Author Archives: sara holbrook

About sara holbrook

Poet/Author/Educator

January 23, 2014

Finding Voice in Writing: A Dialogue

“If you come to my country, you got
to understand my language if you want to communicate.” By his own estimation,
the man spoke three languages: the projects,housing authority executive, and
Citibank.

Ronnie Davis was my boss at the
Cuyahoga Metropolitan Housing Authority (CMHA), he the Chief Operating Officer
and me the Public Information Officer. He had grown up one of eight children
mothered by a single female head of household in the projects in New Orleans
and gone on to get an advanced degree in urban planning from Harvard. Not sure what the odds are against an African
American kid doing this, but I think he might have had a better chance becoming
a quarterback in the NFL. The phrase “long shot,” doesn’t go the distance to describe
his life’s trajectory.

I was getting schooled in his
office, sitting there in my little navy blue suit and gold button earrings,
hands folded on my leather planner having just moved from doing PR at a
prestigious international law firm to CMHA.
He explained that the reason my co-workers didn’t like me (they didn’t)
was that I only had one language. I
communicated just fine to the media and the outside world, and he appreciated
that, but I wasn’t able to communicate with people in the hallway. My worst offense was that I flinched when I
heard what I had always understood to be “bad” language.

Writing lessons don’t always come
via a seminar or a workshop. They come from reading and listening to people
talk. As Anne Lamott says in Bird by Bird, (paraphrase alert) most of
life is like static on the radio, you have to stop and adjust the dial to get
the message. Luckily that day I was tuned in because Ronnie was giving me a
valuable lesson in voice. Ronnie was a good communicator. He never sounded like he was putting on an
affect or an accent. Call it code-switching or linguistic gymnastics; Ronnie
had developed a flexibility in speech that was both effective and genuine.

He taught me that finding an
authentic voice is output from a centrifuge of author and audience. When I hear teachers lament that their
students struggle with finding authentic voice in writing, I often flash back
to me in that navy blue suit, sitting obediently in a chair, trying so hard to
do the right thing. My problem was, due
to the lack of diversity in my upbringing, an unrequited desire to be teacher’s
pet, and my dear mother, captain of the grammar police, I had grown to believe
I had only one right voice. I knew how to speak (in my mind) properly. But was my idea of “proper” always effective; did
it fit the venue? Worse, was it blocking
my ability to listen?

At the time, none of my poetry had
been published, but I had been spending evenings and weekends secretly playing
around with different voices in my poems.
Here writing as a second grader, there as an adolescent, I was scrolling
back the years and finding the voices I had mostly stuffed as a child, the
voices that had been strangled by my self-conscious fear of saying the wrong
thing. Most recently, I had spent eight
years writing for lawyers whose narrow-eyed stares had beaten even the
contractions out of me. I was in a sad
state.

Turns out that poetry is the best
place to practice this voice thing since poems are naturally first person
narratives. And you get to choose your
own point of view. And, they are
short! Which means you can practice the
same text or writing on the same topic in different voices without attempting
Moby Dick.

The following two poems are about
love (yeah, yeah, poets always write about love), but they are in different
voices. In order to write the poems, I
had to assume the age of the speaker of the poem, sure. Try it on.
But also, in the case of both poems, I had a particular audience in mind, and I did my best to speak in their language.

FAST MOVES

Cooties.

Gobbers.

Stinko.

Dread.

Alison got kissed by Fred.

He caught her squarely on the lips,

puckered up and let ‘er rip.

Then, Fred‑the‑Lip?

He strut and bragged.

And Alison?

She spat and gagged.

Fred’s a rookie,

didn’t ask for permission.

Should have known that in kissing,

you play your position.

If he tries it again,

he may get a new twist

from the school’s brand new nickname . . .

Alison‑the‑fist.

LIKE A FEATHER LIFTING

Like a feather lifts, floating on a
breeze,

a pillow rolled behind my neck just
right.

Window cracked, a rustling of
trees,

I spread my wings to dream of you
tonight.

A barely moon set in a starless sky

where we can drift together, then
apart.

Imagining the dance, I close my
eyes

and tuck beneath your shoulder, ear
to heart.

Although I know you’re really
blocks away,

inhaling, I can smell you next to
me.

I dream about your smile, then
press replay,

what was, what is, and what is yet
to be.

