Resources

by Quincy Troupe

Quincy Troupe is a poet, performer, memoirist, and the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Weather Reports, Avalanche, Choruses, Transcircularities, and the children’s book Take It to the Hoop, Magic Johnson. With Miles Davis he co-authored Miles: The Autobiography, and subsequently wrote about his friendship with Davis in Miles and Me.

Following are excerpts from a talk given by Quincy Troupe at Teachers & Writers Collaborative in October 2002 to a group of teaching artists.

Childhood, Poetry, Magic, and “Magic”

QUINCY TROUPE (QT): How do you teach poetry to younger kids? What is it that you’re looking for?

AUDIENCE MEMBER (AM): I’m always trying to find the way to get the kid in touch with his or her vision, with that thing that’s not programmed, that thing that belongs to that kid individually, that place where they begin to imagine their own lives, their own existence.

QT: How much of a role does magic play in the imagination of kids? Does magic have a part?

AM: Yes, a lot. Transformation—one thing turning into another thing: a piece of paper turning into a little world.

AM: My goal is that everybody has fun with words. Whenever I bring them a poem, I bring them something readily accessible to them. I’ll bring them a poem written by someone from the same background as them, initially. I get them to identify things in the poem they like.

AM: I find that working with elementary and high school kids the process is a double-edged sword, because the older they get, the more they’ve built a vocabulary, but they’ve also adapted to set structures of how to put words together and how to think. So at earlier ages you’re trying to keep those pathways clean. When kids are older, those pathways are set and it’s harder to access that early imagination.

QT: It’s funny, I remember when I was teaching in the Bronx. I was a substitute. And the teacher told me, “These kids are out of control, they’re just out of control.” So I walked into the classroom and told them to sit down, and I could see they were really energetic. But just because kids are energetic, doesn’t mean they’re out of control. It means they have a lot of energy.

At that time I didn’t have any teeth in the front, in the top row. And I had long dreadlocks. So I said to these kids, “I want you to write a poem using me. Describe me.” Well, they went nuts. They said, “Describe you? Really? You?” “Yes. Whatever you want to say, say it.” They wrote so fast. They were so happy. They were going to get a chance to rag on an adult. So they had all kinds of images. They had my teeth like, “Your mouth is an upside-down goalpost,” a football image. “Your hair looks like snakes.” “And your mouth looks like this.” “And your clothes look like that.” So they went off. And then when I went in the next day, they were ready. We had them write about everything. That wouldn’t have happened with kids who were a little older. Older kids would know they shouldn’t say those things. But these kids let their imaginations fly. And I think as we get older, all these rules and regulations—what you should do and what you shouldn’t do—start to hold us in.

Miles Davis once said something to me that was very important. We were talking about music and art and creation, and he told me, “You have to stay close to childhood. The artist has to stay close to a child’s mind.”

I want to talk about “Poem for Magic.” This poem is a really big hit with kids. Wherever I go, I read this poem. When I walk into a high school, most high school kids look at me and they say, “Oh God, he’s an old guy, and he’s a poet, blah blah blah,” and I read this poem first, and I never fail to stop them. Whatever they’re doing, they stop. Even if it’s a thousand people, or five hundred kids—New Jersey, California, St. Louis where I’m from, Chicago—they just stop. So I’m going to read this and then I want to ask you, as teachers, why you think that might be so.

A Poem for Magic

take it to the hoop, “magic” johnson,
take the ball dazzling down the open lane
herk & jerk & raise your six-feet, nine-inch frame
into the air sweating screams of your neon name
“magic” johnson, nicknamed “windex” way back
in high school
cause you wiped glass backboards
so clean, where you first juked and shook
wiled your way to glory
a new-style fusion of shake-&-bake
energy, using everything possible, you created your own
space to fly through—any moment now
we expect your wings to spread feathers for that spooky takeoff
of yours—then, shake & glide & ride up in space
till you hammer home a clothes-lining deuce off glass
now, come back down with a reverse hoodoo gem
off the spin & stick in sweet, popping nets clean
from twenty feet, right side

