I'm not complaining. I hate the winter, I hate snow, and few things cheer me more than bright, warm days. But I do wonder what this means for summer. Will it be even more blisteringly hot than normal? Will we have drought conditions here in America's bread basket? Will it be super buggy because it never got cold enough to kill the larvae in the ground? Inquiring minds want to know.
It was a weird day at work today also. I had a student start crying in my creative writing class because the book of poems she was reporting on moved her so much. Mind you, this is not the sort of student who strikes me as particularly emotional or given to tears. She's a type-A overachiever who is a student ambassador, works in the Writing Center, and gives off the air that she is headed for bigger and better things. Today, she was telling the rest of the class about Tess Gallagher's Moon Crossing Bridge, a book of poems commemorating the loss of Raymond Carver, Gallagher's husband.
As the student was describing a particular line, she choked up and her face blanched. She talked about Gallagher's description of Carver's absence, how she feels his "kissless kiss" everywhere she goes - and the girl (Emma is her name) said, "It's just so, so sad!" And she had to stop talking for a little bit because she couldn't get any more words out. It was strange. I told her that I figured Gallagher would be flattered that her poems moved her that much. I told her that there's nothing wrong or embarrassing about being moved by literature and that we'd all be better off if we could be touched so readily by it. She seemed satisfied by that, and we moved on to the next student's report.
I've never cried in a classroom. (Not as an adult anyway. Who knows or remembers what drama childhood brought?) I do remember an English class I took at Ricks College from a guy named Brother Pearce. Actually, it was my first post-mission English class, and it was the one in which I was reunited with another recently returned missionary - a slender blonde with the most beautiful eyes I'd ever seen - a young Suzanne Day.
Anyway, it was a British lit class, and Brother Pearce was teaching us about poetry, about the difference between good poetry and doggerel. First, he read a poem by Helen Steiner Rice called "The Magic of Love." Google it if you're feeling masochistic - it's awful - sing-song rhyme, lame abstract language, trite cliche sentimentality, etc. We all had a good chuckle as would-be English major sophisticates. Then, he read a second poem and, for the life of me, I can't remember what it was or where to find it. It was a poem from a husband to a wife and it was all about her clumsiness, how everything she touches becomes a shipwreck of some sort, and yet - how that small foible made him love her more. The poem, as I recall, was original, written in fresh language, and lovely - the opposite of "The Magic of Love," of course.
Anyway, about midway through the poem, Pearce, this tall (6'4 or so) gawky guy in a shirt and tie, starts to cry and he can barely squeeze out the last couple of lines. After he finished, he closed the book, and dabbed at his eyes with his necktie. He apologized and said, "I didn't expect that. It's just that my wife is a little clumsy sometimes, and this makes me think of her." It was such an odd, intimate moment to share in a windowless, cinder block classroom with twenty other people. It was sweet too, and he was clearly a guy who loved and feel very tenderly toward his wife.
Anyway, poetry doesn't have much power in today's world, if it ever did. No one reads it with any regularity except other poets. But still, here and there, like a little sniper of words, it takes someone down when they are least suspecting it.
3 comments:
I totally know the Pearces. And she really is a clumsy lady. Just kidding. But I do know them.
So I'm a cryer, so there's that. But I cried just like your student did during my very first class in grad school while reading Audre Lorde's "Litany for Survival." That a militant lesbian feminist African-American woman could make me feel like she'd written a poem about me, for me -- a 28 year old Mormon stay-at-home Mom from Utah? I was blown away, and continue to be blown away, by the power of good poetry.
I also cried once teaching a class, but just barely, reading Joyas Voladoras by Brian Doyle aloud. It's the dang reading aloud! Gets me. So now I'm going to copy and paste the last paragraph of that beautiful essay, which will make this a reaaaaally long comment, but it's so good. Even if it doesn't make you cry on the outside, it's gotta make your heart clench up a little:
"So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one, in the end -- not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we must. Perhaps we could not bear to be so naked, for fear of a constantly harrowed heart. When young we think there will come one person who will savor and sustain us always; when we are older we know this is the dream of a child, that all hearts finally are bruised and scarred, scored and torn, repaired by time and will, patched by force of character, yet fragile and rickety forevermore, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall. You can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant, felled by a woman's second glance, a child's apple breath, the shatter of glass in the road, the words 'I have something to tell you,' a cat with a broken spine dragging itself into the forest to die, the brush of your mother's papery ancient hand in a thicket of your hair, the memory of your father's voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children."
It was the line "apple breath" that made me cry. Had to stop there and compose myself. My poor students probably felt all kinds of awkward, but hey. Sometimes, a person must cry.
So lovely, Ang !
But hey, a word of defense for Helen ! Where would greeting card drivel be w/o her ?
When telling stories I can never get through "Love you Forever" without clouding up. Said to be a children's book, but not so ! not so ! It is a book for Mothers of Boys !
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