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.  

Coming Soon—A Puerto Rican Sonnet!

“I’ve been reading up on sonnets, and I’ve decided I like the Shakespearean sonnet better than the Italian,” said Montalvo, who, until he had the misfortune of bumping into me, had happily whiled his time away with free verse. Here’s one example:

Magic Trick

Your memory

Can’t be forgotten…

Those eyes

Will always be

Remembered…

And my feelings

Will never

Die.

Montalvo has this thing—he thinks that any reader who sees a poem of a page and a half, with lines of ten or twelve syllables, will immediately have a mind freeze—too long, too complicated, too much work. So, his strategy? Short poems, short lines: get in, get to the point, get out.

“It sounds almost like a haiku,” said Mary Anne, a painter and professor, who had joined us for coffee, and had just heard one of Montalvo’s poems. So then it’s time to point out that even in a severely restricted form, a poem can have depth, can provoke thought. Challenged, I came up with the only example I could:

The wren


Earns his living


Noiselessly.

His response?

“What’s a wren?”

It’s both the best thing and the hardest thing of working with him—because so much of what I assume everyone will know? Well, people don’t.

“No pierda,” I tell him. We’re going over one of his poems.

“Hunh?”

“I really think you mean ‘no pierda’ instead of ‘no pierde.’”

Well, he’s unconvinced, and why shouldn’t he be? I learned Spanish, after all, in my 30’s. So he does what any kid would do: ask his buddy Carly. I wait for him to come back with the answer.

“It turns out that both are correct, but that I probably mean ‘no pierda,’” he reports.

“So what did they tell you?”

It was, I’m sorry to say, the usual half-baked explanation: better than “because it kinda sounds better,” but not by much.

“Has anybody told you about the subjunctive?”

“Sub—what?”

So we did the subjunctive: first in Spanish, then in English. That’s when he tells me the words that are daggers to the heart.  

“It’s totally cool that you’re teaching me stuff, ‘cause that’s what parents do. Nobody’s taught me anything since I was sixteen. My mom taught me how to do laundry. And now I hate doing laundry….”

16 to 21, his current age: five years.

And what have I taught him? Well, there’s the simple stuff—when to use “your” versus “you’re.” Yes, because this boy, a product of the State of Florida Department of Education? He slid through 12 years of English classes without learning what a contraction was.

Or there was the Saxon genitive—which most people simply call “apostrophes,” but if you can call it the Saxon genitive, well, why not? Right, so I stepped back in the classroom and did a little drilling:

“The house of Montalvo?”

“Montalvo’s house!”

And speaking of the Saxons, what did he say when I told him that—generally speaking—words of Anglo-Saxon origin tended to have more force than words derived from Latin?

“Marc?”

Well, then it was time to get down to some good examples:

“Defecation,” I tell him.

“Ummm, Latin?”

“Shit,” I say.

“Anglo-Saxon!”

“Intercourse,” I say.

He’s so excited, he virtually shouts out that four-letter word, and then goes off to give the news to Carly: “hey, you know where words like ‘shit’ and ‘fuck’ come from?”

He’s bright, you see—he catches on quickly. He’s had everything but a structure (which is why I watched, and attached, the video below). Last week he wrote a villanelle. This week, it’s a sonnet.

Who knows where this is ending up?

Crossing the Bar with Montalvo

“What a motherfucker,” said my young son, referring to Alfred Lord Tennyson.

We had spent forty-five minutes analyzing “Crossing the Bar,” and the first problem was what it meant. And on the off chance that you don’t remember it, here it goes:

 Sunset and evening star,

      And one clear call for me!

And may there be no moaning of the bar,

      When I put out to sea,

   But such a tide as moving seems asleep,

      Too full for sound and foam,

When that which drew from out the boundless deep

      Turns again home.

   Twilight and evening bell,

      And after that the dark!

And may there be no sadness of farewell,

      When I embark;

   For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place

      The flood may bear me far,

I hope to see my Pilot face to face

      When I have crost the bar.

It was all Mr. Fernández’s doing, since in one night of lessened sobriety, he had waxed lyrical about the poem. And “Crossing the Bar” was the poem that Tennyson always wanted anthologists to place last, a fact about which Mr. Fernández makes much.

“OK—so what’s the business of ‘sunset and evening star?’” I ask Montalvo.

“He’s talking about nighttime?” says Montalvo.

This, Gentle Reader, is to what we’ve come. (Sorry for all these twisted constructions, but Mr. Fernández has taken to reading the blog, after which he showers me with bracing criticism….)

“I’m in the sunset of my life,” I tell him.

“Hunh?”

“What does it mean, ‘I’m in the sunset of my life?’”

“Damn, I hate it when you ask those questions!”

OK, we figure out about the sunset of my life, then we have to find out what this whole sea / boat image is about.

“So he’s taking a trip somewhere?”

Right, we sort that out, and then it’s time to figure out the rhyme scheme.

“I don’t get this ABAB stuff,” says Montalvo.

For this they invented paper and pencils, and we write down the last word of each line. He gets it, and that’s when we get to the most fun—meter, in this case iambic pentameter.

“Man, he did all this shit and I didn‘t even notice it! One fucking dude!”

So he drifts off to cadge some coffee, and I start to write the first line of a stanza:

            When first I saw the young Montalvo smile

Well, he’s on top of that like a sailor on a you-know-whom, and he does quite well, which is good, because you know what? His goal—modest though it is—is first to become poet laureate, and then to win the Nobel Prize in Literature; his motivators, as we used to say in human resources, are a bit more external than internal. To this end, Montalvo has the acceptance speech all planned out.

“I’m gonna stand up there and hold up the trophy and say, ‘YO, BROTHERS! NOTHING TO SAY, GUYS! MONTALVO RULES, MAN! I BE THE BEST! PANTIES DOWN, LADIES!!!’”

I’m speechless, a state which occurs less frequently than the sun darkening at noon with roaring lions pacing the streets of the city. But I do point out that we’re in public.

“PANTIES OFF, LADIES!”

Did I mention there’s a lot of rough in this diamond?

But a glimmer of a shine as well, because now we’re going over his poetry, and he says it:

“Man, this poetry is crap! I can’t believe I wrote this. This is AWFUL!”

“It could be improved,” I tell him, and then tell him about the opportunity / problem thing at Walmart.

“There are no problems, just opportunities….”

Won’t repeat what he said: there’s already been too much profanity in this post.

But now it’s time to go back to being supportive, because he’s looking at me, almost with tears in his eyes, and asking not if he’s going to win the Nobel, but if he’ll ever be a good poet.

Yes, I tell him. Otherwise, why would I be doing this?

We go back to work, ripping apart the poems, joining up the line breaks, eliminating the dreadful dashes. At last we can take it no more, and he’s still a bit discouraged, my son.

“Don’t worry,” I tell him, “Tennyson didn’t win the Nobel Prize either….”

Voices Past and Present

Hunh?

He showed up last night, wanting to do some writing, and did take the computer out of the case. And it may be true that I derailed him, since I mentioned that it might be a plan to both force himself to write in specific meters and forms, and—at different times—abandon them.

Montalvo looked at me blankly.

So I tried to explain, citing Shakespeare and iambic pentameter.

“I’ve never read Shakespeare,” he said.

“You did go to high school?”

It turns out he did, and slid by, somehow, on the grease of a good intellect. Nice, but where could he be if the good intellect had been shored up by a good education?

Is it time for a jeremiad?

My grandmother knew more poetry than anyone I knew, and could still recite reams of the stuff when she was quite old; in the clip below, which she recorded in her eighties, she’s reciting from memory.

“Every Friday afternoon we had elocution,” said Gram. “And all the little children would stand up straight in front of the class, and start off on all the old chestnuts. It was ‘The boy stood on the burning deck, whence all but he had fled.’ Or it could have been ‘Captain, my captain!’ Then of course the was the spreading chestnut tree….”

Nor was it a bad idea—is anybody memorizing anything anymore?   

The answer, I discovered years ago, is yes, since I once saw two pre-teenage girls spend forty minutes reciting rap music in a bus. And the amazing thing is that they had done it quite spontaneously: young minds do.

I’m sharing a table with Yeats and Montalvo, because I remembered having heard him recite his own poetry. Wait—it wasn’t so much “recite” but what Seamus Heaney called “an elevated chant.”  Here’s what a wonderfully crusty Yeats has to say about his reading:

“I’m going to read my poems with great emphasis upon their rhythm,” says Yeats in the first segment, recorded in 1932, “and that may seem strange if you are not used to it. I remember the great English poet William Morris coming in a rage out of some lecture hall, where somebody had recited a passage out of his Sigurd the Volsung. ‘It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble,’ said Morris, ‘to get that thing into verse!’ It gave me a devil of a lot of trouble to get into verse the poems that I am going to read, and that is why I will not read them as if they were prose.” 

OK—that was a thing to hear, and then I remembered the story about hearing Brahms play his Hungarian Rhapsody number one. Well, dear Reader, I’m saving you the two minutes you undoubtedly would have given it: the sound quality is awful, to the extent that the piece is virtually unrecognizable. It’s the sound of a piano being played during a hurricane.

I take a break to “edit” the poem that Montalvo has just transcribed, and we have a little talk about line breaks.

“It might be a little stronger if you shifted the word ‘into’ to the next line, and ended with the verb ‘fall,’” I tell him.

“Oh, and what about using a stronger verb than ‘fall?’ Maybe ‘plunge?’”

Right—then it was time to drop back in on voices from the past—in this case Florence Nightingale, who can be heard, and who delivers a short message of support for her “dear comrades” at Balaclava.

“You know, that first stanza? It’s a statement, and that makes me crazy. So could you give me an image, a metaphor, something that summons up a picture?”

He goes back and revises.

“Poetry is imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” I tell him, and then think, ‘damn, who was that?’

Answer—Marianne Moore.

“That’s the difference between poetry and prose,” I tell him.

“Prose?”

Teaching teaches you some things. I hold up my right hand and say “poetry;” then the left hand and “prose.” He gets it.

