Last week we shared an appreciation of Joe Brainard by Matthew Burgess. This week we’re posting an essay on Brainard by T&W artist David Andrew Stoler.

Joe Brainard’s book-length poem I Remember has something of a cult following here at T&W. Nearly every one of us has taught an I Remember lesson using Brainard’s work at one time or another. The poem’s spontaneity, playfulness, frankness, generous spirit, and unassuming tone have made fans of readers, writers, and teachers since its publication in the 70s. The publication this year of The Collected Works of Joe Brainard, edited by Ron Padgett (Library of America) prompted us to revisit I Remember in the winter issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine, where we take a new look at the qualities that have encouraged teaching artists across the country to turn to the work again and again.

Like a Key to the Writer’s Mind 
by David Andrew Stoler 

The first few times we saw each other the best we could do was cast wary glances at one another across the busy halls of the college, like people who met at a party long ago. We recognized each other—vaguely—but that was all.

And then one day the elevator door opened, everybody got out, she got on, the door closed. We stood for a moment, staring at our shoes.

“What high school did you go to?” I said. I thought I knew her, but having taught thousands of students over the last decade, I just couldn’t be sure.

“Lincoln,” she said. Somewhere I had never been. I shrugged, and we returned to the intimate, awkward silence of strangers on an elevator.

Then she spoke: “I remember the pretty German girl who stank. You’re the poetry guy. I still have the anthology we made.”

Her name was Jasmine. She had been in the fifth grade when I had taught her at PS 156 in Brownsville, Brooklyn. It had been nearly a decade since, she was now a sophomore in college, and she remembered the very first lesson we had done together: Joe Brainard.

This has happened over and over since I started teaching I Remember poems in 2001—former students calling out lines to me as I walked down the halls to other classrooms, or down the sidewalk on my block. They’ve never yelled out anything else: not Whitman or Williams, not the Slam poets they loved so much. And they shout out specific lines: from a poem I read them once—I don’t even hand out copies!—when they didn’t know who I was, on our first day, a long time ago.

There’s just something about Joe Brainard. I was introduced to I Remember poems by the poet Lisa Jarnot in my own first poetry class—a class I signed up for skeptically—and the poem I wrote using the form was the rocket that led me to change my college major from physics to creative writing. The simplicity of it masks its true gift: when faced with a blank page, one “I remember” spawns another, like a key to the writer’s mind that opens the floodgates of the subconscious, gets the pen moving, makes the paralyzing self-awareness of the act disappear.

As a writer, whenever stuck, I Remember is where I return. In fiction, it is an incredibly successful way to get into characters’ minds—what do they remember—or to attack a difficult scene. But for a teacher, Brainard is even more useful. As an opening lesson, it is rife with humor, with titillation ( Joe B. must be edited for younger classes), and with experiences that students connect to immediately. A simple phrase—I remember laundromats at night all lit up with nobody in them—leads to lessons on image, details, and—writing’s reason to be—empathy. Students who are shy with their pencils are instantly connected to  their own memories—Well, I’ve also seen laundromats lit up at night…—and those two simple words make starting easy.

I’ve used Brainard a thousand times over, in a thousand different situations—to help young cancer survivors start approaching the trauma they’ve recently confronted; to help my sister write her speech for her daughter’s bat mitzvah; to help business students understand how they, too, are poets. And Joe Brainard has given a gift of the most rewarding kind for a veteran teacher who sometimes wonders if he’s ever really had any effect on any student at all: to know that he, too, long after leaving an elementary school in Brownsville’s halls, will also be remembered.

David Andrew Stoler, a T&W teaching artist, just completed his first film, Daadi.  Details at : https://www.facebook.com/DaadiTheMovie.

Elementary School

Harriet Riley
Write a letter. Write to your grandmother in Guatemala or to your favorite football player or your favorite singer. Tell them about what you are doing this summer and what your interests are. If you are writing to someone you don’t know,  tell them why you admire them. Then be sure to get an envelope and stamp from your parents,  and address and mail the letter. The best part is you might just get a letter back from someone.

Explore alliteration by making a list of words that all start with the same letter. Just choose a letter and create a word avalanche—use nouns,  adjectives,  verbs,  adverbs,  anything. Just list all you can think of. Then order the words into a poem. Think shape and line breaks,  think meaning or be as silly as you can. Have fun with it!

