Montalvo and the Big S

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.