The only thing harder than starting a poem is ending one. My students and other new writers often make the mistake of ending a poem the way one might end an essay – with a conclusion; something along the lines of,  “And that’s what I think about that.” On the other side are those who just stop writing, rather than write an ending.

Here are a few of my thoughts on crafting a satisfying ending for a poem:

·         Don’t tie it up with a bow (a pretty little flourish that adds neither meaning nor emotion) and especially don’t tie it up with a bow so tight that it strangles all the life out of the poem.

·         Think of the last line of a poem not so much as an ending but as a doorway. The reader should be able to walk through the ending into a world of imagination, emotion, thought or wonderment.

·         When you think you’re finished, look at your second to last line. Often that’s your best ending.

Endings are on my mind as today was my last day as the Poetry Lady. I have taken a new job and am leaving my poetry lessons, my poetry students, and alas, this poetry blog behind.

In saying goodbye to my students over the past few weeks I offered them the opportunity to give me poetry assignments of their own. The results are posted on our poetry blog.

In order to have to avoid coming up with the perfect ending for this entry, my last, I will sign off with these lines from Robert Frost.

Keep Writing J

“I am always writing a poem — every minute. There is always something going. But I don’t always have a paper and pencil in front of me. Then, when I get a pen and paper, I just start to write.”

 – H.

This morning I made an appearance on “The  Mo Show” on Valley Free Radio. I was there to talk about … what else? Poetry, of course. Rather than write about it (especially because I’m a little sleepy now, having gotten up at some ungodly hour to arrive at the recording studio on time), I’ll invite you to listen. (Read Mo’s instructions on the top of the page, then scroll down to the July 30 entry, at the bottom of which is the link to the MP3 file for the show in question.)

By the way, in addition to being a creative, fun and intelligent radio host, Mo is an awesome artist who does amazing things with old refrigerators and glitzy mosaic tiles.

Which leads me to wonder … what rhymes with refrigerator?

H. missed our big poetry reading, the one she’d practiced and practiced for. That surprised me. Her love of poetry is no secret around our school. On the other hand, I realized she might have stayed home out of fear. H. is militantly shy. Getting her to speak in class was one hurdle her other teachers and I patiently encouraged her over, and getting her to speak to larger groups in public has been an exponentially more serious struggle.

When I saw her next, H. said she’d been sick. Then she missed some more school. She told me she’d been throwing up. I knew what that meant. And soon she confirmed my suspicions. She’s pregnant again.

But we had another big project we were working on, and H. made it to school for enough days to finish it. My afternoon class, which turned out to be just six girls, interviewed each other about why poetry is important to them, then they recorded their interviews and learned to edit them using the computers. H. is good with computers and good with poetry, so this was a perfect fit.

I interviewed H. on tape, following the script she and her classmates had created. I read each question as it was written: What is your name? What have been your biggest challenges in life? When did you start writing poetry … But my favorite part of the recording is the tail end, when I abandoned the script altogether.

That’s a risky thing to have done with H. She doesn’t like surprises maybe even more than she dislikes talking in public — and even though it was just the two of us in my office-turned-recording-studio, she was conscious of the microphone propped up on the desk in front of her, and the countless  potential listeners it represented.

“You mentioned you want to write a book of poems, is there anything more you want to say about that?” I asked.

Her eyes shot me an accusation. I’d tricked her into talking. I’d tricked her away from the script she’d rehearsed so carefully.

“Well,” she said, “I want to write poems that aren’t like anyone else’s.” Then, after a pause, “I hope someone notices me.”

We talked some more. Then, I closed the interview with one last question. “Is there anything else you want to say about poetry?” I asked.

H. thought for a long broadcast second. Finally, she summed everything up with three words: “I love it,” she said. And then, she and I began to laugh.

I’m inexplicably happy to have that moment recorded; the sound of our laughter, a wordless testimony to the joy of poetry. A haiku in sound.

photo by Aja Riggs

I entered the classroom on a hot, humid Monday morning, after a hot, humid weekend. Before even saying hello to the dozen or so teen mothers seated at their desks, I began to recite:

“It was many and many a year ago …” and continued through all six stanzas of Edgar Allan Poe’s classic poem, “Annabel Lee,” about a perfect love and a perfect tragedy.

I was sure my students would love it.

But when I was done reading I looked up to see that their heads had melted into their desks. Their expressions were of torture mixed with surrender.

“What’s the matter?” I asked?

“Miss, you’re depressing us!” One student said.

“It’s hot, and we’re tired, and that poem was f&*#$ing sad.”

“We’re in school,” I reminded. “Can you express yourself using another word?”

I introduced the concept of angst, but they weren’t looking for new vocabulary.

“Even your clothes are depressing today, Miss!” another chimed in. “You’re wearing black”

“And your hair is up in a bun. You don’t even have it loose.”

I looked down. Didn’t they notice the pink trim on my black dress? But I didn’t argue. It was a rather somber outfit for a July day.

“We should be reading poems about summer and fun and the beach!” one girl suggested.

“Okay,” I said, and I tried again. Poe had a poem about the beach! And it was short! This would surely be the ticket.

I turned in my Poe primer to “A Dream Within a Dream.” In it the narrator stands at the shore (okay, so it’s a “surf-tormented shore”) and tries to hold a handful of sand, that the “pitiless” waves keep pulling from his grasp. Not exactly what they had in mind, as was evidenced by the groans the met my recitation of the final lines.

