John Thompson

Biography

Born in 1938 in the English industrial county of Cheshire, Thompson was orphaned at a young

age by the death of his father and by his mother’s decision to hand her child over to relatives in

Manchester to safeguard him from German bombing raids. A gifted but restless student, he

attended the University of Sheffield and then, in 1960, Michigan State University, where he did

graduate work in Comparative Literature. It was at Michigan State that he began to write,

influenced by the growing youth movement, anti-war protests, and civil rights demonstrations. In

Michigan, he also came under the direction of expatriate Canadian poet A.J.M. Smith, one of the

pioneering literary modernists in Canada, whose seminar on the French Symbolists turned

Thompson on to the rigours of poetic technique. Upon completing his PhD, Thompson and his

wife drove to New Brunswick where he joined the Department of English at Mount Allison

University in 1966. His time in Sackville was uneven at best. He was revered and loathed by

students and faculty alike, the result being that he was not offered tenure at the end of his

probationary term. Eventually overturned, this judgement of Thompson divided campus and

created the tensions out of which At the Edge of the Chopping There Are No Secrets (1973) and

the posthumously published Stilt Jack (1978) emerged. Both masterful collections, Thompson

was hailed as a poetic innovator. Despite these successes, he endured a series of broken

relationships (including his marriage), destructive alcoholism, and mental anguish. He died in

Sackville in 1976.

For a much more detailed biography of John Thompson, see The New Brunswick Literary

Encyclopedia at http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/t/thompson_john.html

Why Should We Read and Study John Thompson?

In the view of esteemed Canadian poet and critic George Elliott Clarke, John Thompson

is both “the most influential East Coast Canadian poet” and one of the most influential

Canadian poets of the twentieth century (5). He was influential because of his unblinking

focus on the formal aspects of his art. He believed that all writers should strive to find a

form, however exotic, that suits and serves their voice. He was also influential, as Alden

Nowlan was, for modelling the life of the writer. For Thompson, a poet must live for

poetry, which oftentimes (and certainly in his case) causes domestic and professional

strife. Thompson insisted, however, that the work came first, and he accepted this

directive as a private undertaking, not publicly as a dandy or bohemian. Thompson’s

surrender to his art instructed other writers in the wages of such a vocation.

We should also read Thompson for the results of that commitment to art – for his very

fine work, in other words. His language is exact, daring, innovative, and always grasping

at essences that are slightly out of his reach. As such, he often brings us to the precipice

of language, to the point where language exhausts its potential. We know (and he knows)

that there is something more there, but neither he nor we have the tools to grasp it.

Thompson is the first of the New Brunswick poets to bring readers to that exciting edge.

As Nova Scotia poet and critic Peter Sanger suggests, much of the delight of Thompson’s

work is found in its simpatico with the New Brunswick and Maritime literary ethos. In

seeking “to find alternatives to the principles and ambitions of contemporary urbanism

and industrialism,” that work, says Sanger, is thus familiar to Eastern readers (“John

Thompson” New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia). His work is in line with our

environmental conditions and with the intention of many modernist New Brunswick

authors (A.G. Bailey, Elizabeth Brewster, Robert Gibbs, etc.) who sought to explore

landscape as a vehicle for understanding the human psyche. The eco-poets of the next

generation will be indebted to Thompson and the modernists for these attentions to

ecosystem.

Literature & Analysis

“Horse Chestnuts”

I drive through

with a clean nail:

it goes

easy and true through the heart,

but only with force

through the tough

undershell, breaking out

in a jagged, stiff,

brown flower, crumbs

of yellow flesh spilling:

in the heel of my palm

the sharp bite

of the nail-head,

as I thread these fruits on a string

to hang up in the sun.

“Partridge”

Stopping dead still

on the road,

a trace of it

sleeps in the air

(far back in the fir

a faint rustle)

song: coiled in spruce bark

an odour:

buck heat or

the juice of fear;

loving a woman, I know

death’s thicket,

the must of rotting

crab apples

in an abandoned orchard,

this partridge

strutting

through the dying fruit.

