If you've been wondering why there's been a serious lack of updates to the blog lately it's due to the many rehearsals for Camelot, this year's school musical, which have been taking place since the beginning of September. I've been part of the directing team this year and it's been a full-on roller coaster ride since then till this week when the show is finally unveiled to the public on Wednesday.
We have a super talented cast who have worked incredibly hard so make sure you get in to see the show if you're in the neighbourhood of Oranmore Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of this week. The show runs nightly at 8pm in the Nano Nagle Hall in the school.
Tickets are available from Ms Kelly's room at lunchtime and more information can be got from the school office on (091) 794564.
In short, there's simply not A more congenial spot For happily-ever-aftering than here In Camelot!
Studying a play without seeing it performed on a stage is like studying cookery and never touching food... or studying science and never doing an experiment...or studying music and never listening to a song.
Reading a play might give you the story but it is not giving you the experience the playwright intended and Shakespeare certainly never intended for people to just read his plays. It's just the theory - not the practice.
To any of the Senior Cycle students studying Macbeth or Junior Cycle students studying Romeo & Juliet who have not yet brought in their money for the Cyclone Repetory Company's shows/workshops after Easter ten euro is a tiny price to pay to see scenes from your play performed on a stage. (If we brought you out to a production it would have cost circa 30 euro between ticket and bus.)
Cyclone Rep have been adapting Shakespearean plays for Second level students for years and are very skilled at combining Globe theatre acting and production styles (ie no sets, men play women etc) and discussion of important themes and issues relevant to your exams. They're entertaining, irreverent and much more fun way to revise your play than just doing another exam question.
Finding it hard to commit those poems to memory before the state exams? It doesn't all have to be hard work... Try this online tool to help see your studied poems in a new light..
A very easy website to use (assuming your Java is up to date on your computer!) Just copy and paste in the text of your poem and Wordle creates a picture from the words depending on the frequency of their use in the text. Play around with the font, colour and layout settings until you're happy with it. Here's a quick sample done by moi in less than 3 minutes:
Just got this email from the UN Envoy for Global Education - I know what I'll be doing at 1.30pm tomorrow to mark Internation Women's Day!
The Future is Hers
When the news came of the tragic shooting of teenage girls' education campaigner Malala Yousafzai, you spoke up for girls' rights - in protest, in support of the cause she championed, and in unity with millions of people around the globe.
Tomorrow, International Women's Day, marks another moment when we come together to speak up and take action for girls and women: a reminder that, following Malala's shooting, the world will never again stand by as their rights are ignored. A reminder that the future now belongs to girls and women.
UN Special Envoy Gordon Brown will be in conversation with Ziauddin Yousafzai - Malala's father - as part of the Women of the World festival at London’s Southbank Centre. Wherever you are in the world - you can tune in and watch the conversation live at 1.30pm GMT. Gordon and Ziauddin will also be taking part in a session in which Sarah Brown will be in discussion with Valerie Amos, UN under-Secretary-General, on the theme of International Activism, from 11.30am GMT. Tune in to both events here.
You can also read Gordon's International Women's Day blog for The Huffington Post - The Future is Hers - here. If current trends continue, an estimated 531 million of this generation’s young girls will leave their teens without ever completing a basic school education.
Show your friends and followers on Facebook and Twitter that you are one of our greatest champions of every girl's right to an education. Ask them to tune in to tomorrow's discussion and find out why 2013 is the year in which we can transform what the future holds for the millions of girls who miss out on decent schooling and learning.
Click the Tweet button below to pass on the message to your followers – and please use our suggested post below for Facebook, LinkedIN and your other networks to pass on this information to your friends and followers – your voice helps ensure that the Future really is HERS.
Thank you,
The Office of the UN Special Envoy for Global Education
Suggested post: This International Women's Day, The Future Is Hers: Watch Gordon Brown in conversation with Malala's father, Ziauddin Yousafzai live at Southbank Centre, London, from 1.30pm GMT http://bit.ly/10bxOZG
Just wanted to share this great TED talk by a chap called Akala about how Shakespeare verse sits perfectly into a Hip Hop beat all thanks to our friend Iambic Pentameter....
And his impressive piece called Comedy, Tragedy, History:
I loved Maths at school and but for the limited choices available in 1st Arts in NUI, Galway I would have studied it on into university. Surely becoming an English teacher has halted my love of numbers forever? Not so (thankfully) as English literature, especially poetry, has much to do with numbers as my students are frequently baffled to discover.
