Landscape and Language
Going outside can enhance language arts skills and open childrens’ eyes to the wonder of nature.
By Lorraine Ferra
When the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke admitted to his sculptor friend Rodin that he had come to a standstill in his writing, the artist suggested that Rilke leave his desk, visit the zoo, and look at an animal for a long time. For several weeks perhaps, Rilke acted on the advice. He singled out a panther and watched it until he could see it and then wrote a memorable poem which reverberates with the monotony of the panthers pacing back and forth behind the bars of its cage. As a sculptor, Rodin understood the necessity of keeping the senses alert, an ability considered basic to the visual arts but often neglected in language. And so we continue encouraging children to produce grammatically flawless compositions and stories — writing that is often devoid of visual and tactile imagery, music, and that aura of silence which can draw us further into the depths of an experience.
I have been looking at the beginnings of two stories by fifth-graders about Utah floods. The first was written by a child who was asked in a creative writing class to describe the event:
One year there was a great flood is Salt Lake City. Stores were closed, and homes were destroyed by the rough water…
Well written grammatically, but echoing in tone the nightly reports of newscasters on local Utah television stations.
The second story’s opening was composed by a child who was advised to go to the scene and witness it firsthand. Besides observing the flood waters, she was to listen to bystanders’ conversations, discern facial expressions and notice the surroundings and activity:
Would you like to meet the father of a flood, stacking sandbags with tears in his eyes? His son ran away in the spring…
What a magnetic invitation to enter the story! The imaginative intelligence and emotional engagement in these lines could have been generated only by attention and sensitivity to detail. Moreover, the fact that the child was present, looking and listening, enabled her to internalize the event, a necessary component of transforming the writing process into more than a mere exercise.
As a poet-in-education, I have been passing along Rodin-like advice to children “This evening, sit outside and watch the sunset. What does it remind you of? What does it smell like? Write a poem about your ideas while you watch the sun fall behind the mountains.” As a result I receive poems describing the sun on the horizon “quiet as a pumpkin sitting in my backyard or “slipping away like someone turning off a lamp in the late evening.” A first-grade boy, whose attention had been diverted by a rainbow, handed me this short poem:
What is a rainbow? Sometimes
I think it is a beautiful bracelet
That turns on a girl’s wrist.
-Rick Lee Robins
The beauty of this poem lies not only in the product, but also in the process; the child did not simply follow the “assignment” in writing about a subject, but rather gave himself over to the few brief moments of the rainbow’s sudden appearance. He was “looking in the purest sense, without the self-consciousness that sees the object or occurrence as homework, without that myopic vision which blurs the possibilities awaiting the peripheral vision of the imagination.
Beyond asking children to observe and write outside the classroom, I have been taking them on what I call “poetry field trips” to meadows and canyons, migratory bird sanctuaries, aviaries, farms, city parks, even cemeteries. The decision on a location could be connected to a current geography, science or social studies unit, or best, could be simply contingent and spontaneous. But regardless of the relationship to the curriculum, it is perception and the act of writing that are integral to the awakening of language.
Early one fall morning I arrived with a group of fifth graders at Utah’s Bear River Bird Refuge, one of the country’s largest sanctuaries on the Pacific Flyway. The sun was still low in the east as shadows of cattails lengthened across the narrow road through the river channels. As we began the twelve-mile auto tour through tall reeds, the children, having spent much of the commuting time consulting various field guides and wagering over who could spot the most species of birds, suddenly quieted in the wild beauty of the place.
In preparation for the experience, I had suggested that they practice looking and wondering the way Walt Whitman did when a child brought him a clump of grass, and I recited parts of Whitman’s poem for them:
A child said What is the Grass? Fetching it to me
With full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition,
Out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancers designedly dropt,
…
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the
Produced babe of the vegetation.