“The Change”

It’s in the dark we approach

our energies, that instant

the tide is all fury, still,

at the full:

as that time I lost an axe-blade

in the chopping,

and listened, for days, to the rust

gathering; and that night

I didn’t find it, but came upon

a cow moose blind, stinking

with heat, moaning, and

hooving the black peat with

such blood, such fury,

the woods broke open, the earth

recovered her children,

her silences, her poems.

Analysis

“Horse Chestnuts,” “Partridge,” and “The Change”

To encounter Thompson’s work for the first or hundredth time is to be startled into recognition.

He writes so carefully and evocatively that we enter his perspective. We are therefore the man

stringing horse chestnuts (“Horse Chestnuts”), the figure caught in the autumn stillness on the

road (“Partridge”), or the man searching for his axe-blade in the chopping (“The Change”). His

poems invite a consideration of how far New Brunswick literature has come from the days of

Adam Allan’s strained descriptions and Jonathan Odell’s partisan patriotism.

“Horse Chestnuts” collapses time to moment and image, both tightly framed and precisely fused.

Not a word is wasted in the poem, the language pared down to essentials. The effect is to bring

us into the concentrations of the subject, which turns his seemingly insignificant action to the

personal and ritualistic. The drive of the nail through the flesh of the chestnut is swift and “true”

(he’s hit the sweet spot!), then resisted, the force to overcome that resistance creating “brown

flower” and “crumbs / of yellow flesh spilling.” Without saying so, the poem suggests an array

of opposite tensions (another language) that all bodies feel: force and resistance, exterior and

interior, shell and flesh. Then, suddenly, as if to ground the suggestive in sensation, the speaker’s

palm is “bitten” by the nail-head. Nail punctures flesh in an act, we learn, of preservation: the

fruit is beaded on a string to dry in the sun. A simple action is transformed into ritual, and so

opens a door to meditations on food, husbandry, and even crucifixion, a nail penetrating flesh

having more than casual significance in western culture. The crucifixion, too, if we think about

it, was an act of preservation, at least in the view of French historian René Girard.

The poem illustrates, then, the extensions of language and the futility of marshalling that

language. In foregrounding movement – pressures, punctures, entrances, etc. – the poem offers a

language of the body that is quite different from the language of the tongue. But even when

fixated on that language of the body, the poem slips out of Thompson’s control, illustrating the

fact that writers can never control that which is mediated by language (in this case, a poem’s

meaning). Readers will make of it what they will – either a man stringing chestnuts on a rope or

an arching toward a much more significant historical moment. The more experienced and able

the poet, the more he/she will surrender to and play with this unboundedness of language.

“Partridge” is equally complex, suggestive, and precise. It replicates exactly the moment of the

bird hunter’s hushed anticipation: the moment when thought gives way to sense; when the ears,

eyes, and nose are maximally attuned; when humans cross the threshold to enter the wilderness

inside themselves. As all partridge hunters know, the moment is one of heightened sense (“buck

heat”) and expectant fright (“the juice of fear”), for the bird, “coiled in spruce bark,” will either

exit loudly (the thrum of its wings felt as a primordial beating of the heart) or, confused, strut

worriedly across the hunter’s line of sight. To pick up that trace, the hunter will freeze,

“[s]topping dead still / on the road.” Next comes the shot – and with it, the compact of hunter

and prey that is so little understood and so much scorned in polite society.

The poem is therefore as much about crossing thresholds as it is about freezing a moment in

language. The hunter crosses the threshold of society to enter a wilderness that is inside him (a

wilderness inside all of us that we don’t talk about in polite company) and the bird crosses the

threshold of wilderness to make itself visible to the hunter. Such is their compact. Each enters a

strange, wordless space of longing, fraternity, and empathy. Hunters understand, as do those who

cross margins and borders of different kinds. The space the poem implicates is “ecotone”: the

transitional space between species. It is a space empty of language but flush with meaning.

Such is the space of “The Change,” a poem in which the speaker again crosses a threshold to the

unnameable. But what is “the dark” that Thompson is writing about here? Is it the dark of night?

