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This week's blind review is not a reader submission although the author did graduate from Antioch College. I was recently re-acquainted with this poem while reading a book on educational theory by Maxine Green. She used it to end an essay about the importance of incompleteness. She is not the author, we'll reveal that info next Friday.
Sometimes it seems we try so hard to get everything into a piece that we leave no room for the reader's imagination. Another pedagogical text I read stated that one reason to use poetry in the classroom was that it forced the consumer to infer. Can you look at your own work and say this? As Ray Bradbury said, “Put two and two on the page – but don’t add it up for the reader.”
Keeping Things Whole
In a field
I am the absence
of field.
This is
always the case.
Wherever I am
I am what is missing.
When I walk
I part the air
and always
the air moves in
to fill the spaces
where my body's been.
We all have reasons
for moving.
I move
to keep things whole.
7 comments:
this is Buddhist, right?
I like this a LOT!
I really like this poem. I've copied it down for personal reference... it speaks to me, makes me feel centered. It's like a meditation....
I'm not sure I see the inference or the 2 and 2 in this piece. It seems, in the last stanza, to add up to four.
That being said, I think it's a very successful piece, and I'd be interested to see how Green uses it to discuss incompletenes.
I like this piece because it didn't have to say everything to make a point. Not just that it leaves something to the imagination... But as Dianne says in her comment... it stirs your mind to think about and reflect on what's said. Meditative is a good description of it...
The Green essay is in a collection called:
Variations on a Blue Guitar
published by teacher's college press
Very cool...I'll have to check that out over break!
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