Our story takes so long to
comprehend,

I fall asleep before I reach the
end.

Link to video

Developing voice in our writing
isn’t something we do once. It isn’t
even something we do over and over with the goal of finding that ideal
voice. It is being able to find the right
voice for a specific occasion, a particular audience. In a way, all writing is dialog.

So, how did Ronnie’s language
lesson go? Well, first he made me put my
ego in an empty Ball jar he kept on his desk.
(Note: this lesson has been modified to fit the potential audience for this
blog).

Ronnie: Say mother-socker.

Sara: Blush.

Ronnie: Say mother-socker.

Sara whispers back: Mother-socker.

Ronnie: Louder, slower. Mou-ther-sock-er. Mou-ther-sock-er.

He made me say mother-socker about
26 times until I could say it without flinching, not even an eyebrow
twitch. He told me, if I wanted to work
in the projects, I had to be able to hear what people were saying even if they were
speaking a language different than the one I was used to.

He was teaching me
how to listen.

And then he told me I should lose the leather notebook, get a
yellow pad, and get out of his office.
He didn’t have anything to say about the navy blue suit.

The fact is, most of us come to
writing wrapped in a suit of our upbringing and along the route we begin to shed
those restraints, experimenting with diversity of expression. I have never
really adopted that particular compound word as part of my regular vocabulary
(well, that one time, with the airlines), but I no longer let it keep me from
listening. Listening leads to understanding and feeds my writing, enriching it
with quirks and intonation.

When we write, we want to be
understood. Learning how to listen helps me as a writer to find a voice, a
language that my intended audience will not only understand, but truly believe.

Do I succeed all the time? No way.
I am still learning. And some
voices I would never even attempt. For
instance, I have never composed a rap.
Middle-aged, white lady rap.
Think about it. We all have our
limitations. And I am still searching
for the right voice to make myself heard to airline representatives. Swearing
(see above) does not help one bit in making myself understood.

Lessons learned.

Finding voice. It’s a life-long pursuit.

Advice?

First, find yourself an empty Ball
jar.

Or, git you a Ball jar.

Or, Hey you! Ball jar. Ego. There.

Your choice.

January 8, 2014

Pout

There is not much to say about this poem… except it is a good poem to try on.
Cross your arms, stick out your boo-boo lip and go for it.

January 4, 2014

I Used to Be, But Now I Am: Repurposed

Did
you used to wear diapers? Was there a
time when examining your feet was more fascinating than watching the NFL? Are
you a former stair surfer and who had the carpet burns on your chin to prove it?

Then
grab a pencil or personal device, you have the research in you and you are
poised to write. In High Impact Writing Clinics (HIWC), Michael Salinger and I
decided to resurrect and repurpose “I used to be, but now I am,” a famous
writing exercise that (to the best of my knowledge) was first put forward by
Kenneth Koch in his seminal book on writing, Wishes, Lies, and Dreams,
originally published in 1970.

Kids
love doing these quick writes. You can
call them poetry, story starters, or just plain fun – fun to write, share and illustrate. This writing exercise has been a staple in writing classrooms for
over 50 years.

One
of the saddest outcomes (one of many) of the No Child Left Behind Act along with their accompanying curriculum driving tests, is that for many kids, particularly
those labeled as lagging in literacy and math skills, they never or rarely got/get lessons in social studies and civics. How
is it that history dropped to the cutting room floor? Easy. What wasn’t on the test wasn’t in the curriculum.

I remember one time heading out to a portable classroom in Florida to do a writing workshop with (I think) fifth graders. “What are they studying in science and social studies?” I asked, thinking since it was a self-contained classroom, we would use their common studies as something to write poetry about. “Oh, these kids don’t get science or social studies,” I was told. (insert look of stunned disbelief) “Well, they can’t pass the tests in reading and math, so they get reading in the morning and math in the afternoon.” It was shocking the first time, but it just became discouragingly familiar as I realized it was a national trend. Arugh.

Trend-buckers that we are, Michael and I are all about writing across kids’ lives and their learning. What
we like to do with this writing exercise is to first have kids write about
their own personal experience. Sometimes
the writing is poignant, often hilarious.
I used to sleep on airplanes, now I throw up in the aisles. I used to have no teeth, then I had teeth, now
I have no teeth again. We have fun looking at ourselves and how we have
evolved.

