One Morning In the Month of May ...

Me and Poetry.

We're starting a new work learning experience that is already starting to torture me: Poetry. If you know me, you know I like poetry. I did a poetry workshop with children.* Anyway, we had our first meeting at lunchtime yesterday and we were asked what our first experience with Poetry was - and for me it was my dad's recitations at the dinner table. "Gunga Din" was probably interesting the first 2,000 times, but it's a long poem and I wanted to go out an play after dinner. Seeing it done by Mr. Magoo made me understand it better, but it was torture after a while. When my dad was elderly, I could recite "The Incident of the French Camp" with him and help him when he faltered. "You know we French stormed Ratisbone ..." - love that poem because of the punchline, "And smiling the boy fell dead." Despite this, I like poetry that tells a story and some rhyme and the tumty-tumty-tum.

But I also like contemporary Word. As you can tell from the March 19 post, my husband and I - a couple of round, very very white, very very middle-class caricatures - attend poetry nights, making the denizens nervous by our pasty-white presence. In all honesty, we can take the strong language, the political and racial backlash, but the religious stuff makes us wince. We have heard poetry so emotionally evocative, so hair-raising, wry, ironic, sad and funny that we exit stunned and amazed by the power and the talent of local people. How dearly I would love to host a salon of these people each week! How rewarding it would be to provide them a safe and stable place to speak their hearts. Even the religious ones.

Anyway, thinking back to early poetry in my life, I recalled having a copy of A Child's Garden of Verses ... and being unable to relate to it. Here I am, subjected to versification at length ("A bunch of the boys were whooping it up at the Malamute Saloon ..."!) on a regular basis and these gentle poems turn out to be totally unmemorable, except the one about the wooden spoon or shovel and digging in the sand and the sea filling it in - something I could relate to having tried to dig in the sand and having the ocean fill it up and destroy my handiwork.

Four languages later, I find I have accumulated some foreign favorites that I can still recite. My mother's cousin used "Du bist wie eine Blume" as a curse: "Ohhhh, dubistwieineblume!" so that resonated with me. I cultivate white roses with José Martí. I used "Venez a ma jubilé" for the invitation to my 50th birthday party. I have The Oxford Book of French Verse all post-it noted and went back this weekend looking for something appropriate for the "Poetry and Pints" meeting in Second Life and amazed myself that I understood any of the poems (much of it 700 year old French) enough to mark them as a favorite.

The first leg of our adventures in "Poultry" (as I relentlessly like to call it, the same way my sister always talked about "Taco Hell" instead of Taco Bell) will be through the Leaves of Grass section called "Song of Myself." I should withhold my applause until the end, I guess, and post it at the appropriate place (the Staffdevelopomendo blog). This particular work of Whitman was probably thrusting, avant-garde stuff when it was first written, both titillating and evocative, but it's an uphill slog for me now. I can mark bits of it I find pithy or expressive, but the totality of it is wearing me down. I hate being oppressed by something I really love. Bring back the stories and the tumty-tumpty-tum!

*Despite the age limitation I put on the sign-up sheet, my workshop contained children who could not read, much less write poetry, because their doting, idiotic, hare-brained parents [puts hand over heart and tries to calm down] insisted that Their Child was Advanced. I have gotten a call about signing up for workshops for this summer already (in April at the time) from a mom who insisted that her five year old was good with scissors and it would be totally appropriate to leave her in a room filled with older children more capable than the child working on some as yet undescribed project of unknown age-appropriateness. I had one of those kids in a program this winter who ended up sobbing her little heart out. Not in my workshop, lady! I want six year olds minimum! These programs are for school-age kids, not for your "Advanced" pre-schooler/toddler. [Looks under desk for bottle of bourbon - none there. Despair!]

Crazy White Girl

Crazy White Boy and I did it again last night: we infiltrated a black poetry stronghold. We've done this before, of course. The first time I was really nervous. I had heard there was a regular poetry night going on (my old one had faded away) at the Coffee and Dessert place in the desanctified church and we waltzed in on what I feared was a black sorority meeting. They were, however, very welcoming to us and in time they encouraged CWB to go back to playing guitar.

The group eventually broke up and we missed meeting with them each week. We missed being their pet white folk.

So when one of our old poetry friends told me that there was another poetry group starting up, we dusted off our poetry ears, turned off our computers, and sallied forth. It didn't have the swank of a coffee shop, being in a barber college, and there wasn't anyone we knew. I had been falling asleep right after dinner and we were planning a discreet retreat early (our source said it ran from 7 to many 9 or 10 pm) so I could be put to bed at a decent hour for a change.

Again, they were welcoming although they didn't know who we were. There was a $5 cover charge each and they tried many times to get us to taste the refreshments, but we'd just eaten a huge meal and were full to bursting.

The emcee seemed a bit nervous about us - warning us about the rap style of someone coming up, but I must admit that we do look like a couple of pasty-white, middle-class nerds. I didn't want to protest, "Oh, no! Go ahead and do your worst. We can take it." We're subversive in our own quiet way.

There was a low turn-out, but one of them was an old friend whose handle is "Spoken." There were about 5 reader/speakers and a couple of singers. One brought a keyboard. The next gathering is March 31st. Again, the quality of their creations can be stunning. I was brought to the edge of tears twice. Okay, maybe I was just a bit tired, but the writing is compact and moving.

They were again very nice when we left, shaking our hands and expressing the hope that we would return. I wondered if they packed up, hugged us and each other, waited until we were out of the parking lot, sighed, and turned the lights back on. CWB didn't think so.