Jim Ross – The Substitute

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The Substitute
by Jim Ross

Nearly every country, culture, and school system uses substitute teachers to fill in for occasional teacher absences or for longer time periods while schools seek permanent teachers. Almost universally, substitute teachers are mocked and reviled by students and by schools, which accord them a status equal to a mayfly.

For four years, I eked out a catch-as-catch-can living as a substitute teacher. I knew the priority was keeping students reasonably safe, but I clung to the illusion I might occasionally get to teach.

After being certified in social studies, my first call came from a self-contained, special education school. On arrival, I was told I’d be teaching blind primary schoolers. When I reached the classroom, I found eight smock-clad students spread out on the floor, engrossed in finger painting. The teacher watching over suggested I let them continue for thirty minutes, handed me a lesson plan, and smiled knowingly.

I hadn’t laid eyes or hands on finger paint since I was five. I squatted down as the students smeared colours from their papers to the floor and back.

“What are you making?” I asked.

“Snow man,” one told me.

“Man walks on moon,” said another.

“Big mess,” said a third.

Fearing for the floor, their clothes, and my job, I encouraged staying on the paper. Then, one by one, I ported the children’s masterpieces to safety, walked each artist to the sink, and then situated them at desks.

The teacher’s lesson plan: Review latest Braille lessons. We conducted a round-robin reading from Braille to English. Whenever Stephen read a long word, he said, “Midnight.”

I checked into the office before leaving. The vice-principal asked: “How’d it go?”

“Through a glass darkly,” I said.

“Perfect. You free tomorrow?” he asked.

Next day, I had deaf students. My background with deaf people was seeing deaf students on the subway when I was in high school. How they communicated via sign language, gestures, and facial expressions fascinated. When I reached class, the students were wearing headphones.

“We’re not teaching sign language,” my escort explained. “We’re trying to tap what’s left of their residual hearing. You’ll communicate with them using this microphone. If they don’t hear you, hike up the volume.”

Thirty minutes later, the principal announced over the PA system that the entire school was departing imminently for the White House. I herded my twelve students onto a bus. Once students disembarked, we tried to keep track as they scurried across the White House pasture, blending in with students from other schools. On signal, I drew my deaf students as if with magnets to a row of folding chairs and observed them fidget to the Youth Orchestra’s beat. After the orchestra’s performance, a White House rep invited the assemblage to approach for cookies and punch. Running amok, students crumbled cookies over the lawn. Eventually we coaxed them back onto buses. I’d hardly begun debriefing my class about their field trip when the dismissal bell rang.

Most mornings I’d wait by the phone with my cup of coffee, bowl of hot raisiny oatmeal, and the newspaper, catnapping. More often than not, between 7.00 and 8.00 AM, the phone rang. The waiting game resumed from 3.00 to 5.00 PM. When I answered, I probably sounded like Helene, from Kurt Vonnegut’s short story, “Who Am I This Time?”

The first two months made me question why more teachers didn’t come unglued.

      •   I observed eight 4th grade girls shove two scrawny boys into the girls’ room. There they beat up the boys, then called for help claiming the boys had barged in and attacked them. Jumping to the boys’ defence, I said, to the contrary, the girls had forced the boys into the girls’ room. Said the vice principal: “Some of those girls were angels … until today.”
      •   I’d been told that if 3rd grader Robert cried, I was to send him to the office. Robert’s Valentine to Mike reached the wrong Mike, who tore it up. Heartbroken, Robert cried. Instead of sending him to the office, I let him lead the game at recess.
      •   Two 6th grade girls fought in the hall, drawing a crowd. The loser’s friends sought asylum in my class, blood streaming from nose and mouth.
      •   As I was teaching French to attentive high school students, rocks came flying through the windows. Glass shattered; students scattered.
      •   When a junior high school girl kept disrupting class, I sent her to the office, where she alleged, “That man tried to stick his worm in me.” The office staff’s refusal to take her seriously gave me cold comfort.
      •   On May Day, I escorted a Russian class onto the school’s front lawn to plant their Russian flag. Thinking I was a student, two passing students offered me drugs.

 
Almost no teachers left lesson plans. Some left terse notes like: “Have students draw their emotions using charcoal.” At best, they left busywork. Teachers who left scant or no instructions sent an implicit message: ‘Use your creative discretion.’

A 3rd grade teacher left instructions to randomly assign each student a required spelling word. The students’ task was to write a sentence using their assigned word and incorporate the sentence into an Earth Day card. The teacher would forward the cards to the White House. Eduardo drew the word “smother.” I expected a cautionary tale about how to keep a baby warm while avoiding tragic over-diligence but hoped for Maya Angelou’s recipe for smothered chicken. Surprising only me, 8-year-old Eduardo articulated the poetry of protest like a young Langston Hughes:

         My, oh my
         Why
         Do they smother
         Our cry?

I often wondered, did the White House write back? Did Eduardo keep asking questions? Did anyone hear him? Or did someone just shut him up?

After four feast-or-famine years, I quit substituting. Believing I might make a difference made quitting hard, but seeing capable, compassionate teachers become worn down and afraid helped set me free. AQ

Laurie Kolp – I’ll Remember the Girl Who Called Me Mom

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I’ll Remember the Girl Who Called Me Mom
by Laurie Kolp

You probably won’t remember me but I’ll remember you
with glassy, button eyes you tried so hard to keep open
on Monday mornings when you’d twist your winter coat
into a knot, place it on your desk and hide your face
until I noticed. I’ll remember your dimples when you giggled,
how the light brown hair at the scruff of your neck
curled like mine when you wore a ponytail as I did,
which you pointed out. I’ll remember your finger, how
it was smashed by steel drain in trailer park
parking lot. You said you tried to lift it on a dare,
but it slap-trapped your middle finger instead. Oh, how
you fretted over that bandage for weeks, stitches pointing
out like cat whiskers, fretted until we noticed
the odour. I made you promise to ask your mother
to take you to the doctor, but the next day you told me
she snipped and pulled the stitches out while you slept.
When the dead nail finally hung like the snag on your sweater,
you turned green as slime just thinking about pulling it off.
I’ll remember when a boot heel from your boots from Goodwill
came off— how you flopped around the room with the sole
hanging like a tongue, slapping the floor. You were scared
your mother would kill you, so I super-glued it back on.
I’ll remember when you gave me a small box
of chocolates for Valentine’s Day. You shared a secret—
you wanted me to have the candy, but you wanted it, too.
I tucked it away for the day I’d do anything
for chocolate. Weeks later you told me
all you had to eat in the trailer was Ramen noodles,
Dinty Moore beef stew, said you were starving
as you eyed the heart-shaped box still untouched
in my cabinet. I grabbed it and gave it to you.
Little did I know that was the last time
I’d see you—that weekend your mother’s boyfriend
shot a cop at your door and you were taken away.

Meryl Stratford – What Would Jesus Teach?

