Of Course I Had To Do It….

I couldn’t resist, and if got away with it, it’s only because of the extreme generosity of Penélope.

She was the coach, sitting behind a table and listening and commenting on the poems being recited by the high school students who are participating in a program called Poetry Out Loud. So Penélope—a long, willowy woman—was making rather general comments, and seemed a bit at sea. At one point I stopped to listen to To Helen, by Edgar Allan Poe. You’ll remember it, of course:

To Helen

BY EDGAR ALLAN POE

Helen, thy beauty is to me

   Like those Nicéan barks of yore,

That gently, o'er a perfumed sea,

   The weary, way-worn wanderer bore

   To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam,

   Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home

   To the glory that was Greece,      

   And the grandeur that was Rome.

Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche

   How statue-like I see thee stand,

The agate lamp within thy hand!

   Ah, Psyche, from the regions which

   Are Holy-Land!

Penélope had nothing particularly to say, and asked if anyone had anything to say.

Guess who did!

“Grandeur,” I’m telling the girl—probably 16, and almost certainly suffering Asperger syndrome. She had been saying it “grander.” Then I went on pretending I was writing. Penélope went on to urge the students only to make gestures that were “organic.”

Marc’s red cape!

Look, students want to know how to do things, which means that the comments have to be specific, practical, and lead to different results—one hopes better. And anyway, what is organic, and how do I know if a gesture is organic or not? At this point I had made several comments, and Penélope asked me if I had any comments.

“Could I stand up and fall flat on my face?” I asked.

“I’m not really good with poetry,” I said. “And a lot of this stuff I don’t know, so I’m winging it. But let’s do this—you recite a stanza, and I’ll recite the stanza, and we’ll see how they differ, and which is better, if any.”

So we were off—and my first question was, “who’s Helen?”

The student didn’t know.

OK, so I explained, even hauling out the tired line of, “the face that launched a thousand ships.” Then we got into the question of the “t”—would it be an American “t” which is almost a “d,” or would it be a good English “t?”

We did similar work of “barks of yore”—the “ks” was getting swallowed. Oh, and what about lengthening and relishing that alliterative “weary, way-ward wanderer?”

And so we spent twenty minutes or so, digging in, discussing meanings, discussing what words are important, what words less so.

“If every word is important, then none of them are important,” I said. At this point Penélope had sat down.

“I’m learning so much from seeing you coach,” she told me.

Right, so the next student was going to do Ella Wheeler Wilcox. I won’t burden you with all of it, but here—in all its dreadful familiarity—are the first lines:

Laugh, and the world laughs with you,

Weep, and you weep alone,

For the brave old earth must borrow its mirth—

But has trouble enough of its own.

It was time to come clean.

“Look,” I said, “you’ve gotta know: this poem is not considered out of the top drawer. In fact, most people this it’s pretty awful.”

News to the student!

“So you’re gonna have to make a decision. On the one hand, you have to own this poem, to say in your voice ‘I know what you think of this poem, I know you think it’s trash, but guess what? I believe it, and you’re going to, too!”

So we played with that, stepping forward, locking eyes with the audience, using a stronger, firmer tone of voice.

“The other alternative is to play it straight, but to try to bring out some meaning in the poem that we’ve been missing.”

Finally, I asked the student if he had analyzed the rhyme scheme of the poem.

He looked blank.

“You mean like ABBA?”

“That’s part of it,” I said. “But is this poem in iambic pentameter? What are the five—think it’s five—types of meter?”

The student’s lip quivered.

“We don’t get that stuff in our school,” said one of the other students. “We’re in 10^th grade, and we’re still studying adjectives.”

Hunh?

“You know, ‘the car is red’—which word in that sentence is an adjective?’ That’s what the teacher does every year….”

“It is NOT your fault,” I tell the kid. “It’s a sin that no teacher has taught you this….”

There were surprises—why would any student choose Emerson, so I asked, midway through working with the student on the poem:

The lords of life, the lords of life,—

I saw them pass,

In their own guise,

Like and unlike,

Portly and grim,—

Use and Surprise,

Surface and Dream,

Succession swift and spectral Wrong,

Temperament without a tongue,

And the inventor of the game

Omnipresent without name;—

Some to see, some to be guessed,

They marched from east to west:

Little man, least of all,

Among the legs of his guardians tall,

Walked about with puzzled look.

Him by the hand dear Nature took,

Dearest Nature, strong and kind,

Whispered, ‘Darling, never mind!

To-morrow they will wear another face,

The founder thou; these are thy race!’   

“It’s about the death of his child,” said the student.

“Whoa!” I said. “Let’s go back. I confess, I had no idea—and I don’t much like Emerson, though my grandmother did.” So how to put more emotion in, without being a ham?

Another surprise:

 All Hallows’ Eve

By Dorothea Tanning

Be perfect, make it otherwise.

Yesterday is torn in shreds.

Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes

Rip apart the breathing beds.

Hear bones crack and pulverize.

Doom creeps in on rubber treads.

Countless overwrought housewives,

Minds unraveling like threads,

Try lipstick shades to tranquilize

Fears of age and general dreads.

Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,

Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.

Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise

You and the werewolf: newlyweds.

I was learning, too—what was the story behind the poem? The poet, it turned out, had been physically abused as a newlywed. What was the tone? Irony? Anger? Despair? And what about that last word, that whole last line? We played with different ways of saying “werewolf,” and then, of course, how you’d say the word “newlyweds.” We spat it out, we sighed it, we shrugged it off.   

It was a mixture of technique and interpretation, and so we played around—could you whisper and still be heard in the back of the room? What was the softest you could speak, and still be audible?

There’s something that happens when teaching, when you step into the river and let it carry you where it may. One kid, thin, shy, and quite possibly gay—looked at me with the eyes of an animal in pain, an animal who knows and trusts—you will pull out the splinter, the pain will be gone. It’s an experience like none other—a kid putting his soul for however long in your hands.

Teaching. It’s something I never much wanted to do…

…but really glad I did.