Poetry & Pedagogy

In this episode I discuss the poem 'And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes' by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib

And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes

And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes

says the man with a cart of empty bottles at the corner of church

and lincoln while I stare into my phone and I say

I know oh I know while trying to find the specific

filter that will make the sun’s near-flawless descent look

the way I might describe it in a poem and the man

says the moment is already right in front of you and I

say I know but everyone I love is not here and I mean

here like on this street corner with me while I turn

the sky a darker shade of red on my phone and I mean

here like everyone I love who I can still touch and not

pass my fingers through like the wind in a dream

but I look up at the man and he is a kaleidoscope

of shadows I mean his shadows have shadows

and they are small and trailing behind him and I know

then that everyone he loves is also not here and the man doesn’t ask

but I still say hey man I’ve got nothing I’ve got nothing even though I have plenty

to go home to and the sun is still hot even in its

endless flirt with submission and the man’s palm has a small

river inside I mean he has taken my hand now and here we are

tethered and unmoving and the man says what color are you making

the sky and I say what I might say in a poem I say all surrender

ends in blood and he says no, what color are you making the sky and

I say something bright enough to make people wish they were here

and he squints towards the dancing shrapnel of dying

light along a rooftop and he says I love things only as they are

and I’m sure I did once too but I can’t prove it to anyone these days

and he says the end isn’t always about what dies and I know I know

or I knew once and now I write about beautiful things

like I will never touch a beautiful thing again and the man

looks me in the eyes and he points to the blue-orange vault

over heaven’s gates and he says the face of everyone you miss

is up there and I know I know I can’t see them but I know

and he turns my face to the horizon and he says

we don’t have much time left and I get that he means the time

before the sun is finally through with its daily work or I

think I get that but I still can’t stop trembling and I close

my eyes and I am sobbing on the corner of church and

lincoln and when I open my eyes the sun is plucking everyone

who has chosen to love me from the clouds and carrying them

into the light-drunk horizon and I am seeing this and I know

I am seeing this the girl who kissed me as a boy in the dairy aisle

of meijer while our parents shopped and the older boy on the

basketball team who taught me how to make a good fist and swing

it into the jaw of a bully and the friends who crawled to my porch

in the summer of any year I have been alive they were all there

I saw their faces and it was like I was given the eyes of a newborn

again and once you know what it is to be lonely it is hard to

unsee that which serves as a reminder that you were not always

empty and I am gasping into the now-dark air and I pull my shirt

up to wipe whatever tears are left and I see the man walking in the

other direction and I chase him down and tap his arm and I say did

you see it did you see it like I did and he turns and leans into the

glow of a streetlamp and he is anchored by a single shadow now

and he sneers and he says have we met and he scoffs and pushes

his cart off into the night and I can hear the glass rattling even

as I watch him become small and vanish and I look down at my

phone and the sky on the screen is still blood red.

In this episode I discuss the poem 'French Horn' by Jane Hirshfield

French Horn

For a few days only,

the plum tree outside the window

shoulders perfection.

No matter the plums will be small,

eaten only by squirrels and jays.

I feast on the one thing, they on another,

the shoaling bees on a third.

What in this unpleated world isn’t someone’s seduction?

The boy playing his intricate horn in Mahler’s Fifth,

in the gaps between playing,

turns it and turns it, dismantles a section,

shakes from it the condensation

of human passage. He is perhaps twenty.

Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red,

while a girl holds a viola’s spruce wood and maple

in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard.

Let others clap.

These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing.

Not the shouts of bravo, bravo,

not the timpanic clamor inside their bodies.

As the plum’s blossoms do not hear the bee

nor taste themselves turned into storable honey

by that sumptuous disturbance.

In this episode I discuss the poem 'The Art of Disappearing' by Naomi Shihab Nye

The Art of Disappearing

When they say don’t I know you?

say no.

When they invite you to the party

remember what parties are like

before answering.

Someone is telling you in a loud voice

they once wrote a poem.

Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.

Then reply.

If they say We should get together

say why?

It’s not that you don’t love them anymore.

You’re trying to remember something

too important to forget.

Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.

Tell them you have a new project.

It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store

nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven’t seen in ten years

appears at the door,

don’t start singing him all your new songs.

You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.

Know you could tumble any second.

Then decide what to do with your time.

In this episode I discuss the poem 'Gate C22' by Ellen Bass

Gate C22

At gate C22 in the Portland airport

a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed

a woman arriving from Orange County.

They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after

the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons

and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking,

the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other

like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island,

like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped

out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down

from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing.

Neither of them was young. His beard was gray.

She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine

her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish

kisses like the ocean in the early morning,

the way it gathers and swells, sucking

each rock under, swallowing it

again and again. We were all watching—

passengers waiting for the delayed flight

to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots,

the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling

sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could

taste the kisses crushed in our mouths.

But the best part was his face. When he drew back

and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost

as though he were a mother still open from giving birth,

as your mother must have looked at you, no matter

what happened after—if she beat you or left you or

you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix

not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you

as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth.

The whole wing of the airport hushed,

all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body,

her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses,

little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.

In this episode, I discuss the poem 'Postscript', by Seamus Haney.

