Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
I've been teaching poetry-writing workshops and discussion groups
in the community now for 20 years
with people of all ages:
students, grade K through 12,
veterans, seniors, patients and caregivers.
And what I find most striking, always,
is the quality of a kind of intimate conversation
that the poems and the discussion of the poetry brings about.
A conversation that gives us an opportunity to have with each other,
with the world and with ourselves.
So, I'm also struck by what happens over and over again in that aha moment,
that moment of surprise,
when somebody makes a leap of thought, a new understanding,
and that leap of thought is like a spark,
like if you rub two sticks together,
you can rub two words together in a new way,
words that might not normally be put side by side,
to make a new meaning,
and you feel that spark.
Emily Dickinson said, famously,
that she knew she was in the presence of a poem
when she felt the top of her head come off.
Well, that's quite a spark.
You know, I think that in our culture,
despite all of our technology and our connectivity,
we have, actually, a growing deeper hunger
for this intimate conversation,
a conversation with each other and with ourselves.
The Chinese American poet Li-Young Lee says,
"Poetry is the inner voice of one person
speaking to the inner voice of another."
And that intimacy can happen in a big crowd of 800 people
when you're listening to a poem -
maybe you just felt it now -
and you feel that thread of connection, of a conversation with that voice.
That's what pulled me into poetry.
I was hungry for my own intimate conversation
and for my inner voice to be listening and responding
to the inner voice of others.
Well, I too am a father.
I know Sam shared his photos of his child,
and I was walking home from school two years ago with my daughter Ella,
who was six at the time.
We were holding hands, walking home from Holden Elementary School,
and all of a sudden, she just stopped.
She squeezed my hand harder, and she goes, "Daddy!"
She looked around.
"Everything has a name.
The clouds, a word for it.
The clouds, the trees, the grass.
Who came up with these names?
Where did they come from?"
Well, that was her aha moment, and I was sharing it with her.
I didn't have an answer for her question;
poems are not about answering,
but about living the questions more deeply,
living that sense of awe and wonder.
And it made me remember and think about a third-grade student
I recently taught
who wrote a poem about her tree in her front yard
that she called her "childhood friend,"
and she wrote, "Tree, you are a big temple for birds."
And what is she doing?
She's renaming the world around her;
she's renaming this tree, she's giving a new name for it,
and that name is a marker for that intimate connection,
for that conversation that she's had.
She's made it new again.
So, Stanley Kunitz, who lived to be 100 years old, an American poet,
wrote up until the day he died.
And in his early 90s, he wrote,
"He who has forgotten the child he was is already too old for poetry."
So what is that saying?
Poems and poetry and all creative expression
offers us that opportunity
to enter back in that conversation with the child we were
and with that youthful sense of play, of exploration,
of experimentation with language.
At the Wick Poetry Center,
we now have an annual performance called "Giving Voice,"
and our very own Hal Walker plays music in between the poems.
And it's everybody from eight years old to eighty-eight -
ninety-two, we had a ninety-two year old senior read.
And a friend of mine said two years ago after the performance,
he said, "You know, David,
I felt like I could hear the young voice inside the old people
and the old voice inside the young
in that performance tonight."
So I want to tell you a story
about my very first experience teaching poetry in the schools,
and in some ways, perhaps, 20 years ago,
it was my best experience and it's been downhill ever since.
Here it was in Akron, Ohio, at a school called St. Sebastian School, fifth grade,
and I came into that classroom to read poems about living in Japan,
and I talked to them about eating bowls of soba
and eating these bowls of soba on the street corners in Tokyo
and how you could slurp your soba,
and it was considered a great compliment to the chef
as you stood in rows with other businessmen
slurping their sobas.
And though I couldn't speak Japanese, I was an excellent slurper,
and eating my soba,
I felt fluent in their language for that time being.
I also said I loved how you could order an egg
dropped in the middle of your soba.
I first called it [Japanese], a soba and egg,
and learned later I was completely wrong, I didn't know what I was asking for,
and I had to order a full-moon soba.
"A full-moon soba," I said to these fifth graders.
