The assignment was to write a Curriculum Vitae poem based on one by Lisel Mueller. Twenty things in chronological order, using figurative language mimicking Mueller's poetic syntax at least five times. There have to be at least five illustrations or artifacts that reflect the content.
It was not too hard. I have assigned this for the past 10 years.
Over the past few years, with the advent of Chromebooks & technology, I have noticed marked changes in the work that's handed in for this assignment. The poems are shorter. The artifacts are just photos or clip art copied & pasted into a document. There is little figurative language. It's cut & dried, analytical. It's like we're teaching them how not to be creative.
This year, I spent a bit of time showing them examples, "modeling" ( I dislike that jargon) and otherwise giving the students huge examples of how to proceed. I told them: I have to read 80 of these: don't make it suck. I do like to use humor in class, after all.
What happened next amazed me, as the immortal bard Buzzfeed repeatedly says. Kids started coming to me after class, after school.
They said: You're gonna think this is depressing.
They said: You're going to think I'm dumb.
They said: I don't think I did this right.
They said: You're gonna cry when you read this, because I cried when I wrote it.
I said: I'm not going to think it's depressing: It's life.
I said: I do not, and will not think you are dumb because of this.
I said: You're doing fine.
I said: You're right, I will cry. I cry every year when I read these.
A girl in my class came in last block and sat by my desk. She sat in the same comfy chair her older brother and sister sat in when they were in school here. Her mom lives in another state. Her poem was about running through fields after school, playing, and then, her parents split up and there were empty cupboards. No one to talk to. Loneliness and sadness and just wanting your mom, but she's not there. And so my brother and sister disappeared, too.
You don't have to be in an impoverished school to know about all the different kinds of poverty.
But after all that struggle to tell her story, she wasn't sad or upset; she was beaming. It was hard, she said, to find the right words to say. But it was better than just coming out and saying: my dad went grocery shopping once a month for the four of us. My dog died. My mom moved to the desert without us. She found the emotions and she got to let them out, a little. That's what poetry is all about, IR.
After l last year, when I had such dismal results for this assignment, I really asked myself: Why assign such a creative assignment to an analytical class? Why do I have them plumb the depths of their lives and reflect on the past 18 years: the good, the bad and the lonely?
Because they need to. They need to look at their emotions from a distance, let them out a bit, so they don't get caught up with anxiety and pain and self-doubt. They need to feel pride in overcoming those emotions. They need to feel strong. They need to be strong.
When I was a child, Paul said, I thought as a child, acted as a child. How are kids who've been through painful times supposed to get past them if they can't put away their childish things? Confusion. Anxiety. Awkwardness. Grudges. Feeling unloved. If I could get them to see how much they are, not how little.
Or, as the immortal bard Jerry Garcia said: If I knew the way, I would take you home.
I'll be honest, IR. I struggle with all these things too, and I am allegedly a grownup. Fun Fact: I spent most of last year trying to better myself because I thought I just wasn't useful or ornamental anymore. I spent 15- 20 minutes every morning in meditation, then another 1/2 hour of reading and contemplation. I was looking for some answers to some pretty big questions. After a year, I didn't feel any better about any of those questions, and I still had no answers. I thought I could discipline myself into knowing something. All that discipline ended up turning into a routine, just as mindless as the life I'd been leading.
And then, in the blink of blue, it all changed, all of it. I didn't need answers any more. I didn't care about the questions, either. I had been flying in a box canyon and suddenly pulled up into the clear blue sky. It was exhilarating, a little disorienting, and sometimes I still feel like my feet aren't all the ways touching the ground. I wrote a whole book, a small one, with cantos and sonnets and lyrical poems and dialogue and happiness. When I finished, I read it, then put it away when the weather turned cold and rainy, because it is a story that can only be a summer story, and summer is past.
Perhaps I will take it out and read it in the bleak midwinter, when I am cold and need to feel the sun again.
Here is your assignment, dear IR. Write your Curriculum Vitae: The work of your life. Keep it short- 20 entries. You have to use figurative language, and it starts with "I was born" and ends with "So far, so good" looking forward.
1) I was born in a Free City, near the North Sea.
2) In the year of my birth, money was shredded into confetti. A loaf of bread cost a million marks. Of course I do not remember this.
3) Parents and grandparents hovered around me. The world I lived in had a soft voice and no claws.
4) A cornucopia filled with treats took me into a building with bells. A wide-bosomed teacher took me in.
5) At home the bookshelves connected heaven and earth.
6) On Sundays the city child waded through pinecones and primrose marshes, a short train ride away.
7) My country was struck by history more deadly than earthquakes or hurricanes.
8) My father was busy eluding the monsters. My mother told me the walls had ears. I learned the burden of secrets.
9) I moved into the too bright days, the too dark nights of adolescence.
10) Two parents, two daughters, we followed the sun and the moon across the ocean. My grandparents stayed behind in darkness.
11) In the new language everyone spoke too fast. Eventually I caught up with them.
12) When I met you, the new language became the language of love.
13) The death of the mother hurt the daughter into poetry. The daughter became a mother of daughters.
14) Ordinary life: the plenty and thick of it. Knots tying threads to everywhere. The past pushed away, the future left unimagined for the sake of the glorious, difficult, passionate present.
15) Years and years of this.
16) The children no longer children. An old man’s pain, an old man’s loneliness.
17) And then my father too disappeared.
18) I tried to go home again. I stood at the door to my childhood but it was closed to the public.
19) One day, on a crowded elevator, everyone’s face was younger than mine.
20) So far, so good. The brilliant days and nights are breathless in their hurry. We follow, you and I.
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