I went to grade school at St. Francis of Assisi, a Pepto Bismol-colored concrete building in the humid flatlands of South Florida. When I was in third grade, Sister Margaret Anina announced a poetry contest. I don’t remember that we were studying poetry or had learned much about it. Poetry back then was another unknown enterprise, and I had not learned to fear it. I just remember the contest. We were to choose a color and write a poem.
I went for green and composed a three-stanza, singsongy bit of twaddle. It was my nine-year-old masterpiece. “Green are grassy meadows and little flowers with long bent stems. Green is also the color of a gem.”
I won.
If there were prizes, I don’t recall. What does radiate vividly from my memory from all those years ago is that our principal, Sister Ann, monotoned my name as the winner during morning announcements, and my poem was thumbtacked onto the bulletin board in the cafeteria. It was my first brush with fame by way of the written word, and poetry had propelled me there.
During that time my hero was girl sleuth Nancy Drew, and my favorite playmate was Andrea Grigsby, who lived a few doors away. Andrea and I had short haircuts, wore knee-highs with our penny loafers and skulked the neighborhood on our Stingray bikes with matching banana seats and streamers. After school we were detectives—Patty and Penny—who spent hours looking for benign clues and writing cryptic notes about our observations in little spiral notebooks. “Empty mailbox. Strange car. Mrs. Mahoney in curlers.” It was haiku, our potent shorthand.
In adolescence I spent sodden, moody hours grappling with being misunderstood by writing treacly poetry. Over-accessorized with exclamation points and questions marks, the poems were my way of self-soothing, of talking myself through the fraught passage from child to adult.
Now I’m a citizen of the nation-state of adulthood; poetry’s exact and luminous voice continues to propel and soothe and startle me. Poetry carries within it a reverence for attention to the particular, the deliberately chosen. It’s the Scandinavian architecture of the written word. It’s a table setting artfully laid out. Instead of fretting about which fork to use first, I prefer to admire the care taken to make the tableau. And I know there are those around me who find poetry vexing. Legal documents are vexing. Ikea instructions for assembling furniture are vexing. But poems? They’re cream puffs of language, contained and caloric and constructed with a capacity for transportation.
I know there are people—smart, savvy people—who think poems should be issued with decoder rings. “What does it mean?” they ask. Which makes me want to ask: What does a tree mean? Or a Jackson Pollock painting? Or Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony? Understanding poetry, or any form of art, isn’t the endeavor; it’s wrestling with the questions left in its wake.
I like the way former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins thinks about approaching poetry. “I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out. Or walk inside the poem’s room and feel the walls for a light switch.” We’re all in the dark, I think he is saying. Just see what you can see. No need to get worked up about not getting something right.
I taught 12th grade English for two years in Flagstaff and look now at that experience as the equivalent of an anthropology research project. I’d spent much of my adult life being paid to write and consider reading to be one of my life’s most satisfying quiet joys. But how did 17-year-olds view reading and writing? The essence of my research findings is neatly summed up in the response from one of my students when I announced that we would be studying poetry. “I would rather have my head shaved with a rusty cheese grater.”
My resoundingly unscientific research showed that the 12th graders had already constructed and erected poetry deflector shields. But because the shields had been built by teenagers and had not yet calcified, I could count on the occasional shoddy construction. I plied the 12th graders with sly and beguiling poetry, and there it was from time to time on one of their faces: The oh-my, wide eyes when a poem had snuck up on them, had expressed something that had been left unsaid, had illuminated a shadowy corner of their longing. I deployed stealth poetry bombs. Some hit their targets.