But
then we like to grow this exercise, add a little research, and expand our
horizons focusing on a changing world.
What was life like for workers before there were unions? How was life
for women before they could vote or own property? What was travel like before
the steam engine was invented? Through
independent research, students can use their personal reflections as mentor text
to build their own comparisons and a deeper understanding of history.

The
gun manufacturers have done a bang up job (sorry, couldn’t resist) of making
sure everyone knows what the second amendment is all about, but what was life
like for folks when they didn’t have the protection of the 8th
amendment? Fuzzy on that one
yourself? No cruel and unusual
punishment, kids, which btw does not mean being grounded from your Xbox for a
weekend nor does child labor mean when the parent says, “hey, grab a
dishtowel and pitch in.”

This
exercise also provides an opportunity for the writer to assume another’s point
of view. In HIWC, we take the point of
view of the American Bison, using one citation for the first draft and multiple
sources for subsequent versions. Writing
from another’s perspective helps to build not only understanding in the writer,
but also empathy as we look at our changing world.

“The
consequences of an ignorant population who have no concept of history, the
Constitution, social studies, and hard fought battles for basic human rights,
are rearing their ugly heads in a myriad of ways in legislatures across the
country. The decimation of history and social studies in schools, resulting
from what isn’t tested isn’t taught, means Americans have no clue who or what
they are voting for, if they even bother to vote at all.” In a recent blog, an
anonymous teacher who calls herself “free to teach,” writes about the long term
realities of test driven curricula that limit rather than expand student’s
historical visions. The fact that this teacher seemingly feels the need to write anonymously itself is a bit frightening. But her observations go a long way to explain how the public can be so easily persuaded that “ignorance is strength,” to quote George Orwell.

We
are hoping that teachers use this writing clinic (one of 20) not only to help kids
appreciate their own growth, but to look closely at the changes in the world around them.

December 15, 2013

My Global Moment

#MyGlobalMoment from The Ubuntu Center on Vimeo.

“And you
call yourself an educated man.”

I was having
a buffet breakfast in 2006 with two Afghan teachers at a conference for Middle
Eastern educators (TARA) in Bahrain. The
man was young, maybe thirty, the woman, Hamaira, more seasoned, with a married
daughter of her own. She had told me of her marriage at the age of 11, how she
was in the garden playing with dolls when her father came to fetch her to meet
her new husband. While they had grown
close over the years, she was quick to distinguish her marriage from her
daughter’s, which, with a slight straightening of the spine, she described as a
“love marriage.” Her daughter lived in Atlanta, far removed from her but also
from the fighting in Kabul. “It is good,” she said definitively.

Hamaira, who
had endured refugee camps and had very little in the way of material belongings
insisted on giving me her headscarf when we parted, an act of generosity that I could not
refuse, but which hurt to accept. Years later, it
still smells of her perfume.

The young
man had a permanent look of concern. He
thought the ideas being exchanged at the conference were all good ones, but, he
tipped his head, unfortunately not much use to him as his students had neither
desks nor pencils. These were only a couple items
on a long list of what had gone missing in Kabul as the result of war. No electricity. No clean water. His grandmother had no legs as a result of an American land mine.

“And you are
sitting here having breakfast with me?” I asked.

“You did not
plant this bomb,” he said matter-of-factly, evidencing a maturity of reasoning
not present at home where educated folks had actually debated the
merits of calling French fries “freedom fries,” a few years prior — a phrase
still in use at that time (and still in use in some restaurants even
today). Americans know how to hold a
grudge and spread it with ubiquitous contempt from border to border.

The
conference had sponsored the attendance of these two teachers. They were both classroom teachers and
trainers of teachers in a school system in which many children go to school in
2 hour increments because of their work schedules. Not the teachers’ work schedules, the kids’. With so many of the men absent from families
after decades of war, basic provisions were a joint effort. As we sat trading
stories, the young man said something that made Hamaira flare. “Ah, you say
these things, and yet when you ask your wife to bring you a glass of water, you
do not look her in the eye or speak her name. You wave your hand and say, water.
And you call yourself an educated man,” she sniffed.

“What do you
expect?” The young man replied with a shrug. “I live in my father’s house.”

