My life in Orange--

I started teaching an English poetry course last term and taught my students Shakespeare and the British Romantics. My students were a little bit bored with the Romantics by the end of the term, though they kind of got into it at the end, when I had them choose their favorite poem and poet and research them for their final.

I decided I wanted them to really get into poetry in a new way. I'm doing a couple of different things this term and so far am really excited. We're working with the modernists--whose language play is interesting and exciting--and other contemporary poets whose poems they can get fairly easily, or with just a little explanation.

The students also present a poet each class, which helps them have a little more ownership. I also try to mix in an easy to understand contemporary poems with some of the less simple older poets, like Emily Dickinson. For example, we're reading "Taking off Emily Dickinson's clothes" by Billy Collins while reading Dickinson, an event that made my students giggle and blush like twelve year-olds. (One of my students said, "I can't keep reading teacher!" as he read the part where the narrator's hands part the fabric "like a swimmer's dividing water." I mean, read it here. It's SO tame.)

Anyway, at the end of my last class, I did an activity. I cut up a bunch of oranges--which got them really excited (free food!). Then I gave them each a wedge. They were so confused and curious. Then I had them look at the orange and describe it, and think of metaphors, i.e. "this orange is like a smile," "this orange is like the sun," or "this orange is sweet and juicy."

Then I had them eat it and do the same. The metaphors again were pretty weak, but they started to get the hang of it and what I was asking them to do. They started to take risks, which is what the poets we're reading were doing. I was asking them to go outside of themselves, to take leaps, to use their imaginations in ways no one has ever asked them to before.

Turkish students are often very poetic anyway (more than my American students ever were in general). They often surprise me with their metaphors. In response to Emily Dickinson's "Hope is a Thing with Feathers" my students had to write a poem with an opening line that was "_____ is a thing with ____" where they chose an abstract idea such as love, and compared it to an animal or insect. One of my students wrote: "Life is a hungry pig..." which blew me away. Have you ever heard such a comparison? I loved her poem.

Anyway, the exciting part was when we got to the orange peel. Suddenly--I don't know if it was the progression or just the emptiness and inherent melancholy of an empty peel--but their metaphors became fantastic. They were talking about how the orange peel was like a cradle for a baby...and then it was like a family without a baby because the peel was empty. The orange peel was like humanity, a shell we use to protect ourselves to hide our sweetness inside. They went on and on...I wish I could remember them all.

It was so beautiful to be in that room with them, talking about how small things can be breathtakingly beautiful, how the most mundane object can be a metaphor for the most complicated feelings or experiences. It was a new way of thinking for them, and so profound. So now their homework (besides the assigned reading) is to spend their free time looking around at the ordinary things--a lamp post, a piece of trash at the bus stop, a pencil on the floor--and make them extraordinary by looking at them deeply, by seeing what meaning they can give them, what the object can inspire in them.

I think that's going to be my new homework for life.