Poetry in the end

According to T.S. Eliot, April is “the cruellest month…mixing/Memory and desire.” I get it. The pussy willow is whispering with buds. The cherry blossoms have popped. The air is spring-soft, and my father just died.

It’s National Poetry Month, and I think of the kids, one from each state, who will soon converge in Washington, D.C. for the annual Poetry Out Loud finals. It’s a contest conceived and bankrolled by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation — a contest, like the Scripps National Spelling Bee, that ramps up from classroom competitions to regional and statewide bouts in which high school students recite classic and contemporary poems that they’ve learned by heart.

For ten years, as a New Jersey teaching artist, I’ve coached kids for the contest. Piscataway. Hoboken. Camden. Trenton. I’ve guided students as they chose poems from the vast Poetry Out Loud anthology. I’ve helped them untangle image and allusion, worked to build their confidence with theater games and vocal calisthenics.

Poetry Out Loud aims to reach all kids — not just drama geeks or English stars, but jocks and stoners, weirdos and cheerleaders, kids who are headed for Harvard and kids who are headed for catastrophe. Teachers don’t cherry-pick who participates. All kinds of schools — public, private, parochial, even home-schooling collectives — take part.

“This shit is whacked”

One dank winter day, I stood in a circle of teenagers at Creative Achievement Academy, an alternative school in Vineland. I wanted to ease them toward poetry gradually, unthreateningly. “Say your name and one word you love,” I instructed. One boy leered, “SEX!” Another shouted, “MONEY!”

Jessica murmured something, so softly I could barely hear. “I’m sorry; what did you say?” Chi-chi, standing next to Jessica, offered helpfully, “She said, ‘This shit is whacked.’”

“Got it,” I said. “But that’s four words. What about just ‘whacked’?” Jessica tossed her boot-black hair and shrugged. Whatever, poetry lady.

Before they chose their own poems, we practiced interpretation, reading “I, Too, Sing America,” by Langston Hughes:

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
…Tomorrow,
I’ll be at the table
When company comes.

“That’s a racial poem,” Hector said. And he went on, unpacking the metaphor. “When he says, ‘tomorrow,’ he doesn’t mean ‘tomorrow.’ He means, ‘later on.’”

Four boys in the class chose to memorize “Fire and Ice,” by Robert Frost. No surprise; it’s the shortest poem in the anthology and begins:

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire…

So, I asked, what’s this poem about? “The world could end in fire, like, a big meteor could hit,” Tony said. “Or we could have another ice age.” I pushed a little: “What does desire have to do with all that? Can desire hurt people?”

There was a beat of silence as Tony thought. “Yeah, if you want something so bad you’d steal for it, or kill for it.”

Offering redemption

I wanted to end on a redemptive note. So I gathered them once more into a circle and recited “Spruce Street, Berkeley,” by Naomi Shihab Nye, the friend who joined the club of bereaved daughters a few years back, the one whose words I often turn to for sustenance and hope. The poem ends, “There is a place to stand/where you can see so many lights/you forget you are one of them.”

I finished, and Charles waved his hand. “That’s a poem about jail. That’s about jail, right?”

Then it was time to pack up my books, my feeble pens and paper. Kimberly had decided on “Deliberate,” a poem by Amy Uyematsu that plumbs the gap between foreign-born parents and their yearning American daughter. Vashti planned to learn “Ballad of Birmingham,” a poem in two voices about the bomb that killed four little girls in an Alabama church in 1963.

“For next time, memorize the first stanza,” I said.

One more question

But someone had one more question. It might have been Kanisha, who told me she wanted to be just like Barbie. Or the kid they called “Too-Tall Mike,” who ripped up his poem after another boy chose the same one.

It might have been Perry, whose eyes were dark and frightened as a doe’s. Or Louis, who watched as his parents were murdered. Or Nydeira, who had a year-old baby. When we read a poem that ended, “The hands are churches that worship the world,” and I asked what their hands did to revere the world, she muttered, “Change poopy diapers.”

It was one of them, insistent but polite. “Miss? Hey, Miss. How is this gonna help us in the end?”

And I was at a loss. Poetry isn’t a cure, and it isn’t a miracle. It’s not penicillin or a hundred-dollar check. It won’t jump your car’s dead battery or fix your leaky roof. It won’t feed your baby or save your dying grandmother.

A tiny lozenge of light

But there are words, phrases, whole poems that — in the grimmest, loneliest, most broken moments of my life — have offered me a tiny lozenge of light. A reminder that life is a crazy weave of pain and beauty and that our job is to live it all, right out to the end of our days.

Chi-chi was right. This shit is whacked. We’re born, we babble, maybe we make some sense, and then, before you can blink, the sonnet’s over, the last iambic heartbeat silenced.

I’m a member of the club, now. I wasn’t ready. We’re never ready. But there are tissues and poems, cousins and friends, and long, full days to learn by heart.