Suss: another literary journal

My stu­dents are par­ents, court-ordered to attend school because of drug prob­lems, or high school stu­dents who need extra cred­its, or teenagers kicked out of high school for “beat­ing the shit” out of a class­mate. My stu­dents are high-functioning peo­ple test­ing in at 12.9+ grade-level on our stan­dard­ized test, and they are low-functioning pre-readers. My stu­dents are angry, funny, unwashed; they are intel­li­gent, com­pas­sion­ate, and often griev­ing; they are born-again Christians who rail against abor­tion; they are home­less or meth-addicted, they have lost their chil­dren or raise the chil­dren of friends; they come early to talk or don’t show up for weeks; they are learning-disabled and mar­gin­al­ized and they dream. Poetry is an equalizer.

My stu­dents grum­ble when I tell them on the first day, “Hey, guess what? We’re going to study poetry for the next 16 weeks.” I do it defen­sively because the class­room always fills with groans. The men roll their eyes and if they’re not already slumped in their seats, they slump in their seats. Occasionally a mouthy woman shouts out that she doesn’t do poetry. But there are always one or two stu­dents who sit a lit­tle straighter when I men­tion that I am going to give every­one a book, a book to take home, to read, to spill cof­fee on, to dog-ear with love—a book of their own.

Most of my stu­dents have had lit­tle prior con­tact with poetry. They see it as drudgery. They were often not per­mit­ted in class­rooms where poetry might have been dis­cussed, as many of them come from the dumbed-down cur­ricu­lum of high school Learning Disabled pull-out pro­grams, or only took one or two years of English because they were con­cen­trat­ing on Voc-Ed, or hated English and lost their books, or even worse, took many English classes and were never exposed to con­tem­po­rary poetry because their teach­ers didn’t have the time or the incli­na­tion to teach it.

That’s not an indict­ment of teach­ers or schools, but an acknowl­edg­ment of the long-turning shift away from teach­ing stu­dents towards teach­ing stu­dents to pass tests, and in lieu of that, towards remov­ing them from the rolls.

I teach poetry now because I think it’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary. I don’t say this lightly. If rev­o­lu­tion is an act or series of actions that elicit rad­i­cal change either polit­i­cally or per­son­ally, then the act of read­ing, think­ing about, and writ­ing poetry is rev­o­lu­tion­ary. I’m aware that the notion may seem grandiose in the face of the over­whelm­ing pover­ties of our times—children bloated with hunger; deer, dis­placed by lack of habi­tat, run­ning through plate glass win­dows; land­mines tossed between small boys before exploding.

The images are endless.

How can poetry heal these rifts, this rent in human­ity? It may well be a flam­boy­ant asser­tion, but I put it out there not because I have a part in it, but because I have a stake in it; we all do. I teach poetry because to be lonely, to feel alone, is inher­ently human. Poems can make us feel con­nected, less isolated.

§

I have taken on the task of try­ing to inspire ABE/GED teach­ers to teach poetry. Last fall I gave my first pre­sen­ta­tion on the topic, Poetry in the ABE Classroom, at an Adult and Continuing Educator’s Conference in Fairview Heights, Illinois. It took me five years of prac­tice on ABE students—and a giant kick in the ass from my boss—to get me to do this. My boss, Donita—an almost exas­per­at­ingly hope­ful woman who says “yes” so often that I am often inspired to say “yes,” too—thought that the suc­cess I have with stu­dents’ ris­ing read­ing lev­els should be shared with other adult edu­ca­tors. Even though I don’t care much about ris­ing read­ing scores except that the scores give me the admin­is­tra­tive “why” I need to keep teach­ing poetry, I do want other teach­ers to teach poetry for my own rea­sons. So I agreed.

§

Olney, Illinois, is a rural town sit­u­ated neatly between two rivers: the wide Embarrass and the smaller Fox. Approximately nine thou­sand peo­ple live in Olney, and accord­ing to the last cen­sus report, we are 98% white. The unem­ploy­ment rate of Richland County, where Olney is the county seat, remained around 6% for the last sev­eral years—about 1% higher than the national aver­age lead­ing into the recent eco­nomic cri­sis and rise in the national aver­age that accom­pa­nied it. In spite of the stag­ger­ing poverty that has become the norm in south­ern Illinois, Olney is home to three lakes and some enor­mous new homes on their water­fronts. The demand for poetry here isn’t great; how­ever, the need is overwhelming.

Over-prepared is how I went to that first adult educator’s conference—poetry books, exer­cises, video tapes, bags of choco­late bars and hard candy, and a pack of cig­a­rettes for the road. I quit smok­ing years ago, but for the two-hour drive to the con­fer­ence, I took a reprieve from that mora­to­rium and allowed the smoke to swirl around my head as I drove the van west toward Fairview Heights, a “sub­urb” of St. Louis on the Illinois-side of the mighty Mississippi.

§

I arrived at the Five Points Sheraton, hopped up on nico­tine, my hands shaky, and my heart nearly leap­ing from my chest. The sun poured from the sky and lit up the early fall morn­ing. It was the last ses­sion of the day, the last day of the conference.

At the lectern of one of the hotel’s con­fer­ence rooms, I anx­iously looked out at the “crowd.” Thirty teach­ers sat at the tables in front of me, their expres­sions rang­ing from expec­tant to tired to mildly irri­tated. Some of them leafed through my hand-out while oth­ers talked to one another. Swathed in flu­o­res­cent light, these peo­ple looked tired. They’d had their fill of inspi­ra­tion for two long days. Even so, I did what I always do when con­fronted with a new group of poten­tial con­verts: I read “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins, from Poetry 180.

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to water­ski
across the sur­face of a poem
wav­ing at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and tor­ture a con­fes­sion out of it.

They begin beat­ing it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

I looked out at the 30 or so women and men—mostly women—and waited as they avoided my gaze, my antic­i­pa­tion, or whis­pered to each other. Some of them opened the choco­lates I had scat­tered on the tables before begin­ning. And no one appeared ready to com­ment. I wanted to scream, “Don’t you love it? Isn’t this a great poem!” But I waited and scanned the room for any signs of inter­est, a fur­rowed brow or eye con­tact. Oh God, I thought, these peo­ple are GED teach­ers; they don’t care about poetry. Although poetry is cov­ered on the GED exam, it isn’t a big con­cern for GED teach­ers. After an inter­minable ten sec­onds, I asked what I ask at the begin­ning of all my read­ing classes:

“What do you think it means?”

§

I read the first poem I truly remem­ber lov­ing when I was 18-years-old. It was a late June night; yel­low light seeped dimly from my bed­side lamp and suf­fused the room with a roman­tic ambi­ence. I’d only just days ear­lier grad­u­ated from high school, but already I was rem­i­nisc­ing and hun­gry for the words to describe my par­tic­u­lar nos­tal­gia. And it was with that crav­ing that I opened my new, gray book The Fact of A Doorframe: Poems Selected and New: 1950-1984 by Adrienne Rich, a grad­u­a­tion present from a friend home on break from West Point. He had found these poems in a book store and was reminded of me—for I too fan­cied myself a poet. I had been wait­ing all day, antic­i­pat­ing the promised self-recognition in the lines. This pas­sage from “Stepping Backward” stirred in me a con­nec­tion, not only to the friend who had read from this book and thought of me, but also to the poet, a woman liv­ing on the West Coast:

And when we come into each other’s rooms
Once in awhile, encum­bered and self-conscious,
We hover awk­wardly about the thresh­old
And usu­ally regret the visit later.
Perhaps the harsh­est fact is, only lovers—
And once in a while two with the grace of lovers—
Unlearn that clum­si­ness of rare intru­sion
And let each other freely come and go.
Most of us shut too quickly into cup­boards
The margin-scribbled books, the dried gera­nium,
The penny horo­scope, let­ters never mailed.
The door may open, but the room is altered;
Not the same room we look from night and day.

The very idea of “com­ing into each other’s rooms” stunned me. By the time I was 18, I had already been in an inti­mate rela­tion­ship, and I was ten­dered, if not pas­sion­ately awak­ened, by the heat of those early sex­ual encoun­ters, the illicit zing between my young body and my older boyfriend’s lean stom­ach and tight chest. When he looked at me, I could see my soft flesh reflected there in his eyes, and for those moments I didn’t feel fat or stu­pid or awk­ward or mis­un­der­stood. I could feel beauty in the trem­bling of his fin­gers as he reached behind my back to undo my bra. I heard desire and the rever­ber­a­tion of my own power when he gasped the first time his hand trailed down my stom­ach to rest on my waist­band. I mem­o­rized his tremor as he fum­bled to reach my center.

And even so, I was self-conscious. I was bulimic. I spent hours in the bath­room reliev­ing myself of what­ever it was I had eaten: ice cream, fried chicken, Sour Cream and Cheese Lays potato chips. I knew what it was to “hover awk­wardly;” my body was only an awk­ward man­i­fes­ta­tion of who I thought I was. My “cup­boards,” filled with fear, half-eaten sand­wiches and lies, were also shut to out­siders. And every­one was an out­sider. The notion that I could “unlearn” that self-consciousness res­onated. I thought myself a fake, some­one with a bright façade, a jester of tom-foolery, and the inti­macy afforded me in those lines sparked what would become a life-long romance with poems.

§

Growing up, I con­sid­ered myself a poet. My ear­li­est mem­ory of writ­ing occurs at my Grandma Fehrenbacher’s house in Wendelin, Illinois. Wendelin is a small vil­lage. When I was grow­ing up, dur­ing the 70s and 80s, the town sup­ported a tav­ern, a gro­cery store which my grand­mother owned, a gas station/service sta­tion, and a tall, brick Catholic Church. The store was sold in 1992 and the fill­ing sta­tion closed, but the vil­lage still sup­ports the church and the tav­ern. On any night of the week, there is a crowd at either one or both.

When I was about six, my fam­ily lived just out­side of Dayton, Ohio, but we came home often. Grandma lived in a huge, six bed­room house at the end of an old coun­try alley that was the one street in the small German-Catholic set­tle­ment. The old white house had black shut­ters and was sur­rounded by small gar­dens. Grandma loved her flow­ers. There were many places for a six-year-old to hide among the bushes and flower beds, and this is what I did.

The mem­ory I have is prob­a­bly a jux­ta­po­si­tion of mem­o­ries, but it feels and looks like a sim­ple one. The air is warm and filled with the scent of pot­ted gera­ni­ums and lilac. I am a lit­tle girl with dark-blonde hair and old jeans—for we had play clothes and good clothes, and at Grandma’s house I was forced to wear my play clothes. I’m wear­ing a sweat­shirt with chewed strings and my hair is bowl cut below my ears. I’m out of breath, hav­ing prob­a­bly just escaped my lit­tle sister’s needling cry of “Wait!” Hunkered down in my hid­ing place, with the soft air mov­ing barely through the shel­ter of leaves and thorns, I’m writ­ing with a Number 2 yel­low pen­cil in an old note­book I had found and stolen from Grandma’s old desk in the front room where we really didn’t play much.

I took to car­ry­ing one of Grandma’s note­books with me. I wrote epic poems describ­ing the injus­tice of being for­bid­den to walk down the weedy lane to the pond unac­com­pa­nied by my four-year-old sis­ter. I wrote about the orange pop­pies that grew lanky out by the old, falling-down barn. I wrote of the stalky, rhubarb that grew poi­so­nously around the red pump and of the burn pile which we lit every evening after dinner.

I thought a poet would be ethe­real, an almost mythic char­ac­ter in a tragic life. I had what I’d call now a poetic atti­tude. And that, to me, con­sisted of a desire to be alone, a note­book or two handy at all times, lots of unearned respon­si­bil­i­ties (being the old­est of three children—in a year or two there would be four us—I always had some­one to take along, some­one to look after), and a sort of unde­fined mys­ti­cal qual­ity that would later man­i­fest itself in a cer­tainty that I would die young.

