Image by Lancia Smith |
Andrew Lazo
Ahhh...summer break. For a teacher, this steamy season of blissful rest and recuperation promises so much more than it can ever deliver—no alarms, no complaints, no Sisyphean and self-replenishing piles of papers. In their place, I draw a contented breath, relishing glorious hours of reading my way down the tower of books by my bedside. Last week I shamelessly indulged in the luxury of pushing everything else aside in favor of a long, captivating book. I didn’t even eat until afternoon, so swiftly did the pages flip before my eyes. And when I was done, I found I’d forgotten about that curious hangover, a kind of stupor that settles over me for a day or two after I’ve submitted to a long book that will not let me go till I’d given it full due.
Summer also affords me
the chance to browse lazily through those books I’ve bought not to read right
away, but to keep on some shelf in the other room for those insomniac hours
that the T’ang Dynasty poet Chang Chiu-Ling calls “the long thoughtfulness of
night.”
Do you know such books?
Products of casual rambles through a used book store, drifting to the poetry
section, or past an author I vaguely remember someone raving on about. I’ll often
slip the book off the shelf, roam around inside its covers, check to see if the
pages have room for some penciled notes and an almost creamy quality.
And if the random paragraphs
or first few stanzas leave me with a little grin broad enough to begin to feel a
little self-conscience about visibly enjoying the book in front of others, I
buy it. Such a shameless kind of public courtship often enough leads me to
hours of delighted engagement once I’ve got such books safely home and into my
dark and sometimes sleepless rooms.
So one night this week
after pushing the little paper boat of another school year out into the pond, I
did a little late-night browsing of my shelves. The results kept me up long
past my now non-existent bedtime, and brought me delighted to former Poet
Laureate Billy Collins. I must confess a fairly new but rapidly-growing
obsession with his poetry, which I plan to indulge until I own every one of his
works.
One poem in particular
quite literally helped me survive more than one day of cajoling my teenage
charges to read and enjoy poetry. In
talking about teaching poetry to his own reluctant students, Collins begins his
“Introduction to Poetry”
like this:
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
And he ends it saying:
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
As if anyone, even poets
themselves, knows what a poem “really means.”
In general, rather than trying
to trap some neat and easily-defined “meaning,” I invite my students to explore
instead a poem’s ambivalence, its arresting images, and its particular and powerful
sounds. I do whatever I can to see that at least once in their lives they’ve
read a real poem in an authentic way that might speak to them. I’m happy to
report some success, if their end-of-the-year journals are to be believed.
Collins’ poem has helped
me to understand why I go to all this effort, for myself deep in long nights
and for my students early on bright mornings. It’s all right there in line
five. That one line in the poem stands by itself as if holding up its hand and
waving it about in the middle of the classroom. Collins asks his students (who
by now surely include me, and hopefully you too) to take a poem and “press an
ear against its hive.”
Now there’s an image to ponder or to conjure with. Let’s just say for a second that a poem is a hive, and we press our ears against it. What might we hear?
Now there’s an image to ponder or to conjure with. Let’s just say for a second that a poem is a hive, and we press our ears against it. What might we hear?
First of all, it implies
that, when pressing an ear to a poem, I’ll likely hear only indistinctly what
happens inside of it. I find some comfort in the fact that I quite often come
away from even the best of poems with only some vague notion about the import
of all the activity happening inside it.
Next, it hints that in that
hive of the poem, I may well discover that praiseworthy situation where a lot
of males scurry busily about, attending to and providing for one female. This refreshing
reversal of gender roles and pay equity, this way of turning of things upside
down—don’t these alone suggest excellent reasons for visiting and revisting
such a poem?
What else do I find by
examining the inside of a poem? The structure of beeswax, of course, as
deliberately made as it is fragile. Precise and repeated order, all made out of
stuff that will easily melt away even as we might make candlelight out of it. Delicate
and carefully-constructed containers of a rich and slow liquor—this too gives
me an excellent way of thinking about poetry.
And these precise hexagons
of course hold a thick, sweet, and golden goodness that will likely get all
over me unless I wash it off well. Treasure, and a treasure increasingly rare
as something is happening to the honeybees in the world. It occurs to me that
poets may be disappearing at a similar rate to bees, much to my distress. Listening
to a poem might just make honey drip out into my ears, and slowly sweeten the
things inside my head.
I think I like this
summer break. I think I like making a little space and time to wander through the
pages of a book, as a bee ambles through a drowsy summer meadow.
And so I suggest that you
find some new poems, and press your ear against them, especially if some time
opens up before you during these swarthy months. And if you do, perhaps you’ll
let me know and share some of the rich goodness you happen to find. And maybe
that’s what the poem “really means.”
Lazo-
ReplyDeleteThis is a terrific engagement with this poem, a joy itself that is also a route to joy: "Honey in the ears" indeed! I also relish (and am a bit jealous of) your delicious sinking into Summer (which has not yet arrived for me). Thanks for the encouragement, the permission to wander...