Lifesaving Poems: John Logan's 'The Picnic'

 

 

If it is possible to identify one poem which acted as a kind of gateway for me into the world of poetry, that poem would probably be John Logan’s ‘The Picnic’. I encoountered it first in an English lesson at school.

 

Our third-form English teacher Mr Borton entered without speaking and with his back to us wrote at the top of the blackboard ‘DO NOT REMOVE BOOKS FROM THIS ROOM’, before turning round, smiling and beginning the lesson.

 

All we had to do was read the poem and then talk about it, but it changed me completely.

 

The poem is a narrative of two adolescent children walking across fields one school lunchtime to eat their packed lunches ‘away from the rest‘. The poem evokes perfectly the ‘soft caving in [the] stomach/as at the top the highest slide’ of giving and receiving a first kiss; and of the physical reactions to unexpected and barely articulated intimacy:

There was a word in my throat

with the feeling and I knew the first time

what it meant and I said, it's beautiful.

Yes, she said, and I felt the sound and word

in my hand join the sound and word in hers

as in one name said, or in one cupped hand.

While the poem did not describe experiences I had actually had, it conjured palpably a world with which I was entirely familiar: that of school, lunch hours, fields, streams, games and a vague but undeniably real sense of longing for ‘something else’, of not wanting to conform, perhaps. 

 

You could say I connected with it.

 

Other important questions about this poem arose during the course of the lesson.  One was to do with the poem’s form, or what I would have then called the way it looked on the page.  Oddly, the poem was laid out in one continuous stanza.  Also, it did not rhyme, nor appear to have any regular rhythm.  Indeed, if anything, it sounded more like someone talking.  These were puzzling for several reasons.  While the ‘poetry’ I had experienced as a young child had largely been oral, I had not been made aware that printed poetry in books could attempt to replicate the rhythms of speech and appear to sound natural.  On one level, therefore, the poem did not conform to my early expectations of what a poem could look or sound like at all: I felt it was more of a story than a poem. 

 

On another level, however, I was more than intrigued because the poem was about experience I knew little about but was keen to discover.  Furthermore, while I felt that the poem was ‘like someone talking to me’ I also knew that lines like those quoted above were not the way that people spoke.  There was a sense that this was language which was both real and artificial at the same time.

 

I now identify these feelings as being to do with the interplay of concepts such as ‘form’ with ‘content’, or, ‘voice and feeling’ with ‘structure’. But at the time I felt a combination of intrigue and puzzlement.  To borrow another phrase from the poem, I now see that the poem enacted ‘talk in another way I wanted to know’.

 

Whenever I read or hear a poem I like for the first time I still feel that same caving as at the top of the highest slide. It is a kind of joyous nervousness. I want the poem to talk to me in a way I know and yet have no knowledge of. I am in the business of wanting to be surprised. I am already falling in love with the words taking shape in my throat and under my breath.  

 

 

 

 

The Picnic

 

 

It is the picnic with Ruth in the spring.

Ruth was third on my list of seven girls

But the first two were gone (Betty) or else

Had someone (Ellen has accepted Doug).

Indian Gully the last day of school;

Girls make the lunches for the boys too.

I wrote a note to Ruth in algebra class

Day before the test. She smiled, and nodded.

We left the cars and walked through the young corn

The shoots green as paint and the leaves like tongues

Trembling. Beyond the fence where we stood

Some wild strawberry flowered by an elm tree

And Jack in the pulpit was olive ripe.

A blackbird fled as I crossed, and showed

A spot of gold or red under its quick wing.

I held the wire for Ruth and watched the whip

Of her long, striped skirt as she followed.

Three freckles blossomed on her thin, white back

Underneath the loop where the blouse buttoned.

We went for our lunch away from the rest,

Stretched in the new grass, our heads close

Over unknown things wrapped up in wax papers.

Ruth tried for the same, I forgot what it was,

And our hands were together. She laughed,

And a breeze caught the edge of her little

Collar and the edge of her brown close hair 

That touched my cheek. I turned my face in-

to the gentle fall. I saw how sweet it smelled.

She didn't move her head or take her hand.

I felt a soft caving in my stomach

As at the top of the highest slide,

When I had been a child, but was not afraid,

And did not know why my eyes moved with wet

As I brushed her cheek with my lips and brushed

Her lips with my own lips. She said to me

Jack, Jack, different than I had ever heard,

Because she wasn't calling me, I think,

Or telling me. She used my name to

Talk in another way I wanted to know.

