Lives Brought to Life
“I am a teacher, and who was I kidding, right?” she said. “This was my calling. It’s a really nice validation to get from the district.”
It’s poetry month and we asked our community to answer 3 important questions, one of them being…
Here are some of the answers we got.
Richard Jeffrey Newman
Poet
I am astonished at their mouthful names–
Lakinishia, Chevellanie, Delayo, Fumilayo–
their ragged rebellions and lip-glossed pouts,
and all those pants drooped as drapery…
-Patricia Smith, “Building Nicole’s Mama”
Jack Ridl
Poet
Some time when the river is ice ask me
mistakes I have made. Ask me whether
what I have done is my life…
-Willian Stafford, “Ask Me”
Teresa Carson
Poet, Associate Editor, CavanKerry Press
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine…
-John Keats, “Ode on Melancholy”
Holly Smith
Teacher
Ladies and gentlemen, ghosts and children of the state,
I am here because I could never get the hang of Time…
-Terrance Hayes, “Lighthead’s Guide to the Galaxy”
Danny Shot
Poet
The Hoboken Poem
By Jack Wiler
Hoboken, city of light.
Hoboken, a bump on the river.
Hoboken, four guys on a corner in guinea
tees gold chains and they’re all the mayor’s friend;
hey they work in his office.
Hoboken, elections every day.
Hoboken, opportunity around every corner.
Every corner a danger.
No stop signs.
No sign of anyone stopping.
Every taxi paused at every corner.
Hoboken, one taxi fare
2.25 cheap.
Hoboken, a bus every minute.
Hoboken, a train every ten.
Hoboken, burning.
Every building on fire.
Children falling from the windows.
Mothers running into the street.
Hoboken, even the fire houses on fire.
Hoboken, burnt.
Hoboken, rising and falling
burning and smoldering.
Hoboken, every factory closed.
Every park full.
Every man a king.
Every one works at the Board of Ed.
Hoboken, unlimited overtime.
No end to the money you can make.
Hoboken, home of baseball.
Hoboken, only one baseball field.
Hoboken, the first fly ball over the Elysian Field,
the first smoking fastball,
the first frozen rope drops just beneath the Maxwell’s sign,
the drop of coffee lands on the ball,
the fielder slips, the factory closes, the sign goes dark,
the children run in the street till well past eleven.
It’s Hoboken,
the fires are out, the factories are closed,
the sign is dark, the world is quiet,
the sun is setting.
Hoboken, good to the last bitter drop.
Hoboken, city of light:
city of paused taxis,
city of beer and fires and children in the street.
Hoboken
the factories closed, the lights out
pauses mid day.
No election today.
No overtime today.
No games are scheduled.
The children leave the house at nine in the morning dressed
as spooks and demons and march down the street.
Ragamuffins in a ragamuffin town.
A raga then for Hoboken.
A last song for a lost town.
Hoboken
taxis waiting for the children to pass.
As a teacher of writing and literature, I never ask students to do what I cannot do myself. I, as much as humanly possible, write to their essay prompts and play guinea pig for my own methodologies.
As my students are memorizing a piece for our in-class recitation for Poetry Out Loud, I also memorize a piece. I only perform it if they wish me to, and in the order they ask me to.
In class, my students (some who had taken a Shakespeare class or who had done Koranic recitation) weighed in on collective wisdom on how to memorize. Really memorize. Not the photographic-memory-wing-and-a-prayer-night-before stuff they had been trying to shill in their lit classes for years.
Here is our list. The all caps emphasis mine.
How to memorize:
I do not have the time to agonize over a selection. I know I will force myself to pick a longer piece, and a pre-20th Century work, for now. But other than that, I give myself five minutes, tops, to pick a piece.
Last year, having just come back from a summer vacation spent visiting Haworth and the very moors where the Bronte sisters wrote, I choose an Emily Bronte piece was a way to hold on to that connection I felt with her.
With the Bronte poem, I spent my morning commutes living with it, building my memorization line by line, stanza by stanza. And I had to find my own way into the poem, trying not to have the literature teacher crutch of explication. I tried to link the voice with something in my own life, much as my students would be doing. In my own coming to terms with the poem, I turned my address towards someone who the demands of work and life forces me to grudgingly turn away from. My muscle memory of those weeks is of walking down a hill past a Colonial Era cemetery at day break, thinking and speaking: “Why did the morning rise to break/So great, so pure a spell?” The anger and anguish of being ripped from a world of dreams became mine.