Maya Pindyck
If you find yourself at a beach,  a lake,  a river,  or a stream,  look for five stones on the shore that you consider to be special or beautiful in some way. Sit down with those stones—either right where you are or back home—and study each one very closely. Come up with a different metaphor for each stone. Then write an “Ode to the Stone” that explores one or more of the metaphors you came up with.

Anthony Calypso
Ask an adult in your family for a photo that was taken before you were born. Do not ask any details about the picture. Instead,  take the picture and create a very short story based on the details you see in it. When you are finished,  return the photo to the adult and show what you wrote about it.

Susan Buttenwieser
Write a list of all the games that you play. Your list should include at least ten games,  and they can be anything: card games,  imaginary games,  sports,  and games you play at recess. Pick one and write about it in as much detail as possible. Pretend you are describing it to a space alien who has never been to earth,  and you need to explain absolutely every single step. Don’t leave anything out. Please include where to play your game,  how many people you need,  what time of day is best for playing it,  what things you need to play your game,  and even what is good to eat or drink with your game.

Peter Markus
In your imagination transport yourself to an exotic place—a place you’ve never been to,  though a place that you’d like one day to go to—and write a postcard to yourself that captures the essence of that place.

Norene Cashen Smith
When you get into a car,  whether it’s for a drive to the local market or hundreds of miles away to a vacation destination,  imagine a vacation without limits. Where do you go? What do you see? What do you do? How do you get back home? Compose a poem that takes the reader on an amazing trip with sights,  feelings,  and sounds.

Middle School

Sarah LaBrie
First: Purchase a notebook. The notebook should be about the size of your hand. If it’s too small,  you might lose it. If it’s too big,  it will be difficult to carry around. Put some thought into the color,  and to whether you want a blank cover or a decorated one. This is a piece of equipment you should want to keep with you for a while.

Second: Open the notebook. Write the day’s date on top of the first page. Underneath that,  write anything. Write about what you had for breakfast. Write about your most recent crush. Write sentences you think you might like to use in a short story or novel. Come up with a list of people (famous or not) with whom you would like to have tea. Think about the weather and then write down those thoughts. No matter what you write,  make sure you fill up at least one page.

Third: The next day,  at the same time,  repeat this process exactly. The point is to get yourself into the habit of producing words for a certain amount of time every day. Learning how to write daily is the first step to becoming a writer.

For help getting started,  check out The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole,  Aged 13 and ¾ by Sue Townsend and The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chbosky.

Karen Benke
Drape over a chair,  your bed,  across your desk. Hang in a forward bend. You can’t do this stretchy-bendy stuff wrong. Ditto creating a poem. Just consider all things that stretch: a wishful thought,  revengeful lie,  the truth,  history,  rubber bands,  a parent’s indecision,  your curfew… Really let your mind stretch into the truth—whatever the truth is to you—of right now. This includes noisy demands,  itchy worries,  rash-like anxieties. Invite it all to crawl out and stretch across the page. Then leap off into writing,  using the following lines: Life keeps giving me… Here’s why I stay… Why I leave… Here’s what lights me up… What can darken my heart…

Kanishk Tharoor
Look at a map of the world. Find three countries you don’t know anything about. Only on the basis of the sound of the country’s name,  the shape of the country,  and where the country is on the map,  write a paragraph speculating on what that country is like (the way people live, the languages they speak, the things they eat, what they believe in, and so on). After you’re done,  check your speculative paragraphs against the Wikipedia entries for each of those countries.

Rachel M. Simon
Write a list of sensory details from a place that is important to you (your summer camp, kindergarten cubby closet, your grandparents’ porch, your bed, your favorite chair, your favorite country, etc.). Be sure to include all five senses. Then write a poem or story that includes all of those sensory details.

Harriet Riley
Write a poem or essay using this line,  “I don’t mind being woken , up for…”

Mark Twain once said,  “Water,  taken in moderation,  cannot hurt anybody.” Since it’s summer there’s a good chance you are thinking about jumping in the water,  or drinking a cool sip of water,  or the relief of a cool rain shower,  so why not try writing about water? You can write a poem or short essay about swimming,  or a trip to the beach,  or the joy of your bath,  or taking a drink of water— anything about water.