Changing the
hearts and minds of people with such deep traditions suddenly looked to me to
be a foolish, misguided and painfully arrogant notion, dreamy, magical fiction,
transient as freedom fries.

To some
extent, we all live in our father’s house.
How we find common ground is never along path carved out by one party.

Do you have a Global Moment? Post it here and read others: http://theubuntucenter.org/moment/

December 11, 2013

Dostyk American International School, Atyrau, Kazakhstan

“What were you doing in Kazakhstan?’ asks the customs agent
in Newark.

“How much time do you have?” I want to answer, but these
folks get paid to not know how to take a joke, so I just say, “Visiting.”

He stares me down.

“Visiting a school.”

“Do you speak Russian?”

“No.” Neither do all Kazakhs, I’m thinking. They have their own language. But I don’t say that part. It was a long trip; I don’t want to add any
interrogation rooms to the legs of my journey.
“English language,” I say.

“What are you bringing back?”

The true answer involves memories, smiles, stunning lines of
poetry, new friendships, hugs from old friends, new vistas, tacos, home made
beer, a muddy market, laughter, and a slight head cold. But this guy doesn’t want all that, so I just
say, “a hat and some alpaca socks from Frankfurt.”

Thump. Thump. He stamps my passport and hands it across the
counter.

“Welcome back.”

How do you sum up a weeklong trip to the other side of the planet in a single sentence? Memories are crammed into the data bank like an over stuffed suitcase, hard to contain even if you sit on it.

My best attempt would be, “Spots of brilliance against an
otherwise grey landscape.” Favorite line came out of Cheryl Fullerton’s pre-school class where one student said that “snow is water than looks like sugar.” Most laughable line came from the K-1 class where one writer was searching a word and pointed to my eye for me to help her. “She’s not being rude,” explained her writing partner, “she just doesn’t know the word.” The word was wrinkled.

Salinger and I spent a week working with the 81 students at all grade levels at
Doystk American International School in Atryau.
The skies may have been grey most days, but the kids were
brilliant. Writing poetry can be risky
business, but the kids just jumped right in.
This tells me that they are in an atmosphere where they feel safe.

The kids had illustrated some of our poems before we arrived
and are active writers, so were open to trying new approaches as they wrote and
revised their way to a culminating performance for classmates and parents.

The first couple of days, I taught in borrowed clothes as our bags got hung up in Moscow and flights to Atyau only happen every two-three days.

Luckily, they arrived before the evening reading we did for parents. Lots of good snacks and warmth with the ever gusty winds whipping outside. Once in a while it’s good to share poems just for the sake of the words. Not teaching, just sharing.

This was the first time we could leave behind a copy of our new book with projectable lessons, High Impact Writing Clinics, with teachers for follow-up, which was exciting. We never go into a school thinking we know the needs of the students better than their teachers. What we hope is that we can add a few more lessons for teachers to draw upon as they help kids find their voices through writing. Sometimes it just helps to have someone back up what the teachers have been saying all year — draft, revise, be specific, use comparisons. The normal stuff made more than normal if kids hear it from more than one place.

Atyrau, Kazakhstan is not a well known tourist destination. But we had fun touring, one day taking a 5 mile walk. This picture was taking on the bridge where you can cross from Asia to Europe and back again. The hat is on loan from Konna, the face mask a souvenir of Vietnam.

Thanks to Principal Raul Hinojosa and his favorite librarian,
wife Patsy for the invitation.
Thanks to Konna and Peter Parker and their therapy husky Toshe for
opening their home to us. Special thanks
to the parents who made us feel welcome with spectacular meals and
conversation.

To Brent, Cheryl, Lauren and Maxim Fullerton, how great to see
you again! Thank you so much for recommending us.

December 11, 2013

Wanted in Michigan

No one climbs aboard
a bicycle and proclaims, “I want to crash and fall on my head. Bring on the broken bones.” No one puts a
cake in the oven hoping it will come out burned black and tasting like a hockey
puck. Likewise, people don’t get married because they want to get divorced. If they did, American Tuxedo would rent helmets.

When a
marriage crashes or turns into a hockey puck, it isn’t because the partners
want it to happen. Divorce is like
volunteering for amputation without the anesthetic. Who would ever wish for
that?

