Foster Dickson's Blog, page 47
April 1, 2019
“Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote”
We hear it around this time every year, that TS Eliot called April “the cruellest month” in the opening lines of “The Wasteland,” a Modernist poem of marked difficulty that few people who quote that line actually read. The reason that it comes up this time of year, of course, is that April is National Poetry Month.
National Poetry Month is our annual reminder that poetry isn’t dead, as some cultural critics have proposed in recent decades. Personally, I don’t think that poetry is dead. In fact, I don’t even think it’s all that bad off, considering our omni-mediated world where audiences of most art forms are splintered into small subcultures. However, there is enough serious concern about its vitality and popularity for the now-tired internal squabble to be argued over and over by its supporters and the practitioners. Still not knowing the answer after writing and reading all those essays for each other, the institutional types always seem to have some program or project that will redirect our attention to poetry, and many of those programs fall back onto the modern cultural curator’s tactic of choice: asking teachers to push it on schoolchildren. They do this not out of any malice or disrespect, but instead hoping that the art form can procure a fresh start with a new generation— and unfortunately ensuring that April will continue to be the cruellest month.
Yet, please don’t take from my comments that I don’t want poetry in schools. I do. Very much. However, I don’t want for schools to be the only places that have poetry. (Let’s be honest that many bookstores can’t even be depended upon for this, while ex-Trump staffers, emergent presidential candidates, and TV personalities gobble up book-buying dollars.) I also don’t want for April to be the only time that poetry is a significant feature in American education— or in American society!
Poetry does needs to be in schools . . . and in parks, and in restaurants, and in bus terminals, and in doctor’s office waiting rooms, and on billboards, and on TV, and in the movies— all of the places that visual art, music, dance, and drama are! Yet, poetry will only be in those places if we do more than just teach poetry in schools. Poetry has to come alive in daily settings, or it will remain something academic. We’ll be able to stop debating over poetry’s demise not when it appears more frequently in curricula, but when walking-around folks quote poets like they quote movies.
Schools are good places to hedge your bets, if you’re pushing poetry, but that can’t be it. My own roots in poetry were planted during school, but not because of any special annual program. In my junior year of high school, I was captivated by a theatrical performance of Spoon River Anthology, for which I built one of the tombstones in the graveyard set, and when assigned to write an analysis paper on a poet, I was allowed by the open-minded Mr. Clayton to choose the lyrics of Jimi Hendrix as my topic. During my senior year, our English teacher Mrs. Sells assigned us to memorize and recite the Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English, and though I remember struggling to comprehend the nuances of a language that was a precursor to mine, I also remember hearing and feeling the rhythm in the Middle English lines. Moreover, long before Eliot, Chaucer declared not that April was cruel, but that it was the time to get outside after the winter had faded, when the green and chirping beauty of new life was emerging: “Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote,” he wrote— “When in April the sweet showers fall.” That was something a seventeen-year-old Southern boy could understand, even in the fall of 1991, six hundred years after Chaucer’s death.
Twenty-three years later, in 2014, after earning two literary degrees, doing lots of writing, and spending ten years in the classroom, I caught sight of one of those poetry-themed essay in The Atlantic that I have continued to read, re-read, and reference, in part because its common-sense approach to poetry in schools comes from an actual high school teacher who is a writer too. Among the insightful remarks in Andrew Simmons’ “Why Teaching Poetry Is So Important” comes this one:
In an education landscape that dramatically deemphasizes creative expression in favor of expository writing and prioritizes the analysis of non-literary texts, high school literature teachers have to negotiate between their preferences and the way the wind is blowing. That sometimes means sacrifice, and poetry is often the first head to roll.
He’s right – also about how all teachers won’t be Mr. Keating in Dead Poets Society – but in the English 12 class that I teach, we swim in poetry. Unlike Simmons’ description of his own class, where “students have read nearly 200,000 words for my class [but] poems have accounted for no more than 100,” my students hardly read any prose until the third nine-weeks when we reach Frankenstein. Until then it is “Beowulf” and “The Seafarer” followed by Chaucer, Marlowe, Herrick, Donne, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Keats, with the only prose reprieve being a few of Malory’s Arthur stories and the factual/biographical sketches of the poets. After Frankenstein, it’s more poetry: Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Eliot, and Dylan Thomas. And though it is necessary to get somewhat pedantic to help 21st-century high-schoolers with these poets’ cultural underpinnings, my ultimate goal is teaching them what poetry is by hearing the poems out loud, recognizing archetypal images and symbols, and looking to a poem’s form for insight on its function. Then, they will leave here with the ability to consider individual poems, any poems, old or new, in school or out of it.
Of course, I have students who are reticent, even resistant to poetry. There are students who only want me to tell them what it means so they can write what I say on the test and be correct. I can respect that. Despite being one of a few in my own high school classes who enjoyed poems, there are things I don’t care about, like video games. But I still won’t exempt them from the work, in part because Alabama’s course of study says this is what we’re doing, but also because leaving high school without understanding poetry will likely mean that it will never be a part of their lives . . . not in a society that relegates it to small venues and small presses.