“But it’s the beach!” I was nearly whining now. “And anyway, doesn’t it make you feel better to know you’re not the only ones who experience the pain and sorrow of life?” We all experience death, loss and decay, I explained. Even now, our youth is slipping away. The world claims everything. But on the other side there is hope! There is eternal love, love that survives material loss, love that survives death, beauty that transcends an individual flower or face.

Despite my attempt to salvage the lesson, I could see I had no converts.

M. looked up in despair. “Can we just write?” she asked.

Now it was my turn to surrender. I handed out the paper. Today, I just couldn’t get the class excited about existential angst. Maybe next week.

Details, I tell my students, bring the poem to life. Recently I saw how details bring life to me.

On my recent trip to Costa Rica, I met Millie, an orphaned sloth. Since she was not raised by her mother, Millie can’t return to the jungle, and thus lives a quiet life swinging from a wicker chair suspended in her well-appointed cage at the Sloth Sanctuary of Costa Rica. Along with Millie I met a number of other sloths who had been forced from the safety of the jungle canopy by the interruption of roads and cities. I reached out and touched Millie’s straw-soft fur, bent down to smell her camouflage-subtle scent, looked into her glossy, glassy eyes and smiled as she turned her shiny brown nose ceiling-ward.

Like you, I’ve heard countless calls to save the rainforest. But it was in the moment that my fingers touched this singular sloth that the commitment was sealed.

The details brought the rainforest into my heart – alive and new.

In my classroom my students think twice about asking me for an extra piece of paper unless they’ve filled both sides of their first piece, or a clean, new sticky note. They know my tirades.

Example: I keep a box of used sticky notes handy, so that if a student wants a note with which to mark a page in a book, or a favorite passage in a long poem, they can take a “used” note.

These young women, for whom hand-me-downs are a source of shame, akin to wearing a sign that says “I can’t afford new,” don’t so much appreciate my zealous environmentalism. Still, I can’t resist.

“Can I have a new sticky note?” a student inevitably asks.

Truth is I have no idea what impact sticky notes are having on the rainforest in particular. I don’t even know exactly where the rainforest is. I do know that mindlessly using the earth’s resources is not working, and I want to do my part. I want my students to consider doing theirs, as well.

It’s become a bit of a joke; a good-natured way for my students to rib me about my passions and for me to coax them to think twice before squandering the earth’s bounty.

But now, the day is fast approaching. Tomorrow I get on a plane and off I fly to South America (yes, yes, I know, leaving a massive carbon footprint in my wake) … for a vacation on an eco-resort, where I’ll be hiking and kayaking in … the rainforest!

So, I told my students: “For those of you who have been re-using sticky notes and writing on both sides of your papers, I will be sure to send the rainforest your regards and good wishes. As for the rest of you, I will carry your apologies with me and offer them up on your behalf.”

Pura vida …

In my afternoon class we are reflecting on poetry, what it means to us, and why it should (or shouldn’t) be taught in school. Students have been interviewing one another on this topic. Among the questions they are asking each other are these:

 Should people write and learn about poetry in school? Why or why not?

 H. answered this way:

Interviewer: Should people write and learn about poetry in school?

H: Yes!

Interviewer: Why?

H: Because I would go crazy without it. I would go on strike!

 

 

A teacher in my school, hearing about my latest efforts to increase our students’ vocabularies, shared with me how she is trying to crack down on swearing in her classroom. She told her students they can’t use the word B**ch anymore.

 ”That’s great,” I told her.

 ”Except now they’re all just calling each other female dogs,” she replied.

 Well, you know what they say, one step forward …

“Ladies, could you please conduct yourselves with a bit more decorum!” I shouted above the din.

This caught S.’s attention. “Why you always have to use such fancy words? It gives me a headache.”

“Good question,” I said. “Why do I use such fancy words?” I wrote the word decorum on the board. “But first,” I asked, “what does it mean?”

“How should we know?” R. muttered.

“Because even though you may never have seen this word before, you know what I was asking you to do just now. What does decorum mean?”

“Acting respectful,” S. offered.

“And being polite,” C. added.

“Good behavior,” someone else added.

“See, you know what the word means.” I said. “Don’t worry if a word looks unfamiliar, you can still figure out its meaning.”

“But why should we use big words?” S. persisted. “I don’t like all those big words.”

“Because that way you can tell someone off and they don’t even know what you were saying,” one young woman suggested.

Fair enough. “Also, the more words you know, the more thoughts you can think. The more thoughts you can think, the more possibilities you have for what you can do with your life,” I offered.

Thus, this week during poetry class I’ve been focusing on vocabulary. For many of my students, who, shall we say, have not exactly felt welcomed into the hallowed halls of academia, new words sting, slap and burn. They’re evidence of what they don’t know. They are like signs that say, “No Trespassing.” “Do Not Enter.”

But for the poet, I told them, words are like treasures. They offer new ways of saying old things. They are new tastes. New experiences. Each one is a doorway into a new world.

I read somewhere that the late, great, poet Stanley Kunitz had the first hint of his calling when, as a child, he would skip through the woods repeating a new word again and again because he loved the sound it made in his ears.

When I took a poetry class with Lucille Clifton, she insisted we all stand up, hold hands, and each share one word we love the sound of.

Meanwhile, as my poetry class with S., C., R. and the rest continued, we added words to our list: gnash, unperturbed and ambiguous among them. I invited students to try to use at least two new words in their poems. C. wrote:

Inside the forest …

leaves gnash against each other

they feel like war

is coming toward them …

S., however, remained unconvinced. She didn’t finish her poem that day, and kept crumpling one piece of paper after another. But she did write the word “ambiguous” in big blue letters across the top of her page. Perhaps that was her way of having the last word on the subject. At least it was a brand new, multisyllabic one.