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.

Today I Am Stealing...

but at least I'm going to cite my sources.  I am posting the introduction to Naomi Shihab Nye's book A Maze Me: Poems for Girls.  I have often given this crowbar for my students to pry open their own souls and take a look at  the little scraps they don't want to slip through their lives' sieves.  To go along with some of my recent posts about mining for memories and focusing on detail, I offer an expert's insights, since my opinion doesn't hold much sway.

At twelve, I worried about a skinny road between two precipices.  Every day my mother drove on such a road, or so I imagined, to her job teaching school.  I feared her car would slide off one side, into a ditch, or off the other edge, into a murky gray river.  But I never told her what I was scared of.  I worried day after day without mentioning my fear to anyone, till there was a fist in my stomach, punching me back again and again to check the clock.  Wasn’t she late?  I was a nervous wreck in secret. 

I did not want to be thirteen, which cast me as something of an oddity among my friends, who were practicing with lipstick and the ratting hair comb deep into the belly of the night.  Mary couldn’t wait to be thirteen.  She stuffed her bra, packed away her dolls.  Susie had been pretending she was thirteen for two years already.  Kelly said thirteen was a lot more fun than anything that preceded it.

But I did not feel finished with childhood.  I was hanging on like a desperado, traveling my own skinny road.  The world of adults seemed grim to me.  Chores and complicated relationships, checkbooks that needed balancing, oppressive daily schedules, and the worrisome car that always needed to have its oil or its tires changed (“bald tires” sounded so ominous)… Couldn’t I stay where I was a bit longer?

 I stared at tiny children with envy and a sense of loss.  They still had cozy, comfortable days ahead of them.  I was plummeting into the dark void of adulthood against my will.  I stared into the faces of all fretful, workaholic parents, thinking condescendingly, You have traveled too far from the source.  Can’t you remember what it felt like to be fresh, waking up to the world, discovering new surprises every day?  Adulthood is cluttered and pathetic.  I will never forget. 

I scribbled details in small notebooks-crumbs to help me find my way back, like Gretel in the darkening forest.  Squirrels, silly friends, snoozing cats, violins, blue bicycles with wire baskets, pint boxes of blackberries, and random thoughts I had while weaving 199 multicolored potholders on a little read loom.  I sold the potholders door to door for twenty-five cents each, stomping around the neighborhood, feeling absolutely and stubbornly as if I owned it.  No one else had ever loved that neighborhood as much as I did. 

If I wrote things down, I had a better chance of saving them.

Recently a friend sent me an exquisite wreath in the mail.  A tag was attached to it: A SMALL AMOUNT OF DEBRIS IS TO BE EXPECTED FROM THE VIBRATION OF SHIPPING. 

Well, of course.

But who tells us this when we are twelve?  Who mentions that he passage from on era into another can make us feel as if we are being shaken up, as if our contents are shifting and sifting into new alignments?

Earliest childhood: skillets and a fat soup pot and two cake pans and a funny double boiler with lots of little holes in one pan,  lids and a muffin tin and two blue enamel spoons and an aluminum sifter with a small wooden knob on its handle, all living together in the low cupboard next to the stove.

A trove of wonders!  Daily I was amazed and happy to take them out, stack them on the floor, bang them together a little, make a loud noise.  Then I could put them back.  There were ways they fit and ways they didn’t.  The door to the cabinet never shut perfectly.  I can close my eyes even today and feel its crooked wood, its metal latch, and the lovely mystery of the implements living in silence inside.

My mother worked at the sink nearby, peeling potatoes, running water over their smooth, naked bodies.  I felt safe.  My whole job was looking around.

It strikes me as odd: I cannot remember the name of a single junior high school teacher.  I cannot remember any of their faces either.  Yet I recall all my elementary and most of my high school teachers very clearly.  What happened in between?

In junior high, I stood proudly in the percussion section in the school band, smooth wooden drumsticks in my hands.  I clearly recall he snappy beats we played to warm up.  I still feel my cheeks flaming when I was forced to sit down, runner-up in the spelling bee, because they gave me a military word.  I remember the smooth shiny hair on the back of the head of the girl in front of me in Spanish class better than the subjunctive tense in Spanish.  Some things stayed, during those rough years of transition, but not the things I might have dreamed. 

What do you want to be? People always ask.  They don’t ask who or how do you want to be?

I might have said, amazed forever.  I wanted to be curious, interested, interesting, hopeful-and a little bit odd was okay too.  I did not know if I wanted to run a bakery, be a postal worker, play a violin or the timpani drum in an orchestra.  That part was unknown.

Thankfully, after turning seventeen I started feeling as if my soul fit my age again, or my body had grown to fit my brain.  But things felt a little rugged in between.

In college I met Nelle Lucas, who wore billowing bright cotton skirts and lavish turquoise-and-silver Native American jewelry.  She taught ceramics (favoring hand-building techniques-coiling rolling, smoothing) and showed us how to prepare our own basic hand-mixed glazes.  I think I took her class three times.