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What Would Jesus Teach?
by Meryl Stratford

When Jesus arrives at Colbert Elementary,
the most recent in a long line of substitute teachers,
no one recognizes Him despite the long hair,
Birkenstock sandals, and WWJD tee-shirt.
Though He doesn’t look it, He’s been teaching
for two thousand years. He speaks Aramaic
and everyone understands. Jesus is here undercover
so He avoids flashy miracles like multiplying
fish-sticks in the cafeteria. When no one is looking
He revives the goldfish floating belly-up
in the aquarium. Jesus puzzles over the pledge
to the flag, one nation under God, as if God
were something to be under, an invisible
plastic dome, instead of something to be
inside of, a vast, mysterious universe.
He studies the map on the classroom wall
and erases all the national borders, all the words
for cities and mountains and lakes, so the world
looks like it did before Adam got busy naming things,
and now a child can see how all the oceans are
one ocean and all the continents are pieces
of a gigantic jig-saw puzzle. Jesus sings
about the Big Bang and the wonders
of evolution. In the beginning, He says, is the Word,
and sometimes the word is popcorn, sometimes
it’s sneeze or lullaby. Jesus finds the lever,
the button, the hidden switch inside each child,
turns their curiosity on, waits for them to start
asking questions. When the fire alarm sounds
and everyone tumbles outdoors, He rearranges
the clouds like fluffy cartoons on the blue screen
of the sky. Although He performs with ease
the minor miracle of keeping a class of five-year-olds
clean, quiet, and busy, He prefers the happier magic
of finger-paint, rhythm band, and an afternoon nap.
The end of the school day finds Him in kindergarten,
cross-legged on a carpet, reading
Harold and the Purple Crayon,
Goodnight Moon.

Michael A. Ferro – A Night on the Scales

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A Night on the Scales
by Michael A. Ferro

As he sat contented upon his reclined chair he could sense the man’s anguish through the solid steel door nearby. With his feet up on the wood desk, he sucked on the pit of a peach that had been so exceptionally ripe he’d used an entire sheet of paper towel to dry his hands and clean his mustache. He took the pit out of his mouth and set it with a tiny clink onto a little white porcelain plate upon the desk and licked his teeth.

“Ain’t no fuckin’ peaches in there, is there?” he said toward the steel door.

This was a man who prized his job. All night long he got to sit and read the newspaper within a large municipal-looking room overspread with bright florescent light. On quiet nights like this one, when there was only a single man within one of the three adjacent cells, he would watch some of his favorite television shows on a tablet that he kept hidden within a bottom drawer of the desk. He knew this particular man on the opposite side of the steel door would be silent throughout the night this time—he would make sure of it.

Near the top of the steel door was a small window with more steel in the form of thick bars. The door itself was new as they had recently replaced it after long-awaited funds from the state came through. His chair had also been swapped and he particularly appreciated that this one could recline. He threw the yellow-stained paper towel into a wastebasket at his side and eyed the door again.

“What? No big drama show tonight? Not gonna yell ‘n’ scream your head off like last time?”

There was no sound from the room.

“Don’t even think about banging yer head against somethin’ in there again,” he said to the door. “I got no time fer that shit.”

Satisfied with the silence that filled the room, the man reached for the handle on the bottom drawer of the desk when through the main entryway came the judge. At first, the man sitting in the chair wasn’t certain that it was him; he’d rarely seen the judge without his immodest black judicial robe flowing down off his large shoulders, but his short cropped silvery hair and square jaw were unmistakable. He walked with a slight limp into the large room and wore a heavy woolen sweater over a snow-white dress shirt with too-long khaki slacks.

“Judge Anderson, Your Honour,” said the man swiftly rising from his reclining position, “What brings you here?”

The judge smiled courteously and came to the opposite end of the jailer’s desk. He placed his big knuckles onto a stack of papers.

“Evening’, Dan,” said Judge Anderson. “Good to see you again.”

“Yeah, only been a few hours, mm?”

“Right.”

The two stood there while the judge watched the cell door.

“Something I can do for you, Your Honour?”

The judge rapped his knuckles upon the desk.

“Need a favour, Dan. It might sound unusual.”

“How can I help?”

“I need you to let me into his cell.”

“… Why?”

The judge slightly furrowed his brow.

“I mean, what d’you have planned, Your Honour?” asked the jailer.

“Listen, Dan, I know it’s an unusual request, but I can assure you that everything’s in order. I spoke with Chief Jailer Ramirez. He’s aware.”

“Oh.”

“Just so you’re aware,” said Judge Anderson, “I plan to spend the night in the cell with him.”

The jailer realized that this meant his world of solitude and privacy would be shattered for the night—there would be no chance to watch his shows.

“I see… well I’m sure y’know what yer doing,” said the jailer. He looked over toward the steel door. “He kin prob’ly hear us right now.”

“That’s fine,” replied the judge.

“Well,” said the jailer turning toward the steel door. “Let’s get to it, Your Honour. Into the jail cell y’go.”

He smiled as he said this and peered back at the judge, but the judge wore no visible emotion.
 
 

#

 
 
The door to the cell closed with a violent thud; not because of any particular force the jailer had used to close it, but rather due to the very nature of these thick, heavy doors. It was impossible to close them without a sound of finality in the air, a gavel’s crash.

The judge stood by the door for a few moments and watched over the man lying upon the cot. The man had his back turned to him with his body snug close to the wall in the fetal position and one arm under his head. The man was breathing softly. If he had been sleeping, the judge was sure that the noise had woke him.

The light sound of the judge’s shoes against the cement floor surprised the man. He’d been awake since the jailer yelled out to him earlier and was now unsure about what to make of the judge being inside his cell. Though he could not see him, for his face was turned toward the wall, the man fully expected the judge to be wearing his antediluvian robe, freshly shined black dress shoes, and whatever else it was that a judge wore underneath their vestments. But upon the judge now stepping over toward the opposite cot, the man could clearly hear the patter of soft shoes hitting the floor in an uneven rhythm.

“You wearin’ sneakers, judge?” the man said casually to the wall.

The judge let out a small chuckle.

“I am, Joe,” said Judge Anderson.

The room was dusky and still, akin to a small basement closet.

“We on a first name basis now, judge?”

“We can be, if you like,” the judge said as he rested his forearms upon his thighs and sat forward.

“Don’t want me to call you ‘Your Honour’ no more?”

The judge realized at that moment how accustomed he had become to watching the man’s facial gestures in his courtroom as they spoke.

“You can call me whatever it is that you like right now, in here.”

“I don’t remember your first name. Sure it was printed on one of all those papers I saw but I don’t remember it now.”

“My name is Ronald, or Ron for short.”

“Ronald,” said the man.

“Mm-hmm.”

There was a long pause.

“I’ll just call you judge.”

“That’s fine.”

Judge Anderson gazed around at the cast of shadows within the cell. Some of the only other times he had been in one were when he took part in walkthroughs of the facility in prior years before minor upgrades. Each time though, the tiny enclosed space had left a profound impression upon him. At night, home lying upon his own bed, he often thought about the shadows in the cells.

“Okay, I’ll bite. Whatchu doin’ here, judge?”

“I’d just like to talk, if you don’t mind.”

“Talk?”

“Yes.”

“Talk ‘bout what?”

“We can talk about whatever you like.”

At this, the man spun with a quick motion and sat up abruptly, though his left arm fell limp to his side. He expected the judge to recoil but the judge hadn’t flinched. Instead, he merely locked eyes with the man as he sat squarely across from him. The man pursed his lips.