As a child, I assumed that I’d pass from lead poi­son­ing or rabies or worse, that I’d be slaugh­tered by a crazed and early-paroled Charles Manson. (When my mother read Helter Skelter, I picked up the book and read the back cover which omi­nously threat­ened that Manson would be eli­gi­ble for parole some­time in the 80’s.) I trans­lated this fix­a­tion or cer­tainty of death with my capac­i­ties for poetic thought. I con­sid­ered myself unusual, more thought­ful than my sis­ter and brother.

But it wasn’t until that night in early June, 1985, that I began to read poetry and found that I wasn’t unusual at all.

§

These are the sto­ries I wanted to tell the GED teach­ers. How poetry can change a life. But I asked them again, “What do you think it means?”

A hand went up in the back of the room, but before I could nod, it was down. I grabbed a sin­gle piece of paper and hold­ing it up to the light I read,

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide.

Squinting, I tried to peer through the thin, lined note­book paper.

“You are try­ing to see through it?” a small woman ven­tured from the mid­dle of the room.

I nod­ded and con­tin­ued to read: “or press an ear against its hive.” I rus­tled the paper against my ear, con­cen­trat­ing on inter­pret­ing the crack­les of the dry paper against my skin.

“You see, Collins is telling us to really look at the poem, look through the poem, and then lis­ten to it, lis­ten to the words, to the thrilling noises, the crunch and muf­fle of the words them­selves,” I said.

I held my hand up, my fin­ger and my thumb together as if I held the tail of a rodent. I read, “I say drop a mouse into a poem / and watch him probe his way out.” Then I opened my clutch on the mouse’s tail as if I’d let him go.

“What does that mean?” I asked them.

“It’s like the poem is a room or a maze, and we can learn some­thing from watch­ing the mouse try to find his way,” said the woman who first raised her hand. They were get­ting it.

I hur­ried to the wall; I shut my eyes, and ran my fin­gers up and down the wall while recit­ing, “or walk inside the poem’s room / and feel the walls for a light switch.”

“It’s all about mean­ing, try­ing to fig­ure out what it means,” said one of the two men in the room.

“Yes, but what about this?” I asked. “‘I want them to water­ski / across the sur­face of a poem’?” Leaning back, I grasped an imag­i­nary ski line and con­tin­ued read­ing, “‘...wav­ing at the author’s name on the shore.’”

“Just enjoy it,” a tall women with a huge smile laughs out.

And I came in for the kill, reading,

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and tor­ture a con­fes­sion out of it.

They begin beat­ing it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

For a moment no one moved. The room was filled with the slow steady breath of revelation.

“What does it mean?” I asked. “Torture isn’t good, regard­less of what our gov­ern­ment thinks. Is it?”

“Beat it with a hose—that’s not good either,” the one guy laughed.

“Who are they?” some­one yelled out.

“Anyone, I guess, who’s more inter­ested in find­ing out what the poet meant than what the poem means.” They were all nod­ding now. Well, not all of them. There was a grouchy lady in the back row scrib­bling on her handouts.

“You see, I think Collins’ poem is per­fect for our stu­dents, peo­ple who’ve had lit­tle suc­cess in school. If they were taught poetry at all, they prob­a­bly didn’t under­stand the mean­ing they were sup­posed to under­stand,” by this time I was mov­ing back and forth across the front of the room, wav­ing my arms about, talk­ing excit­edly and too fast. “Collins essen­tially says, Throw that out the win­dow. Come into the poem and enjoy it for all it is, not what it’s sup­posed to mean. He asks us, What does it mean to you? and he tells us that it’s okay for the poem to mean some­thing dif­fer­ent to each of us.”

§

Three years ago, I asked my boss if she would buy poetry books for all the stu­dents. I wanted to give them a book, some­thing they could hold onto, some­thing they could take home, bor­row out, some­thing they could mark up. And she said yes. Since then, I have been hand­ing out poetry books to my stu­dents on the first day of every new class.

Poetry 180—an anthol­ogy of con­tem­po­rary poetry selected by Billy Collins, the Poet Laureate of the United States when the book came out—is Collins’ attempt to bring poetry to high school stu­dents. There are 180 poems in the book—a poem a day for the entire school year. The poems are not intended to be looked at or talked about, just heard. Collins asked that high schools adopt­ing his pro­gram sim­ply to have a stu­dent read one poem a day dur­ing announce­ment time. There would be no pres­sure on the stu­dents to talk about the poems, to ana­lyze the poems, to write poems them­selves. They would just be afforded the gift of a new poem each day.

I loved the idea, and decided to use it in the class­room. I intended for my stu­dents to hear a poem a day. I gave copies of the book to the other teachers—my friend Jim who we like to call Mr. Math, Jo Anne who taught English and Constitution, Julie and Colleen, the night GED teach­ers, even Trevor and Kathy who taught begin­ning com­puter skills. I asked them to read poetry to their stu­dents, and in the begin­ning I think they did, but soon the strug­gles of the impend­ing GED exams pushed poetry out of all but the read­ing class­rooms, both of which I ran myself. And what I found was that the stu­dents wanted to do more than to lis­ten to the poems. They wanted to talk about the poems. They were rais­ing their hands. They came to class with pages turned over to mark poems they wanted me to read. They brought their own orig­i­nal poems to class. We some­times spent entire class hours devoted to read­ing and talk­ing about the poems of Poetry 180.

The read­ing class evolved. We looked up poetry on the Internet. We did elec­tronic poetry activ­i­ties on the web. I had to find more and more activ­i­ties on writ­ing poetry. And I had to be ready to talk about some uncom­fort­able stuff, like a student’s his­tory of abuse not only as the abused but often as the abuser, or drug use, or sex­ual infi­deli­ties and hunger, because the poems didn’t mean to the stu­dents what they had meant to me.

In recent years, the pub­lish­ing of poetry for the main­stream has picked up. Robert Pinsky, as the Poet Laureate in 1997, ini­ti­ated the Favorite Poem Project, in which he hoped to find one hun­dred Americans to recite their favorite poem. He received thou­sands of responses, and he edited and chose 200 poems to pub­lish in an anthol­ogy called America’s Favorite Poems. He fol­lowed that with another col­lec­tion called Poems to Read: A New Favorite Poem Project. Billy Collins edited and selected the poems for Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and later 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Everyday. In 2003 Garrison Keillor pub­lished a book of his favorite poems, Good Poems, that he’d read on his NPR show, The Writer’s Almanac, and a sec­ond in 2005 called Good Poems for Hard Times. The Best American Poetry Series, which annu­ally pub­lishes a selec­tion of the best American poetry pub­lished the pre­ced­ing cal­en­dar year as deter­mined by that issue’s edi­tor, is wildly pop­u­lar for a poetry series. And still when stu­dents come to my class­room they are more often than not sorely unread in good con­tem­po­rary poetry, much like I was at 18.

I think it’s rev­o­lu­tion­ary to teach peo­ple poetry, to read poetry to stu­dents, to dis­cuss poems with stu­dents, to give them time to write poetry in the class­room because like Jim Mahoney and Jack Matovcik pro­pose in their inspir­ing Power & Poetry, I believe poetry is like food, nour­ish­ment. In the for­ward to The Best American Poetry: 1996, Adrienne Rich, the guest edi­tor, explains for that year’s vol­ume she “wanted poems good enough to eat, to crunch between the teeth, to feel their juices burst­ing under the tongue, unmi­crowave­able poems.” My stu­dents have very rarely been given any­thing tan­ta­mount to that kind of food in the classroom.

§

I ran the work­shop that morn­ing in November the way I run my class. “Does any­one have a poem for me to read?” I asked.

One of the teach­ers raised her hand. “Would you read the poem on page 73?”

I smiled. “Sure,” I said, “I know that one. It’s called ‘Praise Song’ by Lucille Clifton.”

to my aunt blanche
who rolled from grass to dri­ve­way
into the street one Sunday morn­ing.
i was ten. i had never seen
a human woman hurl her bas­ket­ball
of a body into the traf­fic of the world.
Praise to the dri­vers who stopped in time.
Praise to the faith with which she rose
after some moments then slowly walked
sigh­ing back to her fam­ily.
Praise to the arms which under­stood
lit­tle or noth­ing of what it meant
but wel­comed her in with­out judg­ment,
accept­ing it all like chil­dren might,
like God.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“It’s about faith and love,” answered the woman who asked me to read.

