Write The New Year's Revolution
What will you do — right now, this week, this month — to make a better world?
Happy New Year!
One feature of my “write here, write now” classroom mantra is that all holidays should be fitted with a timely writing prompt. You could throw a party, but prompts carry zero calories, virtually no clean-up (maybe tissues?) and you don’t need a horde of organizing classroom moms (God bless them!).
Sometimes the universe just writes your lesson plans. I needed something to celebrate the New Year, but resolutions are just so Ancient Babylonian. As the days of Winter Break were winding down, I was looking for an engaging and student-centered prompt/activity to help students deal with the reality that they were up before noon and wearing clothes. And the universe delivered.
A dear friend and colleague posted Marge Piercy’s “"The Birthday of the World” on Facebook wherein Piercy asks herself what she has or hasn’t done for peace. This was the mentor text I was looking for.
And then in Tuesday’s NYTimes, Roger Rosenblatt asks his readers, “What if instead of making a milquetoast resolution, we made airtight commitments?” Rosenblatt makes the argument that new year’s resolutions defined by self-improvement make a limited impact on the world. So we can be, in George Bernard Shaw’s words, “a feverish, selfish little clod of ailments and grievances,” or we can agree with Walt Whitman to “[l]ove the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone who asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy.”
All of this talk of protest staging and letter writing put me in mind, of course, of my favorite Kentucky poet Wendell Berry’s well-known work, “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” which is built on a crescendoing syntax of imperatives: “Love the world. Work for nothing./ Take all that you have and be poor.”
Thank you. That’s the plan.
Instructions:
Read and annotate Roger Rosenblatt’s essay, “This Year, Make a Resolution About Something Bigger Than Yourself”. Highlight the sentences that sing to you. Underline the main ideas. Put a star by the rhetorical shift. Scribble questions in the margin.
Grab a partner. Discuss the main ideas of Rosenblatt’s essay.
Now designate one of you as Partner A and one of you as Partner B.
Partner A will read Marge Piercy’s “The Birthday of the World” out loud two times to Partner B. While Partner A is reading each time, Partner B will jot down lines, words, or images that stand out to them.
Partner B will read Wendell Berry’s “Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front” out loud two times to Partner A. While Partner B is reading each time, Partner A will jot down lines, words, or images that stand out to them.
Now take 20 minutes to write a New Year’s Revolution poem. You may or may not use the words, lines, images that you’ve jotted down from your mentor poems. You may or may not use Piercy’s or Berry’s style or structure. But consider the following:
What will you do — right now, this week, this month — to make a better world?
How much have you put on the line for freedom, peace, _________?
Where have you spoken out? Who have you tried to move?
What do you hope for?
What do you put your faith in?
Who do you love?
Thank you so much!