“Alright, just what the hell is this!?” barked the man. He waited for a response. He could see that the judge was looking at his arm now, so the man took his left forearm in his right hand and placed it in his lap.

“You know, I was also in the military, Joe.”

The man analyzed this statement and his eyebrows slowly turned upward from their center, relaxing his expression to one of slight puzzlement.

“You were?”

“I was. Marines. Before law school I did two tours in Vietnam.”

The man scratched his head.

“You Marines had them 13-month tours then, right?”

“Most of us did,” replied the judge with a smile. “We wanted those extra 30 days of free R&R to go anywhere we wanted.”

“Yeah,” said the man, cracking a smile for the first time.

“Of course, it was hardly a free vacation, right?”

The man’s smile faded.

“Yeah.”

The judge moved closer toward the edge of the bed and his impressively well-maintained bulk forced a whine from the cot’s wire springs.

“You did two tours over in Iraq yourself about a decade ago, didn’t you, Joe?”

“Yeah.”

“I read in your report that you had some trouble in Ramadi then. That’s where the incident happened that caused the damage to your arm.”

“Yes it was.”

“An IED, right?”

“Yeah,” said the man resting his right arm upon his left, “But what the hell does that matter now? Shit happens. Now I’m stuck in the can for the night.”

“You know that my putting you in here for the night was the right decision, Joe. When they brought you in, you’d been a mess out there, out in the streets. You threw that bottle right through that window and cussed at the patrolman.”

“Yeah, but the building was empty! Abandoned or whatnot. The fuckin’ pane of glass wasn’t even there! Bottle landed on some sheets and didn’t even break nothin’.”

“I know it,” said the judge. “But still—can’t allow you to be doing that kind of stuff.”

The man leaned against the cement wall behind him.

“Yeah, well, I know it, too.”

Judge Anderson relaxed and leaned back.

“This is your third time in here, right?”

“Third time by your ruling, Your Honour, but I got put away twice before over in Harrison County, too.”

“Right.”

“Those were longer stints, too.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“Same crime though. P.I.”

“Right.”

The man looked at the fingernails of his right hand while the judge studied him intently.

“So how do you decide how long to put the person away for, judge?”

The judge sat up and tilted his head to the side in contemplation. He brought his hand up and ran it through his cropped, snowy hair.

“Well, first thing I do is review the case against the person and look at their history. Then I assess the crime and hear their defence in court. After so many years you begin to see patterns.”

“Patterns?”

“You start to see the same people committing the same crimes. Sometimes it can be difficult to make sure you’re looking at each individual for who and what they are. Every now and then, a judge of the court needs to stop and take a step back in order to take a closer look at each defendant that comes before them.”

“Oh yeah?” asked the man through a slight chortle.

“It’s true,” said the judge as he leaned forward and gripped the edges of the cot with both hands. “And seeing you in my courtroom for the third time, it made me realize I needed to stop and do just that: take a closer look.”

“You did, did you?”

“I did.”

“And?” asked the man.

“I knew when I handed down your sentence that I was going to come in here tonight and do this. I was looking over your history while I was rendering my judgement and saw someone that I wanted to get to know.”

“Is that a fact?”

“It is, Joe.”

The man began to nod emphatically and fixed an exaggerated grin on his face.

“Well, here I am, judge! An ex-military, one-armed boozer. Put ‘er there!” he said using his right hand to hold up his disabled left arm.

“I’m pleased that we’re talking here. I really am.”

“I’m sure you are.”

“Would you like to know why I entered the Marines, Joe?”

The man shrugged.

“I originally joined to pay for my education.”

“Sounds smart.”

“It seemed like a sound plan,” said the judge, nodding. “But obviously, things can happen that can change those plans. No matter what we had in store for after we got back home.”

“Yeah, no shit,” said the man nodding to his arm. “Try gettin’ a job or findin’ a girl, or going to law school for that matter with one dead arm.”

At this, the judge slowly rose while his back audibly cracked as he put one arm behind his spine to straighten it. With a timid glint in his eyes, the man watched as the judge methodically stepped over to his cot and sat down on the thin mattress next to him. After a moment, the judge took the man’s right hand in his own.

“Make a fist,” said the judge.

The man complied and formed his fingers into a tight fist. The judge then took the man’s hand and brought it down to his leg and rapped the man’s knuckles onto his shin through his pants. To the man’s surprise, rather than hearing the dull thud of a bare fist upon another man’s flesh—a sound that he had come to know quite well—he heard the distinct noise of his own bony fingers rapping against an unyielding metal prosthesis. The judge let go of his hand and the man looked up at him before he promptly looked away.

“Listen, Joe,” the judge began. “Here’s what I’ve come to say to you: I know it isn’t easy. God knows we all have our setbacks and you with a fair share more than others. I wasn’t literally there with you in Iraq when you hit the IED, just as you weren’t literally there with me in Khe Sanh when a VC shell fell from the sky and took my leg, nor were you even born yet, but that doesn’t matter—what does matter is we caught the shit.”

After hearing him curse for the first time, the man looked over at the judge who was staring at him with a concentrated sincerity.

“Yeah, we caught the shit and it felt like the end of our world. But let me tell you something, Joe, and I know you’ve heard it before but let me tell it to you again right here and right now: it isn’t the end of anything. You lost the use of your arm and I lost a leg, but whatever we lose the mind compensates for tenfold. Yes, it takes time. Sometimes it takes longer for some than for others. When I got back to the States, I drank quite a bit. A lot of the guys I went over with got into some heavier stuff when they got back, but let me tell you: booze will take you down just as fast as anything else on earth if you got the mind for it. You and I? We both got the mind for it. It can be part of the price we pay to defend our country.”

The judge leaned in toward Joe and put his arm upon his shoulder. “It was my dad that got me to quit drinking. A cop who was sympathetic to us returning vets took me home one night rather than to the jailhouse after a bender and told my dad what went down that night. My dad was a line worker at the assembly plant. He wasn’t born with ten pounds of brains but he had a heart the size of a Buick and let me tell you, son, he set me straight. I didn’t know if I had one ounce of intellect in my head anymore and once I lost the leg I figured that was that—no good even for the line, I thought. But he reminded me of one of the reasons why I went overseas in the first place: I had greater goals. You can’t buy brains or your future, but your actions can acquire you justice, meaning—something over nothing.”

Joe lowered his head and the judge tightened his grip on his shoulder.

“I understand your dad passed away while you were over in Iraq.”

Joe nodded and sniffed quietly.

“I’m sorry, son,” said the judge. “Like I said, though, you’ve got a fair share more to set you back than others, but all that really means is you got that much more potential ahead of you. Much more than me and that’s the straightforward truth.”

The judge looked around the room and gestured widely with his hand.

“This—this place around you right now—this is just a stepping stone. The best places worth getting to are harder to reach than others and they require these things. You step out of here in the morning and all this becomes nothing more than just some stepping stone; you’ve been in worse places, you’ve been in better places. Some places were made just for finding new places. You’ve got a few misdemeanors on your record but you’ve also got a wartime record that I happened to take a look at and let me tell you, that’s the record people are going to remember. You’re a hero, son, and I don’t say that lightly to anyone. The good we do isn’t just written down in some history book, it lives off the page, people breathe it—they soak in it like a sunray, Joe.”