What a beautiful expression -
to think of that image and that idiomatic phrase.
One fifth grader raised her hand, very nonchalantly:
"Well, that's not surprising.
In our country, we order our eggs sunny-side up."
And that was a little aha moment for me;
I was shaking my ears and listening
and thinking I was tone deaf all my life to my own language,
to that beautiful phrase and expression,
the image in my own idiomatic expression.
So this is my poem, which tells the story of that very first day,
walking into this fifth-grade classroom around this time of year, in November,
in Akron, Ohio,
called "Reaching to a Sky of Soba."
I must say that actually I read my poem to a quiet chorus that's slurping -
they were so fascinated with that idea of slurping.
I walk past winter boots lined up in rows.
Through the door, Miss Brown's 10:00 5A English.
My first day teaching poetry in the schools;
the students crowd around.
They want to know how tall I am and if my hair is real.
A stranger in the room,
I stand near a small stool they call the "author's chair."
Snow falls outside,
beyond windows dressed with Pilgrim hats and turkeys.
Reading my poem "Eating Soba,"
I say poetry lets you talk to things you don't normally talk to,
and here, I'm talking to noodles as though my bowl were a smiling friend.
In Japan, you can slurp as loud as you want,
the louder, the greater the compliment to the chef.
The class practices slurping.
One boy asks, "Could you say the sky is a bowl of soba?"
I smile yes.
"Then the sun is a raw egg floating in it."
Another hand appears:
"Trees are chopsticks."
Heads turn to look out the window.
"And clouds are steam rising above."
The students gasp and applaud.
"Planets are onions."
"The moon is a bump at the bottom of the bowl."
"Earthquakes break up the noodles; their rumbling is slurping."
"Our mouths are black holes, breathing it in."
"God is the chef."
"Meteors are coins we throw down to pay."
Then the shy boy looking at the floor
raises his hand:
"The universe is a giant bowl of soba
we keep eating and eating until the last explosion.
When the universe ends," he says,
"our bowl is empty."
The bell rings, their hands still reaching in the air.
Well, after that poem and after that class, they filed out,
and the teacher was shocked and said,
"You won't believe what just happened."
I say, "I don't believe what just happened.
I don't know how that happened.
You know, it was like the big bang:
in one period, a new cosmology was born."
She said, "No, no.
The boy who raised his hand with that first question,
'Could you say the sky is a bowl of soba?'
had never raised his hand before in class."
He had not spoken; he had not had a voice
until this poem and this opportunity to play with language
came and pulled out his voice and inspired him
and made him want to participate.
And that's what poems can do.
And so, at the Wick Poetry Center,
we have a wonderful community arts project, now in its fifth year,
called "Traveling Stanzas,"
and traveling stanzas is a community mass-transit poetry project
where we take poems from the community,
we give them to graphic design students at Kent State,
and they make them into posters
that travel in the RTA and trains and buses, the PARTA,
and they've traveled in Akron Metro as well.
And I love that word "stanza," which comes from Italian,
meaning, actually literally, "a waiting room,"
a little waiting room.
So I think of these traveling stanzas,
these poems above the heads of busy, hurrying commuters,
as little moments of pause,
little pockets of time in our day
to pause and have that intimate conversation,
to pull a voice out of us and to engage in that conversation.
So I'd like to play one of our videos.
We made animated videos out of these,
and they're available on the website travelingstanzas.com,
and they can be sent as animated e-greetings
to anybody in the world, with a little message,
to hear the original audio
of the child or the adult or the veteran reading his or her poem.
If that's not an idea worth spreading, I don't know what is.
So go visit that site,
and let's look at this poem/ animated video called "My Voice."
It comes from Miller South School, fourth-grade class.
My Voice.
(Video) (Children's voices)
Children: My voice.
Child 1: My voice fills the air with song.
It pops out like a purple crocus in spring,
blooming louder every day.
Children: Bloom, bloom, bloom.
Child 2: My voice carries a secret, then passes it on.
Children: Psst. Psst. Psst.
Did you hear about Bobby?
