Power of Poetry and the Aesthetic Literacy

“Sometimes I think that what we want to make possible is the living of lyrical moments, moments at which human beings (freed to feel, to know, and to imagine) suddenly understand their own lives in relation to all that surrounds.” -- Maxine Greene

The second keynote in this Teaching of Writing institute was about poetry. Poetry gives children a new way to look at the world and transform pictures in their minds into words. Some teachers think that teaching of poetry should happen in secondary schools. However, poetry writing actually can be conducted by elementary students, too. The “poetic” lecture given in the morning further reminds me of the way of teaching poetry writing in Prof. Ann Sabatini’s class last spring. Teaching of poetry is an indispensable part of aesthetic education. Maxine Greene (2001, Variations on a Blue Guitar: The Lincoln Center Institute Lectures on Aesthetic Education) defines aesthetic education as “an intentional undertaking designed to nurture appreciative, reflective, cultural, participatory engagements with the arts by enabling learners to notice what is there to be noticed, and to lend works of art their lives in such a way that they can achieve them as variously meaningful.” Teaching of poetry can happen anywhere, not limited to space, time, and traditional formats of poetry writing. As Maxine Greene put in her book, which echoed with aesthetic ideas given by a Chinese educator and artist named Zikai Feng in the 1930s, we as teachers should render students the capability of seeking for beautiful moments in the daily life. The beautiful moments are moments that they can appreciate, share, reflect on, and write about. The beautiful moments can be found from regular scenes, such as patterns on an old wall, scenes through a classroom window, breeze felt after a thunderstorm in a scorching summer, a blossoming rose in the backyard, etc. Students will have “trained” eyes of looking for beauty in every corner of their lives. Yes! The beauty of life lies in the seemingly unchanged daily life, as said by the old idiom “Beauty is but in the eyes of the beholder”.

I once did a trial with Prof. Ann Sabatini and some other classmates. I observed the Bancroft building across the street through the window of a classroom in Grace Dodge Hall. The observation took about five minutes. After that, we came back to write about what we saw and felt from the observation via free-style poetry writing. I wrote the follow lines:

Clouds move gently
Under the blue sky
An old building
Stands there
For decades
It has a red and blue roof
With delicate carvings
At the base of each window
Moving shadows are reflected
On the glass
In the color of sunset

This might be a bad example of poetry writing, but it is a good way of letting students “fly” with their minds to write about the beautiful moments they have seen. For lower graders, they can practice this approach of writing and let’s forget about the grammar as well as the rigid formats and rhymes of poems.

Finally, I want to share a well-known example of beautiful moments found in daily life which worth writing and appreciating. It is my favorite piece which I first time fell in love with when I was a high school student learning English in China:

The Sound of Music
My favorite things
Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens
Bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens
Brown paper packages tied up with strings
These are a few of my favorite things

Cream colored ponies and crisp apple strudels
Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles
Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings
These are a few of my favorite things

Girls in white dresses with blue satin sashes
Snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes
Silver white winters that melt into springs
These are a few of my favorite things

When the dog bites
When the bee stings
When I'm feeling sad
I simply remember my favorite things
And then I don't feel so bad