It’s been 20 years at least
since I last did a day as a poet in a school, so when I was asked to
participate in a special one-day program at my sons’ middle school, it was a
return to an experience I hadn’t had in some time. Each year the schools in the
Tredyffrin-Easttown (TE) district put
on some variation of the same program, intermingling concepts of arts, culture
and character. This year, the program for this school was Imagine That: Lives
Well Lived, focusing on people who had passions that took them out of the usual
run-of-the-mill career paths. There’s an assembly one day with a theme speaker
for the week: Robb Armstrong, the cartoonist behind Jump Start. Then, on
another day, the middle school is flooded with various sorts of odd ducks &
the classes literally trooped from room to room during the day, getting
presentations about whatever. There was a former NFL player who quite football
to sing opera, several members of People’s
Light & Theatre Company, playwright Tom Gibbons, an
architectural photographer, the chef from the General Warren Inn, an
investment banker who did alabaster sculptures, another fellow who carved owls
out of tree stumps, a quilt maker, myself & several others. Over the course
of the day, I had four fifth-grade classes & two seventh-grade ones.
Considering the disputations
here
of late concerning poetic difficulty & ant-war readings*, it’s worth noting
here that I built my own little 30-minute presentation around a reading of the
opening section of Ketjak,
a text significantly more difficult than anything Noah Eli Gordon was proposing
for the UMass reading. I’m happy to report that the
poem didn’t prove at all difficult for fifth or seventh graders, which only
reinforces my thesis about the community at UMass
being crippled as literates by the university itself.
I started each class by
asking students to define poetry. No single definition showed up in all six
classes, but a few did turn up in five of the six:
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>“Words put
together”
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Writing that
expresses emotion or feelings
<![if !supportLists]>§
<![endif]>Writing that can
rhyme
At least one fifth-grade
class also offered “writing that doesn’t have to rhyme” as a definition. A
student in one class suggested that it was “what you think,” which I rather like.
The persistence of that first definition, which I heard in exactly that
formulation at least three of the five times it appeared, made me suspect that
this is what students had retained from whatever formal training in poetry the
TE district has given them in the past.**
Ketjak of
course does use rhyme, albeit not in the vulgar sense so popular among the new
formalists. In at least two of the classes, I put up one of Robert Grenier’s scrawl works
from r h y m m s*** that demonstrates how rhyme itself can exist
even without the presence of words.
In the Q&A time that
rounded out each class, there were a number of questions about process – how
long did a poem take, how long does it take to write a
book+, where do I get my inspiration, do my kids ever figure into my work
(yes!) – but the one question that showed up in every
single class was “which book (or poem) is your favorite”? I’d passed around a
dozen or so books as I’d read, everything from In the American Tree to Toner
to Demo to Ink as well as both
the Salt and Figures editions of Tjanting.
It’s an interesting question, in part because it’s so very difficult to
respond, but also because it suggests a relationship between poetry &
desire or poetry & passion that these kids absolutely get, but for which
they don’t exactly have the words. I always respond to this inquiry in the same
way, saying that I can’t pick among my poems any more than I could among my
children – I have intense personal relationships with every one – so that when
asked to sort through this conundrum, I invariably turn to something with which
I have had relatively little involvement, the actual design & printing of
the book itself. Unless the cover itself is actually botched, as was the case
with the first edition of In the American
Tree, I tend to like all of them likewise. But if I look at the cover of What, I can literally see the
neighborhood in which I grew up in John Moore’s
painting, right down to where my mother now lives on the back cover. That’s as
good a reason as any.
* About
which more later this week.
** I know
that Marj
Hahne
did a day in one of the elementary schools here a year or two ago & this is
the same school district in which Ange Mlinko once matriculated.
*** Albeit I
realize now that I inverted the lines. How, I wonder, did that change the poem?
+ I’m a
funny person to ask that particular question, since it’s been easier for me to
“write a book” than to “finish a poem” – The
Alphabet at this point consists of ten published books, but not yet a
completed poem.