Susan Buttenwieser
Cut out photographs from newspapers and magazines and write about them. Make up stories about what is happening in the picture. Make up names for the people in the photographs. Write about what happened right before the picture was taken and what will happen next.

Take a notebook outside and sketch with words. Write down an overheard conversation,  or descriptions of street scenes,  the park,  playground,  library,  swimming pool,  beach—anywhere you find yourself. Be sure to include descriptions of people and the setting.

Gary Earl Ross
With a group of your friends,  use poster board to create a Scrabble-type grid. Use Post-it notes (of varying colors if preferred) to create enough letters of the alphabet that each player may have 7-14 letters. Each player takes a turn or two placing his or her letters on the board. Once the letters are all used up,  everybody writes a poem using the words created on the board,  then reads their poem aloud.

High School

Maya Pindyck
Ride the subway (or the bus) five stops in any direction. Write down everything you observe on this subway or bus ride: the sounds around you,  the people,  the motion,  the seats,  the advertisements,  anything you notice at all—don’t stop writing until the five stops are over. Then get off the subway or bus and take it back home. On the ride back to your home,  look at your observations and write a short story,  essay,  or poem that describes this particular experience. Try to finish a first draft by the time you reach your stop!

Susan Buttenwieser
Rewrite a fairy tale from a different character’s point of view. For example,  re-write “Little Red Riding Hood” from the wolf’s perspective or the grandmother’s.

Kanishk Tharoor
Read about the Voyager 1 and 2 space probes. Look at some of the pictures that nasa keeps on the probes in case of contact with extraterrestrial intelligence (voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/spacecraft/scenes.html). Think about why nasa might have chosen those pictures to represent our civilization. Then imagine your own fantasy world/civilization. Describe five images that would be kept on a space probe sent from your fantasy world. What do they convey about your fantasy world?

Rachel M. Simon
Write a poem in two voices. Consider giving the voices very different attitudes and be sure the reader is able to determine where one voice stops and the other starts.

Use a random line from a book,  personal ad,  billboard,  or overheard conversation as the first line of a poem.

Go to a bookstore or library and sit in the poetry section. Read a few poems from a book by a poet you’ve never heard of and then become a poetry thief. Steal your favorite title (you can even read only the table of contents) and write your own poem or story.

Write a free-verse poem that takes its title from a headline that appears in a tabloid newspaper. You are not required to purchase the tabloid to complete this assignment. Feel free to use the supermarket check-out line as a mini-library.

Jason Leahey
Ride the train or bus (or, if you’re out in the wilds of America and thus not in a public transit city, ride your bike or catch a ride from a buddy) to a stop/neighborhood you’ve never been to before. Once you get there there,  eavesdrop on a few conversations. Write down ten lines of dialogue from at least two people. Make notes about the scene: the people,  the colors,  the smells,  the businesses,  the advertisements,  the looks on the faces of the people passing by. Drink a cup of coffee or eat an orange and hang out for a bit. Then write a scene (or story) in which one character wants to leave the neighborhood and another,  who loves the ‘hood,  tries to persuade him/her to stay. Use at least four lines of the dialogue you noted as a snoop.

 Liz Arnold
Before you visit a new place (anywhere, from the zoo to the Jersey Shore to a new friend’s house) make a list of the sensory impressions you think you’ll experience there. What will you see there? What do you think the place you are going will smell like? What sounds will you hear? What will you taste there? What will you feel? Be specific: The sound of buses or a ferry on the waves,  the smell of exhaust fumes,  the pebbly or soft texture of the sand…. You can make a list of words,  phrases,  or sentences,  or string them together to write a poem or a fictional story. After the trip,  make another list of sensory impressions,  this time of the things you actually experienced on your visit. Then,  use your strongest,  or most interesting or surprising impressions to write another poem or story.

Merna Ann Hecht
Find at least one or two writing partners and create your own summer writing group. Make a commitment to meet once a week at a different spot that defines summer for you. Each week,  take ten to fifteen minutes to record the sensory details of what and who you observe in your surroundings. From this,  create a series of place poems about your neighborhood,  your  town,  or your city. Think of yourself as a street poet or city poet,  with your artistic eye and “see-all” camera lens focused on your surroundings.

