Cherry Blossoms, Fozzy Bear, Throwing Fruit, and Hoop Skirts

Wednesday was both the beginning of a new month and the beginning of a new experience in the class: the writing workshop. For our morning warm-up, we held a mock workshop without mocking. Through written and oral critique of Britney Spears' famous honeymoon poem, the students sharpened their skills at revision, critical reading, and critical feedback. Once we'd learned how to respond effectively to our peer's work, it was time to journey to the depths of Cherry Hall, where the students posted their Lincoln poems on the blog. They also revised and posted the poems from Tuesday night's study hall assignment, which was to write a two-line poem, in the style of Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro," expressing a series of emotions (i.e. love, joy, anger) in images, using only concrete language and no abstractions. Then, the students chose their strongest two-line poem and expanded it to ten lines.
After the break, we read and commented on poems by our first three brave workshop volunteers: Penguin, E Dubs, and Surge. Workshop went swimmingly; the students made sophisticated and sensitive comments, and we all learned a lot about strengthening our writing, improving concision and fluidity. Armed with the tools to read and improve their writing, the class marched down the hill for another delicious lunch at Fresh Foods -- and celebrated the joy that is apple cobbler.
While The Boulder struggled, stuck in traffic behind a slow-moving white van, to make her way back to the classroom, the class began reading a sequence from the Kokin-Wakashu, an anthology of ancient Japanese poetry in the form of the waka, or uta, which translates as "song." The class labored to figure out what makes a waka a waka, in terms of both form and content. After a close reading and examination of the poems in the sequence, the students determined that the form translated loosely to a five line poem, with 5-7-5-7-7 syllables, in English. The students also discovered that the poems present images that contain the idea of time passing -- a Japanese aesthetic known as mono no aware -- and images of loneliness and decay -- known as sabi. However, as the culture differs greatly from our own, these images are presented in a positive light. They remind us that the things of this world are fleeting, which, in turn, reminds us that we shouldn't be attached to them -- and as, in this culture, attachment means suffering, these are positive images.
For the rest of the afternoon, we worked to see how this form could work within our cultural context. We visited a building which housed historical objects, things of the past: the Kentucky Museum. At the museum, students were able to experience the passing of time through exhibits and through interactive mediums. Focusing on objects from an unlit fireplace log to an empty ballroom, each student completed five waka. At the end of the day, we took a few minutes to play improv games in anticipation of next week's playwriting unit.