Poems by Jane Munro, originally presented at the Adult Education Research Conference, May 1987, Laramie, Wyoming and published in The Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education, Vol. 1, No. 2, Nov. 1987, pp. 53-60. There are more of her poems in Papers from the Transatlantic Dialogue, edited by Miriam Zukas (University of Leeds, England: School of Continuing Education, 1988). From the "abstract" submitted to the conference in advance: All I can give you is my reading/of poems about theory,/parsimony and relevance,/understanding, prediction and control./Poems about time frames,/and researchable quest ions,/poems about women taught by men/from textbooks full of he's./Poems about grounding and deduction./Poems about computers and advisors./Poems about families on the fringe of adissertation./ Poems about men who loved women who loved work./Poems about women with stage fright,/scared no one will love them when they're cast/ as someone else.
THE PARLIAMENT OF BEASTS. {RCC, p. 3}. Title of collection of poems by lan Duncan Colvin who also uses the pseudonym Rip Van Winkle (Cape of Good Hope, South Africa: Cape Times Ltd., 1905).
PARLIAMENT OF CATS. {RCC, p. 3}. A biting poem by the British author D.J. Enright in his Collected Poems (London: Oxford University Press, 1981).
The cats caught a Yellow-vented Bulbul.
Snatched from them, for three days it uttered
Its gentle gospel, enthroned above their heads.
Became loved and respected of all the cats.
Then succumbed to internal injuries,
The cats regretted it all profoundly.
They would never forget the evil they had done.
Later the cats caught a Daurian Starling.
And ate it. For a Daurian Starling is not
A Yellow-vented Bulbul. (Genuflection.)
Its coloring is altogether different, quite unnatural fashion.
The case is not the same at all as that of The Yellow-vented Bulbul. (Genuflection.)
The kittens caught a Yellow-vented Bulbul.
And ate it. What difference, they ask, between
A Yellow-vented Bulbul and that known criminal
The Daurian Starling? Both move through the air
In a quite unnatural fashion. This is not
The Yellow-vented Bulbul of our parents' day,
Who was a Saint of course! (Genuflection.)
THE PARLIAMENT OF DEVILS. {RCC, p. 3 & 16}. Also known as The Fendys Parlement and The Plyament of Deuylles. Middle English poem of unknown authorship first printed in 1509 by Wynkyn DeWorde.
THE PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS. {RCC, p. 2}. Chaucer's 1381 poem building on The Conference of the Birds (see above). Begins with these oft quoted words: That life so brief, that art so long in the meaning, that attempt so hard, that conquest so sharp, that fearful joy which ever slips away so quickly, all this is love.
PARLIAMENT OF THE 3 AGES. {RCC, p. 3 & 16}. Poem of disputed authorship first printed sometime in the 1400s. For information see: A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1947, p. 241).
PEDAGOGY. Poem by Richard Harteis in his collection Internal Geography (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1987) .Includes: ... A hundred times on the blackboard then?/"A disabled person is not a disabled person."/or, "Everyone's a little disabled,/from time to time a little blind or broken."
A POCKETFUL OF WRY. {FAE, p. 96}. One of the many compilations of verses by Phyllis McGinley and (Grosset & Dunlap, 1959). Contains four good examples for our purposes: "Advice to a Tot About to Learn the Alphabet," "The Outcast," " Message from Mars," "Less Information Please."
THE PROPHET. Kahlil Gibran (Knopf, 1977, (c) 1923). Includes:
Then said a teacher, Speak to us of Teaching. And he said: No man can reveal to you aught but that which already lies half asleep in the dawning of your knowledge. The teacher who walks in the shadow of the temple, among his followers, gives not of his wisdom but rather of his Faith and his lovingness. If he is indeed wise he does not bid you enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind. . . .
A PSALM OF LIFE. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (1839):
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest, Was not spoken of the soul.
. . . Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
THE READING CLUB. {FAE, p. 97}. An anti-nuclear poem by Patricia Goedicke originally in a 1983 issue of The New Yorker. Reprinted in Writing in a Nuclear Age, edited by Jim Schley (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1984), all of which is a reprint of a special issue of New England Review/Bread Loaf Quarterly (Summer 1983). Begins: The Reading Club/Is dead serious about this one, having rehearsed it for two weeks./They bring it right into the Odd Fellows Meeting Hall./Riding the backs of the Trojan Women,/In Euripides' great wake they are swept up. ...
