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Home > Features > Poetry at Sea: Sailing Across the Disciplines
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Poetry at Sea: Sailing Across the Disciplines
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by Ellen , Greenblatt
University High School
San Francisco , California
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| | Expedition on the Pacific
Biology teacher Jack Kay is a worldwide institution. He's led workshops from California to Hong Kong to Singapore to London, has graded AP Biology Exams for almost 20 years, has helped write textbooks, and served as the Biology Content Editor for the launch of AP Central. At Iolani School in Honolulu, where he has taught for 40 years, students and faculty (some of whom are former students) often refer to him as Poppa Jack. AP Biology teachers who have participated in his
workshops feel just as warmly about him even as they are in awe of his prodigious knowledge.
For the past several years, Jack has taken a group of his Iolani biology students along with students and teachers from the mainland on a five-day marine biology cruise. Last February, I was in the right place at the right time, and Jack, whom I know from College Board committee work and from some visiting teaching I have done at Iolani, invited me to come along with the 100 other students and teachers who were taking over the expedition vessel, aptly called The Rapture.
As you might imagine, it took me about a nanosecond to accept. I knew that I would get to learn about the beautiful oceans surrounding the Big Island of Hawaii, I would snorkel and kayak with the students and the naturalists who were our guides, and I would see whales and dolphins.
But I felt uneasy as a freeloader, so I persuaded Jack to make room for me to shoehorn a miniworkshop on poetry into their packed schedule. I chose Elizabeth Bishop's poem, "The Fish, " in which the speaker describes catching a magnificently "battered and venerable" old fish with five hooks and lines -- "a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. "
Certainly, Elizabeth Bishop's description of the fish is not "scientific," and she doesn't refer to genus and species. Still, her speaker observes as closely as any scientist as she describes the fish in sympathetic detail: Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age. English teachers call analyzing images and form "close reading," but scrutinizing detail in order to see a pattern that might mean something seems common to both science and literature.
Jack is planning another cruise for February 2003, this time to the islands of Maui and Lanai, and I'm already looking at, among other things, some passages from The Odyssey. I don't expect that we will see any Sirens, but you never know!
Ellen Greenblatt teaches at San Francisco University High School and writes for AP Central. If you are interested in joining Jack Kay's 2003 marine biology cruise, you can send him an e-mail at jkay@koa.iolani.honolulu.hi.us.
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