So after my first post yesterday I went grocery shopping. No one recognized me or asked for an autograph. I found this highly disconcerting. Instead of getting depressed, I wrote another blog entry for your perusal/enjoyment. Cheers!
Before landing my sweet Community College gig, I was a public school teacher in New Jersey for six years. For four of them, I taught in an urban middle school. I won’t name the city, but I was born there, along with Allen Ginsberg, and WCW may have written a 300-page poem about it, and the school may have been located next to The Great Falls. Anyway, I had the kids write a lot of poetry, mostly because it was easy for me to teach and I didn’t have to read 120 essays about why public school students shouldn’t have to wear uniforms (my students didn’t have to wear them, but the idea still pissed them off). Oh, and also because I think poetry is important. On occasion I was surprised by what I got out of them.
The majority of them spoke English as a second language and a lot of them didn’t speak it at all at home. I had one girl, from Bangladesh, named Beauty (actually, almost half of my students were from Bangladesh). She spoke extremely limited English, and I’d often let her write her assignments in Bengali, then have an honor roll-type kid translate it into English as extra credit. I know enough Spanish that I could read assignments written in Spanish en español, but Bengali is well beyond me.
Beauty wrote a poem titled “My Village” that she presented to me in immaculate writing, forming a perfect square of script on the page. One of the other students translated it for me as Beauty sat next to him, nodding at the few English words she knew. It was an absolutely beautiful poem, no pun intended, about leading the cows over the small bridge that connected the two sides of their river and how the memory of this small act kept her connected to her home. Immediately drawing from my vast knowledge of Bengali poetry, I asked if she ever heard of Rabindranath Tagore. Her eyes lit up at possibly the only two Bengali words I knew and started excitedly speaking, waving her hands, the first time I had ever heard her say anything in any language.
“What did she say?” I asked my 12 year-old translator.
“She says that he’s her grandfather”
I looked at her, then back at him. “Really?” I had learned early on that anything was possible in that place.
“No, I’m just fucking with you, Findura.”
“Hey,” I said, “that’s how you talk to me? In front of this nice girl?” I had to make a show of it even if swearing was the last thing that worried me in that classroom.
“No, sorry.” He put his hands in his pockets. “I’m just fucking with you, Mister Findura,” the kid said with his head lowered and in all seriousness.
At least he didn’t try and set me on fire, which was a start.
The suburban high school I taught at had a lot fewer stabbings, but a lot more kids willing to give poetry a shot. I was tired of teaching Oedipus Rex and tired of the jokes (“this guy’s a bad motherfucker! Literally! See, I used the word ‘literally’ correctly, right?”) and tired of having a room with no windows. So I taught them about poets that I like, who are alive and still writing. I started off with some of my current favorites: a little Noelle Kocot, added Joshua Marie Wilkinson, sprinkled in some Zach Schomburg. I pointed them to online poetry journals that I like, even though I was nervous they’d find one of my poems, and I’ve written poems that I am not discussing with a 16 year-old.
One of the problems of teaching poetry in public school is that you never have time to get to the modern stuff. You get bogged down with Shakespeare and maybe some Emily Dickinson, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That’s all well and good, but to get the kids really interested they have to know what’s going on now. You can’t teach music, stop at 1950, and wonder why they don’t get Radiohead. You can’t teach about aviation and stop with the Wright brothers. Eventually someone’s going to point to a 747 and ask “what the hell’s that?” What do you say? “NO! Avert your eyes! It’s nothing!”
I invited my good friend and poet Anna Guzon to come and visit a bunch of my classes (and who just happens to have some excellent poems right here on the BAP site here, here and here). The kids were shocked to see a “real live poet,” and it threw them into a tizzy to learn that she’s a girl of all things. And a girl poet who’s not depressed or a drug addict. They couldn’t believe it. She read some poems from her manuscript and you could hear a pin drop. She was the first real poet any of them had ever met in person (I don’t count because I was “just a teacher”). They asked questions. They talked about why she wrote what she wrote. They wanted to know why she would be a poet if she didn’t get paid to be a poet. She gave them honest answers.
After Anna’s visit, attendance in my poetry club shot up. And even boys joined it. They wanted to know if Anna was an alcoholic or a drug addict (or single) and I told them to stop reading the author bios in the back of their textbooks because not every writer is an alcoholic or drug addict. They then became very confused. I’m glad I waited until I started teaching college before I got to the really weird stuff and brought in Jennifer L. Knox’s “Chicken Bucket.”
What’s the moral of the story? I don’t know. I like teaching poetry, and I like when kids get it, in whatever way they get it. Maybe one of them will go on the SPD site and order a few books, maybe a few will go to a reading one day, maybe a few will actually write poetry. Better yet, maybe a few will read poetry for the simple fact that it’s a beautiful art form.