The “energies” of the first stanza, and their equivalency with fury and fullness, suggest not night

but a state of hyper-awareness or sensitivity. “We” enter that state – his use of the plural pronoun

implies shared possibility – when we exit order to enter ungovernable wilderness. His entrance,

this time, is by happenstance: on searching for a lost axe-blade he comes upon a cow moose in

heat and is entranced by the fury of her need. What he witnesses is unbridled, fierce, muscular,

elemental, and raw. It is beyond language because it is not his energy but an animal’s, an animal

not in possession of language, or at least a language we understand. Mute but furiously real, that

force shakes and disturbs the earth, tearing open an entrance that swallows children, silences, and

poems. In that animal’s fury the poet approaches his own energies, the furnace where poems are

incubated and born. It is a place without government or law. Rather, as the Irish modernist W.B.

Yeats described it in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” more “a foul rag and bone shop of the

heart.”

What makes Thompson so original in New Brunswick literature is this yearning to reach beyond

what language can easily express – to, in a sense, exhaust language. As A.J.M. Smith wrote on

the dust jacket to Stilt Jack, Thompson reaches for “a world of essences, primitive and chaotic,

made of earth, air, fire, and waters … spilt blood, split woods; cries; horses; fish; Anabasis half

begun, half finished in the New Brunswick woods.”

“January February March Et Cetera”

Your waist is growing lean, your skirt

slops around your belly:

you are proud;

you pick over crazy salads and feed me

salt fish pie

day after day;

god damn this winter when the air

and women get thin

and cold!

Building a fierce fire

in the furnace, I imagine

August —

bottles of thick Italian wine,

huge milky potatoes bursting

from the moist earth.

“The Great Bear”

You are standing here though you are gone

a thousand miles:

the green world shines, an apple deep

under ice;

I reach out

to stroke the muzzle of the Great Bear, glittering,

dipped, rooting for berries

under the snow in the next meadow.

Analysis

“January February March Et Cetera” and “The Great Bear”

When nineteenth-century American poet Emily Dickinson was asked what qualifies as poetry,

she responded, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is

poetry.” Many of Thompson’s poems qualify.

“January February March Et Cetera” certainly does for its unusual handling of the privations of

winter. Thompson is not the first New Brunswick poet to treat winter. Charles G.D. Roberts did

in a number of sonnets, as did Robert Gibbs, Elizabeth Brewster, and Alden Nowlan in poems of

varied length and complexity. Each wrote about winter as a time of submission and deferral: to

live through winter is to submit to it, suspending hope and deferring comfort to another season.

We forbear, at first with defiance (like the woman in the poem, retaining our pride in the face of

leanness and loss), but soon a “day after day” sameness tests that forbearance. Not only is the

season brutal but it also mocks. It is a line of telephone posts on a flat prairie that never seems to

end. It is, indeed, “January February March Et Cetera,” a white figure on a white ground. Like

Roberts’s cows, that unending sameness compels us to “dream of summer” (“In an Old Barn”).

In this speaker’s imagination, though, something extraordinary happens: there is a transport to

August, where “thick Italian wine” and “huge milky potatoes” burst from “the moist earth.”

Thompson is deliberate in amplifying the contrasts: the thinness of winter versus the fecundity of

summer. Against the rationing of winter is the riotousness of harvest: ripeness, warmth, and

plenitude. Everything teems with life, if only by proxy. The bounty sustains him and us.

Notwithstanding the rather obvious sexual innuendo at the centre of the poem, what Northerner

can read this poem and not want to plunge his hands in that “moist earth” of August?

Boldness of imagination is key, implies Thompson. Though cows may be “content / In day-long

contemplation of their dreams” (“In an Old Barn”), humans dream more robustly. They dream in

technicolour. In fact, as “The Great Bear” demonstrates, the human mind is an agile author, able

to see in an apple frozen under ice a whole green world as it might be seen from space – and as

our planet is seen by Ursa Major, the constellation of the Great Bear. Once freed from the social

strictures of “the normal,” the imagination can thus “reach out / to stroke the muzzle of the Great

Bear” as it is “rooting for berries / under the snow in the next meadow.”