Nelle and her husband had built some modest, rounded Navajo-style hogans out in the Texas hills, and on weekends, they shepherded little flocks of art students to the country.  We dug a big hole in the ground to fire our pots and sang songs while the pots baked under the earth.  Sometimes the pots disappointed us-blowing up, or cracking.  One person’s pot might compromise someone else’s-after exploding, fragments stuck to your own precious glaze.  Or someone’s glaze would drip strange configurations onto your perfect iron oxide surface.  It was a tricky operation.  Nelle sneaked wisdoms into every line of art instruction.  She wasn’t terribly impressed with anyone’s pots, but she loved the process and she loved us all.  Also, she made us laugh.  She experimented.  We slept in a circle, head to toe.  We patted whole-wheat chapatis, cooking them over an open fire for our breakfast.  Nelle loved freshly mixed granola, wild deer, and patience.  She urged us to slow down and pay better attention to everything.  She was radiant, enthusiastic, unpredictable.  And she was older than all our parents.

Somehow, knowing Nelle when I was in college gave me all the faith about “growing up” I needed.  At every age, a person could still be whimsical, eccentric.  A person could do and think whatever she wanted.  She could be as spontaneous at seventy as at seven.  I felt incredibly relieved.

Midway between Brady and Mason, Texas-two wonderful hill-country towns-there’s a mysterious general store called Camp Air.  A small red stagecoach sits out front, and a little sign says the store is closed on Fridays and Saturdays, but I have never seen it open.  Some cows with very short legs are penned up nearby, next to a “watermelon shed.”  There’s a larger sign: HEY IF YOU NEVER STOP YOU’LL NEVER KNOW WHAT YOU MISSED.  I always stop.  And I still don’t know.  But I like it.  I like it a lot.  “Camp Air” has a good ring to it.  That’s where I want to live, every day, inside my timeless brain.

If you have a voice, and aren’t afraid to spend it...

               

If you have many voices and let them speak to one another in a friendly fashion…

If you’re not too proud to talk to yourself out loud…

               

If you will ask the questions pressing against your forehead from the inside…

you’ll be okay.

If you write three lines down in a notebook every day (they don’t have to be great or important, they don’t have to relate to one another, you don’t have to show them to anyone)…

you will find out what you notice.  Uncanny connections will be made visible to you.  That’s what I started learning when I was twelve, and I never stopped learning it.

Every year unfolds like a petal inside all the years that preceded it.  You will feel your thinking springing up and layering inside your huge mind a little differently.  Your thinking will befriend you.  Words will befriend you.  You will be given more than you could ever dream.

-Naomi Shihab Nye

San Antonio, Texas, 2004

V.Day 2013, Part I

In my mind, this is how it started.  One night at dinner, the kids were discussing valentines and their upcoming elementary school parties.  I believe it was Brooklyn who mentioned that she didn’t want to give a valentine to a certain person in her class, and Zac, being ten, suggested that she give him one that said something rather malicious.  Immediately Amy corrected his pre-teen-ness.  I, having subjected myself to dealing with seventh graders who had been especially moronic that day, mumbled under my breath, “You could just say ‘Happy Stinkin’ Valentine’s Day!’”

Of course, Zac heard it and burst into fits of laughter.  Amy and the rest heard it, and being the good father that I am, downplayed what I had said and rendered my comment inappropriate.  And the conversation went on.  But unbeknownst to the rest, an idea had hatched in my brain.

Earlier that day I had been contemplating using Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “Valentine for Ernest Mann” in my classes.  I’ve referenced that poem before (see the entry for 24 March 2011), but for those who are unfamiliar with it, I’ll include the full text here:

“Valentine for Ernest Mann”

You can’t order a poem like you order a taco.

Walk up to the counter, say, “I’ll take two,”

and expect it to be handed to you

on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.

Anyone who says, “Here’s my address,

write me a poem,” deserves something in reply.

So I’ll tell you a secret instead:

poems hide.  In the bottoms of our shoes,

they are sleeping.  They are the shadows

drifting across our ceilings the moment

before we wake up.  What we have to do

is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife

two skunks for a valentine.

He couldn’t understand why she was crying.

“I thought they had such beautiful eyes.”

And he was serious.  He was a serious man

who lived in a serious way.  Nothing was ugly

just because the world said so.  He really

liked those skunks.  So, he re-invented them

as valentines and they became beautiful.

At least, to him.  And the poems that had been

       hiding

in the eyes of skunks for centuries

crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us

we find poems.  Check your garage, the odd

    sock

in your drawer, the person you almost like, but

    not quite.

And let me know.

So I was thinking about skunks and their beauty.  And then I remembered one of my first experiences interacting with Amy.  It was February or March of 1996 when this incident happened, and we were both in the Missionary Training Center preparing to proselytize for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—I was going to Spain, and Amy was headed to Guatemala.  Our time was drawing short before we all left for our respective assignments.  On my own, I had come up with nicknames (in Spanish) for some of the people in my district that reflected one facet of their personality; however, I hadn’t finished with everybody.