Here Prof Roger Bowley argues that poetry and numbers are more closely linked than you might think:
Poetic metre or the rhythmic structure of a line of poetry fascinates me. Why does the number of beats in the line contribute to the humour in a limerick? Or add to the emotion in a sonnet? Why does a rhyming couplet give us a feeling of completion at the end of a soliloquy or a sonnet? How did poets find a way to put music into words on a page?
Another word for poetic metre is 'prosody' which comes from the Greek for 'a song sung to music or pronunciation of a syllable' which demonstrates the two goals of poetic metre - to echo human speech and to capture music in words. Ultimately the 'rules' are not there to constrain poets but help a poet learn mastery over words, their rhythm and their music. If you were learning to paint or to play an instrument would you not want to learn the exercises and techniques to help you learn rather than just figuring it all out on your own? It'd take ages!
If you'd like to learn more about poetic metre there are some great books out there:
Stephen Fry believes that if you can speak and read English you can write poetry. But it is no fun if you don't know where to start or have been led to believe that Anything Goes.
Stephen, who has long written poems, and indeed has written long poems, for his own private pleasure, invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre, rhyme and verse forms.
Whether you want to write a Petrarchan sonnet for your lover's birthday, an epithalamion for your sister's wedding or a villanelle excoriating the government's housing policy, The Ode Less Travelled will give you the tools and the confidence to do so.
Brimful of enjoyable exercises, witty insights and simple step-by-step advice, The Ode Less Travelled guides the reader towards mastery and confidence in the Mother of the Arts.
Instead of a blurb I'll use this chance to reprint one of my favourite Mary Oliver Poems just because she's a fantastic poet and her brilliance at writing poetry serves to represent how wonderful her slim guide to writing poetry is also!
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting
While out of work ill and, quite literally, voiceless last week I decided to spend some time with my much neglected collection of poetry books. Poetry requires time for consumption and digestion. Not just physical clock time but mental 'head-space' time. You can't read a poem while a part of your brain is thinking about what to cook for dinner or that you haven't been to the gym in three days. You have to be focused. If tweets are fast food designed for people on-the-go, poetry is foie gras and caviar; food to be savoured, relished and remembered.
It can be exceedingly difficult to find the time for it in the modern world with so many apps, websites and devices devoted to disrupting our thoughts and grabbing our focus as often as possible. To get all that poetry has to offer you need to get away from the beeping gadgets, put up the 'do not disturb' sign and give it the respect it deserves. Poetry is the one style of writing I don't fancy reading on my Kindle - it belongs on the printed page or to be spoken aloud by the human voice. In short, it is sacred.
And so being bed-bound like a modern day Beth from Little Women (if it weren't for antibiotics I think I would have perished young as well - thank God for modern medicine!) I gathered my books around me to nourish my soul. It struck me as interesting that I was much more drawn (as I usually am) to my mixed poetry anthologies than to a book by an individual poet. I have collections by e.e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsberg, Brendan Kennelly, Wendy Cope and many more whom I love but when I'm in the mood for poetry I tend to go back to the anthology where I read the poem that drew me to that poet originally rather than pick a book solely comprising their work.
Why is that? Are poems more appealing set among contrasting works? Are anthologies better because an editor has gone to the trouble of picking the best poems and excluding the chaff? Perhaps there are people out there who much prefer reading poems in their original collections 'as the poet's designed them' and scoff at anthologies. I'd love to hear your thoughts on this!
I can only speak for myself and for me anthologies win almost every time so I thought I might give a brief introduction to a few of the poetry anthologies that have given me huge enjoyment in my life:
Neil Astley is a prolific anthologiser (I may have just invented that word) having put together a multitude of collections for Bloodaxe Books. This book is one of a trilogy with companion pieces Being Alive (2004) and Being Human (2011) and is divided up under headings like 'Body and Soul', 'Roads and Journeys', 'Disappearing Acts' and, my favourite; 'Me, the Earth, the Universe'.
The blurb: ''Staying Alive' is an international anthology of 500 life-affirming poems fired by belief in the human and the spiritual at a time when much in the world feels unreal, inhuman and hollow. These are poems of great personal force connecting our aspirations with our humanity, helping us stay alive to the world and stay true to ourselves.'
The blurb: 'To pass the time on a long train ride from London to Cornwall, playwright Harold Pinter and his two companions, Geoffrey Godbert and Anthony Astbury, set up a challenge: Choose a hundred poems by a hundred poets – living poets excluded – to represent the finest poetry ever written in English. The three agreed to organize this collection unconventionally, alphabetically by author rather than chronologically. The resulting anthology is challenging, eclectic, very personal, and great fun. With its surprising juxtapositions and gargantuan range of voice and style, 100 Poems by 100 Poets brings old favorites into a new light and less well-known poems out of the shadows.'