Postscript

by Seamus Haney

And some time make the time to drive out west

Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,

In September or October, when the wind

And the light are working off each other

So that the ocean on one side is wild

With foam and glitter, and inland among stones

The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit

By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,

Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,

Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads

Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.

Useless to think you’ll park and capture it

More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,

A hurry through which known and strange things pass

As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways

And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

In this episode, I discuss the poem 'Kindness', by Naomi Shihab Nye.

Kindness

by Naomi Shihab Nye

Before you know what kindness really is

you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment

like salt in a weakened broth.

What you held in your hand,

what you counted and carefully saved,

all this must go so you know

how desolate the landscape can be

between the regions of kindness.

How you ride and ride

thinking the bus will never stop,

the passengers eating maize and chicken

will stare out the window forever.

Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness,

you must travel where the

Indian in a white poncho lies dead

by the side of the road.

You must see how this could be you,

how he too was someone

who journeyed through the night

with plans and the simple breath

that kept him alive.

Before you know kindness

as the deepest thing inside,

you must know sorrow

as the other deepest thing.

You must wake up with sorrow.

You must speak to it till your voice

catches the thread of all sorrows

and you see the size of the cloth.

Then it is only kindness

that makes sense anymore,

only kindness that ties your shoes

and sends you out into the day

to mail letters and purchase bread,

only kindness that raises its head

from the crowd of the world to say

it is I you have been looking for,

and then goes with you everywhere

like a shadow or a friend.

In this this episode, I discuss the poem 'What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade', by Brad Modlin.

What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

by Brad Modlin

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen

to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took

questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.

After lunch she distributed worksheets

that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep

without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe

the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing

how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts

are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am

is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking

for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

In this episode, I discuss the poem 'Wishing Well' by Gregory Pardlo.

Wishing Well

by Gregory Pardlo

Outside the Met a man walks up sun

tweaking the brim sticker on his Starter cap

and he says pardon me Old School he

says you know is this a wishing well?

Yeah Son I say sideways over my shrug.

Throw your bread on the water.

I tighten my chest wheezy as Rockaway beach

sand with a pull of faux smoke on my e-cig

to cozy the truculence I hotbox alone

and I am at the museum because it is not a bar.

Because he appears not to have changed

them in days I eye the heel-chewed hems

of his pants and think probably he will

ask me for fifty cents any minute now wait

for it. A smoke or something. Central Park displays

the frisking transparency of autumn. Tracing

paper sky, leaves like eraser crumbs gum

the pavement. As if deciphering celestial

script I squint and purse off toward the roof

line of the museum aloof as he fists two

pennies from his pockets mumbling and then

aloud my man he says hey my man I’m going

to make a wish for you too.

I am laughing now so what you want

me to sign a waiver? He laughs along ain’t

say all that he says but you do have to

hold my hand. And close your eyes.

I make a starless night of my face before

he asks are you ready. Yeah dawg I’m ready.

Sure? Sure let’s do this his rough hand

in mine inflates like a blood pressure cuff and I

squeeze back as if we are about to step together

from the sill of all resentment and timeless

toward the dreamsource of un-needing the two

of us hurtle sharing the cosmic breast

of plenitude when I hear the coins blink against

the surface and I cough up daylight like I’ve just

been dragged ashore. See now

you’ll never walk alone he jokes and is about

to hand me back to the day he found me in

like I was a rubber duck and he says you got to let

go but I feel bottomless and I know he means

well though I don’t believe

and I feel myself shaking

my head no when he means let go his hand.

In this episode, I discuss the poem 'Living Together' by David Whyte.

Living Together

by David Whyte

We are like children in the master’s violin shop

not yet allowed to touch the tiny planes or the rare wood

but given brooms to sweep the farthest corners

of the room, to gather shavings, mop spilled resins

and watch with apprehension the tender curves

emerging from apprenticed hands. The master

rarely shows himself but whenever he does he demonstrates

a concentrated ease so different from the willful accumulation

of experience we have come to expect,

a stripping away, a direct appreciation of all the elements

we are bound, one day, to find beneath our hands.

He stands in our minds so clearly now, his confident back

caught in the light from pale clerestory windows

and we note the way the slight tremor of his palms

disappears the moment they encounter wood.

In this light we hunger for maturity, see it not as stasis

but a form of love. We want the stillness and confidence

of age, the space between self and all the objects of the world

honoured and defined, the possibility that everything

left alone can ripen of its own accord,

all passionate transformations arranged only

through innocent meetings, one to another,

the way we see resin allowed to seep into the wood

in the wood’s own secret time. We intuit our natures

becoming resonant with one another according

to the grain of the way we are made. Nothing forced

or wanted until it ripens in our own expectant hands.

But for now, in the busy room, we stand in the child’s

first shy witness of one another, and see ourselves again,

gladly and always, falling in love with our future.

In this overview to the podcast, I discuss how I use poetry to invite my students to consider the larger questions for which the intellectual language they’ve inherited is inadequate. The language we use in our teaching is often too small and too impoverished. It isn’t large enough for the territories we want to explore and inhabit.

Poetry offers us a language that is more expansive, more generous, deeper, and more worthy either of the identities we are on the hunt for or the ideas we are trying to make peace with.