The Patience of Poetry

The bookcase in my hall holds three shelves of poetry books. Sometimes I wake in the morning and reach in to grab a random book, hoping for some wind to send me sailing into the day. Today I chose an anthology and started leafing through the pages.

And there they are, the same poems that have hoisted my sails or thrown an anchor into my restless soul or bathed me in dazzling light after a run of cloudy days. But today, those same lines seem like a jumble of mere words, lifeless, inert, powerless to move me. The same words that once sang in gospel shout or bossa nova gentleness, that stirred me awake and set my strings thrumming, now seem flat and out-of-tune. Some time before, they leapt off the page, now they lie there asleep, drowsy, bored, listless, mere block dots on white paper. Their once vibrant rhythm and glittering rhyme now a dull grey. Phrases that once I caught like a life-raft when drowning in my own self-pity now feel deflated and have lost their power to hold me aloft. What’s going on?

Turns out that the poem and the reader need to need each other in a particular way. Some days you read or recite as if your life depended on it, others you might as well just leave the book alone, go make your oatmeal and go off to work. The heightened intensity of the poetic life is indeed a gift, but not easy to sustain in the daily round. Sometimes life is Shakespeare and opera and the blues. sometimes it's just mundane and matter-of-fact.

The poems in the books are patient. They can lie there unread for months on end without complaining. Like the leaves on the trees that keep fluttering in the wind regardless of whether the heads-down-phone-texting-passerbys notice them, the poems are content to wait until you need them. They’ll be there, reliably etched on the tangible pages of the book’s technology, nestled in “Leaves of Grass” and sometimes, like my Whitman collection from 1969, with that comforting smell of old paper.

Me, I got invoices to send and curriculum statements to write today and Maxine Kumin, Theodore Roethke, Jane Kenyon and William Stafford will just have to wait. They’ll be there when I need them and that is comfort enough.

Small Things with Great Love

“Not all of us can do great things. But we all can do small things with great love.”

-       Mother Theresa

It happened. I had one edgy class with my beloved 8^th graders. The first all year. It wasn’t terrible, but I found myself getting annoyed with little side talk, low energy and affect, lack of enthusiasm for the music and practicing it— all this, of course, one week before the Spring concert. For the first time, I felt a them/me divide, me the mildly scolding teacher and them the resistant, recalcitrant students. What was going on?

1)   These things happen. Biorhythms, moon cycles, group chemistry and dynamics. Affects all of us. And oh yeah, they’re adolescents.

2)   8^th grade senior slump.

3)   I didn’t have a great night’s sleep the night before, was puzzled about how to proceed with the piece and was feeling the inevitable tension of upcoming performance, my work and reputation resting on the shoulders of teenagers on a stage.

About 1 and 2, nothing can be done. As I always counsel the teachers I train, imagine everything that has gone wrong is your fault, even when it’s not. You’re the variable in the equation that can change and effect change. And so I did my homework with that particular piece, came into the next class with a good night’s sleep and enthusiasm for my plan and the casual, relaxed relationship we’ve had all year revived. And naturally, it worked great! One tiny teacher-scoldy reminder to one kid and the rest was the usual, “Come on, let’s play some great music! Stop. That didn’t work, let’s do it again. Yeah! You got it!”

With the negative charge gone from the room, the slight pressure of the upcoming concert eased (but present in tightening up rehearsal in a good way), me genuinely happy to be with them and make music, things flowed well and we achieved a great deal. I had found my way back to doing these small things with great love— love for the music, love for the kids, love for teaching, love for the opportunity to be together in love.

Friends, it doesn’t get any better than that.

No Blame

Okay, I had my fun making fun of the crazies who have the power or the spotlight or both to wreak havoc. How else to deal with such insanity? It helps to keep a sense of humor.

But it’s also a good idea to lean in a bit toward understanding. What is going on here? Why the rise in Fundamentalism? Why the ten steps back just as we were beginning to move forward? Why are so many making such outrageous claims and blaming earthquakes, riots and baby genocide on “promiscuous beef-eating gay women?”

Here’s a formula. Rapid change= high anxiety. The one sure thing you can say about the “interesting” times we live in is that things are changing more rapidly than we can assimilate. Heck, I can’t even count on my Niji pen still being manufactured and when offered the new choices at the stationary store yesterday, one was too fat, one too thin, one too tall. It made me anxious.

Anxiety is related to stress is related to a constant low-grade fear. In a world that is unstable, unpredictable, unreliable, anxiety rises, sometimes all the way to fear. Fear of the other, fear of the unknown, fear of the next change just as we were getting used to the last one.

Fear is the lowest form of the brain functioning, the emotion that sends us into the basement of our mind where all we can do is flee, fight or freeze. The access roads to the higher realm of neo-cortical thinking are blocked in such a state. That would help account for the outrageous non-thinking highlighted in my last blog. When we can’t think clearly, we reduce the conversation to blame. And always someone or something else.

Fundamentalism is the home of the non-thinker. The fundamentalist of any religion or philosophy gives up the birthright of the human brain in exchange for an easy security. And all of this is perfectly understandable given today’s world. When change sweeps us away like a Class IV rapid, we reach out to cling to the nearest rock. Enter religion, dogmatic politics, gang membership (both the street kind and the good ole boys clubs). We’re desperate to hold on to something that is sure, dependable, un-demanding. Something that only asks us to believe, not to think. Something that is simplistic and black and white, no bothersome nuance or shades of color. Something that promises protection from the “them” through compliance and complicity in the club of “us,” something that reduces complexity to “good (us)” and “bad (them).”

So while such regression is understandable in the light of the way the brain and psyche function, it is counter-productive to what the situation demands. Instead of clinging to the rocks, we need to release to the flow, surf on the tidal waves of change, tap dance on the shaky foundation, improvise like the jazz musician responding to the moment. While the fear and anxiety and stress are real and not to be lightly dismissed, we can turn their energy toward the higher realms of thinking and feeling, transform them through the active imagination and the probing intellect and the compassionate heart. We need to unthaw the rigid mind and exercise our flexible thinking, unlock the fortressed heart and let love begin to breath again, unbutton the imprisoned body and get dancing. Let’s use all the colors in the crayon box, let the volume move with nuance between soft and loud, let language regain a range larger than “awesome!” and “cool!” 

We won’t get much time on the soapbox—headlines don’t do subtlety and ambiguity—but we can stem the tide of ignorance with informed knowledge, move beyond mindless blame to recognizing our own demons, offset sheer stupidity with breathtaking imagination. We can ride out the tsunami of rapid change, find a few eddies and quiet pools off to the side and keep hope alive through the time-honored practices of exalted thought and feeling. No blame, no shame, light the flame, claim your name, play the game. You get the idea.

PS I found my old Niji pens online. 

Promiscuous Beef-Eating Gay Women

You know about the Darwin Awards? The stories of people who are lowering the gene pool and should have been weeded out by evolution? Mostly things like attaching helium balloons to your lawn chair and once airborne a thousand feet, wondering how you’re going to get down. We can laugh about them, but still such people vote.

But as I mentioned a few blogs back (Institutional Lunacy), the lowering of human intelligence seems to be proceeding at an epidemic rate. But instead of being confined to the crazies on the fringe of society, it’s rising to people who get headline news and are making arguments in front of the Supreme Court. And it’s no comfort to me that it’s not only Republican Americans who are afflicted with the disease of inflated stupidity, but people in the news worldwide. Consider these four headlines:

• Promiscuous women cause earthquakes, Iran cleric says.

• VHP leader links Nepal earthquake to “beef eating.”

• Texas GOP lawmaker: What is going on in Baltimore (riots) is because of too many gay marriages.

• Gays cause the death of a million unborn children.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are the stories I heard yesterday about the two gay dads objecting to their child singing “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” in school and another Mom insisting that “Shoo Fly Don’t Bother Me” be banned from the school song list because it was once used in minstrel shows. And all prepared to bring their lawyers into the conversation. Not quite as extreme, but related to the fear that children singing a song with the word “beer” will promote alcoholism or a song about the poppy flower will certainly lead to a heroin habit.

When I was in high school, we had to take a course called “Logic.” Maybe it’s time to bring that back. Meanwhile, just to be on the safe side, stay away from promiscuous gay women who eat beef.

(Don't) Leave Me Alone

I’m on a hiring committee for a new Middle School Head and it’s turning out to be a great way to step back and look at what’s important. One theme that’s coming up is the relationship of admin to faculty and it’s helping me crystallize some thinking about what feels like a proper relationship. I’ve narrowed down the possible paradigms to three, as follows:

1)   Compliance and conformity. You will teach as I tell you or as the State tells you or as the National Standards tell you or as the previous teacher’s curriculum tells you or as my surface understanding of the latest-and-greatest-best-practices-in-education-that-I-got-from-a-workshop-at-a-conference tells you.

In my talks with teachers nationwide (and worldwide), I hear horror story after horror story of such mandated compliance, down to uniform ways that all lessons must begin, certain machines that must be used, certain keywords that must be spoken. This is death to any meaningful education, any spark of passion in the teacher and sense of being valued. I thank my lucky stars that never once in my 40 years at the school have teachers ever felt such pressure. Or when they did, the necessary conversations helped get it back on track. (The music department was once asked to take attendance by computer that would feed into the main system and we refused on the grounds that we wanted to greet kids at the beginning of class without a screen between us. So the Middle School head comes in with pencil and paper and takes a quick silent attendance while we teach.)

2)   Autonomy in isolation. We will leave you free to teach to your passion and in your own style (within certain curricular expectations) and leave you alone to do so. This has been the norm in our school and it mostly works. Teachers are excited about what they do, appreciate the autonomy to find their own way and build their own curriculum.

As wonderful as this is, it can fall short as teachers feel isolated in their classrooms, alone with their own doubts about their choices and unclear about whether admin is aware of what they do, appreciates it and values it. It reminds me a bit of my daughter’s teenage friends who sometimes said “My parents don’t care what I do” and though they often meant it in an appreciative way about how much the parent trusts them and gives them freedom, sometimes I felt a touch of accent on the care. From watching kids in the playground to checking in about their teenager’s homework and expecting their presence at family meals, the parent’s job is indeed to care what their kids do. While still preserving a developmentally appropriate sense of autonomy. And that brings us to:

3)   Autonomy within community. While still giving freedom to the teachers to find their own way to reach the kids, admin shows great interest and enthusiasm, spends time visiting, not to judge, but to help as possible, to witness, to appreciate, to know what' going on and to engage in follow-up conversations.

“Here’s what impressed me… Here’s what I wondered about… Did you notice how you made this kid’s face light up? Did you notice the confused look in that kid’s face? What are you going to do after this? Is there a particular lesson you’d like me to see? What do you want me to particularly observe?" In addition to such admin visits with a genuine sense of enthusiasm and excitement, admin can also create a community of support in staff meetings devoted to sharing successes and challenges.

Truth be told, we could do this all a lot better at my school. Too many meetings have lowered to the mere nuts and bolts of running a school and there isn’t enough time and space devoted to keeping the mutual flames of our passion lit by engaging conversation. The music department has had the great pleasure of doing this, especially as we meet with the Interns we have to go over the details of the lessons they watch, our goals and intentions and pedagogical premises that shape our lessons, our analysis of what worked and what could work better. Preschool teachers team-teaching also get a taste of that. But with one class per grade level at elementary and a different structure of specialty subjects in Middle School, not all teachers get to do this.

While so much of the nation seems to be slipping back to compliance and conformity and uniformity, let’s do what we can to create the freedom of autonomy within the responsibility of community. Happy teachers excited about what they teach and how they teach is probably the number one factor in the success of a school. Let’s get to work! Together!