SuperWeed

Today is poetry day in my classes. Each student brings in and reads a poem of his or her choice. I teach speech and this is the time in the term when we are focusing on using language colorfully and concisely as well as aspects of delivery such as rhythm and vocal expressiveness.

In my first term teaching speech, I half-expected poetry day to be like pulling teeth (to use the kind of trite metaphor writers really ought to avoid) but it turned out to be a joyous day of creativity and self-expression. Some students brought poems they wrote themselves, bravely reading out anguished reflections that made their classmates wince in empathy or polished pieces that provoked whistles of admiration. Others brought in old favorites, like Maya Angelou’s “Phenomenal Woman” (always chosen by at least one female student in every class). Even those who had clearly done the assignment at the last minute, scrambling to find a poem in an old textbook or on the internet, made some effort to choose a poem that expressed something about themselves or their view of the world. Now I know that poetry day will be one of the happiest days in class each term.

One year, a quite masculine young man brought in “Phenomenal Woman,” which he wanted to read because he liked what it said about Black women. I still remember women in the class echoing gleefully, “that’s me,” every time he read that phrase. (I teach at an HBC/U, so most of my students are African American or African.)

In another class, a young man read out a poem about your rifle being your best friend. This was a diffident young man whose previous speeches and class assignments all had something to do with explosives. His classmates called him “the boy who loves bombs” and viewed him with some trepidation, probably wondering (as I did) when it might be time to worry.

That day, after everyone read their poems, I invited comments on the exercise. After complimenting the love poems read by both male and female students, one bold young woman took a deep breath and went on to say that the poem about the rifle had scared her. “The boy who loves bombs” looked surprised and asked why, clearly really wanting to know. After hearing her explanation, he said that he didn’t really like that poem but it was the only one he knew, having been forced to learn it while in the Marine Corps. His answers to his classmates’ questions about basic training led us all into a discussion about what scholars call the social construction of masculinity.

Then we had to move on to the next scheduled exercise of the day, which just happened to be a fun little game in which the class decides how the phrase “Are you talking to me?” might be said by three different people (a hard-of-hearing old woman, a sarcastic young woman, and an angry young man) at a bus stop. For each of the people in turn, the class has to decide how the speaker stands and gestures as well as the emphasis and intonation of the words in the sentence and then, in unison, everybody has to stand up and say the sentence like that character. As they were impersonating the sarcastic young woman, I caught a glance at the theretofore stone-faced “boy who loves bombs,” laughing and laughing with his peers as they stood, each with arms akimbo and one hip jutting out, asking “Are you talking to me?” I’ll always remember that day because I wrote about it in my own journal, entitling the entry, “the boy who loves bombs gives us a smile.”

Instead of returning to his theme of munitions, that student gave his final speech on a wonderful trip he had taken to visit a relative in another country. He got a passing but not very good grade in the class, simply because of not turning in written work. The next year, I was surprised when he walked into my classroom again, having elected to re-take the class with me. Since he didn’t make any more of an effort to complete his written assignments, I can only conclude that getting a better grade was just the pretext for getting a little more time in a safe atmosphere where people try to use words truthfully to talk about things that are real, forging real relationships with each other in the process. (I did give him a better grade anyway.) And — oh — there were no speeches about guns, bombs, or fighting from him that second term.

Thus, the power of poetry day.

Often, after they’ve all read their poems, my students will ask what poem I’ve brought to read. I always have a few, just in case. Usually, I’ll read Audre Lorde’s “Litany for Survival,” which ends with this passage, which I find very appropriate for a speech class where many students come from dangerous neighborhoods here in the USA and some come from war zones in other countries:

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

Sometimes, if I’m in a mood, I’ll blow their minds by reading Ntozake Shange’s “with no immediate cause,” which begins with this gripping passage…

every 3 minutes a woman is beaten

every five minutes a

woman is raped/every ten minutes

a lil girl is molested

yet i rode the subway today

i sat next to an old man who

may have beaten his old wife

3 minutes ago or 3 days/30 years ago

he might have sodomized his

daughter but i sat there

cuz the young men on the train

might beat some young women

later in the day or tomorrow

…and goes on to become even more intense.

But here today, in honor of poetry day and the melancholy side of springtime, let me take a page from Noemi’s book and share one of my own poems, which I wrote a couple of years ago when — no, first the poem, then the story.

Rural Free Delivery

Somebody planted daffodils.
When? Now naturalized,
they run among rusted cars.

Petals of a black metal fan
still shimmer
within the forsythia.

How long?

At the time, I was reading an anthology of essays and poems by the past poets who called themselves imagists. I really liked the idea of imagism — image-focused poems expressed in concise yet lively language — although I didn’t think the poems in the anthology at all reflected the guidelines for such poetry given in the essays. I guess I was drawn to the idea of finding ways for images to speak because I had myself been more or less struck mute by the aggregation of jarring juxtapositions like those I wrote about in my last post. I kept seeing things, like the headless torso of a deer rotting in a drainage ditch by the side of the road, that provoked in me a complex mix of thoughts emotions that I was finding it difficult to express in prose.

This particular poem was provoked by the images it describes, daffodils that had rewilded themselves in an abandoned yard filled with junked cars and the gleaming black blades of a fan in the same overgrown yard. The rampaging flowers and insurgent “weeds” gave me hope but the persistence of the unnaturally shiny metal made me wonder longingly how long it will be before nature can deliver herself from our toxicity.

March 31st, 2008 | Category: Speech, Writing | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL