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.  

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.

Twinkling Puerto Rican Stars

Well, it was a day Franny got into me, or rather behind me, forcing me out of bed and then after the morning coffee out the door. I had to go hear, she thought, a bunch of kids from 47 Puerto Rican high schools recite from memory a poem in English. The winner of the competition would be sent to Washington DC to represent Puerto Rico in the national competition, which comprises all the fifty states plus the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.

Poetry Out Loud, it’s called, and it was only started in 2006. It got to Puerto Rico in 2008, and there were only eight schools participating. Now, it’s 47, and not just in the metropolitan area—it’s all over the island.

Across the nation, the program, which is sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts and the Poetry Foundation, draws in 365,000 participants annually. On the island, the program is jointly sponsored by the Department of Education and the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture.

Well, it would be something to see—what would Puerto Rican kids choose to read? Would it differ significantly from the poems gringos chose, or does adolescence carry the day, trump all, shatter the cultural / language barriers.

I was also curious—for many of these kids, English is a second language. How will they navigate Shakespearean English? What about the accent, the intonation? Not for nothing was my mantra “333 jewelry thieves” at Wal-Mart. If you can manage the “th” and the voiced consonants of “V” and “Z” (plus get a good “L” which for many Puerto Ricans is an “R”) you have the basic artillery. But how well can you fire it off?

I’m sorry to say that I can’t completely tell you. The contest was to begin at 9, it actually began at 9:30. A long video from last year’s competition was shown. The Director of the Institute of Puerto Rican Culture was introduced and spoke highly important words about culture (she also, by the way, referred to the contest taking place this morning as the “national” contest and then went on to give her best wishes to the winner who would represent Puerto Rico in the—also—“national” contest. Even poetry is no refuge for ideology….) At this point, we were introduced to the head of the English Department of the Department of Education, who also assured us that culture was important, and then went on to quote a bit of Dickinson—a nice touch.

It was now 10:15, and we had yet to introduce the judges—who came out solemnly as their various academic and professional achievements were listed. So that took some time, since one of them could barely walk, and nearly catapulted down the stairs from the stage.

This left us free to hear the rules of the competition—no pictures with flash, no applause between poems, no cell phones except on vibrate. These rules had to be repeated three times in both English and Spanish, since—well, it’s generally a good idea. We do many things very well in Puerto Rico, but there are times when our zeal, our zest has to be reined in. Otherwise, Mamita will burst onto the stage after her child recites, hug the child, beam at the audience, stand proudly and pose with the child while all 70 uncles / brothers / sisters / aunts / grandparents take pictures and then post on Facebook. Remember—we gotta get out of here by three o’clock.

It took me back, somehow, to the spelling bees that the State Journal used to sponsor. The parents in the audience, nervous for their kids, almost more nervous than the kids themselves. The cameras , the teachers and officials—my own mouth was dry, my palms sweaty, just seeing it.

Well, it was 10:40 by the time the first child stepped foot on stage—with a solid, creditable job of “Alone,” by Edgar Allan Poe. You’ll know it, of course:

From childhood's hour I have not been


As others were; I have not seen


As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

Well, I understand that—what teenager is not feeling that’s he’s never been as others are? But I was jolted indeed when the next teenager stepped out, and announced that she would recite “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star.”

Is this real—I thought? Are we all seriously going to sit and listen to “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star?” Somebody is going to start giggling—I had an obvious candidate in mind, and was preparing to dash out the theater—and this kid is gonna be sunk. And what sadistic teacher / mentor suggested this awful choice to this kid? What had she ever done to warrant this? Look, I don’t like kids myself, but neither do I think they should be treated cruelly.

Well, we sat there and took it—we parents and teachers and sibling and interested others. And she got through it, and nobody giggled, and I thought that even on an island where the inexplicable happens with astonishing regularity, I had just seen something wonderfully strange.

It was later, at home, that I wondered—is there something I’ve missed in Twinkle? Are there literary merits, wonderful nuances, subtleties and shades of meaning that I’ve been unaware of? Is it just me?

Well, I looked it up, and if there’s anything there, I can’t find it. But it was a thing to hear, on a Saturday morning in the Santurce sector of San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Alas, it was now close to eleven—I had to get home, eat something, and then go off to the Plaza, to read the portion of 30,000 names allotted for today.

But the handful of kids that I had heard today told me something. There’s a wonderful spirit, a wonderful naturalness in the people, and the kids of Puerto Rico. They were nervous, of course. But something in the air, in the spontaneity, in the emotional lifeblood of Puerto Rico comes through despite the dry mouth, sweaty palms, butterflies in the stomach.

Get ready, DC—you may have a surprise!