She laughed again and then she took he hand;

I gave her what we both had touched; can't

Remember what it was, and we ate the lunch.

Afterward we walked in the small, cool creek

Our shoes off, her skirt hitched, and she smiling,

My pants rolled, and then we climbed up the high

Side of Indian Gully and looked

Where we had been, our hands together again.

It was then some bright thing came in my eyes,

Starting at the back of them and flowing

Suddenly through my head and down my arms

And stomach and my bare legs that seemed not

To stop in feet, not to feel the red earth

Of the Gully, as though we hung in a

Touch of birds. There was a word in my throat

With the feeling and I said, It's beautiful.

Yes, she said, and I felt the sound and word

In my hand join the sound and word in hers

As in one name said, or in one cupped hand.

We put back on our shoes and socks and we

Sat in the grass awhile, crosslegged, under

A blowing tree, not saying anything.

And Ruth played with shells she found in the creek,

As I watched. Her small wrist which was so sweet

To me turned by her breast and the shells dropped

Green, white, blue, easily into her lap,

Passing light through themselves. She gave the pale

Shells to me, and got up and touched her hips

With her light hands, and we walked down slowly

To play the school games with the others.

 

 

John Logan from Touchstones 5

 

Lifesaving Poems

 

In search of the ‘Tyger’: power relationships and poetry in the classroom

 

When I began teaching the Year 5 class of children whose work would form the basis of my doctoral study of teaching poetry writing I did not really know what I was doing. (This was in an ‘ordinary’ community primary school in a not particularly salubrious area, and with no strong tradition of poetry teaching). I had a strong hunch, nothing more, that engaging the children in reading, writing and performing poems would somehow be of benefit to them. I think I had the grand idea that I would somehow find a link between ‘improved literacy’ and writing poems. But I was confident that if I read them poems and asked them to talk about them we might have the basis of a conversation which could be transformational. This was not a research finding, it was a hunch; and I was so serious in my belief in it that I spent the next three years investigating it.

 

I was influenced in my first sessions with the class by something Wendy Cope once told me about her teaching. After reading a poem to a class she would deliberately restrict herself to one question about the poem, and then let discussion about the poem emerge from there. She also tried never to use the same question twice.

 

On my second visit to the class I decided to read them, among other poems, William Blake’s ‘The Tyger’. I imagined that they would not understand all of it, that they might even find it a bit strange or difficult, but I was convinced they would respond to it. What happened that afternoon changed my whole view of teaching, and teaching literature in particular.

 

After reading ‘The Tyger’ to the class I chose to ask what pictures went through their minds as I was reading the poem. After a few slightly predictable answers about forests and tigers one boy put up his hand and said this: ‘I think it is about a big forest and a little forest. The little forest is trapped inside the big forest and is struggling to escape from it. It is a real struggle. Eventually the little forest breaks free and makes its way to edge of the big forest. It looks out.  What it can see on the other side is the First World War.’ There was a silence. Nobody knew what to say next. I thanked the boy for his comment and said that I found it interesting. Then I did something I had not done consciously in my teaching before. Instead of saying what I wanted to say, which was to debate with the boy’s interpretation of the poem, or read another poem perhaps, I asked the class if the boy’s answer had made anyone else think about the poem differently. All of their hands went up. Then I did something else I had not done before: I allowed the children to take control of the discussion. Instead of their comments going through me ‘in the chair’ they began talking and responding to each other, not always in agreement, but with a new energy and purpose.

 

I thought about this story again at the third Poetry Matters Seminar Series in Leicester in September. During a discussion of a paper by Gary Snapper Michael Rosen encouraged us to reflect on the power relationships at work in the English teaching classroom. It was impossible, he said, to ignore them. Drawing on the work of Foucault, he invited us to consider the connection between the questions we ask in classrooms and the imperative of exams and ‘standards’ and thus policy. Placing poetry in this equation is by definition a disruptive act, he reminded us, because poetry is a democratic and subjective art-form. Sue Dymoke added that taking this kind of risk requires confidence, both in terms of subject and pedagogical knowledge.

 

Together we considered the paradox of ‘losing’ power in order to gain new kinds of knowledge and confidence by asking questions about poems we do not know the answers to. As Sue Horner remarked later at the Seminar, it is possible to move too speedily from curriculum specifications to decisions about classroom practices without taking the time to engender the trust and the fun and the risk which we know teaching poetry can bring. We can catch glimpses of the Tyger, but these will not be memorable or long-lasting if we go hunting for it using only pre-planned routes.