T.S. Eliot

It happens this way …

For all you lovers of jokes, pranks, hoaxes, and punks, this is your day to shine – or, according to Merriam-Webster Online, to behave foolishly, to fool around, to fool with, play the fool, feel foolish, be fooled, or to be made a fool of.

Since I can’t tell a joke to save my life — I always flub the punch line — and can’t pull off a prank without giving it away with a premature laugh, I’ll stick to what I know better: poetry.

Literary folks may remember the opening of TS Eliot’s The Wasteland:

April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain.

Or the beginning of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales:

Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licóur

Of which vertú engendred is the flour;

I played with those two classics to create this sonnet:

A Sonnet for Early Spring

When April mixes memory and moss,

twenty moles pilgrimage the yard and toss

aerated soil around our flower beds.

When three feral cats train to track red-heads

and orange-tails, there – beneath crusty leaves –

baby snails, grubs, and worms yearn to believe

the world was made for them. When daylight frees

itself from thoughts of winter-death and trees

convince the earth oblivion’s a hoax,

then every squill and bee engenders hope

that sundry folk, daffodils, and sweet peas

will raise voices with saints of every creed.

They’ll inspire young bleeding hearts to sing

about the lean elegance of waking spring.

All joking aside, enjoy the “lean elegance of waking spring” wherever you are today!

It happens this way …

Last Wednesday we completed our third poetry class at Happy Valley Library. These classes were an experiment to see if any one in the local community would be interested in learning how to appreciate the beauty and intensity of poetic language.

To say I was jazzed by the students’ responses to the model poems we looked at would be an understatement. Then, add to all the poetic ground we covered, three wonderfully unexpected things happened:

Three students emailed me poems based on the prompts I gave in class. Homework was not mandatory, but these folks were serious about upcycling their writing skills. Two were even brave enough to read their poems to the class.

At the end of this final session, we did a 15-minute writing exercise. When I asked for volunteers to read, my 8th grade boy raised his hand. This was the first time in three weeks the class heard his voice and were blown away by what he wrote. (I found out later that he had never signed up for this class; he just showed up! What gutsiness in one so young!) Then an adult who said she has never read anything she’s written out loud astonished the group with her detailed description of a journey she took. Everyone agreed she had the basis for a very fine travel poem.

Finally, I understood for the first time what T S. Eliot meant when he said, Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. Left-brained folks want to understand what the poet intended and try to wring the meaning out of a piece. That’s fine; but in intellectualizing a poem, we might miss what hits the heart before it hits the mind. As we experiences in class, some lines in some poems are just too astonishing to try to translate. We agreed with Robert Frost who said, Poetry is what gets lost in translation. Thanks to this class, I get that!

The group unanimously recommended we continue to meet if the Library will give us the space. They didn’t want to stop! Needless to say, this experiment was a success!

Happy April Fools’ Day

It happens this way …

By your students you’ll be taught, Part II

It happens this way …