Child 3: My voice is like an oven:
it dings when a good idea is done.
Children: Ding.
Child 4: My voice moves to the vibrations of peace.
I hear the world sing and ...
Children: my voice sings back - wooh!
(Video ends)
So in that video, I love that line,
"My voice is like an oven: it dings when a good idea is done."
That sense of surprise,
the Zen Japanese poets actually called "Aha-ness,"
and the ancient Chinese poets called it "raising the head" -
that moment of surprise in a poem.
And in the Wick Poetry Center,
we've come up with a new name for that feeling; we call it a "whomp."
and we've defined it in our intern's office:
"A whomp is when a goosebump comes into contact with the Wick vibe."
So if you've all felt a little tingling,
that's a whomp.
So I'd like to show you another animated video.
This is by a senior at Judson Manor in Cleveland
named Elvidio Bufalini,
who wrote this poem at 88.
He's a World War II veteran,
and he told me once that writing poems, for him -
and he came to it very late in his life, in his late 80s -
was a way of discovering how remarkable his experiences have been
and how they fit together.
And he said, "Every poem is a new hatching."
I love that phrase, the idea of a poem as a new hatching.
This is a poem inspired by a poem by George Ella Lyon,
called "Where I'm From."
Where I'm From.
(Video) Where I'm From.
I dare say I'm from a cherished memory
and the immediacy of an intimate moment,
harking back to the heart's thirsty infancy.
Me at the time, a compliant toddler, sitting content on Grampa's knee,
held close in a warm embrace,
Grampa's soft white beard caresses my quickened face.
The imprinted glow and flow of his full-grown male affection
mothering and fathering me,
perhaps in a subtle way through the alchemy of fellow feeling,
nurturing into being this now-concluding love-blessed life
of an aging man."
(Video ends)
There's Elvidio, talking to the child he was
and being in that kind of intimate conversation.
So what else can we do with these traveling stanzas?
Well, we are now in the process of building, in Kent,
an interactive poetry park on a new KSU esplanade
that links the town and the gown.
And in this poetry park,
we'll have display holders for changeable exhibits of these posters,
of these traveling stanzas,
and using this digital technology,
you'll be able to hold up a smartphone or a tablet to each poster
and hear the voice of the child or adult or veteran reading his or her poem
as you walk around the park and engage with it.
There'll be an amphitheater there for outdoor classes as well,
and it will be linked to our new home,
which will be in the May Prentice House
on the esplanade.
So I like to think -
and we have an app now, the Wick Poetry Center app,
free and downloadable,
that has all of these animations as well as lesson plans.
So I like to think that we're using the newest technology
to remind us of and connect us to the oldest technology,
which is our voice,
which is language and the ability to write it down.
One final little story I want to tell about renaming the world.
It comes from Lima, Ohio.
I was doing a residency in a second-grade class,
and all year long,
I kept coming back for a week at a time,
and not until springtime did this one second-grade girl
find a voice and actually finish and write a poem and read it to the class.
We were making up new words for spring and putting them all on the chalkboard
and then drawing lines and arrows,
as though we were creating some complicated play for a football game,
and making new combinations,
seeing how words sound when we rub them together in new ways.
This girl Kathy wrote,
"I'm going tulip crazy in this lilac city,
dandelion faces smiling all around me.
I'm going daisy crazy in this mud-delicious world."
And that was like, again, a breakthrough for her, and it took time.
It took time.
It was like the end of the year, but she found a voice,
and her mother would come up to me in town and say,
"What happened? What happened?
Kathy's writing poems at home.
She's talking about poetry.
She's engaged.
She's excited."
So I like to think that poetry gives us that ability
to tap into what is forever young in us,
that youthful sense of play, of exuberance, of experimentation,
and to feel the mud-delicious language that we are gifted with
and the mud-delicious world we live in.
You know, if we keep up that conversation
with ourselves and with the child
and that youthful sense of play in ourselves,
we can make our world anew
by naming our world anew.
By renaming, we renew our relationship
to ourselves and to each other and our world,
and we will never be too old for poetry.
Thank you.
(Applause)