National Poetry Month: An Excerpt from "The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue"

An Excerpt from "The Canterbury Tales: General Prologue"
Geoffrey Chaucer

WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

National Poetry Month: An Excerpt from "The Wasteland"

An Excerpt from "The Wasteland"
T.S. Eliot

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke's,
My cousin's, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

National Poetry Month: Always Marry An April Girl

Always Marry An April Girl
by Ogden Nash

Praise the spells and bless the charms,
I found April in my arms.
April golden, April cloudy,
Gracious, cruel, tender, rowdy;
April soft in flowered languor,
April cold with sudden anger,
Ever changing, ever true --
I love April, I love you.

Attention all Delaware Teachers! First Annual Summer Institute on Instruction and Assessment Now Taking Applications

This week we are excited to announce our first-ever Summer Institute on Instruction and Assessment. This two-week (eight-day, forty-hour) institute will deal intensively and exclusively with the “how-to’s” of testing and evaluation in both classroom instruction and preparation for formal, large-scale assessments.

Participants will complete this institute having evaluated and analyzed ineffective test items—including literature-based writing prompts—and having written, critiqued, and revised their own. If you could improve only one aspect of your school’s program to guarantee increased student achievement on the Delaware Student Testing Program and other components of the Delaware Comprehensive Assessment System, classroom-level evaluation of student work is where you’d want to focus.

In addition to the benefits your students will receive as a result of their teachers’ participation, this institute has been approved by the Delaware Department of Education for 40 recertification or relicensure hours. All participants who successfully complete the two weeks will receive the necessary documentation.

There is no cost to participants, their school, or their districts. All necessary materials will be provided by Prestwick House. The potential benefits to participants, their schools, and their districts, however, are virtually limitless.

Prestwick House is also seeking to expand its stable of freelance writers, and participants who successfully complete this institute may be offered the opportunity to write for any of our numerous lines of educational reproducibles and downloadables—for pay, of course, on a per-project basis.


WHEN WILL IT BE HELD?

June 28 – July 9, 2010 (Monday – Thursday; Tuesday – Friday)
9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m. (one-hour lunch break each day)

WHERE WILL IT BE HELD?

Prestwick House Café
58 Artisan Drive
Smyrna, Delaware


WHAT’S IT GOING TO COST?

There is no cost to you, your school, or your district for participation in this institute.

IS THERE A STIPEND?

Because we are able to offer participants 40 hours toward their re-licensure requirement, we are unable to pay them for their participation in the institute. However, any participants who afterward elect to write, edit, or proofread for PWH will be paid on a per-assignment basis.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR THE PARTICIPANT?

40 clock hours toward the Delaware Professional Standards Board’s 90-clock-hours-in-5 years licensure requirement; Potential employment as freelance, offsite Prestwick House writer, editor, or proofreader.

ARE THERE ANY BENEFITS TO MY SCHOOL OR DISTRICT?

Prestwick House has made it a priority to ensure that its products address the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association’s Common Core State Standards for English Language Arts, which are at the heart of Delaware’s successful Race to the Top application. Participants will gain important skills and information to help their schools and districts meet the state’s goals for student achievement and reporting of progress.

WHAT’S IN IT FOR PRESTWICK HOUSE?

Broadened awareness of Prestwick House and its products in Delaware; Expanded “stable” of potential offsite writers, editors, and proofreaders.

WHAT’S IT GOING TO INVOLVE?

Click here to download a copy of the agenda.

HOW DO I SIGN UP?

Simply click here to download an application form.

To mail in your entry:
ATTN: Mr. Doug Grudzina
PO Box 658
Clayton, DE 19938

To fax your entry:
(888)-718-9333, attention Doug

To scan and email your entry:
doug@prestwickhouse.com

Because this is our first annual institute, we are limiting participation to 10 applicants, so don’t delay!

Tuesday Trivia

1. Which author’s wife died as a result of her dress catching on fire as she sealed their child’s hair in a scrapbook with hot wax?
2. Which author commissioned a portrait of himself as he expected to appear when he rose from the grave at the Apocalypse?
3. Which female author was also considered the world’s first computer programmer?
4. Believed to be an alcoholic and opium addict, which poet and author most likely died (prematurely) of a brain tumor?

Which author was so in love with his young bride that he visited her grave and opened her coffin nearly two months after her death?



Ralph Waldo Emerson was married to Ellen Tucker who tragically died just seventeen months into their marriage. According to a diary entry dated almost two months after her death, Emerson not only visited her grave site, but opened the coffin to be closer to his bride.




Which poet was sent to Russia to mediate with Nikita Khrushchev?



Robert Frost was sent to Russia as a mediator, but was so ill upon arrival that Krushchev had to come to him.




Which poet pleaded insanity to avoid criminal charges when police found that he was hiding a friend’s stolen goods in his college dorm room?



Allen Ginsberg ended up being committed to a psychiatric hospital because he did not want to face criminal charges.




Which poet compared love to a compass (the tool used to draw arcs and circles in geometry)?



John Donne, a lover of metaphors, refers to “stiff compasses” with fixed feet in his poem “A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning.”




Which poet is buried at Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey sans his heart (which resides with his wife’s body across town)?