One evening, as I was finished with my studying, I glanced around the room to work on my name collection (Side note: I never finished it.), and I saw Amy (Hermana Walker at the time).  She was wearing a black jumper with some lighter flower prints on it.  She looked up for a moment, and her bright shining eyes contrasted against her dark hair and her dress.  And a perfect image came to mind: a skunk.  (Another important side note: it was those same gorgeous eyes that first attracted me to her when we met again two years later.)

When she found out that I called her a skunk, I believe I hurt her feelings until I explained that I was thinking of Flower from Disney’s Bambi—because of her eyes.  I don’t know if she believed me at first, but it was the truth.  She definitely wasn’t a stinker.  That would have been some of the others.

So I took the skunk images, both from the poem and my nickname for Amy, and added it to the dinnertime conversation, and I conjured an excellent idea for my valentine!

To be continued…

(Tune in to Part II if you want to see this all ties together.  Mwa-ha-ha-ha!)

Field Trip

This is a short (and very rough) ramble I penned while at the Springville Museum of Art yesterday with a group of honors students.

I’m sitting at an iron-wrought table with lattice work that reminds me of an over-cooked apple pie, my wideness squeezed into a matching cold apple pie chair. It was obviously not meant for my comfort. Amid the patrolling volunteer docents are seventy of my junior high students—good kids—meandering here and there, clipboards in hand. The remaining museum population on this cold March morning consists of a smattering of high school students from another county as well as a few roving pockets of knee-high elementary schoolers, complete with chaperon in tow. Here and there a single parent with toddler and stroller appear.

As I perused the art alone—the other teacher chaperons elsewhere—I couldn’t help but observe the other specimens—the human subjects-with the same scrutiny I used on the watercolors and graphite sketches. Most of my students were clustered in various locations discussing anything but art, searching for an alcove or a recess in the building where they would become invisible to teachers' eyes, a place where their thumbs could blaze on their phones in peace.

A select few sit on the weathered wooden benches, appearing to ponder the oil and canvas. But upon closer reconnaissance, they are merely mechanically filling out worksheets—getting their required exposure to art over with as quickly as possible. They read the placard to fill in a box on the paper, doing their duty to photocopied academia so their friends don’t have to giggle in the next gallery with out them longer than thirty-seven seconds.

“Sure, we saw all the art, Mr. A,” they said when I asked one particular band of boys twenty minutes after arrival if they had seen a particular gallery. “We even did the assignment.” A hand produces a misshaped green paper-irregular creases like only a junior high pocket can produce. Three more papers materialize from folders and pockets as if to say “See, we’re cultured; now leave us alone.”

Ah, true. They might have seen all the art, I muse as they disappear around a corner…perhaps even two or three times, based on my frequent sightings of them in various locations. A flirtatious scream from the direction the boys had headed-definitely NOT a museum voice. Matthew’s narration of the Savior’s use of parables comes to mind: “because they seeing see not; and hearing they hear not, neither do they understand (Matthew 13:13).

And so I question, not just here in the Springville Museum of Art, but in life, how many of my students, how many human beings race through the halls of life’s gallery with their eyes open without seeing anything. How many times do I sprint through the day without pausing to enjoy the beauty that surrounds me?

I remember as a teenager being clichéd by my mother to take time and smell the roses. I propose that we not only stop for the roses, but for the plainer, simpler beauties: the daisies and marigolds, even if they don’t have much of an aroma. And truth be told, most flowers plain stink. But there is still beauty to be had.

I consider Naomi Shihab Nye’s “A Valentine for Ernest Mann.” We need to take the time and reinvent the skunks of the world and see them for their potential, their beauty, even if we don't understand the splotches of paint that are supposed to be fruit or seagulls, or the hardships of a the world repressed until they explode onto a canvas. Most people would raise their eyebrows if I suggested that the combined smells of gasoline, freshly cut grass, dirt, and deodorant-tinged body odor reek of success. You might just run through the halls, looking and sniffing, and pass by without a second thought. But my wife sure loves the yard when I’m done on a Saturday afternoon. It's the details of the process, not just the final product that matter.

So, when I say stop and drink up the smell of floor polish (without getting high), or pause to listen to the giggle of three little princesses getting their toes painted in the basement by their mother, or I have you stop and observe a small bumblebee dancing from pansy to petunia while snow still hugs the earth, or point out a 7th grader helping a classmate gather up an explosion that was once his notebook, remember that it’s these small details in life, the brushstrokes, the composition behind the canvas of life, if you will, that make the difference between merely existing and really being part of this life.

I don't pretend to understand art or life. However, I can appreciate it. I try to use my eyes to see, my ears to hear, and my life to comprehend and enjoy the beauty. Maybe some of that can rub off on my seventy—well, at least the two or three who took the time to pause and listen and see for themselves.