REASON. John Pomfret, 1667-1702. Includes the often quoted: "We live and learn, but not the wiser grow." Though well known for his poetry and praised by Samuel Johnson, this poem of Pomfret's seems only generally available from University Microfilms (its copy comes from Harvard College Library), apparently published only in 1700 by J. Nutt, London:
Unhappy Man! Who through successive years
From early youth to life's last childhood errs;
No sooner born, but proves a foe to truth,
For infant reason is o'er power'd in youth:
The cheats of sense will half our learning share;
And preconceptions all our knowledge are.
Reason, 'tis true, should over sense preside,
Correct our notions, and our judgment guide;
But false opinions, rooted in the mind,
Hoodwink the soul, and keep our Reason blind.
Reason's a taper, which but faintly burns,
A languid flame that glows and dies by turns;
We see't a while, and but a little way,
We travel by its light as men by day.
But quickly dying, it forsakes us soon,
Like morning stars, that never stay till noon.
The soul can scarce above the body rise,
And all we see is with corporeal eyes;
Life now does scarce one glimpse of light display.
We mourn in darkness, and despair of day;
That nat'ral light, once dress'd with Orient beams,
Is now diminished, and a twilight seems,
A miscellaneous composition made
Of night, and day, of sunshine, and of shade.
Through an uncertain medium now we look,
And find that falsehood which for truth we took.
So rays projected from the Eastern skies
Show the false day before the sun can rise.
That little knowledge now which Man obtains,
From outward objects and from sense he gains;
He like a wretched slave, must plod and
sweat, By day must toil, by night that toil repeat;
And yet at last what little fruit he gains?
A beggar's harvest glean'd with mighty pains.
The passions full predominant will rule,
Ungovern'd, rude, not bred in Reason's school;
Our understanding they with darkness fill,
Cause strong corruptions, and pervert the will;
On these the soul, as on some flowing tide,
Must sit, and on the raging billows ride,
Hurry'd away, for how can be withstood
The impetuous torrent of the boiling blood?
Begone false hopes, for all our learning's vain,
Can we be free, where these the rule maintain?
These are the tools of knowledge which we use;
The spirits heated will strange things produce;
Tell me who e'er the passions could control,
Or from the body disengage the soul;
Till this is done, our best pursuits are vain
To conquer truth and unmix'd knowledge gain.
Through all the bulky volumes of the dead,
And through those books that modern times have bred.
With pain we travel, as through moorish ground,
Where scarce one useful plant is ever found;
O'rerun with errors which so thick appear,
Our search proves vain, no spark of truth is there.
What's all the noisy jargon of the schools,
But idle nonsense of laborious fools,
Who fetter Reason with perplexing rules.
. , . Custom, the world's great idol we adore,
And knowing this, we seek to know no more;
What education did at first receive,
Our ripen'd age confirms us to believe;
The careful nurse, and priest is all we need
To learn opinions and our country's creed;
The parents precepts early are instill'd,
And spoil the Man while they instruct the child.
To what hard fate is human kind betray'd?
When thus implicit faith's a virtue made,
When education more than truth prevails,
And nought is current but what custom seals;
Thus from the time we first began to know,
We live and learn, but not the wiser grow:
We seldom use our liberty aright,
Nor judge of things by universal light;
Our prepositions and affections bind
The soul in chains, and lord it o're the mind;
And if self-interest be but in the case,
Our unexamined principles may pass.
Good heavens! That Man should thus himself deceive,
To learn on credit, and on trust believe;
Better the mind no notions had retain'd,
But still a fair unwritten blank remain'd;
For now, who truth from falsehood would discern,
Must first disrobe the mind, and all unlearn;
Errors contracted in unmindful youth
When once remov'd, will smooth the way to truth;
To dispossess the child the mortal lives,
But death approaches e're the Man arrives.