Joe looked away from Judge Anderson though the judge had seen Joe’s eyes begin to water.

“If you can make it through war, son, you got what it takes to make it here at home.”

The judge gave Joe another hearty pat on the back.

“You got anything you want to say, Joe?”

Joe turned his face toward Judge Anderson and sniffed loudly, discreetly wiping at the corner of his eye. He wore a cautious smile.

“So that peg leg is what’s been under that big black robe all that time?”

The judge leaned back and let out a tremendous guffaw, startling the jailer eavesdropping just outside the cell. AQ

Naomi Shihab Nye – Elementary

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Elementary
by Naomi Shihab Nye
 

At the 100-year-old National Elk Refuge

near Jackson we might ask,

How long does an elk live?

Who’s an old elk here?

We’d like to spend time

with an elder elk, please.

Tell us how to balance our living

on this hard edge of human mean,

mean temperatures, what we do and don’t

want to mean. Closing the door

to the news will only make you

stupid, snapped my friend

who wanted everyone to know as much

as she did.  I’m hiding in old school books

with information we never used yet.

Before I drove, before I flew,

before the principal went to jail.

Sinking my eyes into tall wooden

window sashes that lined the light

arriving from the far reaches of goodness,

wisdom of the ages, our teachers

as shepherds, school a small vessel

of held golden light, you could lift

up your daily lesson in front of your eyes,

gaze into it and think,  this will take me

important places.  O crops of India,

geological formations of Australia,

ancient poetries of China,

someday we will be aligned in a place

of calm knowing,  together.

Red deer, wapiti, running elk rising

above vast yellow meadows at sundown.

An elk bows her head. In the company

of other elk, an elk becomes his best elk.

But we are lost on the horizon now,

deeper into the next century than we

can even believe, and they will not speak to us.

Naomi Shihab Nye – Teaching was a Lifeline

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Teaching was a Lifeline
An Interview with Naomi Shihab Nye
by Bryan R. Monte

Palestinian-American Naomi Shihab Nye is the author or editor of more than thirty books. She won the National Poetry Series for Hugging the Jukebox, (E.P. Dutton, 1982), the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award for You & Yours, (BOA Editions, 2005) and the Jane Addams Children’s Book Award for her children’s books, Sitti’s Secrets and Habibi. Her book of poems about the Middle East, 19 Varieties of Gazelle, was a finalist for the National Book Award. She has also won four Pushcart Prizes, received Lannan, Guggenheim and Witter Bryner Fellowships and the American Academy of Poets (AAP) Lavan Award as well as being elected AAP Chancellor in 2009. She has lived in Ferguson, Missouri, Jerusalem and San Antonio, Texas and has taught at the University of California at Berkeley, the Michener Center at the University of Texas, and the University of Hawai’i, among other institutions. In June 2017, Nye was interviewed by Amsterdam Quarterly about her teaching philosophy, methods and experience, and the roles storytelling and her students have had on her work.

Bryan R. Monte: What is the role teaching has played in your life as a poet?

Naomi Shihab Nye: Teaching—or at any rate, standing in front of a million classes of all ages and encouraging writing (not sure “teaching” is really the best word here)—has been like a continual blood transfusion. It woke me up. It was a lifeline, yes, because it kept me alive in my art and in my greatest love of other people’s art. I was continually digging for poems that might move other people in various moments and situations.

You lose faith in your own passion or process, your enthusiasm dims, and the sorrowful news of the world pours down around your shoulders like a toxic rain—how do you revive?

You figure out what might inspire other people. You find a door, a knob, a hinge, and you move it. Because I was, continually, a freelancer, I constantly had to stay alert, try to find clues about what might work in the moment, and this helped me as a poet. What one does to lead a group in Albany, Texas, a small west Texas ranching town (which hosts public historic theatre events in a massive outdoor amphitheatre, as well as rattlesnake round-ups) is not the same as one would do in an orphanage in the desert in Jordan (all the little boys wearing white shirts)—you keep improvising. For a poet, this is very good.

BRM: Do you believe being a poet is a gift or a skill or a combination of both?

NSN: I believe we have intuitive pulls or interests from early childhood, which might be classified as gifts, but they can definitely be developed and strengthened, or ignored. I do think all people, especially as children, have “poetry channels” in their brains and these are the tunings into remembrance, figurative thinking, mindful attention, daydreaming, interior savouring of certain images for years and years, etc. Also, it is never too late. This channel gets a clearer beam later on, for some people, even if they have not been tuning in intentionally for years.

BRM: Thom Gunn, for example, wrote me that creative writing courses could only really give students, that initial push, beyond which, they were on their own. Do you agree with this perspective?

NSN: I agree with him, but such courses may also convince us we are never alone—on our own, but never alone. They may also make us sturdier about accepting different responses to our own poems, which can be crucial for a lifetime writer—an essential resilience and neutrality about “what other people think.”

BRM: You’ve taught all over the world. What is the most unusual place you’ve ever taught?

NSN: A rollerskating rink in the Aleutian Islands. It was the biggest place to gather in that community, apparently. There were very good writers there too. And lots of background skating noise. And music.

BRM: What is the farthest you have every travelled to teach a class?

NSN: Up to Nome, Alaska? Muscat, Oman? Cities in China and Japan? It never felt far, though. It always felt close once you shared a poem or two.

BRM: Do you usually have a lesson plan or a set of exercises at the ready when you begin teaching a class?

NSN: I am very free-flowing. I usually have ideas, plans, examples, in my pocket, but am ready to change course if intuition guides. I have been in literally thousands of class settings by now so that helps. I do have a general “flow of things” I try to follow—always ending with sharing of work and perhaps further suggestions ….

BRM: What are some of your favourite techniques and media to teach poetry?

NSN: Modelling on existing poems. Group writings, to get words flowing. Questions and answers. Tiny poems—see a book called Braided Creek by Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison. Like tiny modern haiku. Recent observations—within the last 24 hours. Incorporating spoken voices into poems. I encourage a lot of note-taking first—clumps or nuggets of writing—then drawing on those to find a possible poem.

BRM: How have you used and/or adapted these techniques and media to teach poetry in different cultures and in other parts of the world?

NSN: Wherever we travel, there are local concerns, and it’s best to pay attention to some of these and try to incorporate them into writing possibilities. I am always hoping to help other people feel their own lives are as rich, as full of particular details, struggles, glories, essential joys, possibilities than anyone else’s lives. It is startling how many of us feel real life must surely be happening “over there”—somewhere else. I now live in an American state—Texas—for a very long time, actually—with a bad reputation, politically. When I travel to other American states people often roll their eyes and ask me how we can stand to live here. They only know the stereotypes of our state—ignorant politicians, guns, swagger.

By speaking of simple local things—all the richness that makes up daily Texas life—I can touch upon details they all have in their lives too. It’s important as a writer to penetrate stereotypes wherever we can. I’m sure I am carrying plenty of my own about the current American regime, which I find shocking and terrifying. To become human to one another—to find ground we share—to honour the lusciousness of details (which war never has)—all are crucial for connection. In other countries I probably ask more questions than I do at home. We never pay quite enough attention and we never ask enough questions. But a writing workshop is a perfect place to try to do that more.