“Anything else?” I looked around. No one answered. It was so unlike my classes where the first ques­tion is always. “Why did she try to kill her­self?” Fingers were mov­ing over the lines as if to trace the mean­ing out of them.

I tried again, “What did she do, literally?”

But they were on a dif­fer­ent level, already speak­ing metaphor­i­cally. The guy in the back said, “Well, she put her­self out there, you know, and she got tram­pled. And her faith, her fam­ily, God was there.”

“Yeah, I def­i­nitely think that’s there,” I said, “but what is actu­ally hap­pen­ing? Look at the words—rolled from grass to dri­ve­way into the street. What did she do?”

“Did she try to kill her­self?” an embar­rassed voice from the front asked? And I am reminded of how intim­i­dat­ing poetry can be.

I laughed and vis­i­bly loos­ened my shoul­ders, shook myself out. “You know,” I told them, “that’s the first thing my stu­dents notice, every time.”

§

One morn­ing this semes­ter, after I read a cou­ple of poems, the class and I lis­tened to Ernest∗, a 23-year-old stu­dent with a trou­bled his­tory, read a reveal­ing poem about his imme­di­ate past, replete with the image of a dam­aged fetus in a jar scream­ing men­ac­ingly. One of the younger stu­dents, James, a kid who comes to my class from Safe School, announced to every­one that he and a friend had “beat the hell out of some dumb retard” on their way to school. I had to stop the con­ver­sa­tion, put it out there that they can’t use terms like “retard” in the class­room. That I don’t like clas­si­fy­ing peo­ple like that, that in fact, I won’t allow it, period. But I did want to talk about the incident.

James took the crit­i­cism in stride; that morn­ing he came to class with an under­shirt on—a dirty white one, the kind they refer to behind my back as a wife-beater, the type my dad wore under his dress shirts every day—and over the under­shirt he wore a grey t-shirt bunched up on his left shoul­der. It took me a moment to real­ize that he had his right arm through the arm hole, but that his left arm was free. This should bother me. It both­ers the other teach­ers, but I can’t seem to get worked up about appear­ance. I’m well aware of the argu­ments about respect, but I’m not sure that at this point, after only four or five weeks, that I can expect this kid to have a lot of respect for any of us or for edu­ca­tion in gen­eral. I let the t-shirt thing go because his eyes are what really bother me. They are light with fear and anger—scary eyes. There are times when I look away from him, unable to fathom what might be behind those eyes, that what lies there, what informs the stare, is more than capa­ble of the vio­lence he described.

He apol­o­gized for “the retard thing.” I asked him, “Why? I want to under­stand why you would stop and ran­domly beat some­one up?”

“Because it makes me feel good,” he said.

“But why?” I persisted.

“Because he had it com­ing to him.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“He talked shit about me.”

I glanced at Ernest. He’s pretty quiet unless he’s recit­ing a poem. His name jumped out at me from the police report in the local paper one night. Battery charges. I was reminded of the one episode of America’s Most Wanted I had been unfor­tu­nate to see—a GED teacher shot in the back and left to die under a bridge by a quiet stu­dent named Ernest who only wanted some money she didn’t have.

I wanted him to join, negate my shame­ful fear.

“It’s about respect, Bridgett,” he said.

“Respect, how?” I asked.

Ernest looked down at his desk. He’s not much of a talker, and he’d already said too much. But Derrick in the cor­ner spoke up. Actually, he’d been speak­ing all along. He never shuts up. Last week, I had to explain that he couldn’t call women “bitches” in the class­room as in “I want to have me six bitches one day.” He’s sev­en­teen and wants to be a gang­ster and is really nowhere close to his desire. These guys actu­ally think the streets of Olney are “streets.”

Derrick said, “You got to have respect on the streets, you know. What would you do if I came up and grabbed your purse and ran?”

“I’d let go of the purse,” I said.

“Huh?” Derrick asked, “You mean if I grabbed your bag, that you wouldn’t pull out a piece and let me have it.”

“I don’t have a piece, so yeah, I’d let go of the purse. It’s not worth my life,” I said, “or your life, Derrick. My purse isn’t worth your life, not to me.” I said this but imme­di­ately felt the anguish of my folly. Would he rob me now since I’ve made myself out to be such a patsy?

