Quick to Hope

I came to poetry late. There had been the usual childhood play with rhymes, I suppose. I have little memory of books in my earliest years, and fewer still poems proper. I do remember, from very early on, my mother being made unhappy when I corrected her pronunciation of imaginary words in Dr. Seuss -- probably because I understood the rhymes and missed them when she missed them.

"No, Mom, it's 'Biffalo Buff,' see?"

Otherwise, I was no prodigy.

But in junior high school, I had a somewhat heated flirtation with Da Muse. A handsome,young English teacher insisted we write a few poems of our own, admittedly to no good result. He was, as I said, handsome, and male, and youngish, all novelties at the time. I thought him terribly attractive; tall, blond, perhaps thirty, at the time, so not so young as to lack authority, but not so old as to seem ancient, as he might have seemed had he been forty. He had a wonderful, melodious voice that made me shiver, not unpleasantly. He read to us nearly every day, sometimes poetry, sometimes not, but always in a voice subtlety different from his lecturing; more serious, even sententious, and very deep, even more redolent of cigarettes, I thought, and possibly whiskey. He might have read Keats. I remember Cummings. It was all very romantic, I thought.

We wrote nearly every day in his class, eventually being told we were to write a poem, and then another. I therefore wrote poems with all the clumsy enthusiasm of something like first and unrequited love, gathering words up like so many stemless dandelions, delivering these sad nosegays as if they were roses, by the dozens. But we were provided too few models, having read next to nothing, and were taught little or nothing of form or the simplest versification. Given no guidance at all, we wrote the only poems we might. I took as my model, Poe, at his most lachrymose, and used as many archaisms and exclamation points as seemed appropriate to my seriousness of purpose. While I don't believe I fancied myself going on to fame and fortune as a great poet, I do think I assumed I might just have found the means to, shall we say, adult ends? These poems are no longer extent, fed to a fire some time later, as I described in an earlier post, but I do remember much elevated sentiment, and a perfectly understandable preoccupation with the hopelessness -- instinctively understood, or felt in the atmosphere of that little classroom -- of love likely unrequited. ("Room" rhymes easily with "doom" at just thirteen.)

Perhaps our instructor assumed the results would be endearing. Looking back as an adult, I can see they may well have been, in a hilarious, if heartbreakingly earnest way, to a bored and bemused provincial English teacher, more concerned with passing the time quietly than teaching. My effusions were met with many a manly blush and a dignified reserve, my poems returned to me silently, with a few flattering, if gently reproving remarks. I remember the word "over-heated" recurring more than once. Eventually, poetry, at least the writing of, was left behind and we moved on to areas of literature I suspect my instructor, felt to be more sure beneath his feet, like "The Beats." Passing out of that seventh grade English class was like passing from poetry to prose again, at least so far as handsome teachers went. My interest in poetry flagged thereafter.(My teacher subsequently followed his true calling, abandoned teaching altogether, and became a television anchorman in Youngstown, Ohio, where all he had to read each day was the Teleprompter. I saw him do this, just the once, on a visit home some years ago. Dissipation had had a sorry effect, I like to think, on his good looks, but the voice was still hypnotic, even in "the Farm Report.")

Asking children to write poetry is just a darling idea, though it serve no other purpose. Kids are awfully cute. But we learned no more of poetry in that exercise than we did of biology by dissecting a single frog. And little or nothing did I learn in high school literature or composition classes thereafter of poets, poetry, or writing, once we'd done with grammar.

The great mistake made when I was introduced to poetry in the classroom of my youth, was in teaching poems as distillations of feeling, rather than thought. I believe this was quite a common mistake in the generation of younger teachers I had from middle school on. It was a generation much preoccupied with feelings, and "rapping" about same with the kids. It was not a particularly productive or inspiring classroom strategy, at least from the evidence I saw. Insisting that poets had felt things more profoundly than I might ever do, did nothing to endear them to me as a class of person.

That poets could be genuinely funny, could be clever and witty and smart, as well as or instead of soppy and or psychedelically hip, or "relatable," that poems could be aphoristic, philosophical, narrative even, came as revelations I had to have reading largely on my own. It was, I should think, as much the fault of the times as of any of my teachers that this was not something much taught at the time. The few times we did read poems not fashionable, it was because the teacher was old, had points dryly historical to make, and tended to find nothing funny, not even Pope. Sad, really.

I'm glad that I have lived past such instruction. Though I'd bet I'd still feel something of the old shiver if I ever were to hear Bill Black, assuming he's still among the living, read another poem aloud.