No Writer Left Behind

By Livia Kent

It was only a few months ago that I became a new member of the WNBA. As a writer, I wanted to take advantage of networking opportunities. But as a teacher, what drew me in was the long list of women who understand the power of literacy and are therefore working within their communities to spread their passion for the written word in all its forms. In turn, each member of the WNBA is bound to interpret this issue's theme of "service, advocacy, and empowerment" in terms of their individual experience-the following is mine.

I developed a bad case of angst in my adolescent years, an invisible rash worse than internal poison ivy. Nothing worked to alleviate my condition, and when the itch of intermittent isolation and intense social mania hit its nightly plateau, I longed to pick at the bumps on my enflamed heart and swollen temper and examine whatever oozed out. Instead, I stuck a pen in my hand and started to write. Although I misspelled words and employed hackneyed phrases, exploring my discomfort through language and metaphor was like dousing my insides with calamine.

Now I teach poetry at an inner-city middle school where my students complain about having to fill a blank page with meaningful words. But I watch as they struggle to find similes that adequately reflect their personalities and experiences. I watch as they start to hone their poetic voices, not for accolades, but because they've recognized that through hyperbole and personification and synethesia-all those big words they refuse to remember-they can genuinely disclose their feelings to a back stabbing peer, a preoccupied parent, or even a murdered cousin whose pull once seemed greater that the sun's.

For one of the first classes I taught I played Chopin and asked my students to transcribe the sounds into images. After the inevitable objections-why can't we hear the radio, classical music sucks-I finally persuaded them to close their eyes and listen. A resulting poem, written by the one girl who had perfected the art of eye-rolling, began with a visceral description of a frightened woman running through a forest. She loses a shoe but can't stop to pick it up. She is tired and out of breath and in the end turns out to be running from her self. While I had commended myself earlier on pointing out the ties between the poetry my students shunned and the hip-hop they loved, it was ultimately the inner acuity of this girl's poem that convinced my students writing was worthy of their time.

Of course the beginning of every year brings new students who tell me they neither read nor write for pleasure. But I remind myself that since the school librarian was fired to minimize expenses, the authors they may have been tempted to pick up and emulate are now inaccessible. So I drag them, kicking and screaming, over the sculpted language of Nikki Giovanni's "Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day." And I tell them, as they rustle their concealed snacks, that I forgive their prickly resistance because I know what it's like be starved. Recently, one girl took issue with my comment.

"My grandma buys food and cooks for me every day. You can't come here and tell us we don't get fed."

I explained that it was poetic malnourishment I had been referring to and recited a few lines from "Eating Poetry" by Mark Strand.

"That's stupid," she quipped, folding her arms to let me know she wasn't going to participate when we went on to discuss Kevin Derrig's "First Period." This formidable piece, however, castigates teachers who deface homework "with red pen graffiti that focuses more on missed commas than the content of the sentences," and later I caught her in the hallway giving an impassioned reading to a friend. Although she remained antagonistic in class, she responded to Alice Walker's "Never Offer Your Heart to Someone Who Eats Hearts" with a lengthy poem entitled "Never Give It All Away," which is valuable advice from a thirteen-year-old girl whose tee-shirt proclaimed her a SEX KITTEN. Soon she started volunteering insightful interpretations of Lucille Clifton and Yusef Komunyakaa, and by the end of the semester she was writing on her own accord. One of her poems, scribbled on a copy of Denise Duhamel's "I'm Dealing with My Pain," talked poignantly of "hate and abandonment attacking each other like crazed lions looking for love" and was dedicated to her absent father.

I am told by the full-time teachers I have all the troublemakers in my class. Every year my students self-select, and I get the inevitable group who envision a poetry workshop as an opportunity to goof off outside their regular classes. After a while, my students tell me stories of smuggling cell phones between pieces of bread through the school's metal detector in order to text-message each other during Science and Math. I tell them to save these messages and make them into a poem; for these so -called troublemakers may spend afternoons in detention but even as they write about their crushes and their Playstation 2s they are defining a space in the world. So I publish their works in anthologies I copy myself at Kinko's and invite them to read at local bookstores where audience members recognize creative writing as a process central to learning itself. Although my students may not admit to the irony, as they stand at the lectern beset by applause, being appreciated for their ideas among poets suddenly becomes as important as being indifferent to poetry among friends.

The United Nations views "literacy as freedom." Yet in a school where children can read and write but are reluctant to do either, what turns out to be their key to freedom is literary expression, which must sometimes be forced down their throats.

For an entire year I taught a seventh-grade boy whose writing averaged a half a sentence per two-hour class. Most of the time he spent chewing on his cuticles and making sure his baseball cap sat sufficiently crooked on his head. One day, after an exercise inspired by Pablo Neruda's collection, The Book of Questions, this boy raised his hand for the first time that year. To my surprise he wanted to share what he had written.

"But, Steve," I whispered, "you've only written one line."

He shrugged. The title of his poem was a question I had posed earlier, a question I doubted any of my writers would dare to tackle. "What is Eternity?" he read. And his answer was as follows: "Eternity is an abandoned house that is never vacant, a black smudge that is always clean." The class erupted in applause, and this boy's shy recitation of a one-line poem, the smile on his otherwise stern little face-this moment will remain the reason I cannot join the teachers who lament the superficiality of today's youth.

Throughout the ages there have always been troublemakers, reticent boys, heartbroken girls, angry teenagers lost in a sense of isolation. What we as teachers must remember is that although these children may not always be churning out high-minded grammatically correct prose, as long as they are writing creatively, they are groping their way, word by word, out of the dim and complex years of adolescence. Hopefully, as they become adults, they will carry with them an insatiable hunger for great literature-writing they can taste and feel and tamp into the souls of the next turbulent generation.