For this seminar I returned to the subject of ekphrastic poetry, which I have worked with in the National
Initiative several times before, but I think not to the exclusion of other sorts of poem, and not with an
emphasis on gender and race. This year’s Fellows came from a great many different classroom situations:
there were three art teachers together with an English language teacher who is also an artist; there was a
middle school Spanish teacher; and there was a teacher of high school-age and even older students considered
unfit for ordinary public schools; there was a teacher in an all-Black classroom in Washington, D. C.; and there
were a kindergarten teacher and a middle school teacher of students on the Navajo Reservation of the Diné
Nation--students quite different from each other, as the kindergarten students are ESL learners from the
interior of the reservation who speak Navajo at home and the older students from near the edge of the
reservation are in danger of losing touch with the culture of their parents and ancestors. The other three teach
in perhaps more normative circumstances. There are also curious overlaps in interests. For example, three
teachers, none of them the art teachers, are working with poetic, visual and other responses to the public art
of murals. Of these three the two from Chicago are participating in the groundswell of interest in the murals of
ethnic neighborhoods that is also going on at the university level there. Because of these overlaps, I have
chosen not to arrange these units alphabetically but according to subject matter.
Also unusual about the ten Fellows in my seminar is the fact that apart from the experienced Coordinator the
other nine were participating in an Institute model seminar for the first time. Considering that fact, it is
remarkable that they could all write, with efficiency and clarity of purpose, units that will make wonderful
springboards for the various kinds of teaching they hope to do. Many were attracted chiefly to the chance to
compare verbal and visual works, often remarking that in the electronic age there are more and more visual
learners; and in some cases one could sense them feeling constrained by the need to channel their goals entirely
through poems about works of art. But as they saw soon enough, there was really no such need, despite the
seminar emphasis, and most of the Fellows drew upon ekphrastic poems among many other ways of bringing the
verbal and the visual into conjunction.
The first three units engage, as their primary focus, with the interpretation of ekphrastic poems, focused on
seeing the work of art as the poem sees it while also training students to “read” the work of art on
their own, and in their own poems. Two of these three units have in common close attention to Robert
Hayden’s “Monet’s Water Lilies.” Anita Galloway of Washington, D. C.
selects this poem for her high school students together with Blake’s illuminated and very complex
“The Little Black Boy” and a poem from Natasha Tretheway’s Bellocq’s Ophelia, a
series that responds to photographs of New Orleans prostitutes taken over a century ago. Elizabeth
Mullin of Richmond has a special interest in emotional responses to art and poetry, and builds on
this interest for her middle school students with a pedagogical contrast between “objective” reading
(of Longfellow’s “The Cross of Snow”) and “subjective” reading, modeling her own
private response (to Edward Hirsch on Hopper’s “House by the Railroad”), before blending the
two in her way of reading Hayden’s poem. The seminar’s excellent Coordinator Krista
Waldron focuses on the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, feeling
that her socially marginal students will respond most readily to a personal emphasis—one that admits
pain--and chooses for the purpose Lowell on Vermeer’s “Girl by a Window,” Plath on De
Chirico’s “Disquieting Muses,” and Sexton on Van Gogh’s “Starry Night.”
One of the three units with an emphasis on murals points toward the whole class’s production of a
mural—and then writing about it—as a culminating exercise. Stephany Jimenez of
Chicago, an art teacher, teaches eighth graders and will warm them to the task of visual-verbal comparison with
U. A. Fanthorpe’s hilarious poem, especially funny to adolescents, on Uccello’s “St. George
Killing the Dragon,” “Not My Best Side,” then get them to think about compositional form with
Williams on Bruegel’s “Fall of Icarus” and about the public reception of controversial art
with E. B. White on a Diego Rivera mural before turning to the mural project, for which, as an artist, she is
well suited to give instruction. (I paint, and I took notes!) Laura Gillihan of Chicago teaches
in an elementary school that is surrounded by three proud and wholly distinct Chicago neighborhoods featuring
works of public art. Having introduced her students to ekphrasis with a neighborhood poem, Dan Masterson on
Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning,” she then moves them into the back and forth of imaging poems
and writing about images, all in response to repeated neighborhood walks. The Spanish teacher
Holly Bryk of Delaware, who shares Jimenez’s interest in Diego Rivera, will devote her
unit to a poem in the target language by Xánath Caraza called “Catrina,” the skeletal Mexican
“grande dame of death,” which responds in part to Rivera’s great mural “Suena de una
Tarde Domical in Alameda” (Catrina its central figure) with the purpose of simultaneously teaching the
Spanish language, Mexican cultural mythology, and Mexican history.
As I indicated, the two Diné teachers face opposite challenges, yet they share the ultimate purpose of
cherishing traditional culture. Desiree Denny will encourage her Kindergarteners to learn
English vocabulary through the mnemonic means afforded by rhyme and augmented by illustration. For this purpose
she has chosen four Mother Goose rhymes with fine Edwardian illustrations, rhymes with subjects familiar to the
children-- sheep and other animals—allowing them to make connections with their own traditions while
learning the exotic language of a distant time and place. Ella Earl encourages her ninth
graders to reflect on tradition and their sense of place, first with Georgia O’Keefe’s “Red
Hills and Bones” and Laura Kasischke’s poem about it, and then with a poem that Navajo artist Shonto
Begay wrote about his own painting, “My Mother’s Kitchen.” She then encourages the students to
write poems about traditional objects, such as bowls and baskets, which have acquired aesthetic value.
The other two art teachers are devoted to their students’ sense of personal well-being, to be realized
through psychological activism and political activism, respectively—not that these are wholly distinct
approaches. Leigh Hall of Pittsburgh has engaged in research showing that the leading cause of
students’ disruptive behaviors is household and neighborhood trauma. To make her fifth graders more
comfortable with themselves, she encourages verbal and visual self-portraiture. The ekphrastic poems she chooses
to familiarize them with the possibilities of the genre are Bobbi Katz’s pantoum on Mark Rothko and John
Stone’s poem on Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning,” a poem strikingly different in attitude
from Dan Masterson’s, studied by Laura Gillihan, who also urges neighborhood activism. Nina Ford
of Richmond, finally, uses a remarkable visual archive ranging from images of Blacks
in the Jim Crow era to the complex cultural statements of today’s African-American avant-garde artists to
get her ninth through twelfth graders to recognize the pervasiveness of micro-aggression in white culture,
turning eventually to the work of Black poets from June Jordan to Claudia Rankine expressing this same theme.
Paul H. Fry
