Failing and Flying

Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It's the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was 
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars 
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say 
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.

POETRY INTERPRETATION

Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert

Reasons for Selection

Initially Arielle recommended the poem to the group. After reading Failing and Flying the group was captivated by Gilbert's simple lyricism and straightforward clarity of tone. We thought the poem's characteristics would work well with the concept we had been brainstorming. The length allowed for four interpretations to occur without overwhelming the user of our project. The ability to break the poem up, not by words but rather by sentences, extended our abilitiy to generate knowledge rather than piecing knowledge together. Most importantly, the poem struck us as a raw human emotion that many readers or users can relate to.

 Project Description

Option 1:  An interactive close reading of the poem using "Dreamweaver."  We will hyperlink various words/phrases within the poem which will lead to seperate pages that show a team member's interpretation. These pages could be filled with the team member's personal response to the text, be it through verbal, audio, or textual interpretation (e.g. music clips, images, literature responses, graphs, maps, games, etc). Programs in the toychest will also be utilizied to help build the interpreters visual representation of what they understood the poem to be communicating.

    Brainstorming Ideas

• Interactive?
• Instructional?
• Database program? A program that can shuffle through hundreds of interpretations and generate knowledge for the user?

Option 2:  An instructional close reading using "Camtasia 5." Close reading explained through the format of "Learning another Language". Step-by-step tools that teach close reading of poetry to non-literature people the same way you learn another language. The program will give you options to repeat the steps thoroughly and then move to the next step, and so on until, you are confident in your understanding.

   Brainstorming Ideas

• Interactive?
• Quiz/Test feature on Camstasia?
• Exlporing the Camtasia software to consider other options...

 Our Philosophy

   Poetry has always been criticized for having a multiplicity of interpretations, as well as for it's lack of linear answers. For many of us lovers of literature, and poetry, it is this very quality of poems that lure us into the enchanting world of creative meaning. It is this stimulation of the mind, and possibly the soul for some, that generates rich meaning and gives breathe to the world. It is our hope, and philosophy, to enable tech savvy individuals to enhale the poet's breathe through our Dreamweaver project. Through presenting aesthetic visual images we hope to activate higher levels of thought in a fresh and enjoyable way. We are attempting to create meaning, and information, that pops, morphs, moves, and jumps off the webpage. Our use of sound, music, reversal of soundbites, particular rhymes, and so forth is meant to jolt the passive reader into consciousness and curiousity.

  Most importantly, we are attempting to create a way in which we poetry lovers can re-experience and reexamine the way we read poetry. The most creative thinking occurs while an individual is brainstorming with others. If this is so, than maybe we can max out the creative thinking of brainstorming by storming the brain with visuals and sounds that live in the minds of our fellow earthly beings.

Our Goal

Our Goal is simply to put the theoretical unit of this class into practice. At the end of the project we hope to have recreated, to the best of our ability, a little microcosm of the poetic program we run in our minds when we read poetry. We have reduced the significance of our individual interpretation by adding three others. By doing so, we hope to acheive a different set of procedures for interpretation. We envision a larger version of this poetic program to be more reductionistic and database like.

References:

poetry.org