Voices from the past. I ponder this young man, my new son, in front of me, and wonder what my grandmother would make of him. She would understand, I think, a young man carrying notebooks in which he has written his poems. She would get the impetuous, rebellious spirit. And she might like an older man reading and critiquing a younger writer.

‘There are some things that don’t change,’ I think. ‘The young are busy reinventing the world, and God bless them for it, because if there’s any hope for us, somebody has got to do some major reconstructive surgery. But the old see continuity, the rolling river of tradition. Also valuable….’

“Well, it’s a post that doesn’t have an ending,” I tell him, since I’m floundering here.

“Some don’t,” he tells me.

Who’s teaching whom?

Ah, Youth!

Well, the question, the sizzling question that bedeviled our days and vexed our nights was…

…would Montalvo be able to piss in a bottle?

He’s back, you see, having wedged his way in through the door of the sister shop first, and then having passed once or twice in the gift shop that adjoins the café—where he has worked and been fired so often that no one can remember how many times it’s been—and then having appeared in disguise on Tuesday night for Poetry Night.

“I was not in disguise,” sputters Montalvo, whose name has been changed to protect the guilty. Montalvo, you see, had formed a mystical, transcendental, liminal attachment to a rare blue bird—of which there are only five thousand or so in the world. Nor was it surprising, that attachment, which was greatly enhanced by a drug that only guys in Colorado can do legally. So he had a tangle—no, call it a collision—with the law, was the object of a lot of men’s attention during his eight-day jail stay, and got off by agreeing to piss in a bottle weekly for a year.

“I was wearing shades and a hoodie, that’s all,” say Montalvo.

“You looked like a hood, and nobody recognized you,” said Lady, “so that’s a disguise, right?”

So he’s back, which is where he should be, since home? Well, it’s sometimes not all domestic bliss.

“She was slapping me, just ‘cause I came home at 3 in the morning after smoking cigars and drinking whisky with some friends! Can you believe it? Slapping me, my own mother! And why do women think they got the right to slap men? If I did that to them, they’d call the cops on me, slap a restraining order on me, throw me in the jug! Sure, it doesn’t hurt, but it hurts here….”

He taps his chest above his heart.

“It’s your mom’s house,” I tell him. “Her house, her rules. You know what? My mother would never have allowed me back in the house, at age twenty-one, unless I were working—and paying rent—or studying. And there would always be rules, one of which would have been not coming home drunk at 3 AM. So why Puerto Rican women let their sons come home, use the place like a hotel, expect food and laundry services—I just don’t get it.”

He’s upset; his girlfriend has broken up with him. Oh, and slapped him around, too.

“You know what? If you got two people slapping you around, you must be doing something that really pisses them off. So maybe it’s time to think about what that is?”

Am I man enough to be a dad?

“Yeah, but it hurts here….”

Again the tap.

“They shouldn’t have done it, but that doesn’t let you off the hook,” I told him. It’s a balancing act, this fatherhood thing, and you gotta cut a little slack sometimes.

So we’ve agreed to get together every Friday and work on our projects: his first book of poetry, and my magnum opus,  A Year at The Poet’s Passage. It’s all the best posts of this illustrious and international blog. Order your copy today!

The problem? Montalvo doesn’t have a computer, just an iPad, and a keyboard that his sister doesn’t seem to be using, so he’s sure that he can take it….

“Do you want a third woman slapping you?”

Did I mention that Montalvo is fatally, and certainly criminally, twenty-one?

So that meant that Montalvo showed up around ten one night, when Mr. Fernández and I were sitting around, errr …. drinking whisky and smoking cigars. So guess who joined us?

It wasn’t enough, you see, to procure the legal services to save—and I mean this quite literally—Montalvo’s ass for eight days (he was the object or subject or maybe both of constant catcalls, those eight days in the slammer), now I had to lend him a computer. Why? Because whatever app he was going to use to process the words that would then turn to poetry probably wouldn’t produce a file format that any publisher could work with. Which was easier? Lend him my spare computer, or go through the headache of file conversion?

So here I am, writing this, and in thirty minutes he’s supposed to show up. Oh, and guess what? It turns out that we’re not going to be working on our projects but, instead, on his project, since what has Lady told him?

“You know, you can send me these poems, and they’re good and all, but they’re full of misspellings. I could correct them, but you know whose really a great editor? Who can really tear a new hole in you? Marc! Man, he’s fierce!”

Damn….

“So what did he say?”

“He said, ‘yeah, my man!’”

“That’s what he always says,” I tell her, and Lady goes off to see what might be going on in the kitchen.

So he’ll be here, or he won’t, and I’ll know, or I won’t, whether he peed in the bottle today because yesterday? It was the beginning of the National Stop (Paro Nacional—which should be General Strike, but I like National Stop better….) And indeed it was a national stop because all of the protesters took over the tunnel that connects everything to everything else, and nobody moved. Well, not the cars, at least, but the protesters had brought guitars and tambourines and various percussion instruments—all to keep up the ánimo, and very important that is—so there was plenty of stationary movement. As well as entertainment….

I think I’ve learned the first lesson of fatherhood….

…youth must be served!