You can pattern your poems after writers who have written about their surroundings,  such as “I Am New York City” by Jayne Cortez. Also check out the “Nature & Place” section in From Totems to Hip-Hop edited by Ishmael Reed,  Gary Soto’s poem “Saturday at the Canal, ”  Francisco Alarcon’s poem “Boricua—at the Annual Puerto Rican Parade in New York, ” and “An Excerpt from con flama, ” by Sharon Bridgeforth,  from Naomi Shihab Nye’s collection Is This Forever or What: Poems & Paintings from Texas. Soto’s book Neighborhood Odes might inspire younger writers.

You might want to read or display your place poems in a community center or library for your summer writing finale.

Harriet Riley
Pick any book in your house or at the library. The only deal is that it has to be a book you haven’t read. Copy down the first line of that book. Then use that line as the first line of a story or a poem.

Contributors

Liz Arnold’s essays have been recognized in prose contests held by Georgetown Review and The Atlantic. She writes about design for The Guardian, The New York Times, Interior Design, and others, and has a blog called Homebodies about the people she visits. She taught her first residency through t&w this spring. www.liz-arnold.com  

Karen Benke is the author of Rip The Page! Adventures in Creative Writing (Shambhala, 2013) and a forthcoming book for tweens, Leap Write In! Adventures in Creative Writing to Stretch & Surprise Your One-of-a-Kind Mind (Shambhala, 2013), from which this writing experiment is excerpted. A California Poet in the Schools, visit her at www.karenbenke.com.  

Susan Buttenwieser is a teaching artist with Teachers & Writers Collaborative and with Community-Word Project; She also teaches creative writing workshops with incarcerated women. Her fiction has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and has appeared in Failbetter, Epiphany, Bound Off, and other publications.  

Anthony Calypso, a t&w teaching artist, is a writer, filmmaker, and actor from Nyack, New York. He has published short fiction and nonfiction essays in several publications including The Caribbean Writer and the anthology The Butterfly’s Way, edited by Edwidge Danticat, and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Calypso also teaches creative nonfiction at The New School.  

Merna Ann Hecht, storyteller, poet, and essayist, teaches creative writing and humanities at the University of Washington Tacoma. For the past nine years, she was a teaching artist for the Seattle Writers in the Schools program. Hecht directs a poetry project with immigrant and refugee youth. Her poems and essays appear in Kaleidoscope, The Storytelling Classroom, Drash: Northwest Mosaic, and other books and journals.  

Sarah LaBrie is a Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University. She taught creative writing and fantasy fiction as a t&w writer-in-residence to students at ps 110 Florence Nightingale School for the 2011–2012 school year.   

Jason Leahey’s fiction, nonfiction, and music journalism have appeared in literary journals, national and international magazines, and local and international newspapers. He has taught creative writing at New York University, where he earned an MFA, and through which he became a two-time Starworks Foundation Fellow, providing creative-writing therapy services at children’s hospitals across New York City and Long Island. After his mfa, Jason moved to Cambodia, where he wrote for the country’s English-language newspaper and taught English at a Buddhist monastery.  

Peter Markus, known in local classrooms as “Mr. Pete,” is a senior writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts Project in Detroit. He’s a poet and the author of the novel Bob, or Man on Boat (2008), as well as three books of short fiction, Good, Brother (2001), The Moon Is a Lighthouse (2003), and The Singing Fish (2006). A new book of stories, We Make Mud, was released in July 2011.   

Maya Pindyck, a T&W teaching artist, teaches critical writing and reading skills with Sponsors for Educational Opportunity, and is a former New York City Teaching Fellow. She is the author of Friend Among Stones, a collection of poems published by New Rivers Press, and the chapbook Locket, Master, which received a Poetry Society of America Chapbook Fellowship. Her poems have been widely published in such places as Poets and Artists, Sycamore Review, Bellingham Review, Mississippi Review, and Tusculum Review.   

Harriet Riley is a freelance writer and a writer-in-residence with wits Houston, working in inner-city elementary schools in Houston, Texas. She has taught undergraduate writing classes at the University of West Florida in Pensacola, and has also worked as a non-profit director, hospital marketing director, and newspaper reporter.   

