AUTHENTIC ASSESSMENT 7.2: Written in the Rocks- The Poetry of Geology
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Purpose
In this assignment, you will read a poetic passage by Galway Kinnel and identify the geologic concept. process, or material that is being addressed in the poem.
Learning Goals
to recognize geologic processes and features in poetry and identify the concepts being identified
Assignment Introduction
There is nothing new in geologists writing poetry. In the Library’s Rare Books collection, self-penned poems are abundant: as prefaces, as musings from the field, as dedications, or, in the case of Bakewell and Scafe’s A geological primer in verse (1820)Links to an external site. and J.S. Watson’s Geology. A Poem in Seven Books (1844)Links to an external site. , as epic geological histories of the world, laid out in rhyming couplets. Meanwhile, our Assistant Librarian Wendy Cawthorne has been unearthing poems in books and journals published right up to the present day, sometimes in the least likely of places. Who would have thought, for example, that a poem riffing on Bob Dylan would lurk in the seriously scientific Journal of Metamorphic Geology (Vol. 26 (2008): 123)?
What are the reasons for these strong links between geology and poetry? Is there something more to it than the connections between poetry and landscape, or the fact that geologists are, more than other scientists, revelers in the wide expanses of the great outdoors? And while we’re at it, do physicists and chemists and biologists write quite as much poetry as geologists?
Assignment Instructions
1) You will read the poem below and speculate what this poem is about. This is a poem about a geologic concept or Earth material that you have already learned in class.
Galway Kinnell Poem
I want to be
Swirled, intricately lined
Folded, frozen where I flowed
A clear brazened surface
One can cross barefooted
It’s true; but even more, I long more
To become, Ah me,
Churned rubble still
Tumbling after I stopped
Which a person without shoes
Has to do deep knee bends across
Groaning, aaaaah, aaaaah, at each step
Or be heaped up into a heiau
In sea spray on an empty coast,
Knowing in all my joints the soft
Crablice-ish, clasp of this.
And when I reach the dismal shore
All made, I now, of me
Which is just a hoi polloi of the slopes
I don’t want to call ahoy! ahoy!
And sail meekly in, unh-unh
I want to turn and look back
At my glittering world of blackness
Where we loved in the bright moon
Where all are atoms were broken but lived
Where even now two kneecaps gasp ah!