Is the poem about the bear or the imagination, one might reasonably ask? Given Thompson’s

fondness for Emily Dickinson, it is probably the latter, for “The Great Bear” and the previous

poem seem to be a response to Dickinson’s “The Brain is Wider than the Sky”:

The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and You—beside—

The Brain is deeper than the sea—

For—hold them—Blue to Blue—

The one the other will absorb—

As Sponges—Buckets—do—

The human imagination, in other words, is at least equal to “January February March Et Cetera.”

The Ghazals

Published posthumously in 1978, Thompson’s Stilt Jack is a collection of ghazals (pronounced

“guzzles”), a poetic form that originated in 7th-century Arabia, and is the most popular of the

classical forms of Urdu poetry. Usually about love, loss, or melancholy, the Persian ghazal is

often set to music and has fixed repetition of reference and rhyme. The English form of the

ghazal that Thompson wrote is less rigid.

It consists of a minimum of five discrete and autonomous couplets that have, says Thompson in

an introductory note, “no logical, progressive, narrative, thematic (or whatever) connection” (5).

Its difference from the highly structured sonnet form, he continues, accounts for its fascination

for Western writers. That, and the fact that its internal order is “clandestine”: “the link between

couplets … is a matter of tone, nuance: the poem has no palpable intention upon us. It breaks,

has to be listened to as a song” (5).

The question is, how can a poem without unity, a poem that has “no palpable intention” (5), be

more than random free association? Thompson answers this by saying that the ghazal “allows the

imagination to move by its own nature: discovering an alien design, illogical and without sense –

a chart of the disorderly, against false reason and the tacking together of poor narratives. It is a

poem of contrasts, dreams, astonishing leaps” (5).

In other words, each couplet is complete in itself; in fact, a poem in itself. There is connection

among the couplets but it is beyond narrative logic. The connection sometimes involves rhyme

and at other times involves the extension of a tone or feeling. Sometimes there is parallelism in

evidence – one couplet might respond to another couplet, both still autonomous and complete,

but both a riff on the same emotion. The space between couplets of the same ghazal, then, is

where the poetic imagination does its work – where, freed to roam, digress, and give expression

to unmanageable desires, it thrives in intense focus. The result is an unpredictable cartography.

“Ghazal II”

In this place we might be happy; blue-

winged teal, blacks, bats, steam

from cows dreaming in frost.

Love, you ask too many questions.

Let’s agree: we are whole: the house

rises: we fight; this is love

and old acquaintance.

Let’s gather the stars; our fire

will contain us; two,

one.

“Ghazal VII”

Terror, disaster, come to me from America.

Middle of the night. Highs in the seventies. Penny Lane. Albany.

Albany?

What letters of van Gogh I remember, I’ve forgotten.

He cut off his ear. Crows. Potato eaters.

Crazy squash, burnt tomatoes, char of poems, sour milk,

a candle gone down: is this my table?

I’m waiting for Janis Joplin: why,

why is it so dark?

I talk to a poet: he goes on, drunk:

I pray he’s writing, don’t dare ask.

Hang on, hang on: I’m listening,

I’m listening to myself.

“Ghazal XXXVII”

Now you have burned your books, you’ll go with nothing.

A heart.

The world is full of the grandeur,

and it is.

Perfection of tables: crooked grains;

and all this talk: this folly of tongues.

Too many stories: yes, and

high talk: the exact curve of the thing.

Sweetness and lies: the hook, grey deadly bait,

a wind and water to kill cedar, idle men, the innocent

not love, and hard eyes

over the cold,

not love (eyes, hands, hands, arm)

given, taken, to the marrow;

(the grand joke: le mot juste:

forget it; remember):

Waking is all: readiness:

you are watching;

I’ll learn by going:

Sleave-silk flies; the kindly ones.

