Fast Food Poetry
I have been teaching now for almost thirty years, working with school-children and college students, with teachers and with senior citizens. I have taught poetry and nature writing, biography and memoir, oral history. Most consistently, I have worked for a program based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, teaching teachers to use poetry in the classroom.
That work has taken me all over the United States. One month I find myself changing planes in Atlanta, Georgia, the next in Denver, Colorado. I’ve been to Boise, Idaho, to St. Cloud, Minnesota, to little windswept towns in northern New Mexico. Each time, I lead a pair of intensive weekend workshops, lasting a total of about forty hours. Such “fast food poetry” does not come easily to me. It is always a challenge to connect with a new group of students, themselves already well acquainted with each other. I try to get a grasp of their ideas and interests, their taste, their sense of humor, and then to pitch my teaching at that level. There are practical difficulties too: making my way from the airport to the hotel and from the hotel to the school, often in an unfamiliar car, along unfamiliar roads, hampered by jetlag and exhaustion.
But my difficulties are nothing compared to what my students must endure. Most have families of their own, as well as a full-time teaching job. They get up early to grade papers and prepare classes; they stay on after school to finish crucial paperwork; they carve out time on weekends to complete their assignments. They are kind, warm-hearted, idealistic people, but they are also frantic and beleaguered. They must meet the requirements of “No Child Left Behind.” They must deal with harassed supervisors, needy children, overcrowded classrooms, parents who themselves are often overtaxed and anxious.
When I was first sent to Las Vegas, about a dozen years ago, the city was expanding by some 4-6,000 people every month. Ten new schools were being built each year: eight new primary schools, and two new high schools. Wages were high, and eager young teachers were pouring in from all over the United States. On my most recent visit, in the spring of 2008, the population had reached a high of two million people, and houses were going into foreclosure left and right. Classes were being held in double shifts throughout the year, with special emphasis on Remedial English and English as a Second Language. One teacher told me that in her district, the children spoke 105 different languages. This was a culture of raging inequality: extravagance and affluence at one end of town, and screeching poverty at the other, with the teachers doing their best to walk between. It is not easy in such circumstances to preach the value of a liberal education, or the tender pleasures to be found in poetry. Children handed in poems whose lines were jammed with dollar signs, as if cash were the only alphabet that mattered.
“My son is working at one of those big casinos,” one woman told me. “I’ve been teaching for twenty-three years now, and already he makes better money than I do.”
Meanwhile the teachers themselves are often woefully undereducated, unable to spell reliably (to distinguish there and their, its and it’s) or to write a simple book report. Many are afraid of poetry, which they know only at its most basic (Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky), and which, apart from haiku, and some saccharine inspirational verse, they feel certain “has to rhyme.” I try to quiz them about their earlier experiences, and a name or two may emerge: Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Maya Angelou. Some have encountered couplets and acrostics, or the occasional Shakespeare sonnet. But that is rare.
Often several will admit, half bashful, half defiant, that they have always hated poetry, and done everything they could to avoid teaching it. Now that it is required they want foolproof recipes, lessons that will fulfill every possible criterion at one fell swoop: serving to test spelling and to teach alliteration, to cover rhyme and rhythm, and at the same time tip a hat to Black History Month and the jazz legacy of Langston Hughes. They want poetry with a vengeance, poetry as an all-purpose tool for use in any circumstances: a cell-phone, a camera, a sewing-kit and a Swiss army knife, its compass pointing north to that essential A.
I do my best to assuage these multiple anxieties, perhaps especially in places like Las Vegas. I lead the class through small, manageable, step-by-step assignments. I read them Sharon Olds and William Stafford, introduce them to Rumi in the Coleman Barks translation, and to Neruda, translated by Alastair Reid. Over the course of our two weekends together, I try to shepherd them towards a more adult frame of reference, to show them books they might return to on their own.
But the teachers find it difficult to concentrate. After about twenty minutes, they begin to surf the Web. They step out into the corridor to make a crucial phone-call, rustle through their bag to find more pretzels. They want that A. But it is hard for them to read or write for any length of time. They are children of speed, of novelty, of distraction. It is a challenge for them even to sit still.
On one of my recent teaching stints, I went into a convenience store to buy something to eat. Behind the sliding glass doors were shelves of Coca-Cola and expensive bottled water, plump little flagons of pre-mixed cappuccino. There were mini-servings of cheese and crackers in a tidy plastic wrap. There were aisles of tuna fish and blotchy spam, racks and racks of thousand-flavored chips. But with the exception of some nicely freckled bananas hanging up above the till, there was almost nothing “natural” in the store. This was convenience food carried to the point of nausea, food stale, freeze-dried, prefabricated, dead. It was “fuel” all right, but nothing more. All its savor, all its beauty, had been leached away.
That convenience store came back to haunt me as I thought about my teaching. Convenience food, convenience poetry. Surely there had to be a better way. It wasn’t poetry per se I wanted to teach my students, so much as a life in which poetry might be possible, poetry in the form of slowing down. I had nothing to sell, no forty-dollar workbook, no esoteric rituals or complex promises. I just wanted my students to relax a little, to allow themselves to listen, to remember their own dreamy childhood selves. Walking, talking, reading, drawing, praying, telling stories: the nourishment is there, as close as our own breath. We only have to pause a moment, notice, and enjoy.
You can buy a copy of World Enough & Time direct from me:
Let me know where to send it, and if you’d like it signed.
(See too my full list of publications, including In Praise of Listening:
A Gathering of Stories.)
You can also get it from my publisher: www.bauhanpublishing.com
or from your friendly local bookstore. My own favorite is Broadside Books in Northampton, MA, www.broadsidebooks.com.
On May 24, 2024, Christian was interviewed by Loan Tran for Awakin.
Reminds me so much of my teaching experience in Orlando, Florida. Beautiful piece you wrote.