BRM: What do you see as your primary role as a creative writing teacher? Are you primarily a facilitator, an instructor, a good listener, a mentor, a moderator, a referee, a resource person or a combination of some of these roles and maybe others I haven’t mentioned?

NSN: I feel I am all these things you say. What a terrific and comprehensive list! Perhaps mostly I am an encourager. It’s like a children’s book—if I can do it, you can do it.

BRM: What role does storytelling have in your poems?

NSN: Those of us who favour narrative poems—moments—included dialogue—definitely feel as if we are part of the storytelling family. We are the cousins!

BRM: Do you usually start a poem with a story or does it usually begin with an image that accumulates into a story?

NSN: I start anywhere I can. I start everywhere. Every day is full of beginnings. We need to give ourselves a lot of room to try things out. We need to abandon delusions of perfection.

BRM: Your poetry is definitely a poetry rooted in specific places. Give examples of how living in Missouri, Jerusalem and Texas has influenced your writing differently.

NSN: Thank you for feeling places in my poems. When I think of Missouri, I think of the humid summer heat, the steeping in deep green memory, the cognizance of precious childhood that abides in some of us always, if we have a certain taste for it. I will always be entering my parents’ humble home in Ferguson, imagining them inside there, waiting for me, under the pine trees, next to the cherry trees, interested. I will always be feeling the clash of cultures, the arguing, the depression of my mother that was a very graphic backdrop to childhood years. It was acute. I was deeply concerned. Always trying to make her happy. My father’s endless restlessness…my mother’s frustrations and love for art.

When I think of Jerusalem, I will always be on the high hill outside the city with my father, and he is saying, “This place will change your life forever. Look closely. Do not look away.” He was so right. It was the pivotal time of life, when my world opened up and I became a global citizen—a much stronger feeling than being any particular kind of “patriot”—I think.

And Texas—the long roads—the huge sky—the friendliness—still ongoing. We live near the San Antonio River where egrets and cranes roost in the trees at sundown. I now feel like one of those birds, pushing our baby grandson in his carriage, as he drifts off to sleep. What images will he carry? What sticks? We, who are readers, are very lucky to have lines and phrases, from books we loved, sticking to our minds as well as our own images from experience.

BRM: A teacher once dedicated a book: “To my students, who were my best teachers.” What do you feel are two or three important things you’ve learned from your students about poetry?

NSN: Stay open. Be surprised. Someone else might like something you didn’t even like that much. AQ

Pat Seman – Rushnyk

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Rushnyk
by Pat Seman

Maria Vasileyevna. Tall and firmly built, she wears a bright yellow, floral headscarf. Immediately I see my father in her, the shape of her mouth, her eyes.

She’s waiting for me in the small council office of the Ukrainian village where I’ve come in search of my family, and already I’ve learned that half the village bears my grandmother’s surname. Maria, as teacher at the village school and local historian, is a fund of knowledge when it comes to the genealogy and blood ties of this close-knit community. She’s here to help me trace my family.

“I’m a Semenyuk too, on my mother’s side. We’re all one big family here.” Blood is strong,” she tells me, “it pulls you back to the earth it was fed on. The earth of this village is a magnet. It has brought you back to us. Welcome to Vasyliv.”

She sits down with us, puts on her glasses and studies the photograph I’ve brought with me, then takes out a notebook and begins to write.

The next day she phones to tell me she’s found my family.

 
In the spring of the next year, 2010, I was back in Ukraine, working as an English teacher at a language institute in the main provincial town, Chernivitsi. I wanted to stay longer this time, explore the country, go for long unhurried walks through the lanes and tracks of Vasyliv and, above all, I wanted to get to know my family. At weekends I’d take the local bus to the village. Long afternoons spent with cousins and second cousins, their children and grandchildren, often taken from house to house and at each house another meal spread before me. Eating and drinking and talking until the early hours of the evening. Whenever I could tear myself away from my family’s infinite hospitality I’d visit Maria, who by now had become a firm friend.

 
Maria lives in a small two-roomed house. There’s a courtyard with a fenced off section for her animals—two baby goats, some chickens and a big gobbling turkey. In the middle of the courtyard stands a well and further back, near the entrance to her garden is a wooden hut, which serves as the outside toilet. When I arrive she always has food waiting for me—blinis, borsch, fresh boiled eggs with crunchy spring onions, a dish of chicken or succulent kid. I sit at the table in the corner of her room with its two beds against the walls and picture of the Virgin Mary hanging above the wood stove.

“Eat, eat! I promise you’ve never tasted anything as good as this before. Everything’s my own produce, fresh from the land. Here, take some more bread. Everyone must eat. That’s the way it’s always been. You can’t work on an empty stomach.”

 
Maria is a history teacher at the local village school. Every morning she’s up at dawn to tend her garden, her cherry and apricot trees, vines and flowers. By 8 o’clock she’s at school ready to begin her first lesson. From my own experience, teaching English to school children in Chernivtsi, I imagine her sitting at her desk on a raised wooden dais in front of the blackboard as the children, neatly dressed, file in quietly, hang up their jackets in a wardrobe at the back of the classroom, take their places at old-fashioned wooden desks lined up in straight rows. A classroom with white lacy curtains at the windows, pot plants on the windowsills, pictures and maps hanging on the white walls. The room clean and tidy, everything in its place. It has a typically Ukrainian atmosphere of domesticity; warm and comfortable.

But Maria tells me proudly that in her school instead of blackboards they now have white boards and that the old coal stove central heating system has been replaced by electric convection heating.

“It’s so warm in winter now that the temperature may even reach 24 degrees and the children can sit and study without having to wear their jackets! We have a special computer room and in each classroom there’s an overhead projector that can be connected to a laptop.”

She comes home in the afternoon to more work, hard, manual work this time on her land. Everything she does herself; follows the tractor as it ploughs the earth, pulling out weeds and stones; plants the potatoes, corn and vegetables; weeds and harvests them.

“In everything I do, I find something special. I give it my best.”

 
One afternoon as I’m walking along the path to Maria’s house I pass a bridal procession making its way towards the church. My attention’s caught by two children who go before the bride and her family, one carrying a large decorated loaf and an icon, the other a long, white, embroidered towel. When I tell this to Maria, “Ah, the rushnyk!” and she disappears into the next room, returns with her own beautifully embroidered example.

“Here. This is my rushnyk. A rushnyk symbolises life’s journey, so it must be long and beautiful. It’s with us at all our most important moments—birth, marriage, death. See the red thread running through it? Red is for life itself, fertility, joy. The bride you saw today will take her rushnyk into the church with her. She and the groom will stand on it during the ceremony. And here”, she lays out on the bed a long-sleeved, embroidered white blouse. “A blouse, woven and embroidered by my great-grandmother.” With her hand she traces the paired motifs that rise in dense formation up each sleeve; a red rose for life and fertility, a black rose for the earth, repeated time and time again. Each pair, she explains, represents an ancestor, going back as far as the seamstress could remember.