Analysis

The Ghazals

Since literary analysis – the “processing” of text by an expert reader in order to fix and produce

“meaning” – is contrary to the intentions of the form of ghazal that Thompson wrote, we leave it

to readers to make their own sense of the ghazals above.

What will help is to know that many of Thompson’s ghazals address an absent subject, either his

wife, as in Ghazal II, his friend and fellow poet Wayne Tompkins, or other poets of note such as

W.B. Yeats and Adrienne Rich. Ghazal II, writes Pater Sanger, “refers to the Thompson family’s

move from the rented Wood Point farmhouse … to another old farmhouse with two ramshackle

shed barns at the very small, scattered settlement of Jolicure. … The house was bought partly

with money loaned by Thompson’s mother-in-law in the United States. In October, the

Thompson’s completed their move, and during the ensuing two months, … Meredith [his wife]

and John found it impossible to live together any longer” (Collected Poems & Translations 32).

Questions and Considerations for Reflection

► John Thompson was typical of many New Brunswick writers who looked beyond region to

produce uniquely “regional” work. There is no irony or paradox in that observation. Thompson,

for example, was a British-born, American-educated poet whose primary influences were from

French and Persian literature. Yet much of his work is embedded in a New Brunswick landscape

that is as recognizable to us as it is in the poetry of Charles G.D. Roberts, the first of our poets to

mine the lyric potential of the Tantramar. While literary regionalism, then, is local in execution,

it is also often international in origin. This “cosmopolitanism,” as pioneering Canadian critic

A.J.M. Smith called it, enhances our understanding of “region” by providing the artists who

represent our regions with a wide array of tools. To be a regional writer is thus not necessarily to

be confined to region. In fact, regionalism is better understood as a migratory phenomenon, a

phenomenon given to the free flow of artists and ideas. When regional artists open themselves to

the larger world, both their art and their regions expand. Such was the case with Thompson.

This is an important consideration in the context of this curriculum because New Brunswick

literature began with the writing of outsiders. Only with permanent settlement did it find its

voice, and that voice only became authentic when writers achieved full intimacy with New

Brunswick ground. The import of modernist poetic techniques via A.G. Bailey and John

Thompson served to further the maturity of that authentic voice. What made Thomson unique

was his understanding of the necessity of acquiring “provincial citizenship” – not a citizenship

recognized by the courts, but a citizenship of soil, barns, grasses, horses, and snow. Technique

without citizenship does not produce art any more than citizenship without technique. In Bailey

and Thomson, both were present.

► The analysis of “Horse Chestnuts” above, particularly in light of the futility of marshalling

language, will remind sophisticated readers of the generations-long discussions around William

Carlos Williams’s poem “The Red Wheelbarrow.” Both modernist poets seem to be using the

vivid image to invite a meditation on the unboundedness of language. Williams’s poem is both

arrestingly simple and profoundly suggestive. Here it is in its entirety:

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Are both poets, then, inviting us to complicate their simple pictures, or are they illustrating,

without intention, that language is an untameable, wilful beast?

► Thompson’s work has been very influential in the region because it anticipated the eco-

poetics of Maritime poets Don Domanski, M. Travis Lane, Harry Thurston, and Don McKay, to

name a few practitioners. It has also been influential for modelling how poets call to other poets

in their tradition, both local and beyond. In Thompson’s work, this awareness of who and what

came before is more than intertextual; it is a form of call and response, thus a private dialogue

with other poets. Astute readers must therefore read Thompson with antennae raised, for he

wrote with an awareness of the major modernist poets in his tradition, including the modernist

poets of the Fiddlehead School. For readers who would like to learn more about eco-poetry, the

following two sites provide an introduction: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-

term/ecopoetics and http://www.eco-poetry.org/what-is-eco-poetics-.html.

