The Girl, the Dog, and Poetry

“Cassie, are you ready yet?”

This is not an unusual question when our youngest daughter is home. We are off to my brother’s house to exchange Christmas gifts and we are running a little late. Cassie pops into the kitchen with a smile on her face and, after the usual conversation about remembering things, we head out the driveway. As often happens, I glide up next to our mailbox so Jeanette can grab the mail on our way out.

“You have a package from David.”

My friend David Steingass is a poet and every Christmas he writes a poem to share.  The package is something special.
“He has sent a book of poetry along with his Christmas poem. Shall I read it?”
And Jeanette began to read David’s poem entitled “Girl Walking Her Dog In Vilas Park At Dawn”.  From the opening line -“His legs moved like brown tuning forks” – David’s poem and Jeanette’s reading transformed a mundane afternoon drive into a heart felt conversation about a dog, a girl, and poetry. About the power of words to capture images, as well as the affection of the poet for both dog and girl.  How sweet is that?  He even got the ultimate compliment from Cassie, “That was SO cool.”

Most important, I think David’s poem does what all good poems do – it changes the way we see the world. We will never again drive past the stone bridge in Vilas Park without seeing this “morally sensible” dog choosing his own route or wondering how much the dog’s consciousness depends on the “Girl”.   I love poems.

Thanks, David

Girl Walking Her Dog In Vilas Park At Dawn

By David Steingass

His legs move like brown

tuning forks. His gait’s an automatic
transmission with fluid drive
suspension. All his awareness

the result of extended

dialog. He’s illegal, this dog
in Vilas Park, but only when his feet touch
the ground if he’s running loose

which his moral sensibility would

never allow. And
he’s so cute. Some kind of terrier with fox-
pointy ears, and a scruffy thick wiry coat

spliced with Belgian farm dog genes.

Say a turverin’s, wired to jump
under buses in her place.
Past the zoo’s main gate, over the lagoon’s

stone bridge, his consciousness evolves

as they go. If he can’t respond
yet, his walk makes plain he knows
each day’s route is his to choose.

 From

echolocations – poets map madison

Cowfeather Press
PO Box 620216
Middleton, WI 53562
cowfeatherpress.org

A Child's Eyes

We had everybody home and making Christmas cookies in the kitchen last night. There was laughter and music and even some flying cookie dough, but the final collection is colorful and eclectic. The kitchen is clean and quiet now at dawn.  The sun is just starting to light the eastern horizon. It is December 24^th and I am grateful that my children are snuggled in their beds upstairs.  We will spend the next two days with family and friends recalling and laughing about earlier Christmas celebrations. And we will marvel how the little children in our clan will love the thought that someone they can’t see is bringing them presents. We will also smile when we recall our own childhood recollections. We may also feel a little melancholy.  I think Robert Fulghum said it best, “It’s harder to talk about, but what I really, really, really want for Christmas is just this: I want to be 5 years old again for an hour. I want to laugh a lot and cry a lot. I want to be picked up and rocked to sleep in someone’s arms, and carried up to bed just one more time.”  We know we can’t go back again, but we can still see Christmas through a child’s eyes.

I hope you have a Merry Christmas and a joyous New Year.

A Poem:

Christmas Sparrow

by Billy Collins

The first thing I heard this morning

 was a rapid flapping sound, soft, insistent—

wings against glass as it turned out

downstairs when I saw the small bird
rioting in the frame of a high window,
trying to hurl itself through
the enigma of glass into the spacious light.

Then a noise in the throat of the cat

who was hunkered on the rug
told me how the bird had gotten inside,
carried in the cold night
through the flap of a basement door,
and later released from the soft grip of teeth.

On a chair, I trapped its pulsations

in a shirt and got it to the door,
so weightless it seemed
to have vanished into the nest of cloth.

But outside, when I uncupped my hands,

it burst into its element,
dipping over the dormant garden
in a spasm of wingbeats
then disappeared over a row of tall hemlocks.

For the rest of the day,

I could feel its wild thrumming
against my palms as I wondered about
the hours it must have spent
pent in the shadows of that room,
hidden in the spiky branches
of our decorated tree, breathing there
among the metallic angels, ceramic apples, stars of yarn,
its eyes open, like mine as I lie in bed tonight
picturing this rare, lucky sparrow
tucked into a holly bush now,
a light snow tumbling through the windless dark.

 

Wood Stove and Work

The wood burning stove I am sitting next to just roared back to life after resting for the night. It’s a good thing, too. With the outside thermometer reading 9 degrees, our family room can hover in the mid 50s if the fire isn’t burning. I simply add a few chunks of dry wood, open the vents, and – voilá – the hot coals transform into a good fire. I can still smell the faint aroma of wood smoke.  That fragrance always makes me feel – I don’t know – satisfied? And it’s got me thinking about my experiences as a child. I was raised on a small farm outside Mukwonago, WI. Our drafty, old farm house always smelled of wood smoke in the winter because that was all we had to heat the place. We had a wood burner in our large kitchen and a larger wood stove in the basement. When I was little, my mom and dad would be responsible for starting and tending the fire. But as I grew older, I was expected – along with my brothers and sisters – to manage the fire brigade. There were certain routines and expectations to these roles. If I was the first one awake in the morning, my job was to go to the basement to tend the “big” stove. This involve going down a rickety old stairway that led to the typical farmhouse basement. Part cement floor, part dirt floor. Lots of cobwebs. An open drain pipe. The back section was used as the wood room and was often filled to the ceiling with split wood to burn. I remember it being dank and creepy. Once down there, I was to tend the big stove or restart the fire. No starter sticks and such. Chop kindling and get it burning. None of us wanted to do the basement.