She brings out a dress made for her by her mother; a long, white woven dress with crocheted hem and cuffs, the top and sleeves all closely sewn with tiny beads in a pattern of large red roses against green leaves. She insists I try it on, kneels at my feet to roll up my jeans, adjust the hem, squeezes my feet into a pair of her daughter’s tight, pointed shoes, then wraps a long black apron skirt around my waist, bright with tiny beads that glimmer and shine in a pattern of flowers as varied and rich as those in her garden. The dress feels heavy, almost regal in its weight and flow and, tottering out to have my picture taken amongst Maria’s tulips and sweet-smelling narcissus, I wish I’d inherited just some of that poise and elegance that I’ve seen in so many young Ukrainian women, immaculate in their high heels and tight skirts, strolling along the streets of Chernivtsi.

 
Out through her garden and onto a wide sweep of land that curves gently down to the river, I follow Maria as she strides over the tilled earth, down along a track between plots furred with tiny green shoots.

“There, those are potatoes and over there corn, here beetroot and cabbage. The earth is dry. We need more rain and soon, if they’re to grow.”

She points back towards the ridge we’ve just come from, with its scattering of low-roofed, wooden houses. “That’s where your great-grandfather’s house was once, there where they’re now building a big brick house. Your grandmother worked on this land, in summer she and all her family were out in the fields together hoeing from dawn to dusk. Hemp used to be grown here, great stretches of it. It had to be picked, soaked in the river, then laid out to dry. Your grandmother would have spent the long winter evenings spinning and weaving it into carpets and blankets for her trousseau. And she would have embroidered – bedcovers, pillows, and a pair of white trousers and white shirt for her future bridegroom to be worn at their wedding, and of course, her rushnyk.”

 
Maria and I are sitting by the river cracking sunflower seeds. She’s laid out a blanket for us just clear of the sheltering trees. Nearby some goats and a tethered cow graze on the grass verge. A stork sails by, skimming the opposite shore, which is steep and wooded, its green reflection wavering in the water’s steady flow.

We talk about the recent elections. Yanukovitch, with his connections to Russia, has come to power. Maria tells me that one of his first acts has been to deny that the terrible famine of the 1930’s, in which at least 7 million people starved to death, was an act of genocide committed by the Soviet Union upon the Ukrainian people.

“The Soviet Union stripped the Ukraine of all its harvest leaving our people to starve. They even skimmed off our rich, black Ukrainian earth, took it away by the trainload.” She tells me that this part of Ukraine, Bukovina, escaped this catastrophe; it didn’t become part of the Soviet Union until 1940. But in 1944 collectivisation was introduced into the village. Any peasant who protested against the confiscation of his land was deported to Siberia. The grain too was confiscated, even the seed grain. Soviet agents were sent into the villages to search from house to house for hidden stores of food. Many people died.

“There on the other side of the river,” she points to the steep, wooded bank, “the situation wasn’t so bad, they had rain. The people of Vasyliv would go there with whatever they had and barter it for bread. Just downstream from here there’s a spot where the river runs shallow, that’s where they would cross over. There was a woman; she was pregnant. She was coming back weak with hunger, exhausted, clutching a bag of flour. She’d just exchanged it for her embroidered, beaded blouse. She didn’t make it, couldn’t keep her footing. The swift current swept her away. “These are our stories, our history, written down in every school text book in Ukraine. I am a history teacher. What am I to tell my pupils now? That what they’ve read, what I’ve told them, given them as their history, is not true?”

 
Vasyliv was once an important town in the rich and flourishing principality of Kiev Rus. Situated on the River Dniester, it was part of the crucial trade route that linked the Baltic to the Black Sea and Constantinople. With amber from the Baltic shores and rich brocades, wine, oil and perfume from the Black Sea and beyond, ships sailed into harbour and traded for the local produce –honey, wax, fur, grain and pottery. It had numerous churches, monasteries and a castle, the residence of Prince Vasili, grandson of the Grand Prince of Kiev, Yaroslav the Wise. But its prosperity was short-lived. In 1241 an invading horde of Mongols burnt it to the ground.

I know all this because Maria has taken me along the river, shown me the site of the ancient harbour, the trading post and the large ploughed field nearby where once stood the Prince’s castle. She’s given me a tour of the village museum of which she is curator, with wave of her teacher’s rod, guiding me through the carefully executed plans, diagrams, archaeological drawings and finds that tell the story of Vasyliv’s long history, reaching back 7,000 years. And together we’ve been to the site of the White Stone Church on a rise at the edge of the village with its remains of 12 stone sarcophagi, where princes and boyars once lay; where during the excavation in and around the site, skulls were found.

 
“So many skulls, here and in other parts of the village. Piled high they were. When the experts examined them they proved to have exactly the same proportions as the skulls of our present day villagers.” Hearing this I wonder, if my skull were put to the test, would I too turn out to be a direct descendant of these citizens of Ancient Rus. Could my connection to this place and its people really go back so far?

 
Whenever I can, I go back to Ukraine, to my family and Vasyliv. The last time I was there, as always, I sought out Maria. I found her at the bottom of her field of vegetables down by the river, which was swollen and seething after several bouts of heavy summer rain. She was hanging onto a tree branch, leaning over the fast flowing water, trying to catch a long branch floating by, her face shining with sweat from the effort. She told me that her daughter had gone to find work in Poland. She’s a qualified teacher, but there’s no work in Ukraine for young people and no motivation to study, since a degree is no guarantee of a good job; it’s only money and the right connections that count. The crisis in Ukraine was making the situation even more acute and forcing many of them to seek a better future abroad.

“Ah,” says Maria, “there are so many places to see, so many countries I’ve read about, talked about to my students. If I only had the money, could leave this country, travel, I’d go to Germany, England, Canada, Brazil, India, Greece … a trip round the world! Maybe I’d live abroad for some time, Canada or Sweden, probably for five years, and then I’d come home. For me there’ s no better place to live, my roots are here, here in this earth of Vasyliv. I plant the seeds in its rich earth, they absorb its goodness, grow into the food I eat: the potatoes, the carrots, the cabbage, the beetroot, the sweet corn.

Wherever I am in the world
I won’t forget Vasyliv.
When I think of it, my heart misses a beat.
My Vasyliv, my Vasyliv.

We walked back up the hill in the late afternoon light following the track through Maria’s long field of vegetables, the corn hip-high, potatoes, carrots, beetroot, beans laid out in neat rows, every inch of soil used. On into her garden, which was a tangle and explosion of green. There were roses and lilies of all colours, tall yellow irises, peonies ready to burst their buds, flowering beds of strawberries.

It was time to leave. Maria disappeared into the house, came back with a large jar of preserved cherries and a bowl of eggs, each one individually wrapped in newspaper.

A last hug.

“Come back soon. Don’t forget us!

As if I ever could. AQ

Peter Neil Carroll – Gratitude

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Gratitude
by Peter Neil Carroll

The surgeon says, take a deep breath,
his metal ear trailing across my chest
the only sound between us.
He saved my life but what I want
to tell him seems insufficient.

How hard to speak gratitude
I learn from my students, alumni
who like a doctor’s patients
want to say more
than they know how.

Years later a letter comes, claiming
I changed someone’s life. I’m nervous
about this power, teaching. Most
who love my class already hold thoughts
like mine. Maybe I indulge them,
give consent—self-confidence
a tart ingredient, standing up for belief.