Strategies for Teachers

Strategy 1: Ordinary to Extraordinary (“Horse Chestnuts”)

Teachers may want to guide students through a comparison of “Horse Chestnuts” with Robert

Gibbs’s “Conservation Procedures,” concentrating on how both poets turn the ordinary to the

extraordinary. Because preservation is so familiar to our society, we overlook how remarkable a

process it is; poetry helps us to see the everyday in a new and astonishing light. After discussion,

ask students to write a poem or reflection that elevates something seemingly inconsequential,

such as tying a shoelace, sharpening a tool, or skipping a flat stone on water. Students should

strive to emulate Thompson’s and Gibbs’s careful and perceptive eye, attentive to the colours,

textures, sensations, intentions, associations, and consequences of their activity.

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Writing and Representing: Make effective choices of language and techniques to enhance the

impact of imaginative writing and other ways of representing

Strategy 2: Student Hunting Expertise (“Partridge”)

Given the culture of hunting that is so prevalent in New Brunswick, it is likely that at least a few

students in each class will have knowledge of hunting partridge. Before reading this poem, ask

students to share that experience. Where and how does one find partridge? How is hunting

partridge different from hunting deer? What is the most difficult part of the hunt, and when is it

most likely to go wrong? Is there something that motivates people to hunt besides the promise of

meat? After reading the poem, invite the student hunters to help you and their classmates better

understand what Thompson means by the “rustle” or the “juice of fear.” This strategy would be

particularly useful if the student hunter(s) in class rarely participate in discussions.

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Speaking and Listening: Listen critically to analyse and evaluate concepts, ideas, and

information

Strategy 3: Reading Innuendo (“January February March Et Cetera”)

In this poem, Thompson’s description of summer is exceptionally sexualized. Fantasizing about

moist earth and huge milky “potatoes” is a welcome reprieve from the monotonous reality of his

wife’s “salt fish pie.” The reader isn’t quite sure whether the speaker is projecting frustration

with the season onto his wife, or frustration with his wife onto the season – they have become

intertwined in his mind. Students will likely differ in whether and to what degree they find this

poem humorous or laden with sexual innuendo. Ask them to debate whether the poem is funny,

angry, or sexually frustrated, explaining their rationale. If more prodding is needed, try asking

them whether they believe the speaker has affection for his partner.

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Speaking and Listening: Articulate, advocate, and justify positions on an issue or text in a

convincing manner, showing an understanding of a range of viewpoints

Strategy 4: Grappling with the Ghazals (Ghazals)

Readers may find Thompson’s Ghazals frustrating. Attempts to force a meaning out of them

through intensely focused analysis is likely to fail, and may prove tedious. A number of teaching

strategies are presented below; they can be combined, or each can stand on its own.

1) When a piece of written or visual art is difficult to comprehend, and the technical skills

required to create it are not easily understood, it can be tempting to dismiss the art as

pretence or conceit. Struggling and perhaps failing to understand can, after all, be a blow

to the ego. If Thompson’s Ghazals provoke an angry, defensive, or dismissive reaction in

your class, that reaction provides an excellent learning opportunity. With challenging

material, it is important to model a willingness to admit confusion and persevere through

it. First, discuss the reaction while being open about your own frustrations. Admit if you

don’t know what to make of the poems, and ask for collaboration: say, for example, “I

can’t see a connection between Van Gogh and Janis Joplin (“Ghazal VII”) – does

anybody have any suggestions?” Even though the meaning may still be unclear at the end

of this collaborative process, the development of even partial insights will likely make the

student experience rewarding. If some students insist that there is nothing to get – that “I

could do that” – then take them up on the offer: challenge them to write a Ghazal and

read it aloud.

2) Ask students to read and discuss Billy Collins’s “Introduction to Poetry” (available on the

Poetry Foundation website, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176056). In that

poem, Collins suggests two approaches to poetry. Which approach have students been

more accustomed to in school: playful experimentation or detached, analytical

dissection? Ask students to apply the first approach to Thompson’s Ghazals, immersing

themselves and having fun without trying to pin down the one true meaning that the poet

has maddeningly obscured.