The kitchen stove was easier.  Ma always had dry kindling nearby and it was easy to get at. The kitchen always smelled of smoke because that little stove often needed tending.  It was a never ending challenge as a high school kid to keep my clothes from smelling like wood smoke.

 And here is where the wood stove I am sitting near and the wood stoves of my past seem to collide.

I am very accepting of others who tell stories of the “hard” lives they experienced as children. Many of these stories also take place on small farms and they often explain the unending work that was required. Frequently the point of the story is to illustrate how valuable this experience was to making a responsible adult. (These stories often come up in the context of revealing “what’s wrong with today’s kids”.)   While I appreciate the stories, I always believed the menial, grinding work I did as a child did little to help me as an adult. Many days on the farm were filled with drudgery and mind numbing tasks. What is there to celebrate in that? I understand that it was necessary to help my family, but it wasn’t anything to celebrate. It was something we endured. Wouldn’t it have been nice to learn perseverance and determination in the pursuit of a loftier goal? Please don’t misunderstand. I have many fond memories of my childhood, but shoveling manure and endlessly splitting wood are not among them. Maybe we need to recognize that the kind of work we do is more important than the amount and that learning perseverance and dedication can’t be learned in isolation. The motivation and the activity are connected. Bill Gates got to learn about dedication and hard work by spending endless hours fooling around with the computers available to his family. I learned far more about “stick to itness” learning to play the guitar than I ever did hauling hay.

As an adult I have a longer perspective. When I am out months in advance cutting and splitting wood for my current home, I can imagine the moment I am experiencing now, the comforting warmth of this wood stove. The hard work has meaning.  It is necessary to learn about hard work, but maybe we need to be smarter about it.

A poem:

Two Tramps in Mud Time

By Robert Frost

 

Out of the mud two strangers came
And caught me splitting wood in the yard,
And one of them put me off my aim
By hailing cheerily “Hit them hard!”
I knew pretty well why he dropped behind
And let the other go on a way.
I knew pretty well what he had in mind:
He wanted to take my job for pay.

Good blocks of beech it was I split,
As large around as the chopping block;
And every piece I squarely hit
Fell splinterless as a cloven rock.
The blows that a life of self-control
Spares to strike for the common good
That day, giving a loose to my soul,
I spent on the unimportant wood.

The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You’re one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you’re two months back in the middle of March.

A bluebird comes tenderly up to alight
And fronts the wind to unruffle a plume
His song so pitched as not to excite
A single flower as yet to bloom.
It is snowing a flake: and he half knew
Winter was only playing possum.
Except in color he isn’t blue,
But he wouldn’t advise a thing to blossom.

The water for which we may have to look
In summertime with a witching wand,
In every wheel rut’s now a brook,
In every print of a hoof a pond.
Be glad of water, but don’t forget
The lurking frost in the earth beneath
That will steal forth after the sun is set
And show on the water its crystal teeth.

The time when most I loved my task
These two must make me love it more
By coming with what they came to ask.
You’d think I never had felt before
The weight of an axhead poised aloft,
The grip on earth of outspread feet.
The life of muscles rocking soft
And smooth and moist in vernal heat.

Out of the woods two hulking tramps
(From sleeping God knows where last night,
But not long since in the lumber camps.)
They thought all chopping was theirs of right.
Men of the woods and lumberjacks,
They judged me by their appropriate tool.
Except as a fellow handled an ax,
They had no way of knowing a fool.

Nothing on either side was said.
They knew they had but to stay their stay
And all their logic would fill my head:
As that I had no right to play
With what was another man’s work for gain.
My right might be love but theirs was need.
And where the two exist in twain
Theirs was the better right — agreed.

But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For heaven and the future’s sakes.

This Again?

The US Department of Education just released the scores from the latest round of standardized testing. The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests are given to 15 year old students around the world. And once again – if we are to believe our Secretary of Education Arne Duncan – the American school system is “stagnating” and “falling behind”. We are being told - once again - that our schools are outdated and our teachers are lousy. I hope you have learned to smile about all the hysteria because it is getting a bit old. Putting aside the reality that standardized tests are not an accurate measure of a student – or any person for that matter – let’s put the PISA test in perspective. If we do, we can learn some valuable lessons about current school reform and see how it is hurting public schools and the students who go there.

In her book most recent book Reign of Error, education historian and scholar Diane Ravitch carefully explains the history of international testing and shows how we Americans have never been particularly good at it. In the First International Mathematics Study done in the mid 60s, the US was last compared to 11 other countries. In subsequent years, we were never more than average. The current PISA tests began in 2000 and have continued every three years since. According to Ravitch’s analysis, “we are doing about the same now… as we have in the last half century.”

In his 2007 Phi Delta Kappan article “Are International Test Worth Anything?,” Keith Baker says "There is no association between test scores and national success, and, contrary to one of the major beliefs driving US education policy for nearly a half a century, international test scores are nothing to be concerned about."  He concludes that there is no correlation between national productivity and quality of life after a certain basic level of education. Mr. Baker has documented what many teachers know – the success or failure of any individual student - or school - or nation - cannot be reduced to numbers on a chart.

Despite the evidence that standardized tests are not a reliable indicator of student or school success, our current school reform movement based on the Common Core is more dedicated than ever to using standardized tests to define progress. Those advocating the Common Core will TELL you the opposite. They will claim they want active learning and inquiry based study. They will wax poetic about how important it is for students to have a broad spectrum of “authentic learning experiences” in school.  Don’t be fooled. Nothing else matters if the test scores don’t go up. I don’t mean to suggest teachers aren’t working hard to produce authentic experiences. They are working harder than ever. But when your job depends on test scores, you do what you must.

There are many things our schools need to do better to meet the needs of our students and our society. More standardized testing is not among them. Let’s hope our educational leaders have the wisdom to recognize that obsessing over unreliable test data does nothing for our schools or our students.