This year, I just picked a letter. “T” and came up with “Thoughtless Cruelty”. The imagery reminded me of “The Fly” by William Blake, so my immediate instinct was “Ah ha! Paired poems for my Romanticism unit!” I choose you, Charles Lamb.
But that was my teacher brain speaking.
So, as the Dodge Poetry approach teaches us, back to Beginner’s Mind. I read the poem to myself a few times, immediately letting go of line breaks and trying to find the conversation in the poem. And the surprise to me in the poem is that it is a teacher-like voice speaking.
I shall embrace the object lesson of the fly handed to me by the poem. And await for the surprises bringing the poem in the world brings to me.
This is what I will actually use to memorize the poem:
There Robert
You have killed that fly
And should you thousand ages try the life you’ve taken
To supply, you could not do it
You surely must have been devoid of though and sense
To have destroyed a thing which no way you annoyed
You’ll one day rue it
Twas but a fly perhaps you’ll say
That’s born in April dies in May
That does but just learn to display his wings one minute
And in the next is vanished quite
A bird devours it in his flight
Or come a cold blast in the night, there’s no breath in it
The bird but seeks his proper food
And providence whose power endued that fly with life
When it thinks it good may justly take it
But you have no excuses for’t
A life by nature made so short less reason is that you for sport
Should shorter make it
A fly
A little thing you rate
But Robert
Do not estimate a creature’s pain by small or great
The greatest being can have but fibres
Nerves
And flesh
And these the smallest ones possess
Although their frame and structure less
Escape our seeing
The last thing you want to say to a teacher in the first month of school is “Hey, how about you organize a whole-school, nationally affiliated, kinda-of-a-big-deal poetry program in your building. Now.” When you’ve barely got your roll book set up, the papers are mounting into a summit that needs climbing, and you’re nursing your first cold of the year.
But I am telling you that Poetry Out Loud is the stuff we need to make time for. And that it is the best teacher-cheat in the world. Students will hand you a list of high-interest poems of literary merit to use in the classroom.
Trust your students and their voices and that the poems will speak to them.
For those of you who simply cannot add another thing this year, here’s the seed to plant:
I hope that you will also find they will own it and be eager to take the next steps to bring POL to the school. You can start the program with a small handful of committed kids that have seen it in action, and “get it.” Keep it as small as the POL rules allow until the program builds the word of mouth (ha, puns). You might even find allies in your Department or school will emerge to help.
If you are already on board with the idea and ready to bring Poetry Out Loud to your school – my suggestion is to use your teacher sense of backwards planning.
The POL website can be a bit daunting with dates, rules, etc. Pull out your planner, your school calendar, fire up the browser window– now work backwards.
Pacing and planning gives you and the competitors time to prepare. Let’s face it, we are asking them to do something so anachronistically un-teenage. In public. Under a spotlight. We want them to have a good experience and honor their effort.
My school is entering into our second year of full-on Poetry Out Loud action. And backwards planning has saved me. Here’s what it looks like on the playback in chronological order:
And then we breathe.
Unless we’ve made it to States. But that’s another blog entry.
And, did I mention, Poetry Out Loud is a free program?
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DD5GSZtfavM]
TERESA CARSON
How and why did you get involved with Poetry Out Loud?
HOLLY SMITH
I can’t recall how I heard of the program, but I stumbled upon it and it seemed like a project too interesting to pass up. The incredible fact that the materials and registration are free, and that it is a national program, also made it seem worth pursuing.
TERESA CARSON
How many Dr. Ronald E. McNair Academic High School students participated in POL? Tell me a bit about the students who participated.
HOLLY SMITH
It is always difficult to add another program into an already packed and time-crunched school year, so the past three years were all about building visibility, momentum, and student buy-in into the program. Our students are all college-bound, highly diverse in terms of family background and economic situations, and are eager to do extra-curriculars. The problem is they are so booked up, there is interest, but often the follow-through is harder to come by. The program has been small, with perhaps fewer than 10 students vying for Regionals. This year, we were able for the first time to get a school bus and were able to bring students to watch the competition. That alone has amped up interest, and now the students are keen to drive this process. We are planning on hosting a major school-level competition and also a District-level competition with the other 6 high schools in Jersey City. Because each school can send competitors, it allows us all to be a community and support each other. Having Cameron Clarke so visibly be successful and so publicly celebrated at MAHS and in the District has put POL on the next-level. The program has been modest. A few classroom teachers have had students memorize and present, and students who had independent interest to participate selected pieces on their own. Then we had an after-school competition with judges and only the students who were interested in competing. It was frankly structured more like an audition.