3) In A Mind for Numbers, Barbara Oakley distinguishes between two modes of thought that

cannot occur simultaneously: focused and diffuse. Focused thinking involves

concentration, whereas diffuse thinking is the relaxed, fluid kind of thought one can

experience when lost in a walk or drifting off to sleep. The diffuse mode allows for

unexpected connections and creative leaps. Have students share examples of when they

had sudden insights: what were they doing? Were they focused intently on something, or

was it when their attention was wandering? Have they ever woken up from sleep and

seen things in a new light, or realized how something they were studying in math was

related to a sport they were playing or a book they were reading? Ask students to try

focusing intently on a Ghazal immediately before bed, and then letting themselves drift

off. When they look at the Ghazal again the next day, do they see any different

connections between the couplets? 4) Thirteenth-century Persian poet Rumi, who often wrote in the ghazal form, is the best-

selling poet in the U.S. Ask students to seek out some of this popular poet’s work, and

guide them through a comparison with Thompson’s 20th-century adaptation of the ancient

form. In what new directions did Thompson take the form?

Key Stage Curriculum Outcomes:

Speaking and Listening: Examine others’ ideas and synthesize what is helpful to clarify and

expand on their own understanding Reading and Viewing: Articulate their own processes and strategies in exploring, interpreting,

and reflecting on sophisticated texts and tasks

These suggested strategies all involve grappling with difficulty, a skill and an attitude that is

applicable to all subject areas. Beyond the subject-specific key-stage outcomes listed above,

please note that the strategies also address Essential Graduation Learnings in problem-solving

and personal development that are usually only indirectly addressed in the English classroom.

Specifically, the EGLs addressed in this Teaching Strategy are

Personal development: Demonstrate intellectual curiosity, an entrepreneurial spirit and initiative

Problem-solving: Use a variety of strategies and perspectives with flexibility and creativity for

solving problems; Formulate tentative ideas and question their own assumptions and those of

others

Further Reading

Clarke, George Elliott, “Sounding John Thompson’s White Noise.” Studies in Canadian

Literature / Études en littérature canadienne 36.2 (2011): 5-31.

Collins, Billy. “Introduction to Poetry.” The Apple that Astonished Paris. Fayetteville, AR: U of

Arkansas P, 1996. Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/176056

Dickinson, Emily. “The Brain is Wider than the Sky.” The Complete Poems. Boston: Little,

Brown, and Company, 1924. Bartleby. http://www.bartleby.com/113/1126.html

Oakley, Barbara. A Mind for Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science (Even If You Flunked

Algebra). New York: Penguin, 2014.

Sanger, Peter. “John Thompson.” The New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia. Ed. Tony

Tremblay. Fredericton: St. Thomas University, 2011.

http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/t/thompson_john.html

---, ed. John Thompson: Collected Poems & Translations. Fredericton: Goose Lane, 1995.

Thompson, John. “Ghazals.” Stilt Jack. Toronto: Anansi, 1978. 5.

Williams, William Carlos. “The Red Wheelbarrow.” The Collected Poems of William Carlos

Williams, Volume 1, 1909-1939. Ed. Christopher MacGowan. New York: New Directions

Publishing Co., 1938. Poetry Foundation.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/178804

Yeats, W.B. “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” The Poems of W.B. Yeats: A New Edition. Ed.

Richard J. Finneran. London, Eng: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1933. Poetry

Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/172071

For much more detailed primary and secondary source bibliographies of John Thompson, see

The New Brunswick Literary Encyclopedia at

http://w3.stu.ca/stu/sites/nble/t/thompson_john.html

Copyright

We gratefully acknowledge the generosity of House of Anansi Press, Inc., John Thompson’s

literary publisher/executor, for allowing us to use the poems above for this curriculum. Further

use or distribution of these poems, however, is a violation of Canadian copyright law and is

strictly prohibited. Under no circumstance may literary material used in the curriculum be

reproduced, distributed, or stored without the permission of the copyright holder.

All poems above (with the exception of the ghazals) appear in Thompson’s At the Edge of the

Chopping There Are No Secrets. Toronto: Anansi, 1973. The three ghazals above appear in

Thompson’s Stilt Jack. Toronto: Anansi, 1978.

All contents except for poetry and fiction copyright © Tony Tremblay, James W. Johnson, and

Alexandra Cogswell.