Winged Words and Warm Places to Land
Welcome back to High School English! I’ve structured this post with a few typical components of a class agenda: Welcome, Independent Reading, Check-in, Discussion, Freewrite, and Exit Ticket. Feel free to engage at any level that feels fun or meaningful to you. I’m glad you’re here!
Welcome: Wings!
Independent Reading: Bank, Mahfouz
Since teaching The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros earlier this school year, I’ve been belatedly obsessed with the beauty of a perfect simile or metaphor; typically, these two tools are taught early in school and seen as less sophisticated than other forms of figurative language (with elaborately excessive Homeric similes offered as an epic exception), but in the hands of Melissa Bank and Sandra Cisneros they are the very linchpins anchoring the evolution of their spunky protagonists, Sophie and Esperanza, respectively. One particular favorite sentence: "Margo passed me on her way out with Bert, and her ‘Goodbye’ was the unified kick of a hundred Rockettes" (Bank 225).
Anyways, I came back home every night for a week and read The Wonder Spot by Melissa Bank like it was a Netflix binge, even though, truth be told, very little happens. This one followed hard on the heels of Naguib Mahfouz’s Children of the Alley, whose lush prose cultivates an immersive, luxuriant atmosphere for exploring the power of story in shaping humanity’s sense of self. (Thanks, Qaher!)
What are you reading? What lines do you love? What reads do you recommend?
Check-In: Between chapters
These weeks have seen me pack up my classroom, say goodbye to many treasured companions, and turn my face toward transition. It’s bittersweet to be turning the page to the end of a chapter, not knowing exactly what the next one will hold but anticipating the unfolding.
What words describe how you’re doing these days? Does this chapter of your life have a title?
Poem Discussion: "Yellow" by Anne Sexton
A few months ago, I was deep into grading a stack of exams when my flow was interrupted: I was floored by Anne Sexton’s shocking sonnet "To A Friend Whose Work Has Come to Triumph", which was a text included in the assessment — so of course, sychronicity kicked in and I came across "Yellow" soon after.
I love "Yellow” today: the healing, the heat.
In its extravagant opening it echoes Langston Hughes’s iconic "Dream Variations," yet it rushes forward, headlong.
Line 4 reminds me a bit of a haunting line in Franny Choi’s "Choi Jeong Min": "i confess. i am greedy. i think i deserve to be seen/for what i am: a boundless, burning wick" (Choi 35-36). There is certainly a haunting here, especially in the ending — an audacious question reminiscent of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s "Dirge Without Music" and her closing line, "I am not resigned."
But the healing — it’s communal, and it’s a meal, spoonfuls of soul nourishment not unlike the soft mamool in Naomi Shihab Nye’s "Gate A-4." Its healing power feels like it could reach the aching characters in Quiara Alegria Hudes’s Water by the Spoonful, for the "mother-broth" is plentiful. It’s a celebration of the senses. The vision overflows from one line to the next, enjambment offering a gush of desperate generosity — molten, golden. In these summer days, hot for all the wrong reasons, this poem, “Yellow" is one I feel I can feed on.
What do you think? What does this poem remind you of? Are there poems you remember — from high school or otherwise! — that have brought you a sense of healing?
Freewrite: A Healing Place
This prompt is a hand-me-down from Deena Metzger and then Diane Morrow, since altered and adapted several times for my own classroom. It’s a fitting follow-up to "Yellow" and a lodestar for me as I seek my next residence! When you’re ready, read "A House of My Own" from The House on Mango Street. Then set a timer for 10 minutes and write about your own healing place.
This is something writing can do—allow us to become very clear about what is necessary for us.
Visualize a safe, peaceful place. It can be real or imagined.
What kind of place is your healing place?
What kind of light is present?
What sounds? Music? Silence?
What smells or fragrances ride on the air?
Is someone there with you?
What do you feel against your skin?
Write about it for ten minutes without stopping or judging yourself.
What was this writing experience like? What, if anything, would you like to share?
Exit Ticket: Today’s spoonful
What is nourishing you today? Your words or someone else’s? Hopes, dreams, or visions? Relationships, memories, or experiences?
Check-in: This chapter is the same chapter I was on during my sophomore year of highschool. Where there is no light at the end of the tunnel yet, where I am walking with a few members of my life, where all I know is that the light at the end of the tunnel will soon be seen, and I must continue to walk to see it. To others, it may be a dark and lonely place, but to me it is a middle ground: A place to keep going forward for something good will come.
Free write: My healing place is my bedroom. Fresh lilies fill the room with a prestine floral scent. No sound other than my breath, the wind rustling the trees outside, and my blinking. Sunrise sunlight fills my room with an amber glow, making me feel heavenly and engulfed in peace. Sitting on my desk chair, one leg up and the other underneath it. Sitting there existing, with my own thoughts, with nothing but a book and a journal and a white pen. Peering out my window, with nothing but a hoodie hugging my skin and a cold chain hanging out of it. This is my healing place, a place of solitude, with no one else but my spirit and imagination. A place to heal, a place to think, a place that is solely mine.