Once, twice I may achieve swift
revelation, guide a student
to an invisible star. That’s enough.
I take the doctor’s creed—
first, do no harm—
let them find their lonely way
while I still search for the right word.

Rob Jacques – In Lore Alone

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In Lore Alone
by Rob Jacques

          for Joseph Menesale, Beverly Schools Custodian, 1939-1973

That calloused, cracked and aged hand
was dexterous in shoelace tying, helping
pull on, pull off galoshes, patting a back
and comforting with a touch a child crying,
opening school doors before rules allowed
to let us enter warmth and safety, stoking
furnace fires, and, belying time, unbowed
at day’s end for hours of waxing floors.

From a cellar-dungeon up would come
Hephaestus from his coal fires, Apollo
with his sun-bright replacement lights,
Hercules with his mop and buckets
to clean the Augean stables of our school,
Zeus with all the power to make things run,
janitor-master of all he surveyed, watchman
at outdoor recess guarding us as we played.

He had the knack of turning work to fun,
so we helped him shovel coal or snow,
wash chalk dust from slate blackboards,
scrub graffiti from boys’ room walls,
preferring mild tasks to classroom boredom
where nothing happy happens, time stalls,
and teachers lord knowledge over us until
dismissal bells free us from keeping still.

He was a friendly, passive fixture for years,
fixing what we broke, repairing what we tore,
ever in our background an invisible support,
and when we needed or wanted, he was there
to provide in his quiet, unassuming way
just the right solution in the right amount
although his picture isn’t in our yearbooks
and his name isn’t listed in any staff account.

Our parents never knew him, or if they did,
they never knew his offices to their children,
how he coaxed smiles, dried tears, all the while
keeping a building running, answering requests,
clearing trash, laying in supplies, calming fears,
stopping calamities, smoothing rough spots into
comforting patterns on which education relies,
acts of a grace unnoticed under scholastic skies.

“I’m sorry, but we’ve no record of what he did,”
the school district claims. “Schools were staffed
with custodians, but they weren’t teachers,”
so his practice of janitorial, safe-keeping craft
lies in lore alone, in childhood memories where
all honest acts that form adult character lie,
we in turn passing them on to new innocence
with benevolence, old services that never die.

Stephen O’Connor – “Lalla Roohk” and the Great Slide

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“Lalla Roohk” and the Great Slide
by Stephen O’Connor

My grandfather, John O’Connor, once told me, in definitive tones, that Thomas Moore was the greatest poet in the English language. I was a boy, and when my grandfather made declarations, I set them down in the book and volume of my mind as facts, as infallible to my young Catholic understanding as papal bulls, and I remember many of them to this day. Besides, if anyone knew poetry, it would have been “Papa,” as we called my grandfather, for he was a great lover of verse. He often boasted that he had won an oratorical contest as a lad back in Ireland for a recitation of “Bingen on the Rhine.” The sponsors of the contest were supposed to have sent him a prize—a major award, no doubt. “I’m still waiting,” he would say, leaning toward me as we sat in the wicker chairs on his porch, slapping my knee or pushing my shoulder and laughing.

There was a tremendous thick tome on his bookshelf called The Poetry and Song of Ireland, edited by John Boyle O’Reilly. It was a literary mainstay of Irish American households, and held within its sacred pages the complete poems of Thomas Moore. A frontispiece depicted Cathleen ni Houlihan, the beautiful woman who was the embodiment of Ireland. While her people bore the yoke of foreign bondage, she was the Sean Van Vocht, the poor old woman, but whenever the Irish took up arms and shed their blood in the cause of freedom, she was transformed into the Gile na Gile, the Brightness of Brightness, the lovely Cathleen. Under the depiction of this radiant queen was a line from Thomas Moore, “Rich and rare were the gems she wore.” Papa gave me the book, and it sits in front of me on the desk as I write, one of the granite blocks in the foundation of my identity.

Papa, who was born in Rathkeale, County Limerick, in the late nineteenth century, was not alone among his contemporaries in his estimation of Moore’s greatness, or in his certainty of the genius of his chef d’oeuvre, “Lalla Rookh,” published in 1817. The Norton Anthology of English Literature states that the three thousand pounds that Moore was advanced by his publisher was the largest sum ever offered a poet for a single poem, and this at a time when Byron and Shelley were household names. Before Moore’s death in 1852, “Lalla Roohk” had gone through twenty editions.

I was reminded of all this the other day as I was thumbing through a copy of Huckleberry Finn, and noticed that Huck mentions a Mississippi riverboat which he refers to as “Lally Rook.” The poem is also mentioned in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, and Schuman wrote music based on scenes from the work. Moore’s “Lalla Rookh,” it seems, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Les Miserables, was one of the most popular works for soldiers to read “by the bivouac’s fitful flame” during the Civil War.

Papa had declared “Lalla Rookh” a masterpiece, and since the verses he recited from memory had such a rich sound rolling off his Irish tongue, I was eager to read it. I must have been about thirteen, so I hoped that it would be a tale of mighty Irish heroes like Cúchulainn and Conall Cearnach, or The Fighting Prince of Donegal, whose exploits I had seen in the film of that name at the Strand Theater—still the only movie in my life that I sat through for a second showing. When I finally sat down in the rocking chair in my room with the heavy book opened in my lap to “Lalla Roohk,” I was immediately puzzled by the subtitle: “A Persian Tale.” It was a work of what is known today as Romantic Orientalism.

Let me be honest with you, and hope that my grandfather is not listening from a perch in heaven. I never did read the entire poem. In fact, I’ve never read most of the poem. The reason is that no one ever held a gun to my head and forced me to spend the hours that it would take to plough through all the maidens beckoning the brave to their bowers, or the descriptions of “the crimson blossoms of the coral tree in the warm isles of India’s sunny sea.” Three pages of this stuff would cure the most obdurate insomniac. The footnotes alone would keep the Prisoner of Zenda busy for months. On the first page of the poem, there are twelve explanatory footnotes drawn from atlases, treatises, mythologies, Persian miscellanies, and dictionaries.

Now I will not say that none of this is interesting; in fact, in some respects the footnotes are more interesting than the poem. Who knew that a “bulbul” was another name for a nightingale? But what I find truly interesting—fascinating, really, is the simple fact that throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, such a dense and verbally ornate poem was enormously popular. It was not read by graduate students, (if graduate students even existed, they must have been rarer than a bulbul in February); it was read by a lot of people like my grandfather, who was a house painter with a grammar school education. Melodrama is out of favour, but beyond that, would anyone today have the attention span required to read a heavily footnoted, book-length poem? Most modern readers, including me, would not get beyond the first sentence of Moore’s introduction, which begins, “In the eleventh year of the reign of Aurungzebe, Abdalla, King of Lesser Bucharia, a lineal descendent from the great Zingis, having abdicated the throne in favor of his son, set out on a pilgrimage to the shrine of the Prophet, and, passing into India through the delightful valley of Cashmere…” Is your mind wandering yet?

My point here is not just that such works have gone out of fashion. What strikes me forcefully is that people in the past, those who could read, possessed an extremely high order of focus, comprehension and expression relative to the modern reader and writer. Even the illiterate groundlings relished Shakespeare’s elaborate word play. And we need not go back so far. In the grammar schools and high schools of our grandparents, or in my case even aunts and uncles, American students still committed great swaths of Longfellow to memory, verses from such epic poems as “Evangeline,” (which sold 36,000 copies in the decade after its publication), “The Song of Hiawatha,” (50,000 copies within two years of its publication), and the ever-popular ballad “The Wreck of the Hesperus.”

