The Cloister Walk - Kathleen Norris [25]
A strange thing happens when I enter an elementary school classroom as a visiting artist, to read some poetry and eventually get the kids to write. It has much less to do with me as an individual than with the power of poetry, and may also be a side effect of the simple fact that I come to the children knowing very little about them. With me, they are suddenly handed a fresh slate. But no matter if the school is rich or poor, in the country, a suburb, or city, I’ve found that the kids that the teacher might have described as “good students” will inevitably write acceptable but unexceptional poems and stories. The breathtaking poems come from left field, as it were, from bad students, the ones the teachers will say don’t usually participate well in classroom activities.
One day, when I was engaged with fifth-graders in a working-class neighborhood in North Dakota, I glanced down at a boy’s paper and saw the words “My Very First Dad,” and that alerted me that something very personal, very deep was going on. I no longer remember what my assignment had been, but I know it was nothing as invasive as “write a poem about someone in your family.” Most likely it was an open-ended challenge to work with similes. Given the freedom to write about anything at all, this boy had chosen to write about his “very first dad,” and while I left him alone to work it out, I did have several conversations with him. He was pleased, and surprised, when I pointed out to him that his similes were so good they had quickly led him into the deeper realm of metaphor. He’d written of his father: “I remember him/like God in my heart, I remember him in my heart/like the clouds overhead, /and strawberry ice cream and bananas/when I was a little kid. But the most I remember/is his love,/as big as Texas/when I was born.”
The boy said, rather proudly, that he had been born in Texas, but otherwise told me nothing of his story. It was his stunned teacher who filled me in. She said things that did not surprise me, given my previous experience as an artist-in-residence—“He’s not a good student, he tries, but he’s never done anything like this before”—but then she told me that the boy had never known his father; he’d skipped town on the day he was born.
Oddly enough, hearing this was gratifying. Just a poet’s presence in that classroom, on behalf of similes and metaphors (officially, to justify my presence in terms recognized by the educational establishment, that’s what I was “teaching”), had allowed this boy to tell the adults in his life—his teacher, his mom, his stepfather— something they need to know, that a “very first dad” looms large in his psyche. Like God in his heart, to quote the poem, a revelation from the depths of this boy’s soul.
There are no prescriptions, no set of rules that will produce a poem like this; no workshop could teach a method that would replicate exactly what went on between me and the students in that room. But I have some idea as to how and why it happened. A teacher once told me that having an artist come to her classroom was like letting a cat in—and I’ll risk a bad pun by saying that I think it’s more like dropping a catalyst into a chemical solution in order to stimulate a reaction.
What is happening in that classroom, when the poet acts as a catalyst? Well, first of all, before I ask students to write, we always have a long discussion about rules. I tell them that for this adventure of writing poetry, we can suspend many of the normal rules for English class. No, you don’t have to write within the margins; no, you don’t have to look a word up in the dictionary to make sure you’re spelling it right—we’ll do that later. For now just write the word the way you think it’s spelled so you don’t interrupt the flow of writing; you can print or use cursive (that’s a big issue in third grade); you can doodle on your paper; you can scratch things out (here I show them my own rough drafts, so they can see that I mean it); you can write anonymously or even make up a name for yourself as a poet.
If you’re really stuck, I tell them, you