My parents were
divorced. I was an adult when it happened, but that doesn’t mean it was easy on
me. My marriage also ended. Didn’t want
either one of these things to happen. Just did.
Today I can say, I am pretty glad things turned out as they did. I like my life. But, I can’t say, could never say, that I
wanted divorce to be part of who I am.

So this knowing
was the impetus for my poem, Wanted.
Today, that poem is wanted by teachers in Michigan as it (unpredictably)
is a component in their state standards.
The state didn’t choose to provide the poem to teachers for classroom
use, they just assigned it.
Unfortunately the book that originally contained the poem has gone out
of print. So teachers have been writing
to me (apologetically) asking for the text of the poem.

Some would say
(and have) that divorce is no topic for kids’ poetry. Kids’ poetry should be about balloons rising,
spinning till you fall over, or castles in the air, in ancient times, in Spain. Anywhere
and anything except the dismemberment of the castle in which a kid currently
resides. It’s true that the poems that
pop out when pulling your finger out of your nose are funny (perfectly okay with editors) and a (ick)
represent a pretty universal experience, it’s also true that divorce
happens.

In my world, real happenings are the stuff of poems. I spent about 15 years writing poetry in my
kid voice before I had anything published.
I had never been to a book fair or teacher’s conference where children’s
poetry was discussed. I didn’t know
writing kids’ poetry came with a set of rules having nothing to do with iambs,
quatrains or free verse. I didn’t know
there were topics that kids’ poets just didn’t write about, like divorce. Death
and war are okay topics, but only if they are old news, not breaking news.

My first editor
suggested I divorce all my divorce poems from the others and make a book of
poems just on that topic. My response
was a big no to that idea. I mean,
seriously. Who would check that book out
of the library? After I wore that first editor out, the second one suggested
that since she had an intact marriage and so had her parents (lucky her,
exactly the opposite of my experience) that only certain kids would be able to
identify with the topic of divorce and therefore, poems on divorce should not
be included in any collection. “You have
a skewed perception based on your experience,” she told me, “Most kids are
happy.”

“Not in my
neighborhood,” I said. True, I may be a
little askew, but what do I have except my own perception? From what I could see, divorce had touched
the lives of every kid I knew, if not their own parents, then a friend had moved
away, a cousin got squirrely, a friend wound up in tears at school, even grandparents have been known to split up. Besides, nobody as in NOBODY is happy all the
time. I got a third editor.

One reviewer
suggested when my book Am I Naturally this Crazy was published that I was
making light of kids’ feelings because I used rhyme in this particular poem. No rhymes allowed when speaking of
divorce to kids? Who wrote that rule?

Crazy even got
banned in one district that I know of because not only did it contain a poem about divorce, but also about a current war (double whammy). Writing about divorce, a rather tight-lipped
librarian explained, meant I was “anti family values.” Did she mean I didn’t value my family because we spread ourselves over two houses? Where do people get these ideas?

Funny how a few
words arranged in shortened lines can take on a life of their own. Since the
book this poem first appeared in is out of print, this particular word collection is
hard to find.

I may never have
wanted to know about divorce, but I do want teachers and kids to have access to
this poem.

November 23, 2013

Freed from Accelerated Reader Stress

I received this email from my daughter Kelly yesterday. Go Kelly! Go Danny! Following in the family tradition of being plain-clothes revolutionaries.

Mom,

Since the beginning of September the dreaded AR points have been hanging over Danny’s head. At Danny’s school 4th graders need 12 points a month to go to the carnival at the end of the year. The minimum monthly points required at his school for 4th graders is 4 points or you get disciplined by the principal. She will “cut a corner” off your behavior card. I’m not sure what that even means but each student has one card and I imagine you only have 4 corners. What happens when they’re all cut off? Public stoning? Jail? No idea but according to Danny, it isn’t good.

But Danny has never been the type of kid to just do the minimum to get by, so 4 points was never good enough for him. He was aiming for 12! Because that’s what our family does. We don’t aim for C’s we aim for A’s… right?

During September Danny read some Joey Pigza books do get the points. But the language, topic and mood of the story was difficult for Danny so he begged me to sit and read with him (or, to be quite honest, to him). That was hard for me because his younger brother having Autism needs a lot of help with homework and everyone tries to get their homework done right after school. It was hard for me to help two boys at once so the reading became a stressor and was aIways pushed off until later in the evening when we were all exhausted. And when Dad came and visited he saw Danny was so stressed out about finishing his book before the end of September (so he could take the test before the end of the month), Dad and Danny sat and finished one of the books together. Then the same thing happened when you came to visit in October, remember?

