Y’all seemed to enjoy my “liveblogging” of Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, so here’s something similar. Follow along, if you can, as I reveal the labyrinthine thought processes of a totally clueless poetry reader (i.e., me).
The background here is that my daughter’s new violin teacher asked her to memorize a poem and recite it “with feeling.” (Can you beat that? He is so awesome!) Lena picked “Bear Song” by Kay Ryan, because she thought it would be easy to memorize. Here it is:
If I were a bear
with a bear sort of bellythat made it hard
to get up after sittingand if I had paws
with pads on the endsand a kind of a tab
where a tail might beginand a button eye
on each side of my noseI’d button the flap
of the forest closed.And when you came
with your wolf and your stickto the place that once was
the place to get inyou’d simply be
at the edge of the townand your wolf wouldn’t know
a bear was around.
Eh? The flap of the forest? Your wolf and your stick? Your wolf? It’s a strange little poem, ain’t it? The belly, paw pads, and button eyes suggest maybe a teddy bear, but the second half of the poem, with the wolf and the stick and the YOU feels almost menacing. Naw, couldn’t be.
Lena found “Bear Song” in an anthology called Poetry Speaks to Children. It has a wide variety of poems, many of which are obviously written for children (R.L. Stevenson, A.A. Milne, Roald Dahl, Margaret Wise Brown, etc.). Others are by “grownup” authors (Shakespeare, Poe, Sylvia Plath, Blake, Rilke, etc.). Still others (like Kay Ryan) I’d never heard of. However, the fact that the poem is in a children’s anthology makes me want to give it a gentle interpretation. Yeah, must be a teddy bear. Maybe even a puppet — a wolf on a stick? And the flap of the forest could be, I dunno, the scenery of the puppet show. Still makes no sense, but the illustration kind of bears out (ha ha) that reading. You can click on the image to see a full-size version.
But wait! This book comes with a CD! Duh, we could actually listen to the author read the poem! Wonder if that would make a difference to my understanding (or lack thereof). So we popped the CD into the player, hit track 9, and… whoa! I’ve uploaded it here. Listen if you can (I’ve never uploaded an audio file before), and then come back.
It has a whole different meaning now, doesn’t it. It’s a real bear, and you’d best not disturb it. “You” are a hunter, and your wolf and stick are your hunting dog and rifle. Or, since this is a children’s anthology, maybe it’s a grumpy kid, feeling bearish, who wants to be left alone, and you and your wolf and stick are the grownups who keep bothering you. Either way, this poem definitely has a dark side. And the illustration, I now realize, is crap.
So, next question: who the heck is Kay Ryan? Well… it turns out she is the current Poet Laureate of the United States. Her profile at poets.org describes her poems as “compact, exhilarating, strange affairs, like Erik Satie miniatures or Joseph Cornell boxes” and the New York Times says she is “known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes.” Yes, I think both quotes could apply to “Bear Song,” don’t you? Even better, though, is this hilarious article that she wrote about the one and only time she attended a writers’ conference:
It turns out I have an aversion to cooperative endeavors of all sorts. I couldn’t imagine making a play or movie, for instance; so many people involved. I don’t like orchestral music. I don’t like team sports. I love the solitary, the hermetic, the cranky self-taught. Make mine the desert saints, the pole-sitters, the endurance cyclists, the artist who paints rocks cast from bronze so that they look exactly like the rocks they were cast from; you can’t tell the difference when they’re side by side.
Ha ha, I love this woman! What a kindred spirit! Except for the bit about orchestral music, I agree with everything she said. Especially *ahem* the “cranky self-taught.” Knowing this about her, the meaning of “Bear Song” becomes even clearer, doesn’t it. Yes indeed, she’s a grumpy old bear lady who just wants to be left alone. No doubt about it.
I wish I didn’t need all this extra information in order to be able to understand a poem, though.
7 Comments
The thing is, I don’t think you *always* have to understand poetry to enjoy it. It’s fun on a lot of different levels.
I’m going to have to check that out. I think my kids need something a little more challenging that Shel Silverstein and Jack Prelutsky. :)
I rather like the poem. My first thought was the wolf and stick were a dog and gun, but I still couldn’t figure out the flap of the forest part. So I’m glad you did a bit of sleuthing and found more out about the poet. How interesting.
Hey, I have this book, too! I used it with 7th graders, but haven’t explored it much. I love that Lena is memorizing poems. When her Great Grandmother took classes with W.H. Auden at the Univ. of Michigan, I’m told that much of the homework consisted of memorizing poetry and literary passages. Her Grandpa John delighted in spouting memorized lines from Shakespeare when the opportunity arose. I am sometimes amazed (and always delighted) at the way I draw on the memory bank of poems and literature built up over time.
When I participated in a poetry workshop for teachers in the summer of ‘07, the initial explanation of poetry is that it is indirect speech; trying to say one thing in terms of another. Given that, what if we imagine that Ryan’s bear is a poet and the “You” is the reader. What if buttoning up the forest is a metaphor for using figurative language! (A metaphor for metaphors!) After all, the bear isn’t telling us we can’t come into the forest at all, just that we need to find another entrance than the one we expected to find.
And the “dark” side of the poem is not something the bear (=poet) has put there, it is something that you (=reader) have brought to the scene. Maybe the poet is just telling us to come to the forest without our wolves and sticks. After all, the bears have buttons for eyes; they don’t attack us, they just use buttons to thwart our aggression – they can’t be too harmful. If the message is that we have to be less aggressive when we approach a poem, this would be a great companion piece for the hilarious poem by Billy Collins (also a U.S. poet laureate) called, “Introduction to Poetry.”
At the same poetry workshop, the poet Mary Jo Salter (editor of the Norton Anthology) pointed us toward some good examples of rhyme and wordplay in modern poems. She described the poet Paul Muldoon as, “The most important thing to happen to rhyme in a long time.” This fascinated me. How could there be new developments in the world of rhyme? I never really thought of rhyme as a genre – more of a tool or a game; a means to an end.
I like the way that Ryan uses alliteration in roughly the same spots in each stanza – paws/pad, tab/tail, flap/forest, etc. I wonder whether this is part of the exciting new developments in rhyme, or if I just never paid attention before.
God, your post is great! I’m so glad you’re back!
You’re right…he is an awesome teacher. A great assignment.
I wish more books came with CDs. I’d probably be able to “read” more of the books that I’ve wanted to pick up.
Loved this post, Julie! Poetry for “children” is some of my favorite reading, and often has lots more to say to us adults than we’d like to think.
Kay Ryan is new to me, but thanks to your fine introduction, I’ll be looking for more of her work. I was wondering who our current Poet Laureate was – seriously, I actually was wondering that just the other day ;)
I have a lofty goal for 2009 that I will dive into some poetry… I liked this one. I loved this post!