put the ball on the floor again, “magic”
slide the dribble behind your back, ease it deftly
between your bony stork legs, head bobbing everwhichaway
up & down, you see everything on the court
off the high yoyo patter
stop & go dribble
you thread a needle-rope pass sweet home
to kareem cutting through the lane
his skyhook pops the cords
now, lead the fast break, hit worthy on the fly
now, blindside a pinpoint behind-the-back pass for two more
off the fake, looking the other way, you raise off-balance
into electric space
sweating chants of your name
turn, 180 degrees off the move, your legs scissoring space
like a swimmer’s yoyoing motion in deep water
stretching out now toward free flight
you double-pump through human trees
hang in place
slip the ball into your left hand
then deal it like a las vegas card dealer off squared glass
into nets, living up to your singular nickname
so “bad” you cartwheel the crowd toward frenzy
wearing now your electric smile, neon as your name

in victory, we suddenly sense your glorious uplift
your urgent need to be champion
& so we cheer with you, rejoice with you
for this quicksilver, quicksilver,

quicksilver moment of fame
so put the ball on the floor again, “magic”
juke & dazzle, shake & bake down the lane
take the sucker to the hoop, “magic” johnson,
recreate reverse hoodoo gems off the spin
deal alley-oop dunkathon magician passes
now, double-pump, scissor, vamp through space
hang in place
& put it all up in the sucker’s face, “magic” johnson,
& deal the roundball like the juju man that you am
like the sho-nuff shaman that you am, “magic,”
like the sho-nuff spaceman you am

What do you think? Why do you think that poem works with kids?

AM: Well if you read it like that, it lends itself easily to being a performance piece, and I think particularly older kids in this age of post-Love Jones performing poetry, they’re really into that. Also it’s about sports. Boys, girls, young adults, little kids know about Magic Johnson and basketball. Also the imagery itself is very visual. While you were reciting each stanza, I could see all that imagery. So I think it’s something they can relate to, that’s not talking about the Civil War, or something.

AM: The language is very playful—the shape of it. It’s got a lot of character. It’s very alive and very immediate. High energy.

AM: It’s got rhyme and alliteration.

AM: In addition to all of that, it puts you in the moment.

AM: It sounds like you’re the announcer of the game.

QT: The reason I wrote this poem was that I read a poem—I’m not going to say who it was, but it was by a really academic poet. He wrote this poem, and he had never played basketball. I was a basketball player. There’s nothing wrong with it, but I could see that he had never played because he was analyzing it, you know, it was one of those analyzing poems. You analyze the players and what they do and what’s happening and all of that. And I said, I’m gonna write me a poem about basketball. I had never written a poem about basketball. Basketball is fast. It is big guys like gazelles moving at incredible speed, doing incredible things with their bodies, whether you like it or not. They’re doing incredible things in this little space. I was watching Kobe Bryant hit a shot the other night on Sacramento. He drove in, jumped—and this is a six-foot seven-inch young man—and he jumped like this and spun around like this in the air under the basket—spun—and shot the ball backwards like this, high off the board. They showed it about seven times on instant replay. What that was was like a Charlie Parker or a John Coltrane or a Jimi Hendrix improvisation. He didn’t plan that. He did that in the moment. He didn’t say to himself, “Well I’m going to jump now, and spin around like this…” No, that ain’t what happened. He jumped, and a seven-foot guy came to get him, and Kobe said, “Oh, I’m not getting stuffed, not on national TV.” So what I’m saying is, that was almost like that Jimi Hendrix solo at Woodstock when he changed his guitar into a bomb, playing his guitar live in front of 400,000 people. And kids know about that. They haven’t gotten to the age I’m at where your knees are stiff and it’s all in memory. But for them—like my son, who’s 19—it’s in the present. Not just guys, but girls too, young women.

AM: A lot of us, when we do a residency, we go into a classroom, we have 45 minutes, we often start off with a poem, and then we give the kids a writing assignment or exercise off the poem. Could you say how you might do that with this poem?

QT: I would ask them to pick a language that is akin to something they know that is fast. It doesn’t have to be a basketball game, it could be anything. You can tell the kids to write a poem about the moment, about improvisation. Explain to them what it is. “Let me see if you can do that, if you can write something that is really fast, that is dealing with some concrete images. It could be the subway, since we’re in New York. Let’s talk about walking down Broadway. Let’s talk about what you could write on the street, using the street as a setting. Let’s talk about whatever.” The assignment would be to deal with language as speed, and to do it with concrete images. And then also music. How can you put music in it? And how can you put energy in it? New York is like that. I wrote this poem in New York, walking the streets. For me, this is my quintessential New York poem. My language changed a bit after I moved to California because California is slower.

A Poem for Magic was published in Transcircularities (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2002).