The happiness of ice cream and piano keys

playing with color and feelings and poems

First of all, a quick reminder I’ll be talking on Zoom tomorrow night about Sparking Reluctant Writers. Come join me for ideas about getting kids engaged with writing!

Colors and feelings

Second of all, I’d like to share a very pleasing poetry project we enjoyed last week. That sounds more boring than it was. Let me try again: in my child’s preschool, they learn a whole system of talking about feelings, using colors. Blue is calm/challenging feelings like sadness and shyness. Red is agitated/challenging feelings like anger and frustration. Yellow, active happy feelings. Green, calm happy feelings. It’s definitely useful, and helps me understand why my kid goes from excited to agitated so easily — both feelings share that active intensity.

But like most things preschool (except maybe the importance of sharing), this is a very simplified view of the human experience.

So I was very tickled to run into Mary Ruefle’s color sadness poems in her book Private Property. In them, she talks about all different kinds of sadness, each with their own shade. For instance, and excerpt from her poem about purple sadness:

Purple sadness is the sadness of classical music and eggplant, the stroke of midnight, human organs, ports cut off for part of every year, words with too many meanings, incense, insomnia, and the crescent moon. It is the sadness of play money, and icebergs seen from a canoe.

I love the idea of there being many colors of each feeling, and each one having such specific and strange associations. I knew I wanted to imitate them with my students.

The Prompt:

First we picked colors, and did some freewriting about our associations with that color. I had kids list everything the color made them think of: objects, experiences, feelings, tastes, memories — no wrong answers. I had them write long enough that they could get past their obvious associations into stranger stuff. (For us, this was about 10-15 minutes.) I also encouraged them to be specific. Instead of just “white is like snow,” I urged them to write something like, “white is like the snow on my windowsill in the morning when it’s snowed secretly in the night.” The weirdness is in the details, and we want weird!

Then I read them several of Mary Ruefle’s poems. Maybe too many. I couldn’t stop. I love them so much.

Then I had them pick a color and a feeling and write a poem about that color feeling. After seeing lots of stereotypical combinations come out in my first class (yay second chances!), I encouraged them to think of a combination that wasn’t their first association. We all have a sense of red anger, but what does green anger look like? Or red sadness? Or red happiness? Or?

What color happiness is this?

The results:

The poems were so good! I wish I could pile them on you. So many strange and wonderful images and expressions of experience came up in them. Here is a poem I’m particularly excited about. Enjoy!

Black Happiness
by Eric Cisyk

Black happiness is the happiness of ice cream and piano keys, food in your hair, a painting canvas, groomed ski runs and a cold swimming pool.

It is the happiness of spring and the ending credits after a scary movie.

You can wrestle with black happiness but no matter how many times you push it to the floor or punch it in the face it will always get back up reciting poems.

Black happiness is mascular, and it tosses you into a deep bucket of bittersweet chocolate, drowning you until you can spot a sprig of joy dancing around.

It is the happiness of a blister, and a broken lamp in the middle of the night, the sound of a friend collapsing into a stiff chair, a muffled crash as he leaps to his feet, and the whispers of guests leaving your birthday party.

Awesome, right?