After that Danny was done with Joey Pigza and grabbed “The Lightning Thief.” He was aiming high! 12 points for one book. All he would have to do was read one book for the whole month and take the test and get his points. One problem, he couldn’t get through it. Not on his own. He begged me to read with him again because he just wasn’t getting into it. Plus it was taking him a long time to read and that was stressing him out because he needed to finish it before the end of the month to get the points in.

Around the end of October, after he lost the school government election to the kid that ran on the premise that he had the most AR points in their grade, I sat down with a defeated Danny who was absolutely beginning to HATE reading. And he told me he was feeling “stupid” cause he couldn’t get the reading done. The AR system, the pressure from the school (whether deliberate or perceived), the other kids bragging about their AR points and the carnival were destroying his love of reading. It was time for something drastic.

I had to have a sit-down with Danny. I explained to him how absurd and pointless this AR system was and that in this case, we’re going to make an exception and just do the minimum required. What a lesson I was teaching my son but it was time for an intervention. I told him to forget the carnival and I would let him stay home from school that day and take him to a movie and to ice cream, whatever he wanted. I told him to aim for just 4 points and month (do we didn’t have to deal with the dreaded corner cutting) and only choose the books that he likes to get the points.

It is now 3 weeks into November and he’s just about to complete his 4th Diary of a Wimpy Kid book. The type of books he loves. Now he comes home from school, reads on his own curled up in the big chair in my family room because he loves the story, the characters, the humor. He loves reading again. And now he slaps the book on the coffee table when he finishes and says “done!” And then walks outside to jump on the trampoline. 🙂

The funny thing is he’s still on track to get the points he needs for the silly carnival at the end of the year. But now it’s not about that anymore. He’s not reading for points he’s began to love reading again.

Today he asked me if he still gets enough points for the carnival at the end of each month, if we can still skip school the day of the carnival and spend the day together. Of course I told him we could.

November 18, 2013

Flatter the Mountain Tops with Sovereign Eye

Myth #2

Deconstructing
poetry is an advanced academic pursuit while constructing poetry is child’s
play.

Imagine
this. You are called into a classroom
and asked to hunch over images of Tiger Woods swinging a golf club. You answer a set of questions beside the
picture. These questions have been
developed not by a golfer, but by one who has mastered the art of writing
formulaic questions about golf. You then
compare Woods’ image with the image of another golfer. You are asked to formulate an argument on why
one of their swings is superior, similar or different to the other’s, what makes his grip effective,
how his natural talent is reflected in his follow through. All this and you haven’t picked up a golf
club since second grade when you awkwardly whiffed a few balls in the backyard.

So, you read
other people’s analyses of Woods’ swing to help unlock the mystery. You read about his childhood, his daily
workout regime, his marital troubles.
You have to fill five paragraphs with your analysis, so you come up with
three strong arguments and dig through other people’s analyses to support your
observations. You will be graded on how
well you are able to cite the experts, so you include that gifted talker with
the 80s blow dry on ESPN, a bald headed black commentator who moonlights as a
spokesperson for a golf ball manufacturer, and a Dallas Cowboy Cheerleader,
evidencing your range, your respect for diversity, and a propensity to think
outside the box.

Welcome to
the world of literary analysis as set forth by the Common Core (CCSS) which
ask students to “demonstrate a knowledge of figurative language” but do not
suggest that kids might write a poem to do so.

NOTE: The
standards don’t say you CAN’T write a poem to demonstrate this knowledge, but
since it is difficult to evaluate a handmade poem in terms of automated aggregates,
the CCSS remain mute on the matter of the construction of poetry, (see above
re: they don’t say you can’t).

This is just
plain nonsense. Any golfer knows you can’t
perfect your swing sitting under a study lamp just as any auto mechanic knows
you can’t learn engine repair without getting your hands dirty. You can’t learn to swim without getting wet
or how to make soup without stirring the pot. (How’m I doing with the
figurative language thing?).

You know how
I learned to use figurative language?

By writing
poetry.