TERESA CARSON
What value is added to your students’ experience of poetry by participating in POL?
HOLLY SMITH
POL allows them to be self-directed and own the piece they select, while still providing that level of curated, quality poems. Students end up spending way more time browsing, reading, researching and thinking about poetry when forced to make their own choices, so they will end up reading more than if you had simply assigned them reading. It also lets them interact with a piece before a formal “teachery” reading is imposed on it. And as a teacher, it allows me to coach, rather than teach. There is no objective or test that circumscribes meaning. The meaning is in the performance.
TERESA CARSON
How did you help Cameron prepare for his performances at the school/regional/state level?
HOLLY SMITH
My sense of the competition is that being true to your own unique timbre and picking pieces that play to that quality is the way to go. And Cameron’s got some pipes on him. I can take little to no credit for Cameron’s success. Because our program is so small, Cameron committed to do the work because of his interest in performance. Because both our schedules were so tight, he did a few “check-ins” with me, first for me to see if he had come to an understanding of who the speaker of his piece was and what the poem meant. He had spent some time watching some of the POL videos on YouTube to get a feel of the style of performance. Then we did a few rehearsals (to which Cameron had come having memorized the lines quite early on) and calibrated choices he wanted to make. I tried to not insert my own history or interpretations with the pieces, and just tried to ask him questions as to why he was making choices, and how he thought that communicated the meaning.
TERESA CARSON
What were the highlights of your POL experience in your school, at the regional competition and at the state finals?
HOLLY SMITH
Selfishly, it is seeing the students really catch fire in excitement with both POL and this year’s first Poem In Your Pocket Day. There is a strong poetry nerd cohort growing, which is going to make building the program much easier! The other highlight is having the students (and not just my own students, but the wonderful competitors on the Regional and State levels) show me which pieces they relate to. I have already started to share and incorporate these “road-tested” works in the classroom. I tend to pick disciplines that there is no way one person can ever claim even a fraction of knowing the canon – film, literature, poetry. There is just so much out there and more being created constantly. So seeing students recite, and being exposed to new poems via guest poets reading, I build my store of teachable poems. (I loved Gary Whitehead’s “Glossary of Chickens”)
TERESA CARSON
What advice or thoughts would you offer teachers who want to get their students involved in POL?
HOLLY SMITH
I’d say, just say yes. Commit to bringing the program to your school. Let the students speak for themselves – it can be as simple as having a brief meeting and just screening some particularly good student pieces from YouTube, passing out some of the poems off the website and having students read some aloud, and giving them the POL website. Get buy-in from students FIRST, and they will drive the adults to want to participate in giving up class time, to volunteer to judge on school-level, etc. Put all your deadlines in your calendar as soon as you have them, and set your own internal deadlines (for classroom teachers, for school-level competition, for the competitors to have picked pieces, to be “off book”, etc.).
TERESA CARSON
Based on Cameron’s success at the state finals, you were awarded the scholarship, sponsored by CavanKerry Press, to the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching. How do you feel about winning this scholarship?
HOLLY SMITH
It is like finding a puzzle piece under the couch I was not aware I was missing. I was unfamiliar with the conference, so I got to be tapped on the shoulder and pointed towards this whole world of things that dovetail with things that I do on a modest scale, or would like to do, as a teacher and human being. I like conferences that remind a teacher the flow and energy of being a student, let you encounter a work with fresh eyes, and be given structure and space to write. It lets you carve out time to focus on activities that are integral to being a good teacher – but that usually get short shrift because the very real impossibility of what teachers are asked to do on a daily basis. And you get to do this with colleagues who are committed to the same project. I do identify as a writer, and perhaps more specifically as an amateur poet, however the demands of earning a paycheck and working in public education give me copious excuses as to why I have no chapbook of my own.
CavanKerry is grateful for past and current support received from the following organizations:
