Guy’s telling me he and his buddy are driving around Atlanta
one night in the seventies and they hear the DJ say,
“Percy Sledge is in town for just one more might, folks,
and he’s staying in room such-and-such at the so-and-so motel
and would like all of his fans to come out and see him,”
and they’re thinking, Percy Sledge hasn’t had
much radio play lately (and won’t again until 1987 when
Oliver Stone puts his only big hit on the Platoon soundtrack),
and while Mr. Sledge might have another type of fan in mind
altogether, my friend and his buddy go to the motel
and knock on the door, and this chubby guy with a gap in his teeth
and wild hair invites them in, asks them to sit down,
offers them a soft drink, and the three of them talk
for awhile about music, sure, but also about sports and food,
and then the two men get up to go, and the guy
shakes their hands and thanks them for stopping by,
and just then my friend stops to take a sip in the middle of his tale,
and for no reason I can think of,
I recall the most beautiful first sentence of any story
ever written, Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher,”
which begins: “During the whole of a full, dark, and soundless day
in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung
oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone,
on horseback, through a singularly tract of country.”
Lovely, huh? It’ the word “heavens” that make it so:
everything here on earth is dull, dark, soundless,
autumnal, oppressive and low, but it’s better up there—in the heavens!
In the place where Roderick and Madeleine Usher will go
and where Poe himself will join them in a few short years.
Oh, and the verb tenses, especially the “had been”!
For if the speaker were miserable then, is it not likely
that he is happy now? Even if he isn’t.
It is language to dance to, is it not,
to waltz to, one might say, and slowly, soberly, like bears,
not wildly like frenzied chickens:
Flaubert said language is a cracked kettle
on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to,
while all the time we long to move the stars to pity—
but we are bears, are we not, lumbering about
to the harsh clang of the quotidian?
For Wittgenstein, philosophical problems
are “language on vacation,” by which he meant—
well, I’m not sure. How about this: philosophical or,
for my purpose, poetical language, is language on vacation
from humdrum usages, from weather reports and office memos.
Think of nouns and verbs in lounge chairs, basking under
a tropical sun as their paper-umbrellaed drinks grow watery
yet somehow even more intoxicating.
Here’s a good word: “isthmus.” It would make a fine title
for a book, though not one of mine. and “Zamboni”:
now there’s a fun yet deeply responsible word,
with its connections of erasure, of wiping clean, of virtue.
Charles Ives loved virtue; Harold C. Schonberg said
Charles Ives “yearned for the virtues of an older, town-meeting,
village-band, transcendentalist, Emersonian America,”
though he expressed those yearnings “in the most advanced,
unorthodox, ear-splitting, grating music composed by anybody
anywhere up to that time.” Ives let the notes go out for a walk,
didn’t he, as did musicians as different as Jim Morrison and Poulenc,
now buried together in Pier Lachaise. Oh, and the two guys,
the other two: the one’s telling me they’re standing in the parking lot
thinking, Was that really Percy Sledge, and they look back,
and suddenly the guy throws his arms out wide and sings,
“When a mannnn loves a womannnn . . .”
David Kirby
from his book The Ha-Ha: Poems
Louisiana State University Press, 2003
used with permission of the poet
LESSON PLANS
For a Math Class
by Laurie Williams
Pass the poem out to students. Have them number the lines on the left-hand side. Please note that this poem is written in octaves (8 lines per stanza).
How many lines total does this poem have?
After students have numbered the lines, have them go through the poem and look for periods, question and exclamation marks (full stops).
How many full stops does this poem have?
How many of those full stops are periods?
How many are exclamation marks?
How many are question marks?
What is the ratio of period to exclamation mark?
period to question mark?
exclamation mark to question mark?
How many commas does the poem have?
How many colons?
How many dashes?
How many pair of quotation marks?
How many pair of parenthesis?
What percentage of the punctuation is commas?
What percentage is periods?
What percentage is colons?
What percentage is dashes?
What percentage quotation marks?
What percentage parenthesis?
What is the ratio of dashes to colons?
What is the ratio of commas to full stops (periods, exclamation marks, and question marks)?
What is the ratio of parenthesis to quotation marks?
For an English Classroom
by Laurie Williams
The rhythm in this poem moves at a frenetic pace. This is a good discussion for pacing in writing in prose and poetry.
Terms to know:
end-stopped
enjambment
octave
If students do not already know the meaning of the above terms, please discuss those terms with them.
Pass the poem out to students. Have them number the lines on the left-hand side. Please note that this poem is written in octaves (8 lines per stanza).
After students have numbered the lines, have them go through the poem and look for periods, question and exclamation marks (full stops).
How many sentences does the poem have by way of punctuation?
Which sentence is the longest? the shortest?
Have students highlight the first sentence, then not highlight the second sentence, and so on and so forth so that the students can “see” the grammatical constructions.
Have students then read the poem aloud sentence by sentence. Have a different student read each sentence so that students can also “hear” the grammatical constructions.
What is the tone of the poem?
Where does the tone shift? What happens to the grammatical structure when the tone shifts?
What effect does that shift or those shifts have on the rhythm of the poem? the meaning?
Have students look at the end of each line. Which lines are enjambed?
Have students denote the enjambed lines somehow, with an asterisk or some other marker.
What is the difference between an enjambed line and an end-stopped line?
Have students point out favorite end-stopped lines and favorite enjambed lines.
How do the octaves work with the rhythm of the poem?
How is the poem set up? What occurs in the poem?
How does the pace of the poem work to convey meaning? If this poem were written as a story or a personal essay, where would the paragraph breaks be?
Have students tell each other a story that actually happened. As the teller is telling, have the listener take notes and also make note of what associations or other ideas he or she makes while listening.
Taking the story told and the associations and mind wanders, have students craft a poem that includes regular stanzas of some sort and variations in sentence length and a combination of end-stopped and enjambed lines.
end-stopped—a line that ends with some type of punctuation
enjambment—a clause or phrase that continues through the break of the line
octave—an eight line stanza
Lesson Plan for David Kirby’s “Looking for Percy Sledge”
by Laurie Williams
This is a great poem to teach annotation.
Pass the poem out to students. Have them number the lines on the left-hand side. Please note that this poem is written in octaves (8 lines per stanza).
After students have numbered the lines, have them go through the poem and look for any words they do not know and circle those words.
Have them look for people and for quotations as well.
For each unfamiliar word, have students look up the word in a dictionary, and then write in their own words a definition that most fits with the poem.
For each person mentioned, have students research that person and then write a brief annotation of that person is or was that best fits the intent of the poem.
For each quote, have students research where the quote came from and how it relates to the meaning of the poem and then write a brief annotation that sheds light on the quote and the poem.
Have students include their annotations in the poem in the same way annotations are done in their textbook or in an example. It could be numbers with footnotes or a symbol with the annotation out to the side or a combination.