Monday, October 22, 2018

Be the beach pea!

How to terrify a room full of first-year composition students: hand them some poetry--at 8:00 on a cold October Monday morning--and make them read it.

I know, I know, I'm a horrible cruel taskmaster. This is not, after all, a literary analysis class, but today my department is hosting a reading by Ohio's poet laureate, Dave Lucas, and my students have an opportunity to earn some extra credit by going to the reading and writing about it, so I thought I'd whet their appetite--and since my first-year writing class focuses on science and nature, I gave them a Lucas poem on a sciency, natural topic: "Beach Pea."

"Poems are made of words," I said, and then I made them look up words they found unfamiliar: lexicon and mettle and hardscrabble, conjuring and loam, xylem and phloem. "We learned that in, like, fifth grade," a student pointed out, so we talked about why Lucas would commingle science and magic to describe the plant's ability to survive in harsh circumstances.

"Poems are made of sound and rhythm," I said, so I read the poem out loud and asked them to notice sound repetitions and rhythmic patterns. We heard waves crashing in one stanza, felt dry grass rustling in another.

"Poems are made of imagery and metaphor," I said, so we examined the word-pictures, the way Lucas contrasts the sturdy little beach pea with the cultivated rose. "[P]oets, you can have it," he says of the rose, and in the end he urges the beach pea to "spread out, spread deep. / Bow to no one, to no rose."

And this is what I wanted to say to my scruffy, sturdy little class this morning: We may not all be roses, dependent on proper soil and fertilizer and careful cultivation, but if we can just hold on through harsh circumstances and spread our roods wide and deep, we'll thrive like the beach pea and bow to no rose.

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