Memorization of poetry? I’ve been teaching high school for twenty-seven years; when other teachers find out that I’ve had my students memorize “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” they look at me as if I had required the youngsters to put away their pencils in favor of a quill and inkwell. The last professor I had who expected students to commit poems to memory was another Irishman, Augustus Martin at University College, Dublin, who seemed to have the complete poetical works of Yeats at his fingertips, and in 1980, his fingertips were not connected to a hand-held device.

“Mnemosyne—Memory, is the mother of all the Muses,” he would remind us in that sonorous Richard Burton voice of his. “Memorization” in the modern educational lexicon is often coupled with the culpatory adjective “rote.” Why would you want a head full of poetry when you can google whatever you need? But what if knowing things, rather than just knowing where to find things, is a formative experience? What we know, what we memorize, lives in us, becomes part of us. The words return to us as we witness the beauty and tragedy of the world around us; they lend depth to every scene and illuminate every experience. I found strength in the words in my head as I spent time with my terminally ill father. The lines that always came back to me, as his days dwindled, were from Sonnet 73:

           This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
           To love that well, which thou must leave ere long.

There are no longer popular poems which most Americans can quote. As a child, I used to look at a framed needlepoint my great aunt had done, which hung in the parlour. It depicted a homey cottage above the lines: “Let me live in a house by the side of the road, and be a friend to man.” Many visitors recognized those lines from a poem by Sam Walter Foss, “The House by the Side of the Road.”

Such popular poetry no longer exists in America, and popular reading is synonymous with light reading. It was not always so. While watching a documentary on the Mexican American War recently, I was surprised to hear that many of the American soldiers in that conflict (or invasion) carried Prescott’s 1843 Conquest of Mexico, which they read to pass the tedious hours between marching and fighting. Now I happen to have inherited a copy of Prescott’s Conquest of Mexico, or I should say copies, since the work was published in two volumes. Opening volume two at random, I read, “Cortes reflected on his own impotence to restrain the fury of the Mexicans, and resolved in spite of his late supercilious treatment of Montezuma, to employ his authority to allay the tumult, an authority so successfully exerted on behalf of Alvarado at an earlier stage of the insurrection.”

Whether we can appreciate their tastes or their world view—whether we feel that their histories are slanted, their plots incredible, their scenes sentimental, or their poetry flowery—the sheer literacy of our ancestors astonishes me. Look at the works that they read; in 1842, a year before Prescott published his Conquest of Mexico, Charles Dickens visited my hometown of Lowell, Massachusetts, (hardly the Oxford of America), and was the toast of the town as the most celebrated novelist in history. Fans crowded the docks of New York awaiting the next instalment of Martin Chuzzlewit or The Old Curiosity Shop. Yet I suspect that the average modern reader would be flatly incapable of getting through Bleak House, or even David Copperfield. And the difference shows. Read the letters of Civil War soldiers; visit the Nantucket Whaling Museum and read the letters sent home by those rugged men who thrust the cruel harpoon, (one letter I recall recounts that members of the ship’s company were performing Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar for the entertainment of the crew); read the prose that was written by young women mill workers here in Lowell, who were largely self-educated and often sent their pay home to put their brothers through school. Yet the discussions and debates conducted through their literary magazine, The Lowell Offering, were carried on at an intellectual level far beyond the capabilities of most of today’s college graduates. The magazine impressed Charles Dickens; in fact, Professor Natalie McKnight of Boston University, and grad student Chelsea Bray, have put forth a convincing theory that Dickens conceived of the idea for A Christmas Carol after reading stories in The Lowell Offering, stories written by “mill girls.”

The evidence of a general decline in literacy may be anecdotal, but it is persistent. New examples present themselves continually. A woman told me recently that she read War and Peace in its entirety with her English class at Lowell High School in the 1950’s. When is the last time you saw a high school student sitting in a coffee shop reading Tolstoy? And you never will. Am I nostalgic? Perhaps, but the incontrovertible fact remains that The Hunger Games is not Wuthering Heights, and that the preponderance of what high school students read today is much closer in style and level of complexity to the former than to the latter. Earlier I mentioned Jane Eyre—a retired librarian informs me that for many years, and again, we’re probably talking about the forties and fifties, and probably into the sixties, it was the most frequently borrowed book from our city library, principally by girls and young women. Try to read the novel with a typical high school class today—I speak from experience—and see how many pages are turned before students are yawning and peeking at their iPhones. A couple of years ago, I asked my daughter, then nineteen, what she and her friends were reading over the summer. She responded that most of them were rereading Fifty Shades of Grey because the film was coming out. In terms of the quality of the prose in that quarter, I can only repeat a question that was posed by a reviewer of the novel on Amazon, “Was this book written by a teenager?”

 
What happened to us? Shall we blame our schools? Was it TV? Was it the cult of self-esteem and lack of self discipline? The proliferation of excuses and accommodations? The belief that education could be had without a price and it would all be just good fun—a group project with crayons? Flannery O’Connor once responded to the assertion that students should be given what they want to read rather than what they should read. Her response was not ambiguous. “Their tastes should not be consulted,” she declared. “Their tastes are being formed.” Score one for Wuthering Heights. But the brave new world requires us all to change with it, they say, and so we continue, as Neil Postman argued decades ago, to “entertain ourselves to death.”

Politicians talk about the need to get the internet in every classroom across the globe, as if it is a given that this will, that it must improve education—a key component of “21st century learning” as they’ve dubbed it. But what if part of the problem is that we have all slipped into the world of the quick link—of “surfing” the web instead of deep-diving into a book. I know that many of the works I enjoyed easily as a young man strike me as dense and difficult when I reread them today. Maybe it’s true that the internet is changing our brains, as a recent book posits. What this will mean for our future, I don’t know, but I continue to swim against the tide, often repeating to my own high school students the simple admonition that John O’Connor, Papa, once used to chastise me for not having read a book of Irish history that he’d given me: “If you don’t read, you don’t know.” I’ve always remembered those words, but I’m quite sure my students have already forgotten them. For the very young, it is a world of distractions, a world of tweets and texts and sexts and posts and Instagrams and likes and downloaded videos, distractions with which even “high-interest” reading books cannot compete, let alone the interior life of Emily Dickinson’s “landscape of the spirit.”

Clearly, an ignorant populace is not a solid foundation on which to build a democracy. Beyond the political implications, I feel a sense of regret for what we’ve lost, for what people of all cultures are losing, for what we parted with all too easily, for what we are not handing down to our children. “It’s over,” an old book dealer said to me recently. She didn’t need to explain.

I’m sure there will always be a silent student somewhere reading Thoreau in the corner of the library—who knows, maybe even “Lalla Roohk,” but the general decline in the kind of deep literacy of a not so distant past is undeniable. We are approaching a time when, for many educated in American schools, our “native English,” will have become, in Shakespeare’s words, “like a cunning instrument cased up, or, being open, put into his hands that knows no touch to tune the harmony.” AQ