On Love, Death, & Poetry Infections: A Letter to My 9th Grade Students

by Jenny Cameron Paulsen

Remember, about a month ago, when I burst into tears while reading Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem “You Know Who You Are”?  So, about that.

That was not in the lesson plan.  

You’re smart, so you already know that.  I talked about this then, but it's taken some time and distance from the event to gain perspective.  I needed to explore the emotions that surfaced and write my way to understanding about the power of her words.

I've read this poem many times.  But reading these words for an audience, reading them aloud on a sunny day in my classroom, your faces bright with expectation, I was surprised to find new emotions surfacing.  Like the poet, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed and longing for my world to be simpler.  Maybe bringing this state of consciousness  to the poem made me feel more vulnerable than usual.  When I reached the line, “Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words / and not one of them can save me,” my skin tingled in recognition at this beautifully simple metaphor. Did you feel a visceral reaction to those words as well?  Did you feel like the poet had somehow seen inside your heart and mind?  In my mind, my own “hurricane of words,” safely contained in my navy notebook of poetry scribbles, threatened on the horizon.  Perhaps because I thought I had lost this precious item, and I rediscovered it recently. Perhaps because I was nearing the anniversary of a crippling sorrow.  Perhaps because I know what it's like to wake up sobbing at three in the morning, and the only way to relieve the agony of the images whirling and haunting every moment, asleep and awake, is to write them down, to try harnessing the storm in the desperate hope that pinning the words to the page will save me from their unspeakable power.  

As I read through the previous paragraph upon revising, I almost removed that last sentence, afraid it might be too raw and confessional.  Then I remembered a quote from Neil Gaiman, shared at our English teaching conference this week by my treasured friend Kirstey Ewald, a teacher in Charles City: “That moment [while writing] when you think, just possibly, you are walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind, and what exists inside, showing too much of yourself . . . that is the moment you might be starting to get it right.”  And so I let the sentence stand.  Because as a writer, I want to get it right.  And if I expect you to take risks in your writing, I should show you how.

Return to the poem: as I read the line “not one of them can save me,” the familiar sting of beginning tears surfaced.  I know you heard my voice hitch. Most of you suddenly sat up straighter.  But I sailed on to the next line thinking, “Keep it together, Jenny.  You cannot lay this burden at their feet.”  

Then I read, “Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together, / they float. / I want to tell you about the afternoon / I floated on your poems.”  A different afternoon of bright blue sky surfaced from the darkness of memory: stepping out of the hospital in Iowa City and sinking into the front seat, my husband and I both mute, numb with the grief of leaving without our first born, our twin daughters Lucie and Lillie, who emerged too soon from the womb, perfect and still.  The sunlight blinded—it could not pierce my personal darkness. On Saturday afternoon, September 15, 2001, I was in dire need of a raft of poems. Four days in and out of labor.  Four days of watching planes explode into the Twin Towers.  Four days so surreal and singular in all my personal history, they are singed into my memory with vivid, scarring clarity.  When I saw that particular patch of blue sky in my mind’s eye, I crumbled.  I knew I’d need a great deal of courage to finish reading the poem to you as I struggled for composure through hot tears.  My hands trembled, and my voice wobbled dangerously, but I swam on through the words, hoping a raft would float by in the torrent.

The raft appeared, in both the past and the present, when I reached the lines, “Suddenly I felt the precise body of your poems beneath me, / like a raft, I felt words as something portable again.”  My voice strengthened in the present while remembering the past:  I was sitting on my couch, ten days after 9/11, seven days after the death of my daughters, watching Bono on television.  Vulnerable without his usual sunglasses, sang  "Walk On" as if written only for me:  “And if your glass heart should crack / And for a second you turn back / Oh no, be strong / Walk on, walk on.”  Yes, my glass heart had cracked.  That was exactly the image that contained all the grief I could not say.  For the first time in ten days, my heart lifted with hope, as if a raft had floated under the current and popped up in exactly the right place.  There was a moment of stillness in the storm.  It happened again in February when U2 performed “Beautiful Day” at the Super Bowl: “The heart is a bloom, shoots up through stony ground.”  Two heart images capturing both fragility and resilience.  Two messages of hope.  This is my raft.  These are my “portable” words I carry with me when I’m overwhelmed in the hurricane.

