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High School Lesson Plan
Visiting Poet, Elizabeth Rivers, with Elise Brand at Souderton High

Walt Whitman

This program and the program was prepared for an hour and a half class. They could also have been divided into two 45 minute sessions.

15 minutes: introduction, icebreaker exercise (What form of creative writing do you like best to use? tweets, blogs, journaling, fiction, poetry etc…)

40 minutes: "doing" Walt Whitman together…not a lecture! The visiting poet does take a few minutes to introduce Whitman as a founder of modern and contemporary American poetry and explain some of his startling innovations, such as a lack of typical rhyme and rhythm patterns. Connections to Transcendentalists. A little history of "Leaves of Grass".

We read excerpts from "Song of Myself" together. First we underline and practice parts for all to read as a chorus. Other parts are read by volunteers taking one section each.

The students are divided into small groups and asked

A. 10 minutes (includes discussion and question responses)

1. Think about lines that turn you on…one choice each student

2. Group reporter: What seems to be the overall idea or theme of the poem? Check out title, beginning and end of poem especially.

B. 20 minutes (includes discussion and question responses)

1. What does your section mean? How does it relate to the overall theme? What puzzles you?

2. What senses does the poet use? (smell, touch, taste, sight, hearing) What repetition of sounds, vowels or consonants, does the poet use? Do you notice anything about rhythm? Are there rhymes? Short lines, long lines? Other patterns? Does the poet compare one thing to something else? (metaphor, simile) Is there a catalogue or list?

15 minutes: Writing exercise based on Whitman's NOW, projecting that into any imaginative scenario the student chooses and looking for distinctive details.

15 minutes: Students share their work.

15 minutes: Visiting poet reads a poem, has brief Q& A about it and poetrywits. as time permits.


Selection from "Song of Myself":

Song of Myself
By Walt Whitman 1819-1892

1

I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.

I loafe and invite my soul,
I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass…

2
The atmosphere is not a perfume, it has no taste of the
distillation, it is odorless,
It is for my mouth forever, I am in love with it,
I will go to the bank by the wood and become undisguised and naked,
I am mad for it to be in contact with me.

The smoke of my own breath…
My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing
of blood and air through my lungs,
The sniff of green leaves and dry leaves, and of the shore and
dark-color'd sea-rocks, and of hay in the barn,

The sound of the belch'd words of my voice loos'd to the eddies of the wind…

3.
There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now,
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.

Urge and urge and urge,

Always the procreant urge of the world…

5.
Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valved voice…

8.
The blab of the pave, tires of carts, sluff of boot-soles, talk of
the promenaders,
The heavy omnibus, the driver with his interrogating thumb, the
clank of the shod horses on the granite floor,
The snow-sleighs, clinking, shouted jokes, pelts of snow-balls,
The hurrahs for popular favorites, the fury of rous'd mobs,
The flap of the curtain'd litter, a sick man inside borne to the hospital,
The meeting of enemies, the sudden oath, the blows and fall,
The excited crowd, the policeman with his star quickly working his passage to the centre of the crowd,
The impassive stones that receive and return so many echoes,
What groans of over-fed or half-starv'd who fall sunstruck or in fits,
What exclamations of women taken suddenly who hurry home and give birth to babes,
What living and buried speech is always vibrating here, what howls
restrain'd by decorum,
Arrests of criminals, slights, adulterous offers made, acceptances,
rejections with convex lips,
I mind them or the show or resonance of them--I come and I depart…

52

The spotted hawk swoops by and accuses me, he complains of my gab
and my loitering.

I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable,
I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.

The last scud of day holds back for me,
It flings my likeness after the rest and true as any on the shadow'd wilds,
It coaxes me to the vapor and the dusk.

I depart as air, I shake my white locks at the runaway sun,
I effuse my flesh in eddies, and drift it in lacy jags.

I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,
If you want me again look for me under your boot-soles.

You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.

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