There's a Poem in That

Last year, I carpooled with a few colleagues to a literacy conference in Salt Lake. On the first morning of the conference, a couple of us went to a breakout session and heard from Georgia Heard, who offered these tidbits (among others) for teaching and writing poetry:

-          Find poetry in the ordinary

-          Observe the small moments around us

-          Be filled with curiosity and wonder

-          See beauty in the ugly (beyond stereotypes)

-          Look at the world in a new way (simile and metaphor)

-          Love the meaning and sound of words

-          Pay attention to and write from all feelings

-          Always be on the lookout for poetry seeds

-          See that you can look at anything and find a poem

Sound advice; and points I wholeheartedly agree with, especially as I name Billy Collins as my favorite modern poet. He subscribes to all of the above. (I try to as well when I pretend to poet.)

The next morning, as we began our journey north, we started a conversation about poetry, and I shared an anecdote about using Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Valentine for Ernest Mann” as a writing prompt for my 9^th graders. And as we discussed the place that poems hide, especially in the lives of teenagers who refuse to look for them, I spotted a middle-aged woman in a bright pink bathrobe, mismatched house slippers, and curlers, cigarette smoke shrouding most of her face, sitting slouched on a short, crumbling cement and brick wall at a bus stop. Flippantly, I mentioned that there was even a poem in that.

We had a good laugh—not at the woman, but at the truth that there was poetry everywhere, waiting to be discovered. Susan took that and ran with it. For the rest of the day (actually for the rest of the school year), she was always pointing out people and objects—ordinary or extraordinary—and asking me, “Is there a poem in that?” I think it started as a jest, but it stuck with me, and the rest of us, I believe, and we started seeing things for more than what they were. Our eyes were opened, if you will.

Susan used this and the presentations from Georgia Heard and Brod Bagert as a foundation for sharing with her students, advising them to always be on the lookout for poetry seeds. She also used this as a presentation during a week-long institute for the Central Utah Writing Project that I helped facilitate. The participants loved it and the other ideas she shared about poetry.

 

My favorite part was a haiku that Susan crafted and shared (and illustrated with an accompanying photo she found):

One of those mornings:

Slept through alarm; can’t find keys.

How I HATE Mondays.

A simple, shared sentiment—one that most of us dread—captured poetically. An image; a thought; a feeling. All of these can spark poetry. Another of my most favorite recent experiences with this is the “Three-Mile Radius” exhibit at the Springville Art Museum featuring art by Jacqui Larsen and poetry by her husband, Utah Poet Laureate Lance Larsen. I visited the museum with my nine year old daughter Brooklyn, queen of finding the art and poetry in the simple motions of daily life. I strongly recommend that you visit the exhibit before it’s over (22 Oct 16).

I guess the whole point of this post is to remind myself and whoever happens to read this far to look for the beauty and the profound in the simple day-to-day living. Who knows, you might find a poem in the recesses of your closet, the soccer-stained socks hanging on the edge of the tub next to a pile of Band-Aids and tissues, or the stack of undisturbed memos in your in box. I know I have found a few over the past few months. I’ve even gone so far as to scribble a few lines in sundry scattered notebooks. Maybe I’ll go back to them and remember the beauty I wanted to save for another day.