We read "Total Eclipse" from Annie Dillard's Teaching a Stone to Talk, in which she records her reaction to witnessing the 1979 total eclipse of the sun. Her central metaphor was metal imagery as most of her comparisons illustrate the sudden lack of color in everything during "totality." "My hands were silver," she writes. Her husband's face appears as if made of "bronze plating" that seems as if it would just "peel off." The grasses appear as if viewed in a "platinum print." Students wrote spoken word pieces based on their observations of the eclipse. We began with an observational chart with six categories: See, hear, smell, taste, touch, and interpretation. Students chose a central metaphor to use and many came up with incredible pieces.
This week, we began incorporating Allison Boyd Justus's Solstice to Solstice to Solstice, her observations of 366 sunrises. We learned two terms from Sunrise 245: Surfeit and Dearth. In Sunrise 245, the idea that we can live "a year in a morning or in a red onion" gave us the idea that days are not equal: some days weigh more heavily than others, and some moments weigh more than others. From Surfeit and Death, we made a list of five things there are not enough of and five things there are too much of. Besides the Annie Dillard piece, we read Sylvia Plath's "Mirror, Mirror," in which the MIrror is the speaker. The central metaphor is the mirror itself, and it is the Mirror's perspective we receive. From the mirror's perspective, the old woman's aging appears violent and final: "In me, she has drowned a young woman."
Finally, we reviewed concepts from the past two weeks via quizlet.com, using the flashcards and taking the practice test. The class is formidable minds. The study set is "Introduction to Poetry."