Week Forty-Eight: Oh So Sweet! - Heather Nova - "Doubled Up" - Oyster

This week's songs are of the nature that any time I hear one of them, I can't help but think to myself: "What a really sweet song!!!"

<3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3 <3

**Just in case you missed it, I made a bonus post last week on Friday, 3/29; check it out!!!**
**Oh, and I have a new profile pic with my fabulous sweet little jelly bean of a nephew, Carter!!**

I will apologize, in advance, that today's post is so incredibly looooooong, but I am in a very reflective mood... and it's not like anyone is forcing you to read it all! You have a choice to just skip straight to the song, ya know? ;-)

So, I was listening to Heather Nova sing: "Feels good, it feels like poetry, Don't ask me to explain, it just feels good, like poetry..." Then, I started to get a little bit sentimental because out of all the units that I teach in literature, the one that I will miss the most (aside from reading The Outsiders with my 8th graders every year) will be the poetry unit.

Our textbooks have some really excellent poetry selections, and I also enjoy the poetry portfolios that they create as their unit projects. Granted, I do sometimes get tired of reading their original poems about football, basketball, baseball, cheerleading, shopping, texting, and video games, but some of them really do get into the project and end up creating some amazing poems.

My favorite poet of all time is Sylvia Plath. When I was a freshman in high school, we read a selection by Sylvia Plath called "Reflections of a Seventeen-Year-Old", and I was completely blown away!!! Since I still attended Catholic school at that time, we had to purchase our textbooks, and I refused to allow my mother to sell my literature book back at the end of the year. In fact, I still have it in my possession.

Some of the lines that stuck with me the most from "Reflections of a Seventeen-Year-Old" were:

"At the present moment I am very happy, sitting at my desk, looking out at the bare trees around the house across the street...Always I want to be an observer. I want to be affected by life deeply, but never so blinded that I cannot see my share of existence in a wry, humorous light and mock myself as I mock others.

I am afraid of getting older. I am afraid of getting married. Spare me from cooking three meals a day- spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote. I want to be free- free to know people and their backgrounds- free to move to different parts of the world, so I may learn that there are other morals and standards besides my own. I want, I think, to be omniscient...I think I would like to call myself 'The Girl who wanted to be God.' Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be? Perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it. I am I- I am powerful- but to what extent? I am I."

I could not believe how eloquently Sylvia Plath was able to express exactly what I was feeling in my life as a fifteen-year-old... and even still now! Then, when I discovered that Sylvia and I shared a birthday (October 27th), she was immediately elevated to my favorite poet because I absolutely relish coincidences like that!!!

Before I get to Heather Nova's video and lyrics, I am going to leave you with my favorite Sylvia Plath poem called "Elm". I found this poem not long after discovering the birthday coincidence, and it has been my favorite poem ever since:

Elm

(For Ruth Fainlight)

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root: 
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there. 

Is it the sea you hear in me, 
Its dissatisfactions?
Or the voice of nothing, that was your madness?

Love is a shadow. 
How you lie and cry after it.
Listen: these are its hooves: it has gone off, like a horse. 

All night I shall gallop thus, impetuously, 
Till your head is a stone, your pillow a little turf,
Echoing, echoing. 

Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons? 
This is rain now, the big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin white, like arsenic. 

I have suffered the atrocity of sunsets.
Scorched to the root
My red filaments burn and stand, a hand of wires.

Now I break up in pieces that fly about like clubs.
A wind of such violence
Will tolerate no bystanding: I must shriek. 

The moon, also, is merciless: she would drag me
Cruelly, being barren.
Her radiance scathes me. Or perhaps I have caught her.

I let her go. I let her go 
Diminished and flat, as after radical surgery.
How your bad dreams possess and endow me. 

I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. 

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me; 
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

Clouds pass and disperse.
Are those the faces of love, those pale irretrievables? 
Is it for such I agitate my heart? 

I am incapable of more knowledge.
What is this, this face 
So murderous in its strangle of branches?--

Its snaky acids kiss.
It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults 
That kill, that kill, that kill. 

  19 April 1962

And last, but not least, I will include another song by Heather Nova called, "Walk this World", under the lyrics. If you are interested in knowing more about Heather Nova, just 'google' her; there is a ton of info about her online.

I saw a mountain from higher above.

I held your hand and I was doubled up in love.

Big sky above me, a river inside me
And I'm doubled up in love.

You're watching your step but you fall as you're walking.
You take it in stride but still you fall as you're walking.

Big sky above me, a river inside me
And I'm doubled up in love.

Feels good, it feels like poetry,
Don't ask me to explain it just feels good, like poetry,

I'm doubled up again.

Look at the sky,
Lift off like an aeroplane,

Watch the ground come up to meet you.

Big sky above me, a river inside me
And I'm doubled up in love.

Feels good, it feels like poetry,
Don't ask me to explain it just feels good, like poetry,

I'm doubled up again.