It’s easy
to forget, because we do it all the time and it’s normal for us, so it was nice
of Joshua to drop around and remind me.
He was one
of many people who—obviously—I was supposed to remember, and that was clear
when he sat down and peered nervously at me; in situations like this, what
choice do you have?
“I’m sorry,
but I don’t remember you,” I finally said. And he went on to tell me that I had intruded myself on a group of his fellow high-school
students who were being coached on their poems for the Poetry
Out Loud contest last
year.
Here’s my
version: I had held back as much as I could, since some of the kids were
struggling even to understand their poems, some were consistently
mispronouncing words, most were speaking either too quickly or too softly
or…something. And the coach? She was murmuring—sorry, make that cooing—the
gentlest words of encouragement on them.
And that’s
nice, because discouragement? Who needs it? Isn’t being a Latino kid reciting
English poetry enough of a challenge?
But there
was this thing: if one of these kids was going to go to Washington, DC, to face
native speakers from the fifty states, shouldn’t they have a decent shot of it?
So there I was, writing and wincing in the corner, and then my father, Jack,
dead these two decades, cleared his throat up there in heaven and fixed his
gaze down though the clouds at me. His eye is as the eagle….
So I had gently
taken over the group, after assuring the coach that she was doing an excellent
job, and that I had little, nothing really, to say.
Now for
Montalvo’s version:
“Man, you
fuckin’ blew those kids outta the water. They didn’t know what the fuh had hit
‘em. Most of those kids didn’t even know what they were saying! You blasted
them off the planet, man.”
Well,
Montalvo is a youth who measures poetic success with the grade of “PANTIES OFF,
LADIES” at the top, so my own performance?
“Jockstraps
off, team!”
This,
however, was after Montalvo had settled down a bit, because I had made my
umpteenth parental blunder by answering truthfully to his question: “did you
like my poem?”
When am I
gonna learn?
“No,” I
told him, and look, you don’t have to be adolescent to hear that as less a word
than a slamming door.
The
problem? The stuff that seems so obvious to everybody else around me, as they
read their poems to each other, I just don’t get. So Montalvo read the poem to
me, and then asked: what was it about? My answer, of course, was completely
wrong.
“How can
you not understand my poetry,” he demanded, “it’s perfectly clear,” and then
proceeded to recite the poem again. It’s sort of the equivalent of all the
tourists encountering non-English speaking people. What do they do? Raise their
voices!
The
problem—as I, and only I, see it—is that a lot of the poets are sort of
commentators on their emotional fields, as it were. Think talking heads given a
news analysis from the wars of feeling. Want an example? Well, I’ve just moved
up and looked at one poem, and came upon this:
Our
unspoken reason has led me
To
understand the world we live in.
OK—looks
like poetry, but is it?
So I’ve
been telling Montalvo, don’t, please, report in. Instead, break out your verbal
paint box, set your brush to work and set my eye and soul ablaze with the
colors of metaphors, similes, images, adjectives, verbs that stab the eye. And
I had suggested that he might do one short poem, but using an extended
metaphor. And since of course—of course!—I hadn’t explained what I wanted, much
less shown him an example of one, he had failed. Oh, and then I had panned the
result.
There is
sadism in teaching. Or rather, there is a time for plain words and honesty.
There’s also a lot of bad teachers blaming their students for the bad teaching.
So it was time to apologize, and then ask—since the Calvary had come over the
hill—if he had read Sonnet 18, by the big S.
“Look,
would you just assume that I haven’t read all this stuff,” he snapped, “because
it makes me feel like a fuckin’ retard to have to say that I haven’t.”
Right. And
so upset is he that he wants me to read it, not him. Is he afraid of
encountering a word he doesn’t know?
So I start
in:
Shall I compare thee
to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely
and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake
the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease
hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the
eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold
complexion dimmed,
And every fair from
fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's
changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer
shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of
that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag
thou wander'st in his shade,
When in eternal lines
to time thou grow'st,
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to
thee.
So we tackle it, and,
the first question?
“Since when can you drop all the ‘e’s’’
“Since forever, I tell him, “though, in
fact, nobody in the last hundred years or so has done it.”
“Can I?”
Time to throw a bone!
Well, if he’s going to write a sonnet, why
shouldn’t he drop some ‘e’s just to give it a nice archaic effect? That done,
we go line by line, until we arrive at the moment I just love:
“Motherfucker,” he breathes.
That, along with “what a Niggah!” is
Montalvo’s Presidential Freedom Medal / Purple Heart / Nobel Prize (you choose)
tag line. And what poet is not going to be attracted to the idea of, ‘my words,
baby, are gonna blast you into eternity? Panties off!’?
So then it’s time to look and see: what has
Shakespeare done? How did he use the metaphor through all fourteen lines of the
sonnet? How did he extend it, morph it, tweak it? And isn’t it interesting that
the poem works, paradoxically, by at once diminishing the summer day, which can
be too hot, the winds too rough, the sun clouded, and anyway, it’s all too
fleeting? Yet somehow Shakespeare still suggests all this and makes you feel
both the wonder of the summer’s day, and that the object is even more
wonderful.
A Niggah indeed.
Well, he’s just called now, since it’s
raining torrentially and he’s not coming today; he’s on a motorcycle now, and
doesn’t want to get the computer wet. This, I tell him, is a good plan, so we
agree, he’ll stay at home, where he doesn’t want to be, instead of at the café,
where he does. I go back to writing this, and then remember Joshua—the high
school kid who remembered me though I didn’t remember him.
“You really helped us a lot,” he said, and
went on to tell me that he’s in the university now, studying computer science,
but he wants to get back involved with Poetry Out Loud, because that had been
the coolest moment of his high school years. Then he looked at me, and I
remembered that feeling that day: the kids had looked at me with all the trust
and admiration with which my cats had looked at me, in those terrible moments
when they had been asking me to help them to their death. When those moments
happen, or when Montalvo breathes in that he’s understood a sonnet by Shakespeare?
That’s when I remember…
…teachers make a difference.