Gary Earl Ross is a novelist, playwright, public radio essayist, and University at Buffalo professor. His books and plays include The Wheel of Desire, Shimmerville, Sleepwalker, Picture Perfect, Blackbird Rising, Murder Squared, and Matter of Intent, winner of the Edgar Award from Mystery Writers of America. He is a past board member of the Just Buffalo Literary Center, which sponsors adult workshops and readings, places writers in classrooms through Writing with Light, and brings international writers to western New York through its Babel program.  

Rachel M. Simon is the author of the poetry collections Theory of Orange and Marginal Road. She teaches writing, gender studies, and film courses at suny Purchase College, Pace University, Bedford Hills Prison, and Poets House.  

Norene Cashen Smith, a writer-in-residence with InsideOut Literary Arts in Detroit, is the contributing editor for the journal Dispatch Detroit and writes about literature and the arts for Detroit’s Metro Times. Her first collection of poems, The Reverse Is also True, was published by Doorjamb Press in 2007.  

Kanishk Tharoor is the Writers in the Public Schools Fellow at New York University. His fiction, which includes publications in the Virginia Quarterly Review and a Penguin India anthology, has won several prizes and been nominated for the National Magazine Award. With Teachers & Writers, he recently taught elementary school students in ps 110 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. 

I ask students to share from their image journals. Hands shoot up.

Prior to my arrival for my two-day writer’s residency at this tony Connecticut prep school, I had given the image journal assignment to the classroom teacher to share with the students.

My mandate is to help 8^th-graders deepen their short stories. I wanted to hit the ground running—with material from our lives that we could use to deepen our fiction.

These students’ lives seem buttressed by privilege, but sharing our images quickly bring us past external social markers.

One dark-haired boy begins reading from his image journal: “gold sneakers whose tongue glints in the sun.” An amber-haired girl reads from hers: “memories of scented candles.”

The images keep coming: “rough wooden bars,” “sticky red seat of train, “forsaken hat,” “hardens into a frown.” And coming:

“fresh grass”

“sun beating”

“empty court”

Then, suddenly, we are awash in images, the stuff of our lives.

Behind each of them I can sense a pulsing inner life.

“staring scoreboard”

“smell of imported Italian shoes”

I learn more about my students in these first few minutes of sharing from our image journals than I would, probably, in hours of conversation. (The classroom teacher suggests that these images could be used as the basis for personal essays.) The images are springboards to further revelations. The boy who shared the image of the gold sneakers volunteers that he avidly collects rare sneaker models. He recently took the train into the city to go to Sneakercon, an event held in a church basement of an outer borough of NYC. The girl who shared the memories of scented candles is an aspiring actress who chooses (against her parent’s wishes) to attend auditions after school, while her friends are playing soccer.

As I work with them, I discover that these digital natives have been raised on narratives of all kinds. They have no trouble generating plots. Their short stories jump and hurl through plot hoop after plot hoop. But what often feels missing in the narrative pyrotechnics are moments of stillness, of humanity. When I get home from teaching, I reread Charles Baxter’s great essay on the value of stillness in Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Baxter reminds us, “What’s remarkable is the degree to which Americans have distrusted silence and its parent condition, stillness.” He goes on to argue for the importance—even necessity—of stillness in making sense of narratives. [click here for an interview with Charles Baxter on "stillness."]

The resonant image—the wind in the trees, the clatter of dishes, the whirr of the refrigerator motor, the tattered lipstick case you can’t remember where you got—can oblige us to stop and listen for moment or two to others’ lives. And to our own lives.

Before we start running again.

-Sari Wilson

Sari Wilson is a T&W teaching artist and a creative writer who works in fiction, nonfiction, and comics.  You can read more about Sari here.

April brings us National Poetry Month,and to mark the
occasion the spring Issue of Teachers & Writers Magazine 
features three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry 
to the elementary, middle, and high school classroom.
Written by experienced teaching artists, these exercises offer suggestions for using contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from students. This week we feature Sarah Dohrmann’s exercise, inspired by Ross Gay’s poem, ”The Truth.”

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Three:

Because Poems:Teaching Ross Gay’s “The Truth”
to Middle and High School Students

Sarah Dohrmann

At the age of 14 my first “real” job was at Wendy’s. I worked the potato ovens for several weeks until I burned my hand badly. I was then switched over to cashier, but when my drawer was forty bucks short one day, I was demoted to sweeping up the dining area. This presented another problem in the form of a school nemesis who’d come into the restaurant, order French fries, sit in the dining room, and toss her fries one-by-one onto the floor so she could watch me sweep each one with a broom into a long-handled dustpan that I could never seem to hold right.

At the same time I worked at Wendy’s, my family was about nine years into a disperate attempt to patch itself together after my mother’s death. The patching process is still underway these thirty-odd years later, because recovery is slow when no one talks about loss. We prefer to mime our way through innuendo and pain, making our non-actions as weighted and important as anything we might actually say or do.

Perhaps it’s my personal background, then, that first drew me to Ross Gay’s poem “The Truth”, which appears in his first collection, called Against Which:

The Truth

          Ross Gay

Because he was 38, because this
was his second job, because
he had two daughters, because his hands
looked like my father’s, because at 7
he would walk to the furniture warehouse,
unload trucks ‘til 3 AM, because I
was fourteen and training him, because he made
$3.75 an hour, because he had a wife
to look in the face, because
he acted like he respected me,
because he was sick and would not call out
I didn’t blink when the water
dropped from his nose
into the onion’s perfectly circular
mouth on the Whopper Jr.
I coached him through preparing.
I did not blink.
Tell me this didn’t happen.
I dare you.

(From Against Which by Ross Gay (CavanKerry Press, Ltd. 2006). Reprinted by permission of the publisher.)

Like all poems we choose to teach, Gay’s poem moved me. It moved me not because of what the narrator chooses to do, but because of what he chooses not to do. I liked that it is a humble reflection, and that the narrator made a choice that others may not approve of. And I liked the repetition of the word “because,” how it lilted me along until I came to a full-stop of truth. Naturally I also liked that the narrator is fourteen years old, working at a fast food restaurant just like I once did—only this narrator is the better version of me, the less narcissistic one capable of thinking beyond his own discomforts while he works at a job he probably doesn’t love.

The youngest age group I’ve taught “The Truth” to is eighth grade. Children are often asked to reflect upon what they did over the summer, but rarely are they able to write their way to a truth that may cast them in an unfavorable light. So often I overhear angry and self-righteous people talking to their friends and loved ones on city streets and in subway cars, telling everyone how they sure did show that guy or how it’s the last time that sucker will mess with them. That kind of thing. Sometimes I feel like I’m walking through a world in which everyone—myself included—is feeling awfully proud for being such a tough guy.

When I teach this poem, I want my students to think deeply about a time when they were not the tough guy. I want them to focus humbly not upon what they said or did, but instead on what they didn’t say or do. What’s more, I want them to narrow this non-action down to a gesture, to something that may not have been noticeable to an onlooker. I want them to think of a time they showed deep compassion for another, or maybe like me in the case of my mother’s death, they chose not to speak about something very important because they felt afraid. I want their poems to be quiet.

I ask my students what word is used most frequently in “The Truth.” I then ask them why it is a person would keep repeating himself: Because he wasn’t heard the first time around? Because what he’s saying is important? Because he’s trying to explain himself clearly? What does the repetition of the word “because” have to do with the title of the poem? How did he come to the truth? I tell students to mimic Gay’s structure if they like—to repeat the word “because” in order to lilt yourself downward toward your truth, using it as a means to peel back the translucent, barely detectable reasons amassed to justify a non-action. At the end of these layers I ask students to reveal the core of their Because Poem, their truth. (It should be noted that Because Poems could also work as an excellent starter for asking students to write a reflective essay.)

After the first read, “The Truth” speaks only to a few teenagers. Some students can’t get past how gross it is that the narrator said nothing about the man’s “water” dripping from his nose into the burger. They say the narrator should’ve been fired and somebody should’ve called the health officials. I agree that a guy’s dripping “water” is unsanitary, but why’d the narrator not even blink when it happened? What do we know about the two characters in the poem? Why does Gay choose language like “he had a wife to look in the face”? I mean, why not just say the guy had a wife who expected him to support the family? High school kids know very well the difference between a 14-year-old fast food manager and a 38-year-old man who’s got real responsibilities like a wife and two kids and two jobs. They know what it means to have to look somebody in the face. They know it cuts deeper.

“The Truth” can cut deep. When I ask students to think humbly about their own lives, there are often only a few takers. Many students can’t help but make their poems into another opportunity to list this reason they did that thing and that reason they didn’t do this other thing, until they’ve written themselves into a tizzy with no real end. But some students are able to use this writing as a way to come to a quiet truth. When these students write, they are writing about the most interior parts of their lives, the parts they’d prefer, maybe, to hide even from themselves. They write about not passing important tests, disappointing others, breaking up with lovers, fighting with friends, and not always coming out the winner. In short, they write about real life.

Untitled

Travis J.

Because he had a beef with my friends
Because he had a fight with my friend
Because he chose me out of everyone to pull a knife on
Because I woke up the next day not in a good mood
Because when I approached him in breakfast to speak about the situation, he disrespected me
Because even though I left him alone, he had the nerve to still talk about me
Because I got tired of hearing his mouth run on and on
Because he was trynna humiliate me in public
Because I snapped and made his mouth stop running for a while to come
Because I should have just went to class instead of making my biggest mistake ever
Because I turned into a person completely out of character
Because the shy and quiet shell that covered me for so long finally cracked
Because he continued to embarrass me and broke the shell completely
Because my friends were there and I felt as if I had to prove myself
Because I stopped and tipped my peak
Because he swung and tried to hit me
Because I swung back and actually hit him and my anger was being unfair and wouldn’t let me stop
Because of all that…
I ended up in hell for three months.

Tragedy

Ben P.

Because when I saw her on the street with another guy
she looked like she wasn’t doing anything wrong
Because maybe she thought she could fool me with anything
Because she thought it was okay to go out with another guy
Because she actually looked happy when she was with the guy
I could only stand under the streetlight
with my broken heart
looking at her from far away.

Why I Wanted to Cry

Rosemary O.

Because you were seven years old
and couldn’t do subtraction
Because I was failing you
and letting you fail
second grade
Because I took every mistake personally
Because I had number lines,
buttons,
and flashcards
and I let you count on your fingers
Because there are only
so many ways to explain
that subtraction
means getting smaller.
I asked you what
four minus two
was
You looked at me
like I had kicked a puppy
And answered,
“Seven?”

Sarah Dohrmann was a teaching artist for Teachers & Writers Collaborative for ten years before becoming its education director,  and has been teaching creative writing in Special Programs at Sarah Lawrence College since 2003. She has been awarded a Jerome Foundation Travel and Study Grant,  a New York Foundation for the Arts Award in Nonfiction Literature,  and a Fulbright Fellowship. With photographer Tiana Markova-Gold,  Sarah won the 2010 Dorothea Lange-Paul Taylor Prize from the Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University for their joint project on prostitution in Morocco. Also in 2010,  she was a finalist for both the Iowa Award in Fiction and the Iowa Award in Nonfiction.

April brings us National Poetry Month,
and to mark the occasion the spring Issue of
Teachers & Writers Magazine features
three exciting new exercises for bringing poetry
to the elementary, middle, and high school
classroom. Written by experienced teaching artists,
these exercises offer suggestions for using
contemporary poems to inspire fresh writing from
students. This week we feature Bushra Rehman’s
exercise, inspired by the poems of Ishle Yi Park.

Three Classroom Writing Exercises for National Poetry Month
Two:

Rosebuds Folded Over in Sleep:
Teaching the Sonnets of Ishle Yi Park to High School Students

Bushra Rehman

 “Peer closer: a soul and a soul. He folds over her like a rosebud in sleep.”
 ~ Ishle Yi Park

How to bring a love of sonnets to my high school students? Easy. I was a student, once upon a time in the old hip-hop life of Queens, and I am armed with sonnets so fierce that whenever I’ve taught them, students are unable to resist. I teach the work of Ishle Yi Park, a Korean-American woman who was a touring cast member of Def Poetry Jam and whose book, The Temperature of This Water, was the winner of the pen America Beyond Margins Award. The poems I teach are drawn from Angel & Hannah: A Love Story in Sonnets, published alongside Park’s performance in the 2006 Hip Hop Theater Festival. They center on what is still forbidden for most students: interracial teenage love.

