Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
"You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles
through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair,
yours,
and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile, the world goes on.
Meanwhile, the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile, the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are,
no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese,
harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place in the family of things."
I teach public speaking,
and many mornings before class starts,
I will ask my students, "May I read to you?"
What can they say, right?
But what I read is a poem,
usually short,
sometimes funny and entertaining,
sometimes thought-provoking and inspiring,
always something that I think the students will not have heard before.
And my intention here, with reading the poem before class,
is to establish a sense of community amongst all of us there in the room,
as co-learners,
as a community that has come together for the purpose of sharing knowledge -
not just a one-way exchange of knowledge.
I began thinking about ways of opening my class
after I became dissatisfied from watching students file into my class
over and over again.
After all, it's just public speaking,
this is just another class,
and I am just another instructor.
And as I began confronting this dissatisfaction,
I began looking for different ways that I could sort of mix things up.
And I have to tell you
that the inspiration for starting classes runs pretty thin for many of us.
(Video) Bueller, Bueller, Bueller.
If you are familiar with the high school/college routine,
of course you know roll call is often the way that we get things started.
And what happens is immediately we set up this dichotomy
of one professor, many students,
and this is the way that the relationship is going to go.
And so I began looking for inspiration.
Less satisfying to me, beyond roll call,
was the idea that perhaps I could hand out some graded test work or graded assignment
that would, you know, really reinforce that mindset in the area of the audience.
And then one morning on my way to work, I found my inspiration.
A typical morning, but this was just a little bit different,
in the sense that I timed it just right
to hear Garrison Keillor read a poem on The Writer's Almanac
in that soft, flannel voice of his,
and I thought, "Aha, there it is. There's my inspiration."
Because I thought
if Garrison Keillor can capture the imagination of an entire nation
in five minutes with a poem,
certainly I could do the same with just 20 students in a classroom.
And so I began looking for little artifacts,
short poems that I could bring in that were immediately accessible
that I could share with my students.
Now, I do that as an invitation,
as sort of an appetizer to the main course,
and also as a point of invocation.
Invocation is a word I learned in church,
and my therapist says I can still use it, time and again, not very often.
(Laughter)
But this idea of invocation
means to invoke the spirits or a higher power for assistance,
and so I do.
And the higher powers that I invite into the classroom
are Billy Collins and Sharon Olds,
Ted Kooser, Stanley Kunitz.
I invite in, every quarter, a woman by the name of Anne Sexton,
who writes this wonderful poem called "Welcome Morning,"
and it begins like this:
"There is Joy in all:
in the hair I brush each morning" -
which usually gets a laugh when I read it -
(Laughter)
but what Anne Sexton does
is she runs through this mundane list
of things to pay attention to in the morning -
the Cannon towel,
the chapel of eggs that she is cooking for herself.
And the poem ends so beautifully:
"All this is God, right here in my pea-green house ...
and I mean, though often forget,
to give thanks.
So while I think of it, let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning ...
The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard, dies young."
And there it is, in two minutes,
a daily lesson, a daily dose, in the important quality of gratitude.
And I would argue that that's good for any community.
Sir Ken Robinson, TED's creativity guru,
once quoted Socrates, or quotes Socrates,
as saying, "Education is about kindling a flame, not filling a vessel."
I don't know, maybe Sir Ken was there when Socrates said it,
but I would argue that education
is both the kindling of a flame and the filling of a vessel.
And not just any vessel -
the vessel of a student
who is learning about life-long lessons that they will take with them.
Let me leave you with a few other lines of a poem,
another poem by Mary Oliver.
I opened with a poem of Mary Oliver.
I should give her credit: "Wild Geese."
But this poem is called "Sometimes,"
and in the fourth stanza, she ends the poem very simply:
"Instructions for living a life."
Makes you pay attention, doesn't it?
"Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it."
Good luck. God speed.
(Applause)