Teaching poetry in the inner city

It was my first morning as a visiting writer in a Newark, New Jersey elementary school, and I reached the sixth-grade classroom early enough for a little reconnaissance: Venn diagram posters comparing Steve Jobs with the narrator of Bud, Not Buddy; a wall clock with Roman numerals and the wrong time.

And the laminated placards, strung from the ceiling with twine, to delineate each cluster of desks: Idioms in the corner, by the window. Hyperboles nearest the door. Metaphors up front. Personifications in the middle. The onomatopoeias consisted of just two desks (Crackle and Pop? Bubble and Hiss?), nudged next to each other in the center back.

But the similes’ table was askew, despite the science textbook (Discover the Wonder) wedged under one leg. Worse, a ceiling panel tilted overhead. A girl had thrown something at it the day before. It hung there, a sharp-cornered pane of Plexiglas, like a sword of Damocles, like a dangling conversation, like the other shoe, waiting to drop. (Alas, there was no table for clichés.)

Scattered similes

So the similes scattered, finding empty desks wherever they could. The teacher had already warned me that the SMART board wasn’t achieving up to its potential. She handed over a paper cup of dry-erase markers and encouraged me to use it as a whiteboard.

Before I wrote anything, I wanted to hear what the kids thought about poetry, what they wondered, whether they cared. “Jot down one thing you know about poetry,” I said.

“I know that poetry don’t have to make sense,” one wrote.

“It’s a different way of explaining yourself.”

“You write with your heart.”

“It doesn’t have to rhyme.”

Then it was their turn to pepper me with questions: How many different poems are there in the world? (No idea. A lot.) How much do poets get paid? (Not much. Get a day job.) Who made the first poetry?

Great question. I didn’t know the answer to that one, either, but I made them laugh by imagining the first poet, a cave-dwelling bard thumping his hairy foot on the ground while shouting to a neighbor: Rock. Big rock. Big rock falling. Big rock falling fast! Big rock falling fast DUCK!”

Tragic turf

These sixth-graders knew about ducking from danger; they live on tragic turf (sorry, no table for alliterations, either). They go to school in a city whose violent crime rate in 2012 was three times the national average, a place where nearly 30 percent of the residents squat below the poverty line.

And when they wrote, their poems blistered with loss. They scribbled elegies to grandparents, fathers, cousins, mothers, and brothers: dead from sickle cell and cancer, from stabbings and suicide. They wrote about what they see and hear and recoil from every day:

I’ve known streets and silence

I’ve seen car accidents and robberies

I’ve heard gunshots and curses...

I’ve wondered when life is going to stop.

I’ve been afraid of being taken out of life,

afraid of not being loved.

But they also wrote about a cherished friend with “basketball skin” and about a baby cousin, nicknamed Widget, who walks “wobbly like a penguin.” One girl’s poem captured her baby brother: “His loud footsteps sounding like heels/His shirt gulping up his spaghetti.” Another vividly evoked her grandmother: “She loved watching people walk by/She loved to twirl her fingers in her great white hair.”

Bumps and twists and turns

And when we read “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” by Langston Hughes, one student (not one of the metaphors) ventured, “I think the rivers mean something else. I think they mean his life had bumps and twists and turns.”

We wrote together for four days. Sort of. On Tuesday, a morning assembly lopped 30 minutes off our class time; another day, half the kids vanished to take a practice standardized test in preparation for the real standardized test, the PARCC, which would begin the following week.

I learned two things that day. One: class size does matter. With just 11 kids in the room, plenty of breathing space between them, they bent eagerly over their poems, focused and quiet. And two: a test like the PARCC, in a place like this, is just one more punch of defeat.

When they straggled in after their morning of testing, the similes looked like wet string. The metaphors were punctured balloons. The idioms? World-weary. And the lone onomatopoeia was splat in his chair.

I got them on their feet, doing goofy vocal and physical warm-ups: Say “alphabet” the way Dracula would do it. Say “cucumber” like it’s the funniest joke you’ve heard all year. Shake out your right foot — quick! — 16 times. Now your left foot. Right arm. Left arm. Now eight times: right foot, left foot, right arm, left arm. By the end, they were laughing, loose again. But the giddy mood didn’t last long.

Turning the page

One boy buried his head on his desk, concealing his poem, hiding his tears. Later, I glimpsed his paper: “All I remember is my uncle hanging himself/It was sad I was crying raining/drops.”

Again, again, we turned the page. We returned to the stuff of their lives: mean, delicious, dreamy, terrifying. And we wrote some more:

“I’ve known spiders, survival and bad people.”

“I’ve wondered what lies behind/questions.”

“I remember tasting pears, the juice dripping/down my lips.”

“I’ve known my mother/telling me to/never give up.”

Poets, I told them, are people who notice. Writing begins before you pick up the pen. Your words can make someone cry, or laugh, or change.

But they already knew. “Why does poetry matter?” I asked them — the squirmy similes and the hyperactive hyperboles, those muttering metaphors and idle idioms, even the onomatopoeia who kept popping out of his chair.

“Because it can change your life.”

“You can let what’s inside of you go free.”

“Poetry matter because without poetry we would not been having any music in this world.”

Class dismissed.