As the sound of a fight on a playground makes the ground electric, Park’s poems shock and excite students, spur them to keep reading. Her sonnets trace the trajectory of love between Angel, a Puerto Rican boy from Brooklyn and Hannah, a Korean-American girl from Queens. I prefer to teach the entire book, but when short on time, I choose the following three poems as touchstones: “Quinceañera Sonnet,” “Wind Sonnet,” and “Gold Hoop Sonnet.”  ( “Quinceañera Sonnet,” “Wind Sonnet,” and “Gold Hoop Sonnet” all reprinted with permission of Ishle Yi Park)  

Quinceañera Sonnet

On Friday nights, Karin & Hannah drink Old Es

on a peeling bench at 109th Street Park,

til an amber, foamy buzz blurs the dark edges of night.

They watch boys shoot hoops like lean,

heartless seraphim and test chain-linked swings,

Nike soles pointed towards heaven,

towards star-shaped leaves. Sometimes, she

wonders why they spend 
long hours preening like two peacocks,

shadows huge on an abandoned playground.

But tonight is Tasha’s sweet fifteen

in St. Mary’s church basement. Hannah licks her lips,

draws on scarlet liner. She puckers.

Paints herself darker, more dangerous: 

a girl who can scar in the shape of a Kiss.

I’ve taught this sonnet to high school students from Oakland to Queens. In the conversations that follow, the more worldly students explain the meaning of Old Es. This always leads to much laughter and the “aha” of why the night is becoming amber and foamy. Others explain the importance of Quinceañeras in a girl’s life. We find references to heaven, look up the word seraphim, and discuss the enchanted feeling of the night.

Park’s language is uniquely her own, her vision of the urban world one of living, breathing magic. In “Wind Sonnet,” Park infuses Bushwick, Brooklyn, with Technicolor surrealism. Students feel the thrill of decoding her imagery: the flags like teeth, the grains of light.

Wind Sonnet

June. Grains of light sift over Wyckoff 
Avenue,
dusting strollers shoved

by thick-hipped mamís with slick, gelled hair.

Tattered triangular flags blow and click

like sharp teeth above all heads. 

Angel struts, clasping Hannah’s fingers.

A cool wind ripples his undershirt,

dares to lift her skirt. Young fools with easy

grins, they stroll loose-hipped down Hart Street,

say wassup to boys ribboning Dee’s

Phat Beatz, Sal’s pizzeria. 

Young street king and queen; everyone knows

his name: mira Angel y la China, 

they hiss. The two own the block, 

walk straight into a hot wind.

In the third of Park’s poems I show my students, “Gold Hoop Sonnet,” Park provides an essential moment of self-love, and as long as gold hoops are in style (forever) this poem will sing to teenage girls who understand.

Gold Hoop Sonnet

One day she will be brave enough

to venture away from those typical gold hoops,

from parroting her mean friend’s laughter, or 
sitting on the stoop

for hours, trying to look half-fly/half-tough,

sucking on a sour apple Blow Pop,

listening to the boom box’s latest version of bad hip-hop… one day 

she will look at her rough, scarred face

in the compact mirror without her Mac eyeliner and stop

hating those young, haunted eyes.

I hope a slant of gold light will hit her cheek

just right, and it may come as a surprise

to her how fine she really is. Fabulous. Sleek

Soulful—full of her own juju and mystique…

a rose fury! Black lightning when she hits the street.

Students are hooked. I remind them they are reading the dreaded sonnet. They disbelieve. I show them the 14-line pattern, rhyme schemes, iambic pentameter. We count syllables, label rhymes, and discuss how Park’s sonnets weave loosely through the forms, Petrarchan, Spenserian, Shakespearean, both celebrating and shunning the form’s limitations.

Finally, I ask students to imagine a moment of intense feeling, whether it is desire, loneliness, hatred, or awakening. I have them spend a little time entering this moment. Then I ask them to write, not directly about the emotion, but about their surroundings, to give place details, such as the ones Ishle Yi Park used to describe 109th Street Park, and to imbue these details with the chosen feeling through original metaphors and description. Students have the option to write in sonnet or sonnet-inspired form.

The blessing of writing with youth is that they sometimes just need to be given permission. Ask them to write something strange, funny, and unique, and they will.

Bushra Rehman is co-editor of Colonize This! Young Women of Color on Today’s Feminism,  a seminal text on women of color and feminism.  Her poems have been featured on BBC Radio 4,  KPFA,  the Brian Lehrer Show,  and in The New York Times,  India Currents,  and New York Newsday. Her book of short stories,  Bhangra Blowout,  is forthcoming through Upset Press.