Sjodin's Blog

I have been checking out a cool website by another teacher somewhere in web world. You can check it out if you want at thereflectiveteacher.wordpress.com/ . Anyways, I am borrowing one of his activities. Try boiling down your full day into one sentence. Post your sentence as a comment. Kudos for those of you who manage to utilize figurative devices or new vocab in your sentence while keeping true to the sentiment of your day!

An excellent Hamlet resource!

(Still looking for the full text of his poem to post here. Please refer to your notes :)) Jon Silkin 's poem "Carved" is interesting with its blunt, colloquial tongue and bare presentation of image. The rhythm is simple, yet poignant with the message it carries. As far as I know, every living thing dies at least once, and yet, we fear this passage. Silkin has us pause to gaze upon this fear. He forces us to see the "dead black bird" as it is, "very dead". And as we stare at the unsympathetic "red ants" devouring the fallen creature, we witness a strange transformation. The dogs bark, as if at the gates of Hades, as the live ants become "red death" and the black bird becomes a "thing" personified and uncaring. A metamorphosis has occurred, the live ants spill over the bird like blood and the black bird becomes larger, like a shadow, a "thing", perhaps fear itself. * Try mimicking Silkin's poe...

Your booklet is to include your four best poems written during this unit of study. Three of these must be the poems we have "workshopped" in class, modelled from what I am calling the "Mentor" poems. These are as follows: I. Seen From Above — by Wislawa Szymborska SEEN FROM ABOVE —Wislawa Szymborska On a dirt road lies a dead beetle. Three little pairs of legs carefully folded on his belly. Instead of death's chaos—neatness and order. The horror of this sight is mitigated, the range strictly local, from witchgrass to spearmint. Sadness is not contagious. The sky is blue. For our peace of mind, their death seemingly shallower, animals do not pass away, but simply die, losing—we wish to believe—less of awareness and the world, leaving—it seems to us—a stage less tragic. Their humble little souls do not haunt our dreams, they keep their distance, know their place. So here lies the dead beetle on the road, glistens unlamented when the sun hits. A glance at him...

www.vancouverpoetryhouse.com/programs/vanslam

(Image: Oil Painting by Kirsti Ann Wakelin) The other evening I dreamt I found a dead crow caught behind the cushions of my sofa. Disturbing. How did it get there, in my dream, so concrete and visible? And what does it mean? Carl Jung would have me analyze the significance of this dream as it connects to our collective consciousness. What do crows symbolize in our culture today? Was this a visit from Poe? Has a Haida raven dropped by to keep me on my toes? Or is the recent death of my grandfather somehow "couched" in my internal dialogue? He was a storyteller. Even more intriguing is what happened when I relayed this dream story to my grade 8's. Picking up a new book of poetry and opening it randomly the first poem I fell upon was Jon Silkin's "Carved", the first two lines: Two small dogs stood by a dead black bird And the black bird was very dead. There is no denying death. The dead are dead. As with Silkin's black bird. As with...

Billy Collins, The Dead, Video Poetry