When Derrick and James left the class­room, Ernest looked up again. “How much of that stuff do you believe?”

“I don’t know,” I answered. “Some of it’s just talk, and I know that some of it isn’t talk. I prob­a­bly dis­count more of it than I should.”

Ernest nod­ded. “Some of it isn’t just talk, you know.”

The pre­vail­ing atti­tude about these kids is to get them out of the one pub­lic high school so they don’t poi­son the pop­u­la­tion. We send these kids to Optional Education and if they’re really bad, they go to Safe School, and then they end up in these classes at the college.

I con­sid­ered it, but I didn’t notify any­one about the reported fight.

Later that morn­ing, I asked, “Why do you think I want you to read and talk about poetry?”

It was slow going. “Because you like it,” Derrick said, and grinned.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” I shrugged, “I like it, but that’s not why I want you to do it. I can read poetry at home or on my break. Why do I want you to do it? What is my main con­sid­er­a­tion as a GED teacher?”

“You want us to pass the test?” said Scott, who just needs to raise his scores.

“Yeah, I want you to pass the test. That’s the main thing. I think this will help you pass the test, or in your case, I think it will help you to raise your scores. So I think study­ing poetry will improve your basic skills. Does that make sense?” They nodded.

“So what else then? Why else would I want you to study poetry? Why do I want you to talk about it?” I asked. “What hap­pened when Ernest read his poem out loud to the class?”

Toni, a tiny girl with a three-month-old baby, raised her hand, “I under­stood him a little.”

“Yeah. Now on a larger scale, what does poetry do for us?”

“It helps us to con­nect to each other,” said Toni who was smiling.

“Yes.” I clapped my hands together. “That’s it. We con­nect to each other. That’s a good thing, isn’t it? It’s a good thing for us to con­nect because then it’s more dif­fi­cult for us to beat the shit out of each other, don’t you think?”

§

Back in that con­fer­ence room at the Five Points Sheraton, with its arti­fi­cial light try­ing to mimic the early autumn sun, I wanted the teach­ers to know how impor­tant it is to make these con­nec­tions with our students—to us as teach­ers and human beings. I asked them to com­mit to find­ing a cou­ple of poems on the inter­net or in a book and to read one or two a day to their classes. “You don’t have to know a lot about poetry to enjoy it,” I offered up as an incen­tive. “I think peo­ple don’t study poetry because they are afraid of it. But the poem is a micro­cosm of the world, some world, a spe­cific moment or series of moments, read not in a vac­uum but in the breadth of the reader’s life, her expe­ri­ences up to that moment when she reads aloud the words.” I told the teach­ers, “Please read the poems aloud, and encour­age the stu­dents to read the poems aloud at home. Because poems are meant to be said and heard.”

I gave them a bib­li­og­ra­phy of books and activ­i­ties to use in their class­rooms, but really that sunny fall day, I couldn’t wait to get back to mine. I wanted to read my favorite poem to my class back in Olney, Illinois, at Olney Central College, Room 210. It is called “Song” writ­ten by Adrienne Rich in 1971, pub­lished in her ground­break­ing book of poems, Diving into the Wreck:

You’re won­der­ing if I’m lonely:
Okay then, yes, I’m lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aim­ing
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an air­field on the ocean

You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman dri­ving across coun­try
day after day, leav­ing behind
mile after mile
lit­tle towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely

If I’m lonely
it must be the lone­li­ness
of wak­ing first, of breath­ing
dawn’s first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep

If I’m lonely
it’s with the row­boat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it’s nei­ther
ice nor mud nor win­ter light
but wood, with a gift for burning.

When I got back, I would tell my stu­dents how I was only four when this poem was writ­ten, but 18 when I first read it. I would tell them how for years, I loved it for that last line, “wood, with a gift for burn­ing.” That it was years before I sat down with the poem to look at it. Years before I real­ized that the lone­li­ness at the heart of our lives is at the heart of this poem, and how I have been less lonely, how I am less lonely each time I read it, how I am less lonely when I read it to them.