Text: William Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience (Oxford Edition, illustrated pb edition). See also Teaching Poetry.
To help my sophomores appreciate Blake in personal, sensuous, and emotional as well as more "academic" and intellectual ways, I ask them to do a project that weaves oral readings, dramatic performances, and personal writings and drawings into selections from the poems to form a visual and verbal collage. The culminating activity is a series of informal group performances from rough-drafted scripts, based on Blake's poetry and their own experiences. Below are worksheets that lead up to production of these scripts and performances.
I assign these tasks one by one over a period of days (rather than distribute the assignments all at once) so that each day's work feels fresh and new. Obviously, as with classroom use of any published materials, the worksheets cannot substitute for instruction; the teacher must communicate deep personal interest and engagement in every activity on the sheets.
BLAKE COLLAGE:
Goals:
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3)
B. Choose one clause, phrase, or line from the above verses and copy it below. Pretend it is the first sentence of a prose poem by and about yourself. Continue drafting your prose poem for 5 minutes.
C. In groups, rehearse and perform one of the poems discussed today.
D. Draw 3 symbols that represent 3 themes in your life. For example, if you remember liking to play under a certain tree when you were a child, perhaps a tree of that kind would be a symbol of innocence, of imagination, or of the lost past. See the symbols as keys to emotional states that are difficult to express in any other way.
E. Choose 3 clauses or phrases that you like best from your recent fast-writes* (including B), and write them below: (*Throughout the year, my students do 5-10-minute informal writings which they keep for use as "seed" writings from which they might develop formal papers. During the Blake project, they write a few more and add them to their collection. As fast-write prompts, I often use a set of about seventy 3x5 cards, on each of which I've written a question, e.g.: "What is your earliest memory? Narrate and describe the story." "What was the happiest time in your past?" "Write about a person you love and enjoy." "Write about the last time you visited a place you love and enjoy." "Make a list: 'my favorite things.'" "Describe a scene that you came upon suddenly, something that surprised you, or something that just stays in your memory. Don't explain what it means." "Write an apostrophe to a favorite place or thing, asking it and telling it something." I deal out 3 or 4 cards at random to each student, and they quickly choose one of the questions or borrow one from a neighbor.)
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F. Find your three favorite etchings in the Blake book. Choose one, pretend you are one of the figures (human or otherwise), and write a short monologue. You might want to speak directly to the 20th-century viewer of the etching.
G. Find or make a connection between your response to E and your response to F.
H. Find or make a connection between your responses to E and A.
I. H. Find or make a connection between your responses to D and A, E, or F.
J. Write a quick note to William Blake about a connection between a piece of his work and your experience or a piece of your writing.
Create a interactive group performance, using your worksheet "collage" materials, fast-writes, other Blake poems, further personal stories, and your imagination. Tasks:
1 -- Work in enough excerpts from or references to Blake to occupy about
half the time.
2 -- Combine these with your fast-writes and additional stories from
your own life.
3 -- If possible, work in some visual art and/or some music excerpts.
4 -- Develop a "through-line" that will loosely hold the pieces together,
e.g.,
Suggested starts on creating a "through-line" for a performance:
- a simple plot in which characters interact, possibly resolving a conflict
- a unifying theme, observing narrator, or central image (e.g., a sunflower, whose petals represent different ideas related to Blake's work) which will gather a collage of different dramatic vignettes into 'a pattern with surprises, to satisfy the mind.'
1. With your group, choose one of Blake's etchings. Arrange yourselves so that your positions and postures imitate the visual content of the etching. Freeze. Then develop a short scene in which members of the group act out a short drama that starts with these characters in this situation. Freeze your closing scene into a second tableau.
2. One member of your group will be William Blake, and the other members of the group will be various characters from his poems. Develop a scene in which the characters speak to their author, and he responds. Or develop a scene in which characters interact without their author.
3. You will play yourselves, and the plot will be the solving of a problem that one of you has, through the use of the various materials on Blake and from your own life that you've collected.
4. Your performance might be about school and education -- your experiences and feelings about it. Start with a car-pool conversation?
5. Your performance might revolve around childhood memories. Scene: a friend's house during spring break or on a snow day? An elementary-school playground?
6. Your performance might be about friendship. Scene: refectory?
7. Two friends are babysitting two children. Scene: the back yard -- the children playing in the grass under the trees, in the sandbox, or with other play equipment (swings, etc.?).
8. A group of friends is arguing about Innocence and Experience, using events from their lives to support their positions ...
One group built their performance around memories of childhood playgrounds at recess. The class gave a standing ovation to the student who composed a ballad about how all the kids had teased "a girl named Autumn" and sang the verses to his guitar. The theme of this group was that "innocence" in any pure form does not survive infancy, for even the very young child has developed and is willing to draw on a deep capacity for cruelty. However, they thought that understanding and compassion can spring from reflecting on one's own and one another's cruelties.
In another scene, 4 students were hanging out and disagreeing about the value of innocence and of experience. One girl said that an essential aspect of her creative life is writing stories, but that she never began writing them until she passed the stage of innocence and appreciated the fundamental sense of loss and pain that imbues human life. Her opponent in debate, a fervent advocate of preserving a state of innocence, told how her mother's recent disillusioning experiences at work have darkened the emotional atmosphere of the entire family, and how she wishes her mom had her innocence back again so the family could be happier (she surprised herself and the rest of us by starting to cry as she told this -- the other kids passed her the classroom box of tissues).
A third group scene began with a morning carpool. The driver was irritated that one student was late and that another, not a friend on good terms, had requested a ride at the last minute.
Another group did a funny skit whose subject was their remembered pleasures of unspoiled nature from their younger years (their core poem was "The Garden of Love"). Two reminisced about school beach hikes in 8th grade. One student told how he disappeared down a 20-foot cliff, slid-fell to the bottom, and then jumped up, to see faces overlooking the cliff edge in horror, his whole group assuming he must have been badly hurt. "Mr. G, from whom I'd come to expect words of wisdom in almost any crisis, just stared at me and said, 'Aw, shit, dude!'" and Mr. S added, "When you fell, I saw my whole job flash before my eyes!"
Another group based its performance on a stanza-by-stanza commentary on "The Poison Tree," relating each stanza to other poems by Blake and to personal experiences of jealousy, some resolved, some unresolved.
Some students taped crayon drawings onto the chalkboard to signify settings,
then danced and did choral readings from their scripts.