Poetry is
powerful language. It is precise and
concise. The writing of poetry helps
kids perfect their communication skills.
Short and (not always) sweet. Poetry, the original tweet. (oops,
rhyme, academic points off). Poetry is both an art form and a craft, perfectly
suited to be vehicle for learning language and content area skills. Unfortunately, most of us have been schooled to study poems rather than getting into the swing of things, which was why Salinger and I wrote High Impact Writing Clinics, to give teachers some, starter ideas for constructing real (handmade) poems as a means of understanding how language works. And the reason we put these ideas on projectable slides is so that students wouldn’t be hunched over in mystified isolation, but heads up, ready for human interaction as they read and discuss poetry as a prelude to writing their own.

So. Can we
compare writing poetry to a summer’s day as we proceed through the winter of
our CCSS educational discontent and stay focused on what really matters (kids’
thinking and communication skills) and refuse to cloud the splendors of poetry
with relentless analysis with no escape hatch for self-expression?

Sonnet
XXXIII

Full many a glorious morning have I
seen

Flatter the mountain tops with
sovereign eye,

Kissing with golden face the meadows
green,

Gliding pale streams with heavenly
alchemy;

Anon permit the basest clouds to ride

With ugly rack on his celestial face,

And from the forlorn world his visage
hide,

Stealing unseen to the west with this
disgrace;

Even so my sun one early morn did
shine,

With all triumphant spendour on my
brow;

But out, alack, he was but one hour
mine,

The region clud hath mask’d him from
me now.

Yet him for this my love no whit
disdaineth;

Suns of the world may stain when
heaven’s sun staineth.

Shakespeare

P.S. I’m not sure I understand all that Shakespeare means here, but I sure like the parade of images. Here’s hoping we give each child more than one (alack) hour of poetic sunshine on their brows.

November 7, 2013

As Spine Straightening as a Rooster Crow

Thoughtlessly this morning I brushed my teeth with the tap
water. I cooked oatmeal over a steady natural gas flame in a heated home and
then poured it over frozen blueberries.
When I saw the clock blinking on the stove, I realized we must have had
a power outage in the middle of the night, but a quick time check with my cell
phone told me that it was for less than a minute. I stood in my bathrobe and slippers, clothes
made in another part of the world just so I have something to lounge around in, and my mind flashes to…mothers bathing their children in littered streams in Bali, bundled
up students on benches in an unheated immigrant school in wintery Shanghai, the 14
hours power outages that are common in Zimbabwe, the garment workers in Dhaka,
the women selling small bags of
grain that they have beaten into flourly submission beside the road
in Ghana for whom lounging about is something you save for after you’re dead. I searched my mind for images of people I saw in Africa who
had shared as many mornings with the world as I and came up empty.

What’s it like to travel?
It makes rinsing out the oatmeal pan an act of wonder.

October 26, 2013

Cape Coast, Ghana

“Do you really want to do this?” Michael asks. He knows that I hang on to images. The Hanoi Hilton. Treblinka.
Hiroshima wiped me out for a week.
I couldn’t eat, close my eyes. Man’s inhumanity quite literally makes me sick.

“Yes.”

So, we take a cab to one of the castles that housed dungeons that kept
male, female and children captive, 200 to a room the size of your average
subway (only without the windows, the flush toilets, or the fresh veggies), for
periods of a few days to 3 months until the imprisoned Africans passed down unlit stone
passageways to The Door of No Return and onto small boats similar to the fishing boats still in use, to ships that would take them
through the middle passage to North and South America. It is the same one that the Obamas visited when in Ghana.

“Africans were
stronger,” our guide explains. “They were more
able to survive harsh working conditions on the plantations rather then simply
enslaving the indigenous peoples.”

I slip and almost fall as we descend into the men’s dungeon. The floors are slippery, a muddy looking
covering over the cobblestone floors as thick as asphalt. This, she explains, is the caked residual of
blood, vomit and feces from the nineteenth century. I feel nauseous and disoriented by the
darkness as she switches off the light for less than a minute.

In this picture, a young Dane contemplates the magnitude of what we are experiencing and the guilt that all of European descent must bear.