Thomas Hardy wished to be buried alongside his first wife but also wanted to receive the honor of being buried at Poet’s Corner. A compromise was made and Hardy’s body was sent to Poets’ Corner while his heart was buried next to the grave of his wife.

National Poetry Month: Over The Land Is April

Over The Land Is April
by Robert Louis Stevenson

OVER the land is April,
Over my heart a rose;
Over the high, brown mountain
The sound of singing goes.
Say, love, do you hear me,
Hear my sonnets ring?
Over the high, brown mountain,
Love, do you hear me sing?

By highway, love, and byway
The snows succeed the rose.
Over the high, brown mountain
The wind of winter blows.
Say, love, do you hear me,
Hear my sonnets ring?
Over the high, brown mountain
I sound the song of spring,
I throw the flowers of spring.
Do you hear the song of spring?
Hear you the songs of spring?

National Poetry Month: Just Before April Came

Just Before April Came
by Carl Sandburg

THE SNOW piles in dark places are gone.
Pools by the railroad tracks shine clear.
The gravel of all shallow places shines.
A white pigeon reels and somersaults.

Frogs plutter and squdge—and frogs beat the air with a recurring thin steel sliver of melody.
Crows go in fives and tens; they march their black feathers past a blue pool; they celebrate an old festival.
A spider is trying his webs, a pink bug sits on my hand washing his forelegs.
I might ask: Who are these people?

The Birthday Bard

by Douglas Grudzina

Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday to you!
Happy Birthday, dear Billy!
Happy Birthday to you.

Except it isn’t really his birthday, and he might not even be who we think he is to begin with.


William Shakespeare, aka The Bard of Avon, is one of those GREAT WRITERS whose life is shrouded in mystery, doubt, innuendo, and lack of real evidence—so anything anybody says is true.


No one knows when Will was born. The third child of John and Mary Shakespeare (nee Arden), he was baptized, according to the record of Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-on-Avon (sometimes Catholic and sometimes Anglican, so W.S. could have been either), on April 26, 1564. Since they baptized kids young back then, the popular speculation is that little Bill was born three days earlier, on April 23.


April 23 was also the date of Will’s death (but not the same year), so having him born and die on the same date (but several years apart) is kind of fun. So much fun, in fact, that some scholars believe that that is how the April 23, 1564, birthday rumor began.


When he was eighteen, randy Will married the much-older Anne Hathaway (eight years back then was a pretty big age difference—actually, it’s nothing to sneeze at today, especially when it’s an older-woman-younger-man couple—why do you suppose we have such a double standard, anyway?).


Most scholars agree that Shakespeare’s wife is not the same Anne Hathaway as the twenty-first-century American star of Get Smart and The Devil Wears Prada. There is no evidence to suggest that Anne Hathaway ever appeared on stage in one of her husband’s plays. So adamant was he about his wife not being in show business (sort of like a ramped-up Ricky Ricardo) that there was a complete and total ban on women appearing on stage in all of England!


Actually, according to Tom Stoppard and Marc Norman, Shakespeare was really in love with some rich guy’s daughter who had to marry a Virginia plantation owner before there were Virginia plantations.


During the course of his prolific career, William Shakespeare wrote 37 plays. Or 38. Or 39. Or 40.


Or none, depending on who you listen to. (Depending on to whom you listen.)


He disappeared from Stratford-on-Avon in 1585 and stayed missing until he popped up in London in 1592. One thing is certain, however, and that is that he died on April 23, 1616, at the age of 52. Or 51, depending on when he was born.


There is no evidence to support the contention that Anne tried to return his un-opened birthday presents.


There is no one alive today who is a direct descendent of William and Anne Shakespeare (nee Hathaway). His sister, Joan (Hart), however, has numerous living descendants.


So, Happy Birthday, Bill … whenever it is and whoever you are.

National Poetry Month: My April Lady

My April Lady
by Henry Van Dyke

When down the stair at morning
The sunbeams round her float,
Sweet rivulets of laughter
Are bubbling in her throat;
The gladness of her greeting
Is gold without alloy;
And in the morning sunlight
I think her name is Joy.

When in the evening twilight
The quiet book-room lies,
We read the sad old ballads,
While from her hidden eyes
The tears are falling, falling,
That give her heart relief;
And in the evening twilight,
I think her name is Grief.

My little April lady,
Of sunshine and of showers,
She weaves the old spring magic,
And breaks my heart in flowers!
But when her moods are ended,
She nestles like a dove;
Then, by the pain and rapture,
I know her name is Love.

National Poetry Month: April's Charms

April's Charms
by William Henry Davies

When April scatters charms of primrose gold
Among the copper leaves in thickets old,
And singing skylarks from the meadows rise,
To twinkle like black stars in sunny skies;

When I can hear the small woodpecker ring
Time on a tree for all the birds that sing;
And hear the pleasant cuckoo, loud and long --
The simple bird that thinks two notes a song;

When I can hear the woodland brook, that could
Not drown a babe, with all his threatening mood;
Upon these banks the violets make their home,
And let a few small strawberry vlossoms come:

When I go forth on such a pleasant day,
One breath outdoors takes all my cares away;
It goes like heavy smoke, when flames take hold
Of wood that's green and fill a grate with gold.