Poems, Names, Songs
Life is a lot like one of my favorite American poems. This one. “You were happy/you were sad.” I like a poem that speaks to what life is actually like, and I bet you do, too. Used to tell my students “that’s the point of poetry: it expresses the inexpressible.” I think I stole the second clause from some literary critic I once enthusiastically agreed with. Maybe Laura Riding-Jackson. Maybe some amazing poet teacher I’ve had. People whose hands I’ve shaken and classrooms I’ve belonged to who will someday – quite certainly, that is, if the planet carries on – belong to the poetry canon, which I myself still refer to sometimes because a canon is nothing more than a history, a sampling of gold standards in their genres, for their time, for their place. Sometimes we all love the canon. Sometimes we all hate the canon. Always, though, we are intrigued by the canon, and who decides, and who says, and what it reveals, and what we might learn about our type of animal who does absolutely wonderful things like write poetry and tell stories, and shockingly awful things like make war – okay, theoretically some primates, too, but Lemurs haven’t built nukes yet. *** We do awful things like make hate for personal profit, hurt people we don’t even know for personal gain, and hurt those who love us and trust us again for the same.
*** I’m not bringing up all my monkey knowledge this morning, and I do have some. Even went to see one of my primatologist heroes, Jane Goodall, on my birthday. So there. This asterisk is to give you a teaching tip. If you are working with teens/college freshman, in a humanities classroom setting, and if you enjoy Socratic seminar style teaching, then you need to be prepared to answer every single fucking “what about . . .” that the human mind could possible imagine. Even the irrational, young, undercooked human minds. I didn’t know this starting out and once found myself alone in a room with the whole of the freshman baseball team after I had dared to conjecture that the human animal is unique in that we are conscious of our own mortality. In the early aughts, only in my late twenties, I was not the first human to ever make this specific observation. Entire tomes have been written on the subject. Long, long, long before I was an egg in my mother’s body inside my grandmother’s body. (Wild shit, huh?)
What I’m saying is if you work with the young, and you want to be a decent teacher, like one who allows for questions, you gotta prepare. Lean hard into your own preternatural ability to remember odd facts and details and song lyrics, lean hard into your ability to anticipate the questions, even the most batshit questions, lean hard into your ability to respond to questions and comments that are not rooted in any sort of reality, much less scholarship, because as God as my witness, as soon we were midway through that very long (it really did seem long, and I was teaching it) unit on Darwin, and I stood in the classroom with the baseball team seated in those riser seats, looking down on me and said, “One way humans are unique is that we are aware of our own mortality. Might that not fuel our ambition to make poetry, music, buildings?” Those fuckin’ kids mutinied on me.
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