I’m not the only one for whom U2’s music is a raft.  In David Levithan’s lovely novel Love is the Higher Law, written about the events of 9/11, a number of New York City characters connect with U2's music, in addition to the work of many other artists, to make sense of their world after devastating change.  The character Peter says, “The song I latched onto most, the song that I would play ten times in a row because I needed to hear it all ten times, was ‘Walk On.’ It was that unexpected, almost religious thing: the right song at the right time” (119).  If you are looking for song lyrics to use as rafts, like all Levithan’s works, this book is full of them.  It’s one of the reasons he’s a favorite writer of mine.

Back in the classroom, we arrived at the end of the poem, Nye’s words echoing Bono’s: “You keep walking, lifting one foot, then the other, / saying ‘This is what I need to remember’ / and then hoping you can.”  We all experience survival mode, where existence narrows to one foot in front of the other, and we chant our personal mantra over and over inside our heads to get through.  We make our world simpler in order to survive it.  This is the understanding of the poem I discovered in writing this letter to you.  Hold on to this truth when the world threatens.  Focus entirely on the next step only. And then the next. Do not dwell on the whole journey ahead.  This is how to combat the paralysis of fear.  In the famous words of Thoreau, “Simplify.”

As I gazed into your faces and saw your discomfort and empathy and tears, those of you who could still look at me instead of away, I knew I would have to tell you my story.  And that would require more courage and heart than I felt I had in reserve.  But I owed you an explanation about the power of words, especially spoken aloud, to trap us in a hurricane or lift us like a raft.  About the stealthy way grief sneaks up on you, unaware, and wrecks your heart, and sometimes your lesson plan.  

Words can haunt, and words can heal.  This is why we read and write: this interaction between the reader and writer, and all the connections, memories, and emotions he or she brings to the text.  What you bring to the text is as important as what I bring to it, and what the author brought to it.  John Green even says his books "belong to their readers now, which is a great thing—because the books are more powerful in the hands of my readers than they could ever be in my hands.” I hope you felt this power as you read along with me, your own images flashing in your mind.  I know you all have your own rafts.  When you are feeling brave, I hope to hear about them someday.  Because the only thing more powerful than what we each bring to a text, the only thing more powerful than a text by itself, is the meaning we create together from our shared experience of reading and discussing it.

Please know that I was uncomfortable, too.  There is nothing more terrifying than laying your fragile heart bare in front of a crowd.  A week later, I was worrying I hadn’t handled it well, (to be honest, I’m still worrying), and I felt ashamed I hadn’t contained my emotions and protected you from them.  I regretted laying my heaviest burden on your unsuspecting young shoulders.  And my dear friend and writing coach, Shaelynn Farnsworth said, “Don’t you think it would’ve been worse to cry and not tell them why?”  Yes.  No doubt.  But, it would’ve been better not to cry at all, I thought, trying to channel the strength of Matt “it-doesn’t-count-unless-the-tears-leave-the-eye” de la Peña.   But my tear ducts are apparently not macho enough nor deep enough to contain the well of my sorrow and shame.  

Speaking of Matt de la Peña, it’s only in writing this letter that I finally discovered my answer to his two word assignment imitating this sentence from "Steady Hands at Seattle General" by Denis Johnson: “When I look back at my life all I see are wrecked cars.”  My replacement for "wrecked cars"?  Blue skies. These two words could take me to a lot of places as a writer: the layers of possible meanings, the irony in associating blue skies with sadness as well as happiness, the various significant blue sky images I remember throughout my life. What do you think? Have you discovered your two words?

Later in the day, I received a serendipitous tweet from Shaelynn, (retweeted from Bud Hunt, @budtheteacher) with a link to a Naomi Shihab Nye video, “The Art of Teaching Poetry.”  In the video, Nye talks about bursting into tears at a dinner party while listening to a guest recite a Longfellow poem from memory because she was so moved by its “exquisite beauty.” So, I’m not alone.  Bursting into tears while reading or listening to poetry might be a thing.  I feel a little better.