Those who would learning's glorious kingdom find,
The dear bought purchase of the trading mind;
From many dangers must themselves acquit,
And more than Scylla and Charybdis meet;
Oh! What an ocean must be voyag'd o're,
To gain a prospect of the shining shore;
Resisting rocks oppose th'inquiring soul,
And adverse waves retard it as they roll.
Does not the foolish deference we pay
To men that liv'd long since our passage stay?
What odd preposterous paths at first we tread?
And learn to walk by fumbling on the dead.
First we a blessing from the grave implore,
Worship old urns and monuments adore.
The rev'rend sage with vast esteem we prize,
He liv'd long since, and must be wondrous wise;
Thus we are debtors to the famous dead
For all those errors with their fancies bred;
Errors indeed! for real knowledge stayed
With those first times, nor farther was convey'd:
While light opinions are much lower brought,
For on the waves of ignorance they float;
But solid truth scarce ever gains the shore,
And soon it sinks and ne're emerges more.
Suppose those many dreadful dangers past;
Will knowledge dawn, and bless the mind at last?
Ah! No, 'tis now environ'd from our eyes,
Hides all its charms and undiscovered lyes.
Truth like a single point escapes the sight
And claims intention to perceive it right;
But what resembles truth is soon descried,
Spread like a surface and expanded wide.
The first Man rarely, very rarely finds
The tedious search of long enquiring minds;
But yet what's worse we know not when we err?
What mark does truth, what bright distinction bear?
How do we know that what we know is true,
How shall we falsehood fly, and truth pursue;
Let none then here his certain knowledge boast,
'Tis all but probability at most;
This is the easy purchase of the mind,
The Vulgar's Treasure, which we soon may find,
But truth lies hid, and e're we can explore
The glittering gem, our fleeting life is o're.
THE SCHOLAR GYPSY. {FAE, p. 64}. A long poem by Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) building on a story by Joseph Glanvill in his book The Vanity of Dogmatising (1661). In The Heath Introduction to Poetry, Joseph de Roche, ed (D.C. Heath, 1975). Includes: And near me on the grass lies Glanvill's book./. . . The story of the Oxford scholar poor,/. . . who tired of knocking at preferment's door,/. . . went to learn the gypsy-lore./and roamed the world with that wild brotherhood . . .
SCHOOL. Poem by the well-known ballet company director Lincoln Kirstein in his collection The Poems of Lincoln Kirstein (Athenaeum, 1987). Poem focuses on Kirstein's experiences in the military in the second world war in Europe. Ends: . . . So, here's one lesson more to learn, a variation on Love's theme./Two practiced tarts amuse themselves nor is it in some dirty dream./Mind rejects such a show as Bad. Heart, made muscular by much/He's seen, felt, thought since he's been In, permits itself a transient touch/Of Wisdom. No. His earlier schools affirm their paltry form./Captain commands his heart to numb. Asserts the academic norm.
SEASONS GREETINGS. From the 1987 Xmas letter of Dave & Margaret Gueulette (Northern Illinois University) . . . Margaret put off math till her 44th year;/Now is getting an A, but still living in fear./She's setting up workshops for Continuing Ed./All over Chicago her brochures are read.
THE SMALL CELANDINE. See "A Lesson" (Wordsworth) above.
A SONG OF MEETINGS. {FAE, p. 64. RCC, p. 4 & 26}. Irving Howe the author of many books on modern literature, radical politics, and Jewish life in his autobiography, A Margin of Hope (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982). Ends: . . . We/Who are survivors. A wince, a tremor, see/The marks of finger, foot, and knee/that speak of meetings gone and failed. As for me/I cannot look them in the eye, these aging children of meetings.
SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY. {FAE, p. 54}. See "Ida Chicken" above.
THE STUDENT. {FAE, p. 65}. From The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore (born 1887) (Macmillan, 1967). Includes: . . . You can't beat hens to/Make them lay. Wolf's wool is the best of wool,/But it cannot be sheared, because/The wolf will not comply. With knowledge as/With wolves' surliness,/The student studies/Voluntarily, refusing to be less/than individual."