…
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
-from Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (from “Song of Myself” section 6)
Although they all readily agreed that the last image was “weird,” they were, nevertheless, enchanted by its mystery and haunting sense of beauty. *I recited that line in a lower, reverential tone of voice which lent to the ambivalence and left them wondering at its openendedness). They like the way Whitman initially confessed his helplessness in satisfying the child’s curiosity and then enumerated the various “answers.” I reminded them that the poems they would write about the birds would not rhyme, explaining that always trying to find a rhyming word often cuts off the flow of their ideas and feelings. The Whitman poem was a good example, filled as it is with its playful exploration while moving in tune with the natural rhythm of the human voice. It was also an inspiring model for a new way of looking and imagining. As we drove deeper into the refuge, the boy who had been reciting the familiar nonsense about “the pelican —his beak holds more than his belly can,” pulled his tablet and pencil out of his backpack while watching a flock of magnificent birds descending a hundred yards away and began his poem: “Pelicans resting like huge white clouds on the blue river…” I sense we were on our way.
One girl, convinced that there were no birds more wonderful than the whistling swans, composed this gracefully tangled mixture of images:
They float like leaves over the river,
Like crowned kings, but different in ways—
Their long necks resemble arches
That have been standing for thousands of years.
–DeAnn Perkins
Besides capturing the majesty of swans in “crowned kings,” she unconsciously unfolds her thinking process, making it part of the movement of the poem as she pauses with “but different in ways—” and then works out the association of swans with arches. The association was real for her, since she had lived as a very young child in southern Utah near the Arches rock formations. The sight of swans had evoked that childhood world which she transformed into a magical kingdom in her poem.
All the children were overwhelmed by the wide variety of bird life, but one boy was particularly charmed by the snowy egret’s alternating displays of stately and comic posturing. His poem evolved into a “candid camera” clip of what he found to be the bird’s human-like quirks of vanity:
THE QUESTION MARK
The snowy egret flaps his wings once
Or twice, to show his pride. But
When a noise comes near, he pokes
His head up out of the water
Like a question mark.
–James Fairbanks
It was unmistakable that observing the birds intensified the children’s pleasure in writing about them. They clearly wanted to write and read their poems as the went along. The experience was similar to coming upon a secret and longing to tell it to someone who would also find delight in the excitement and wonder of it all. Their poems were spontaneous celebrations of being in this landscape of strange and wonderful birds, not written assignments after the fact.
Ultimately, the “secret” children stumble upon in writing poetry is an inner landscape, that realm of language (a place all their own) in which they can wander about and conceptualize the world in such a way that trying to communicate where they have been requires a new way of speaking. Moreover, the accumulated experiences of reading and writing outside the classroom can encourage a habit of spontaneity among children. The next poem, in which the young writer saved the breathtaking moments of watching a Cooper’s hawk devour its prey in her yard, is an example of this spontaneous writing:
THE HAWK IN MY YARD
The hawk comes in
on silent wings
and perches high atop
the old bare-branched tree.
His piercing beak pokes
his dead prey
and little sparrow features
fall to the ground.
He sits with his back to me
and, with a wary eye,
turns his head
to watch
over his shoulder,
then shifts his feet
and ruffles his feathers
as the cold night air draws near.
–Allison Prescott
The writer just happened to be outside when the hawk came in “on silent wings.” Her poem reads like an eyewitness account by a reporter at the scene of a mysterious event, and her last line, “as the cold night air draws near,” leaves us shivering with her in the darkening yard filled with the hawk’s awesome presence. Also, this tactile ending of the poem points to the fact that once the wonder of looking and seeing is encouraged, the other senses seem to open naturally as we allow the daily events of our lives to penetrate the shell of routine.
With the same group of fifth-graders I led another poetry field trip to a canyon just a few miles outside of Salt Lake City. It was a weekday morning, and, as I had expected, we found ourselves alone on the canyon trail. Alone, that is, with aspens and pines, hawksbeard, lupine, and perhaps a dozen other newly opened, wild flowering plants.Each child had access to booklets on the regional wildflowers and had already thumbed through the pages filled with color photos of variegated flower accompanied by their “wild” names: Rose Pussy Toes, Goatsbeard, Prairie Rocket, Yellow Monkey Flower, Creeping Barberry… The names were enough to excite their imaginative instincts.