What Nye said in her video rings so true to me.  “What gives us a relationship with poetry, it’s our love for the poems that we’ve known, what they’ve done for us.” Absolutely! I want you all to strengthen your relationship with poetry, to find poems to love, and to share them with our learning community. While the most pervasive form of poetry in our culture is song lyrics, I hope to add other kinds of poetry to your reading life.  You are living at a time with unprecedented access to poetry.  Read as much of it as you can.   (Start at Poetry 180 online.)  When you do, Nye suggests,  “Find places of real love within yourself for lines, for voices, for topics, for ways of writing, for styles that will help you create an atmosphere where poetry becomes contagious.”  YES!  That’s exactly what I want!  A poetry infection.  Don’t you?  Maybe not, but I will continue to share the poems I love with you, no matter what emotions steal up and mug me while reading.

Finally, Nye suggests rather than worrying about “getting” poetry, we should approach it from a curiosity standpoint, asking:  “Do you like it? Where does it take you? What does it make you think of?”  Using this approach as a teacher involves some risk.  It’s messy and unpredictable, but your answers are interesting and thoughtful and worthy of exploration.  It’s what makes your one-pagers on poetry so much fun to read and think about.  One of them is never the same as another.  Many of you are worried though, about “getting it.” Or more likely you're afraid of not "getting it" right. Some of the most beautiful poems I carry with me mystify me.  I can’t say I “get” them, but I love certain lines.  (For examples, check out any e.e. cummings poem or Shakespearean sonnet.)  What matters most is your willingness to travel with a poem.  Thinking in a “getting it” mentality is destination-focused.  To change your thinking about poetry, consider that it’s more journey-focused.  The obstacles, the sidetracks, the traveling companions, and the scenery along your journey of reading the poem are all of far more interest.  Besides, every poem has multiple destinations of arrival.  Choose your path.  Pay attention en route.  Report back about where you end up.

I just read a preview of a presentation (via Facebook status) from our art teacher Mr. McCormick where he observes how our culture is immersed in media violence and death while creating a “societal disconnection with real death.” I like the way he always pushes me to think deeply and differently.  It only occurs to me now, after reading about this idea, that while I’m anxious to protect you from a quiet and personal death, we are reading and discussing a book narrated by Death, about one of the most violent times in world history: WWII.  My personal tragedy seems small, almost inconsequential in this context. There’s an irony in this tension between the personal and political.  Most of the great works of literature you’ll read in school are tragic.  But to speak of the deaths that may personally haunt us is taboo.  I am wondering why we teach so many tragic narratives in school, yet the life skills associated with management of fear and grieving, perhaps our hardest human work, are not taught.  As suggested by Mr. McCormick, art, in all its forms, can be a way of owning and harnessing our grief and fear.  Perhaps we can explore these ideas together.  If we all, like the character Death in The Book Thief, are “haunted by humans,” why do we suffer in silence?   Chew on that and get back to me.

So, this letter was also not in my lesson plan.  But I have hope that something within it will reach you.  Because I don’t want you to feel compelled to respond, or like we have a Great Wall of Awkward between us, I wanted to discuss how you might  respond to this type of letter.  Well, it’s not an assignment, so you may leave it behind and never think of it again.  But I hope you don’t.  If you are moved to do so, you could write one back at some point in the future.  You might share a line that got you thinking and where it leads.  You could lift a line and write your own story.  Maybe write a letter to someone else and see where it takes you.  If it makes sense to do so, you might refer to something within in it during a discussion or one-pager.  But for now, please tuck it into your notebook and think about the power of words.  That is all I ask.

Thank you for traveling with me on this journey even though you weren’t sure where I was going.  To be honest, I wasn’t sure either.  But I’m happy at our place of arrival.  Keep this raft from U2 stowed away in your reserves:  “Walk on / stay safe tonight.”

And here’s one more raft especially for you from me:  Make wise choices.

Mrs. Paulsen

Jenny Cameron Paulsen teaches English (and knitting) to 8th and 9th graders at Holmes Junior High in Cedar Falls, Iowa. A graduate of Iowa State University and the University of Northern Iowa, she writes bad poetry in her steno notebook and sometimes blogs about life as a teacher at 2020teachervision.blogspot.com. Follow her on Twitter @JennyPaulsen555.