THE TABLES TURNED. {FAE, p. 66}. By William Wordsworth (1770-1850), published in 1798. Includes: Up! Up! My friend, and quit your books;/Or surely you'll grow double:/. . . Let nature be your teacher./Enough of science and of art;/Close up those barren leaves;/Come forth, and bring with you a heart/That watches and receives.
THE TAMING OF THE SHREW. Shakespeare's play (Act I, Scene 1, line 25):
No profit grows where no pleasure is taken:/ln brief, sir, study what you most affect.
THEMES OF ADULTHOOD THROUGH LITERATURE. See "Wisdom" below
THOUGHTS ON ONE'S HEAD (in plaster, with a_ bronze wash). William Meredith in The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry, edited by J.D. McClatchy (Vintage Books, Random House, 1990, pp. 119-120). Also in Partial Awards: New and Selected Poems (Knopf, 1987):
A person is very self-conscious about his head.
It makes one nervous just to know it is cast
In enduring materials, and that when the real one is dead
The cast one, if nobody drops it or melts it down, will last.
We pay more attention to the front end, where the face is,
Than to the interesting and involute interior:
The Fissure of Rolando, and such queer places
Are parks for the passions and fears and mild hysteria.
The things that go on there!
Erotic movies are shown
To anyone not accompanied by an adult.
The marquee out front maintains a superior tone:
Documentaries on Sharks and the Japanese Tea Cult.
The fronts of some heads are extravagently pretty.
These are the females. Men sometimes blow their tops
About them, launch triremes, sack a whole city.
The female head is mounted on rococo props.
Judgnent is in the head somewhere; it keeps sums
Of pleasure and pain and gives belated warning;
This is the first place everybody comes
With bills, complaints, writs, summons, in the morning.
This particular head, to my certain knowledge
Has been taught to read and write, make love and money,
Operate cars and airplanes, teach in a college,
And tell involved jokes, some few extremely funny.
It was further taught to know and to eschew
Error and sin, which it does erratically.
This is the place the soul calls home just now.
Ones dislikes it of course: it is the seat of Me.
TO A LITERACY TEACHER. Budd Hall, in Rich and Vibrant Colours, see "My Philosophy of Education" above. About a Buraku literacy teacher from Sumioshi Community in Osaka, Japan, June 1990. He stood up up awkwardly/A room half-friends, half-strangers/The only teacher to speak tonight/"When Mrs Kimoto asked me to teach/I thought I needed to prepare/A lot of materials./I had watched her writing/A poem on the blackboard/But I had never written even one./She told me that it was better just/To talk about life,/we have curricula in our lives/As teachers/I think it is better to abandon/Our sense of mission/And just speak the truth
TO DAVID, ABOUT HIS EDUCATION. {FAE, p. 66}. Another poem, like the many with the word "lesson" in the title above, indicating what literate adults feel about education including adult education. This one is by the Poet Laureate of the United States Howard Nemerov in his collection The Next Room of the Dream (University of Chicago Press, 1962). Ends: ... I don't know what you will do with the mean annual rainfall/Or Plato's Republic, or the calorie content/Of the Diet of Worms, such things are said to be/Good for you, and you will have to learn them/In order to become one of the grown-ups/Who sees invisible things neither steadily or wholes/But keeps gravely the grand confusion of the world/Under his hat, which is where it belongs,/And teaches small children to do this in their turn.
TRANS-RADICAL THOUGHT IN ADULT ED. {PAE, p. 67}. Poem by Mitzie Wilkins presented as part of a seminar with the same title I conducted at Northern Illinois University in 1984. Includes: . , . When we deal with the assumption that 'all people want to learn,'/It brings up the question, what?/I once met a dancer/Who worked in a night club./She said, 'Everybody who can/Dance on their feet,/Can't dance on their backs.'/. . . 'Everything I ever learned I learned in bed.'
UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS IN EGYPT. {FAE, p. 66}. A non-traditional view of "non-traditional" students. D.J. Enright, born 1920. In The Now Voices, Angelo Carii & Theodore Kilman, editors. (Scribners, 1971). includes: . . . The nervous eye, patrolling these hot unhappy victims,/Flinches at the symptoms of a year's hard teaching /'Falstaff indulged in drinking and sexcess,' and/. . , Behind, like tourist posters, the glamour of laws and committees,/Wars for freedom, cheap textbooks, national aspirations /. . . and Goethe who never thought of thought.
