Greenheart Fern

for H.V.

Green
as rock-walled tide pools
we remember, shifting and transposing
itself like filigreed kelp sea-blossomed
in Keatsian dark even our best dreams must envy,
a simple plant with a spare grandmotherly thirst,
unlike yours and mine. But you poured anyway,
Lord how you poured. Then you moved it,
day after day, searching for light,
tracking every glow by a sextant,
some might have supposed,
under the soft gray
of your curls.
Like you, it went on
enlarging, sluffing off the dead
sores of self, of daily usage, fabular,
doing what it could to keep alive its house.
Each window got its share of your plant’s attention.
Anyone driving by would have thought some green
invasion had caught us, would have said,
against radiant glare, we must be
slithering in a tangle of our
own making, though such
green was surely
luscious.

 

Dave Smith
from his book Floating on Solitude
University of Illinois Press, 1996
reprinted with permission of the poet

LESSON PLANS

For an English Class

Lesson Plan for Dave Smith’s “Greenheart Fern”

This poem has such fabulous language that I immediately became fascinated with the physical look and the length of the lines. This is a great poem to show students ways to revise a poem they have written.

Show the poem on an overhead or LCD projector. Discuss the physical look of the poem.

How does the poem look on the page?
What is most noticeable about its appearance?

Pass out the poem to students and have them number the lines in the left-hand side.

Have students place a ruler or other straight edge along the edge of the longest line (including punctuation and then without punctuation).
Place an arrow by the longest line or lines.
Pull the ruler in until the shortest line or lines can be seen.
Place an asterisk by the shortest line.
Are any of the in-between lines exactly the same length (including punctuation and then without punctuation)?

On the right-hand side, letter the lines starting with longest as A.

Now, read it either aloud or silently.
Discuss the theme of the poem.
Make a note of any unfamiliar words, and then look them up.
Does that help clarify the meaning?
How does the look of the poem either underscore or work against the theme?

Then rewrite the poem starting with the longest line (the one labeled A)
and follow with the next longest line,
and the next longest line,
and so on (this does work best with typing instead of writing)

Read the reorganized poem.
Where do you need to change punctuation? pronouns? insert a word or two or delete a word or two for clarity?
Revise this reordered poem to give it the most clarity while still keeping the diminishing shape.

Read aloud the revisions.

For a writing exercise, have students write a concrete poem and then have another student adapt it as this lesson adapts Mr. Smith’s poem.

For a Science Class

Lesson Plan for Dave Smith’s “Greenheart Fern”

Read the poem aloud in class.

Have students underline words and phrases that show the life cycle and/or the growth cycle.

Discuss how the poem shows the lifecycle of human beings and how it shows the life and/or growth cycle of the fern.

After looking at the way the poem shows the growth of a fern, have students work in pairs or small groups to look up the growth cycles of the fern.

Is the growth cycle of a fern different from other houseplants?

Create a chart or table the compares and contrasts the following.

Compare and contrast the growth cycle and life cycle of a fern and at least one other non-flowering house plant.

Compare and contrast the growth cycle and life cycle of a fern, a non-flowering house plant, and a flowering houseplant.

Add non-flowering shrubs flowering shrubs.

Add deciduous trees and coniferous trees.

Add in the human life cycle.

From this table, what are the main similarities and the main differences? How does the human life/growth cycle differ from a plant growth/ life cycle?

Write an essay detailing the differences between the growth cycles of plants.

Write a poem that ties the lifecycle of a chosen or assigned plant with the human life cycle.

For a Math Class


Lesson Plan for Dave Smith’s “Greenheart Fern”

Pass out the poem to students and have them number the lines in the left-hand side.

Have students place a ruler or other straight edge along the edge of the longest line (including punctuation and then without punctuation).
Measure the lines with a ruler including punctuation.

On the right-hand side, letter the lines starting with longest as A.
Then write the measurement of the line to the side or in a chart.
Continue to measure lines and make a note of their length.

What is the difference between the longest and shortest lines?
What is the average line length?

After measuring the lines, have students read the poem.

Then have them count the syllables per line.

Which line has the lost syllables? the least?

What is the average syllable count?

Do the lines that have the longest length also have the most syllables?
What is the difference between line length and syllable count?

For a writing assignment, write the longest line you can, and then write a line that has a high syllable count.

Have the class as a whole, come up with the average syllable count for one line.

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