The sticker from Charlie Byrne's bookshop on the back of this book is in punts so it's been in my possession at least ten years now. I love it because they chose to include my favourite Shakespeare Sonnet (No. 29) which proves I have the same taste as Pinter. Win.
3) Lifelines - New and Collected.(2006) Compiled by Dónal O'Connor, Caroline Shaw and Stephanie Veitch, intrduced and edited by Niall MacMonagle. published by Town House, Dublin.
The blurb:
It is twenty-one years since the pupils of Wesley College Dublin first published their pamphlets, Lifelines - Letters from Famous People about their Favourite Poem, to help with famine relief in Ethiopia. Their stunningly simple idea resulted in three volumes of best-selling poetry anthologies.
Under the direction of their English teacher, Niall MacMonagle, the pupils of Wesley College now publish their finalLifelines. It is a hugely entertaining, eclectic collection, comprising entries from the famous of 2006 and selected responses from previous editions.
My favourite collection - without question. The fact that each poem has been selected as somebody's 'favourite' means that every one is gripping in some way. The inclusion of the letters explaining the choice is also a stroke of genius as it offers a helpful introduction to a previously unknown poem or can offer insights into a familiar one the reader may not have considered before. I have been dipping in and out of Lifelines for a few years now and continue to find hidden gems guarded by the blurry blue bunny (!)
Does anyone out there have an anthology they treasure and would like to share? Please let me know if so! I can offer more suggestions if people have all of these and want more ideas but I'd love to hear your ideas first.
Apparently learning poetry by heart is the new 'in' thing in educational theory. They've even got a new government initiative in the UK driving the memorisation of poetry involving a nationwide competition for school students - see here: Poetry By Heart.
Anyone lucky (!) enough to have had me as a teacher over the past number of years will know that I have long extolled the benefits of poetry memorisation and since 2004 I have cajoled enormous numbers of students to successfully commit poetry to memory. I always enjoy the look of astonished pride on the face of a reluctant poetry student as they complete the stanza or poem successfully in front of the class.
Poetry Ireland and the National Library have also been running the Poetry Aloud competition, a competition aiming to celebrate the spoken recitation of poetry, here in Ireland for a number of years now. Poems must be spoken from memory for Poetry Aloud so the while memorisation is not the focus of the competition it is necessary to compete. By all accounts it's a terrific competition and if any Calasanctius students would like to compete next autumn do come to myself or one of the other English teachers to discuss it.
Memorising poetry isn't easy, as Stephen Moss of the Guardian demonstrates with his somewhat failed attempt to memorise William Blake's Auguries of Innocence -->
But the benefits of it for your brain are immense. Rote learning gets a bashing in the media these days but I actually think we don't do enough of it in schools. Memorisation improves focus, challenges and exercises your brain and has been proven to improve cognitive ability into old age. There's a detailed run down of these benefits on awaken.com here: In Praise of Memorization.
In an era when we are generally externalising most of our knowledge (does anyone remember how we found answers to questions before Google?) and memory (do you actually know your best friend's phone number?) to devices and the internet we face a general 'dumbing down' of society unless we consciously fight to learn things by heart.
So what makes a particular poem good to memorise? I think a regular rhyming scheme and steady rhythm really help. The Poetry By Heart website has a very wide mix of stuff from Chaucer in 1380 right up to present day poets like Carol Ann Duffy and Patience Agbabi. Some of it is very challenging (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight?!) but most of it is accessible to all readers and a few of the Leaving Cert poets including Yeats, Boland, Longley, Mahon, Rich, Heaney and Larkin feature.
Since I started teaching I've compiled my own list of the best poems to gently encourage (read: force) students to memorise. Here's a shortlist:
There was an excellent discussion about creative writing on the Marian Finucane Show on Radio 1 yesterday (hosted by Aine Lawlor) featuring authors Carlo Gebler, John Boyne and MJ Hyland discussing their approaches to writing. It's well worth a listen if you've ever thought about putting pen to paper.
If you've been wondering why there's been a serious lack of updates to the blog lately it's due to the many rehearsals for Camelot, this year's school musical, which have been taking place since the beginning of September. I've been part of the directing team this year and it's been a full-on roller coaster ride since then till this week when the show is finally unveiled to the public on Wednesday.