WHO PAYS? Budd Hall in Rich and Vibrant Colours, see "My Philosophy of Education" above. Build a movement/Voices for those who cannot speak/Education for all/Literacy by the Year 2000/Laudable/A measured sacrifice/But what about the loneliness/But what about the tears inside/But what about the friends too far away/But what about relationships which break/But what about the friendships which just never happen/But what about our children/But what about our lovers, friends/But what about ourselves/Who pays?
WINTER LESSON. Poem by Richard Harteis in his collection Internal Geography (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1987). Includes: There were nights the snow began as powder/. . . Sometimes you shake a little/in your sleep. I hold you tighter till it's over/or I stoke the fire. I know the ritual like a/well-trained dancing bear. More than habit though,/sometimes the tenderness I come to as I watch you/curl into the warmth of your sleep feels like perfect/instinct, like slapping the wet air to hook a rainbow.
WISDOM. {PAE, p. 67}. Sara Teasdale. Included in Themes of Adulthood Through Literature, edited by Sharan B. Merriam (Teachers College Press, 1983T:
When I have ceased to break my wings Against the faultiness of things,
And learned that compromises wait
Behind each hardly opened gate,
When I can look Life in the eyes,
Grown calm and very coldly wise,
Life will have given me the Truth,
And taken in exchange my youth.
WOMEN. {FAE, p. 68}. By the author of The Color Purple, Alice Walker, in her Revolutionary Petunias & Other Poems (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973). Includes: They were women then/My mama's generation/. . . How they battered down/Doors/. . . To discover books/Desks/A place for us/How they knew what we/Must know/without knowing a page/Of it/Themselves.
YOU SHALL ABOVE ALL THINGS BE GLAD AND YOUNG. See E.E. Cummings' "I'd Rather Learn from One Bird How to Sing" above.
A YOUNG MAN'S EPIGRAM ON EXISTENCE. {FAE, p. 15}. Thomas Hardy. According to The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, edited by Richard Ellmann & Robert O'Claire (W.W. Norton, 1973): "When in 1895, [Hardy's classic novel] Jude the Obscure was lampooned as Jude the Obscene, Hardy (perhaps gratefully) turned altogether to verse." This example printed in 1909, Hardy characterized as "merely an amusing instance of early cynicism.": A senseless school where we must give/Our lives that we may learn to live!/A dolt is he who memorizes/Lessons that leave no time for prizes.
-----------------------
INDEX
AFRICAN-AMERICAN ISSUES
MOVEMENT SONG
AGING
MEN AT FORTY
Arnold, Matthew
SCHOLAR GYPSY
Ashberry, John
AND YOU KNOW
INSTRUCTION MANUAL
Attar, Farid ud-Din
CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS
Auden, W.H.
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
LESSON
BACON, FRANCIS
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
BLAKE, WILLIAM
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI BOOK OF THE WORLD
LESSONS OF NATURE
Browne, Simon
LESSON OF LOVE
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett
LESSONS FROM THE GORSE
Burt, John
LEARNING THE TABLE
Bynner, Witter
LESSON OF WATER
Chaucer
PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS
Cochran, Mrs.
LESSON FOR MAMMA
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor
LESSON FOR A BOY
Colvin, lan Duncan
PARLIAMENT OF BEASTS
COMMUNITY PROBLEM SOLVING
COMMUNITY PROBLEM SOLVING
IDA CHICKEN
LAO TZU
LOW ROAD
WOMEN
CONFERENCES
ADVERTISING AGENCY POEM
ARCHY ON THIS AND THAT
AT WRITERS' CONFERENCE
CONFERENCE CRAZY
HAIKU
IN RE CONFERENCES
LOST IN CONFERENCE
PARLIAMENT OF BEASTS
PARLIAMENT OF CATS
PARLIAMENT OF DEVILS
PARLIAMENT OF FOWLS
PARLIAMENT OF THE 3 AGES
Crane, Stephen
LEARNED MAN
Cummings, E.E.
