2021 Post #16 -- A Meditation on the Wild Things

 by Brett Vogelsinger

Listing images, objects, and ideas in our Writer's Notebook is always a fun way to get the internal gears turning and ready to write. To introduce Wendell Berry's poem "The Peace of Wild Things," I start by asking my students to write "wild things" in their notebooks and take two minutes to list anything that comes to mind under that heading.  Under the document camera, I start my own list each period. 

A toddler throwing a tantrum?  A rushing river? Yellowstone?  Animal from The Muppets? A herd of deer?  A raucous concert? (And yes, I might be slipping in a review of our recent vocabulary word "raucous" on that last one!)

It's intriguing how the word "wild" can bring to mind things that are quiet or loud, outdoors or indoors, human or otherwise.  

We watch the video animation of Wendell Berry's poem, read by the poet:

We watch the poem a second time, and this time I encourage students to start a second list, this time capturing a few key words that they find striking in the poem.  Words like heron, grief, day-blind, and grace might make their lists. 

Briefly, we discuss this: Can things be at the same time wild and peaceful? How is it that the poem refers to wild things and is yet so still?  

It is not uncommon for Maurice Sendak's Where the Wild Things Are to come up in this conversation. 

Finally, in our notebooks, we take a few minutes to write about one of the wild things on our list.  There is no pressure to make our words take the form of a poem or sound anything like Wendell Berry's. His poem is a backdrop for our thinking.  

I do invite students to consider whether there is something surprising or ironic about the wild thing they chose to elaborate on in their notebooks.  Might they borrow one of Wendell Berry's words we listed to write about it? Do they find peace in their wild thing, or something else?  

Further Reading:

Brett Vogelsinger is a ninth grade English teacher and NBCT at Holicong Middle School in Doylestown, PA. He is the founding editor of Go Poems, facilitates his school's literary magazine, Sevenatenine, and contributes monthly posts at Moving Writers. Follow him on Twitter @theVogelman.