Before going off on the search, we gathered together and I read them a poem by Denise Levertov in which she speaks of tulips “becoming wings/ears of the wind/jackrabbits rolling their eyes…”
Rarely do I ask children to write without first reading them a poem or two from selections of classical or contemporary poetry. Doing this results in the stimulation of ideas and exposure to the various ways language can be explored. I ask them to recall favorite lines and to tell why they suppose the poet chows a particular word out of so many possibilities. This habit invokes a necessary attentiveness to language and consequently to careful writing.
The Levertov model was the right choice. Its associations broadened the list of exotic names the children had learned in the field guides, and its last stanza established the perfect mood: “some petals fall/with that sound one/listens for.”
These last words drifted off in the cool mountain air, and so did the children, quietly, as if listening for the flowers. One by returned, after sitting for a while beside a wild rose, with his poem:
THE WILD ROSE
High in the silent forest
a wild rose sits, in its center
a harmless sun rests. Its petals
are wings of a baby chick.
Its leaves are hands waving goodbye.
–Adam Lewis
The delicacy of language and imagery parallels the fragility of the rose. “A harmless sun” is a wonderful metaphor for the flower’s sun-like stamens. And the las image in which leaves are seen as “hands waving goodbye” suggests the transience of all living things, not only of the flower. These kinds of insight come from the children when we gather again to share our poems. “It makes the flower seem like a person who’s going somewhere. Maybe not coming back for a long time,” one child thought. Some children affirm the idea while others volunteer new perspectives, and the writer listens, sometimes shyly, mostly pleased, and often happily surprised by his or her poem.
Commenting on each other’s work, especially outside the classroom environment, creates a unique communal experience and noncompetitive atmosphere in which children learn things about themselves and the world that they never considered before. And what better place to write and read about a wild rose than in the mountains on a spring morning while its fragrance mingles with the smells of pine and canyon life?
The following poem approaches that place in poetry where the barriers between thought and speech dissolve into simple acts of praise:
SHOWY GREEN GENTIAN
What are you,
a falling start,
or hidden fire growing
quietly by yourself?
Showy Green Gentian,
What a beautiful name!
–Rosemary Fairbanks
The effortless conversational tone, so spontaneous and direct, reveals an intimacy with the subject which the young writer might not have achieved at her desk by simply looking at a wildflower picture. It also accents the personal impact of the observing-writing process that keeps children connected to what is most human in themselves and in their perceptual relationship with their environment.
The idea of “poetry field trips” does not imply that creative writing cannot happen in the classroom, for imagination can be stirred in any environment. But the imagination relies on senses not dulled by routine, by schedules, or by school bells that move us so quickly from one activity to another that we no longer hear them.
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Lorraine Ferra was born and raised in Vallejo, California, a seaport on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. She was a nun for seven years in a community in Fremont, California, where she majored in theology and education and taught in elementary and secondary schools.
After leaving the convent, she lived for several years in Salt Lake City, pursuing seminars in modern and contemporary poetry and creative writing under the directorship of Robert Mezey at the University of Utah.
Her poems have appeared in many literary journals and anthologies since 1976, and some are collected in Eating Bread (Kuhn Spit Press, 1994) and What The Silence Might Say (One-Crow-Dancing Books, 2012).
Her creative writing book, A Crow Doesn’t Need A Shadow: A Guide To Writing Poetry From Nature (Peregrine Smith Books, 1994) has been endorsed by the National Council of Teachers of English.
Ferra is a recipient of a Utah Arts Council Award in Poetry and a Westigan Poetry Award selected by John Haines.
She has worked extensively for many years as a poet-in-residence with various state arts programs across the country and, since 2002, through the Skagit River Poetry Foundation in La Conner, WA.
Lorraine and her spouse, Deborah Trent, have lived for twenty-three years in Port Townsend, WA.