ALL IGNORANCE TOBOGGANS INTO KNOW
I'D RATHER LEARN FROM ONE BIRD HOW TO SING
Davies, Sir John
NOSCE TEIPSUM Day re, Sydney
LESSON FOR MAMMA
DEATH
BLACK SOAP
Detzel, Denis
COMMUNITY PROBLEM SOLVING
Dickey, William
LESSON OF THE MASTER
Dostal, Cyril A.
ADVERTISING AGENCY POEM
Doubney, Sarah
LESSON OF THE WATER-MILL
Drumroond, William of Hawthornden
BOOK OF THE WORLD
LESSONS OF NATURE
Duffy, Maureen
LITERACY CLASS
ECOLOGY
LEARNING THE TREES
LESSON (Wagoner)
ELIOT, T.S.
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
ELLISON, ART
LOW ROAD Enright, D.J.
FIGHT AGAINST ILLITERACY
PARLIAMENT OF CATS
UNIVERSITY EXAMINATIONS IN EGYPT
Erskine, John
MODERN ODE TO THE MODERN SCHOOL
FENDYS PARLEMENT
PARLIAMENT OF DEVILS
FREIRE, PAULO
LAO TZU
FROM WANTING TO LEARN TO LEARNING TO WANT
I'D RATHER LEARN FROM ONE BIRD HOW TO SING
Frost, Robert
DEATH OF THE HIRED MAN
LESSON FOR TODAY
LUCRETIUS VERSUS THE LAKE POETS
Fry, Christopher
LADY'S NOT FOR BURNING
GHOST IN THE MACHINE
LETTERS TO AN ADMINISTRATOR
Gibran, Kahlil
PROPHET
Goedicke, Patricia
READING CLUB
Gross, Ron
HAIKU
LESSON I
Gueulette, Margaret & Dave
SEASONS GREETINGS
Hall, Budd
MAGICIAN
MWIZI
TO A LITERACY TEACHER
WHO PAYS?
Hardy, Thomas
YOUNG MAN'S EPIGRAM ON EXISTENCE
Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins
LEARNING TO READ
Harteis, Richard
PEDAGOGY
WINTER LESSON
HEGEL, GEORG WILHELM FRIEDRICH
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
Hobsbaum, Philip
LESSON IN LOVE
Holub, Miroslav
LESSON
HORTON, MYLES
LAO TZU
Howe, Irving
SONG OF MEETINGS
Justice, Donald
MEN AT FORTY
KALLEN, HORACE
LAO TZU
KIERKEGAARD, SOREN
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
Kipling, Rudyard
LADIES, THE
Kirstein, Lincoln
SCHOOL
Lao Tzu
LAO TZU
LESSON OF WATER
Lieberman, Elias
NIGHT SCHOOL
LITERACY
ADVICE TO A TOT ABOUT TO LEARN THE ALPHABET
EXCURSION OF THE SPEECH AND HEARING CLASS
FIGHT AGAINST ILLITERACY
ILLITERATE, THE
LEARNING TO READ
LITERACY CLASS
MWIZI
REASON
TO A LITERACY TEACHER
WHO PAYS?
Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth
PSALM OF LIFE,
A Lorde, Audre
MOVEMENT SONG
Lowell, Robert
LESSON Lucie-Smith, Edward
LESSON Ludvigson, Susan
LESSON MAN O'AIRLIE
LESSON OF THE WATER-MILL
MANDATORY CONTINUING EDUCATION
TAMING OF THE SHREW
Marquis, Don
ARCHY ON THIS AND THAT
MARX, KARL
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
Masters, Edgar Lee
IDA CHICKEN
Mayakovsky, Vladimir
CONFERENCE CRAZY
IN RE CONFERENCES
LOST IN CONFERENCE
MEETING ADDICTS
McCord, David
LESSONS IN LIMERICKS
McGinley, Phyllis
ADVICE TO A TOT ABOUT TO LEARN THE ALPHABET
HOMEWORK FOR ANNABELLE
LESS INFORMATION PLEASE
MESSAGE FROM MARS
OUTCAST
POCKETFUL OF WRY
McPherson, Sandra
BLACK SOAP
Meredith, William
ILLITERATE, THE
THOUGHTS ON ONE'S HEAD METRICAL FEET
LESSON FOR A BOY
Miller, Vassar
LESSON IN DETACHMENT
Moore, Marianne
STUDENT
Moss, Howard
LESSON FROM VAN GOGH
Munro, Jane
HYACINTH
PARADIGM APARTMENTS
Murray, George
LESSON OF MERCY
Nemerov, Howard
LEARNING BY DOING
LEARNING THE TREES
TO DAVID, ABOUT HIS EDUCATION
NEWTON, ISAAC
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
NIGHT SCHOOL
MOVEMENT SONG
Nims, John Frederick
AT WRITERS' CONFERENCE
Page, Tom
OSAGE COUNTY STATE PARK LAKE IN THE FALL OF 1971
PARENT EDUCATION
LESSON (Holub)
LESSON (Lucie-Smith)
LESSON (Ludvigson)
LESSON (Rossetti)
LESSON (Rubin)
LESSON FOR MAMMA
TO DAVID, ABOUT HIS EDUCATION
YOUNG MAN'S EPIGRAM ON EXISTENCE
Peterson, Elizabeth
LESSON
Piercy, Marge
LOW ROAD, THE
PLYAMENT OF DEUYLLES
PARLIAMENT OF DEVILS
Pomfret, John
REASON
Reed, Henry
LESSONS OF THE WAR
Reid, Alastair
LESSON IN HANDWRITING
RELIGIOUS EDUCATION
LESSONS OF THE YEAR
Rockefeller, John D.
LEARN TO LABOR AND TO WAIT
Rosenberg, David W.
NIGHT SCHOOL
Rossetti, Christina
LESSON
Rubin, Larry
LESSON
Sarton, May
LETTERS TO AN ADMINISTRATOR
SELF-DIRECTED LEARNING
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
APRIL INVENTORY
ARCHY ON THIS AND THAT
JULIAN AND MADDALO
LEARN TO LABOR AND TO WAIT
LEARNED MAN
LEARNING THE TREES
NOSCE TEIPSUM
PSALM OF LIFE
REASON
TABLES TURNED
THOUGHTS ON ONE'S HEAD
Shakespeare, William
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST
TAMING OF THE SHREW
Shelley, Percy Bysshe
JULIAN AND MADDALO
SMALL CELANDINE
LESSON (Wordsworth)
Snodgrass, W.D.
APRIL INVENTORY
SOCRATES
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
SPOON RIVER ANTHOLOGY
IDA CHICKEN
Stuart, Dabney
LESSON IN OBLIVION
Taylor, Bayard
LEARN TO LIVE, AND LIVE TO LEARN
Teasdale, Sara
WISDOM
Thwaite, Anthony
LESSON
UNLEARNING
OSAGE COUNTY STATE PARK LAKE IN THE FALL OF 1971
Van Loo, Jo
MY PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
Wagoner, David
EXCURSION OF THE SPEECH AND HEARING CLASS
LESSON
NAVEL TRAINEES LEARN HOW TO JUMP OVERBOARD
Walker, Alice
WOMEN
Warren, Robert Penn
LESSONS IN HISTORY
Weber, Helen
LESSONS
Wilkins, Mitzie
TRANS-RADICAL THOUGHT IN ADULT ED
Williams, William Carlos
ASPHODEL EDUCATION A FAILURE
Wilson, Jr., Robley
LITERARY LESSON
WISDOM
I'D RATHER LEARN FROM ONE BIRD HOW TO SING
LAO TZU
LESSON FOR TODAY
LESSON OF WATER
LETTERS TO AN ADMINISTRATOR
MAGICIAN
MY PHILOSOPHY OF EDUCATION
REASON
WHO PAYS?
WOMEN'S ISSUES
BLACK SOAP
LADIES, THE
MOVEMENT SONG
Wordsworth, William
LESSON
TABLES TURNED
XANTIPPE
ACADEMIC GRAFFITI
YOU SHALL ABOVE ALL THINGS BE GLAD AMD YOUNG
I'D RATHER LEARN FROM ONE BIRD HOW TO SING
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