Directly above the cries from the dungeons stood (stands) canons pointed out at sea and a church,
where the overseers prayed for peace and redemption. A trap door is in the entryway so worshipers
could look down and check on the status of the imprisoned before taking
communion. Redemption indeed. Were the overseers clinging to guns and religion on this rock thinking they were worshiping on some high ground? I stand
there trying to pull logical thoughts together in the blasting wind. Later she takes us down to visit The Door of No Return, which she unlatches and swings open. Our little tour group steps out into the blinding sun to imagine what it might have felt like for the departing prisoners of slavery.

Our guide is a soft-spoken volunteer who tells us about the
five graves in the open yard of the castle.
These were not for slaves that succumbed to the horrors, those folks were
either buried in a mass grave or thrown to the sharks. Instead, this is the final resting place for
four white guys who mostly succumbed to malaria along side the body of one woman. She was the wife of the head overseer, who
arrived at Cape Coast only to find out her honorable husband was getting it on
with a local. There are three theories
why she died. 1. She found out her husband had been unfaithful and did herself
in. 2. She too succumbed to malaria. 3. Her husband’s mistress poisoned
her. “Which do you think?” the guide asks
me.

“Murder.” I reply.
Our kindly guide does not agree, She thinks malaria or maybe the woman died by her
own hand.

Later we have a few minutes to ourselves. She is slight, young, leading our tour with compassion and exquisite detail. A striking beauty
with her braids piled high on the back of her head. She is well educated, her English impeccable.

“I would think the locals would have wanted to kill all the
Europeans, they were so wretched to them,” I speculate. She has already told us how some greedy chieftains
had been complicit, trading their enemies and even members of their own tribes for
payments by the European slavers. She
patiently reminds me that the Europeans and their clients in the Americas were not acting alone.

“I don’t care,” I say.
“I would have blamed the Europeans and wanted to kill them all.”

She reaches up to gently take a blond strand of windblown
hair that has attached itself to my angry lip and tries to tuck it behind my
ear. She speaks to me of the power of forgiveness. She says that it was the Europeans who
brought Christianity to Africa and for that Ghanaians must always be grateful
for that gift.

I have always thought the missionary movement in Africa to
be an epic case of presumptive arrogance, but I try and see it from her side,
especially since her side comes from such a loving place.

Tonight as I write this I am still trying to digest all that
we saw there: the overseer’s bowed bedroom with 14 windows to catch the cross
breezes from all directions, the special dungeon with no windows for rebel men who were locked up and usually suffocated within two days, to the special dungeon
for women who would not submit themselves to the sexual whims of the guards. They didn’t suffocate those women, just
starved them and kept them cooped up for years as a model lesson for incoming
females. I am digesting, but I am not so
sick as I might have been. I keep
thinking of the deep walnut colored eyes of that young woman speaking to me
about how we need forgiveness in our hearts in order to progress.

“We must forgive others of course. But it is just as important to forgive
ourselves. This is how we go forward.”

This picture is from the castle looking north, bare shore similar to what the departing slaves might have seen back then. It is not a friendly port, but an uneven shoreline with aggressive waves and a vicious undertow.

The next picture is taken looking out The Door of No Return to the south, onto today’s vibrant community of fishermen, tangles of nets and waiting boats. In order to get the boats back into shore, men must pull them from the shore, tug-of-rope style.

We used this photo in our writing at the AISA conference and one teacher observed that these people are all living on the edge, trying to subsist on what they pull from an increasingly debilitated ocean. When I asked stupid question number 1,067, “what is the unemployment rate here in Ghana?” a teacher’s response was, “it depends on what you consider employment.” Are these people employed? If you take coconuts from trees and try to sell them on the side of the road in order to buy a day’s meal, is that a job? This is the way many or most eke out a living in Ghana. I remember how over lunch our red eyed cab driver told us that his father is a fisherman and how he had been up all the night before helping him. How his mother pounds grain and sells it beside the road. How he took my left overs from lunch home in a bag.

It takes a few days to notice that as you walk down the street, through the markets, you see very very few old people. For the most part, they don’t exist here.

I will remember the sights, the heat, and the kindness and good humor of the people of Ghana. We were made to feel very welcome. I will remember the close quarters of those dungeons and our guide’s hand brushing my cheek and her observation that forgiveness is always a component of progress.

Thank you to Lincoln Community School and particularly Rhona Polonsky for helping us plan this side trip.