And Now for Something Completely Different . . .

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My first job after after grad school was traveling around the state of Montana in a succession of elderly cars, teaching writing to kids in schools, a week at a whack. It’s tempting to dwell on what a basket case I was that first morning—Havre High School (Home of the Blue Ponies), mid-January, still pitch-black outside . . . on the other hand, why glorify a young man’s terror? I got the hang of the work over time, grew into it, really, even felt glimmers of what Buddhism calls right livelihood. But what I really want to tell you about is a second-grader at Garfield Elementary in Billings, MT.

In the early days of Poets/Writers in Schools, we were influenced by New York poet/playwright Kenneth Koch’s ideas in Wishes, Lies and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry (1970). Koch brought play and free expression, even nonsense into the process. One strategy was to jumpstart writing by using line-beginnings such as I dreamed I— or This is the morning that—  or I’m the one who—. It was gimmicky, but had the virtue of getting things off the ground fast. And there were other benefits: the playfulness made writing seem less like schoolwork; the built-in repetition painlessly introduced rhythm/cadence/words-as-sound; and even if the first lines a student wrote were low-energy/fill-in-the-blank stuff, the non-ordinary, the quirky/personal often appeared a little later, out of the blue—just as it did in my own writing on good days.¹

I’m indebted to Koch, no question about it.² Yet, over time, I grew less sanguine about his method. Despite what I said above, I came to think that this writing wasn’t different enough from what transpired when the teacher asked everyone to write Thanksgiving poems: twenty-five versions of the same thing, and none terribly unique or engaged. In the end, it was a simple thought that shifted my MO: if I wanted the writing to be more real, I had to treat the kids like real writers. I stopped asking them to do exercises I’d feel silly doing myself. I tried getting them to write the same way I got myself to write—by responding to the best work of other writers.³

I brought in adult poems—ones I liked, ones that were clear and relatable and full of good nouns and verbs—then drew the day’s lesson from our talk about the poem. I brought in Pablo Neruda’s “Ode to My Socks” and we discussed how a physical thing (especially a gift) could make you happy, thankful (or not). I brought in David Wagoner’s poem about tumbleweeds bounding across a lonely road and getting snagged by barbed wire. And so on—poems that shunned abstraction, sappiness, outmoded diction, poems you didn’t immediately bounce off of, poems that sounded like someone talking to you, wanting you to know something worth knowing.

We read Theodore Roethke’s famous poem,“My Papa’s Waltz”⁴:

We read this one by Jay Parini⁵:

We talked about having mixed feelings—a subject I thought kids knew something about. I asked: Are there times you’ve felt more than one thing at the same time, the way the boy on the trestle did? Can you describe it? It was still school, still an exercise, yet when the dust settled, we had twenty-five different pieces of writing. And more than a few were interesting—candid, quirky, real.  

But the girl in Billings:

Her name was Cindy (that’s all I ever knew) and she was in second grade. I shudder, telling you this, but she’d be about 55 now. I don’t remember that day’s lesson (with kids her age, it would’ve been a bit simpler than what I described above).

Maybe you can picture the handwriting, slowly penciled on wide-lined paper? As the writers wrote, I strolled about the room, reading over shoulders, mumbling encouragement. I’m amazed, even now, that I didn’t miss what she was saying, didn’t read right past it; I may remember nothing else about her, or the day, but her one-line poem has been lodged in me for close to fifty years. To appreciate it, you need one more piece of information: Despite one’s default image of Big Sky Country, Billings is a city; Cindy’s school was in a downscale section, on the south side of the BNSF tracks (which may or may not be implicated in what she wrote).

Here’s her poem:

Out in Roundup the stars are all bunched together.

Someone had taken her to Roundup, a small town fifty miles north on Hwy 87. It was, perhaps, the first time she’d looked up into a night sky free of light pollution.

And now she was telling us about it.⁶

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1. My shorthand for the way writing begets more writing, compliments of a dogfood commercial: Makes its own gravy.

2. Koch: I should add that his approach kept evolving. I think my course correction came from my own experience, but Koch’s follow-up book on teaching writing reflects the same idea:

Read about his life and his other writing here:

     https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Koch

3. Other writers: Years later, I’d run into Saul Bellow’s perfect nutshell version of this wisdom:

     A writer is a reader moved to emulation.

4. Roethke: In The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke (1961).

5. Parini: In Anthracite Country (1982).

6. Cindy’s poem: Published in I Feel Like Touching Something That’s Not There: Poems by Students in Elementary & Secondary Schools of Montana, © Montana Arts Council (1976).