John Haines, "The Sweater of Vladimir Ussachevsky"

The impetus for last week's Hands on Stanzas poem idea was the change in seasons. We've had a mild (and lengthy) fall here in Chicago, and only recently did winter begin to make itself known and felt -- while no snow currently clings to the landscape, just a few days ago we had our first serious flurries which transformed seemingly instantly into a full-fledged whiteout. Temperatures have also dropped into the thirties; my ritual morning check of the Weather Channel's Local on the 8s offers, as of this writing, no surcease from winter's chill.

Rather than have students write a weather poem -- a reliable and flexible idea unto itself -- I used the onset of winter to have them consider a favorite (or unfavorite) article of clothing. I asked them to describe it using as much detail as possible: color, size, shape, condition (old/new), material (cotton/wool/leather/fur/denim/rubber). How does it feel when you wear it? Warm, safe, (un)comfortable? Did it belong to someone else before? If so, who? Does it have an emotional component then? For the purposes of this poem, I defined "clothing" as anything they could wear, which would also include jewelry, glasses, hats, gloves, etc.

The poem I chose to read and discuss for inspiration is an interesting one: "The Sweater of Vladimir Ussachevsky" by John Haines. Haines is not a poet I was familiar with, and I found this particular poem by searching using a variety of different terms and databases. While there were others on my critical radar beforehand (Neruda has some terrific clothes poems, especially "Ode to My Socks"), I like how Haines begins his poem, focusing on the borrowed sweater and the more or less contemporary sense of place (New York City), and erodes reality through the first three stanzas to find the speaker, by the fourth (and longest) stanza, "in Siberia or Mongolia, / wherever I happened to be." Students reacted well to this slippage of time and place; even if the geographical layout was unclear to them, they knew something had happened to transport the speaker from urban New York to a mountainous terrain elsewhere. I also gave them some background on the poem courtesy of the poet himself, including information about the titular sweater-lender.

A poem such as this really opens the door to multiple interpretations and ideas, and at both of my schools we enjoyed discussing it as much as possible in what time we had. Here are the poems from Shields and Solomon students.