help for my workshop

Apr 30, 2008 at 1:09 PM
17 comments

Dear friends,

I am leading a workshop on poems about paintings and would appreciate any suggestions of poems or paintings to present to the teens. I have a whole pack of poems, but most of them seem to be in a similiar vein, from May Swenson to Anne Sexton. I do have a Longfellow one to add to the pot. Bring it on!!!

My goal is to read and discuss poems for the first hour and then have the students create poems from various paintings. I will also throw in a raucus game of Duck, Duck, Goose, Poetry.

Lucy, off to clean the family car... uggh...If I don't reply to commnet, I may have been eaten by gross dirty car lemurs

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Horace Odes; Book II, Ode IX: Non Semper Imbres: About love lost; should resonate.

Robert Frost: The Road Not Taken

Dylan Thomas: Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Wilfred Owen "Dulce et Decorum Est"

Emily Dickenson: There's a certain Slant of Light

Walt Whitman A noiseless patient spider

Never mind. I misread your post.

Let's try again. Here's one website.

And I think a different Horace work is good on this: See if you agree.

How about some paintings by: Michelangelo, Picasso, Monet, or Leonardo da Vinci. Just some suggestions :)

Any of Aubrey Beardsley's drawings. If you want lush, try the illustrations from "The Rape of the Lock" or "Under The Hill". If you want sparce and Japonesque (and want a few rude caricatures of Oscar Wilde) try "Salome".

The paintings of Jan Vermeer. Talk to your students about the nature of light. Then see if they can write about it.

Poetry:

Aubrey Beardsley: "Ballad of a Barber"

Dylan Thomas: "Fern Hill"

Wilfred Owen: "The Parable of the Old Man and the Young"

Lucy replied to ancora impara’s comment:
May 1, 2008
Reply

great poems anyway. :) thanks.

Lucy

Lucy replied to ancora impara’s comment:
May 1, 2008
Reply

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lovely website. thanks so much. I think the Horace ode would be too long for the teens, but I may read the first part of it to whet their appetites. I also have a short attention span, so I can empathize with twitchy teens. The first part of the poem of Horace, I find a hilarious. I like it.

Lucy

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Thanks Tammie! I find out how many kids I have today and will print out slews of art images and have them pick from a pile.

Lucy

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Aubrey, you are a treasure. Thanks so much!!! Your knowledge is appreciated.

Lucy

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Vermeer was my favorite painter throughout my twenties. I love how the subjects seem to glow with an internal flame.

Lucy

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Wilfred Owen, his war poems, are so lovely and tragic. I love this so. Thanks. He wrote some earlier tripe about fairies, but then he was so very young.

Lucy, who will find an Abraham and Isaac painting to pair with this

You're welcome. Good luck with the kids!!!

Gross dirty car lemurs ate my foot one time, but no worries....it grew back the next day....

:) Now I feel better that regeneration is a possibility

Lucy

At least in the imagination !!

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Just wanted to say that I think this sounds like a lovely idea...and it's the exact thing my favorite poetry professor had us do in his classes. We went to the student art gallery several times to look at and "read" paintings, and then write about them. He also had a slide show that he played in class with a wide variety of paintings and sculptures for us to look at. He'd do it very quickly...give us 3 minutes to look at and write a few lines on a particular painting. He also encouraged us to write total nonsense, to do wordplay rather than attempting anything cohesive or "pretty" sounding. It was lovely!