Personally, I admire the perseverance and fortitude of poetry professionals who doggedly refuse to accept mainstream America’s incipient conclusions about poetry’s oncoming death, which are not declared by force of edict but through spending and consumption habits. (My son told me not long ago that people have spent fourteen billion hours playing Roblox over the last ten years. And to be candid, if I spent on poetry what I spend on craft beer, I’d probably be better off.) However, I also have to question the wisdom of continuing to use schools as the main mechanism for trying to get poetry into more places than just schools. Come April, instead of seeing more poetry resources for my students, I’d be glad to see a series of poetry PSAs on network TV during prime time or poetry ads on million-follower YouTube channels. I’d like to see a poet on the cover of an April Rolling Stone or as one of Jimmy Fallon’s guests. Say what you want to about the 1996 movie Romeo + Juliet with Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes, but that movie brought Shakespeare, who wrote in verse, to a lot of people. Poets, teachers ,and professors need to keep on doing what we do, but a more common-man approach in April might just expand poetry’s audience beyond the students who are required to attend the reading for course credit and the walk-ons hoping for an open mic and an on-the-spot evaluation of a spiral notebook.
March 29, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Field Trips to Nowhere”
[image error]As our bus rolled down rural Highway 14, which sprawls loosely between Selma, Alabama and the iconic Sprott Post Office, we passed the sign for Hamburg, the tiny farming community where Mary Ward Brown wrote her brilliant stories and memoir, and I tried to apprise the busload of students of it. The few who heard me over the roar of the charter bus turned their heads vaguely as we passed the inauspicious left turn. A few then looked back at me, waiting for more, while others told their classmates who hadn’t heard me what I’d just said. It was hard to teach in such a setting, but I tried anyway.
We had just visited the Edmund Pettus Bridge, where I had my students start on the downtown Selma side and walk the arc of the bridge so they could get a physical sense how the marchers in 1965 could not see the small army of state troopers on the other side until it was too late to turn back. After a brief stop in the visitors center, they also got to browse the low-slung lobby of the supposedly haunted St. James Hotel and peer into the lush, dark courtyard at the center of that pre-Civil War structure. Now, we were rolling down a two-lane back road, moving further northwest into Alabama’s Black Belt.
March 28, 2019
#throwbackthursday: Lillian E. Smith Center, 2010
In the woods around the Lillian E. Smith Center
in Clayton, Georgia, with artist Robert Fichter, 2010.
(photo by Tommye Scanlin)
March 27, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “Eudaemonia”
[image error]Though I certainly don’t eschew enjoyment or joy or fun or leisure, I seldom consider whether I’m happy. At least not in the way that Pharrell Williams sings about in his pop hit “Happy,” whose message I don’t love: do what feels good to you. My kids dial up that two minutes of clap-along subjectivism on the iPod in my truck sometimes, and I am reminded of these interminable suit-yourself messages. (I’d be a lot happier listening to The Band or The Allman Brothers Band or Widespread Panic, personally.)
March 26, 2019
Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige
In the final paragraph of The New South, 1945 – 1980: The Story of the South’s Modernization, historian Numan V. Bartley wrote an epitaph for the well-intentioned post-Civil Rights Sunbelt South of the 1970s. The book was published in 1995, so Bartley could remark with the benefit of hindsight that the new service economy had resulted in mostly low-wage jobs that were picked up by women and blacks, while “corporate and professional people prospered.” What Bartley described at the end of his book was the South of my childhood, an urbanized, post-movement culture foraging around its crumbling foundations.
[image error]In the South of the 1980s, Bartley wrote, “social developments wreaked havoc on traditional southern folk culture.” By the time I began the first grade, in the fall of 1980, the shifts had already occurred. George Wallace had one more gubernatorial term in him, but with Reagan’s presidential victory, the days of the conservative “Solid South” Democrat were basically over. At the dawn of cable TV, our dads still had and used leather-working kits, but they were a novelty, not something we needed. Without fail, each fall and spring, us kids were taken to an array of folksy outdoor festivals where craftspeople sold their homemade wares, and in preparation for Sunday supper, we were dragged to the curb markets where our mothers and grandmothers bought homegrown vegetables. For us, it was the heyday of the Atari 2600 and Toys ‘R Us, yet we were expected to be excited about playing with wood-carved rubber-band guns and diligent about shelling a bag-full of blackeyed peas. The times, they had already a-changed.
Bartley was also right about the prosperity that came from working a service job for a corporation. My father worked a blue-collar job with the telephone company (AT&T/South Central Bell/BellSouth) from 1966 until 2008, and when my mother went to work in 1984, she became an office manager for Franklin Life Insurance, which later became part of now-infamous AIG— “too big to fail.” Those jobs allowed my parents to enjoy ascendant middle-class benefits like private school for their sons and a week at the beach every summer. What was lost, however, were the homespun ways of their youth, the ones they tried to share with us. We had a foot in two worlds: the old one that necessitated personal interaction and hands-on labor to overcome daily obstacles, and the new one whose conveniences allowed bouts of laziness, neglect, and indolence.
Just as the newly modernized South of the 1970s and ’80s confused our parents as to how daily life should work and where boundaries should be drawn, my generation is now struggling with new issues of the same sort. My parents never wondered whether to limit screen time or sugar intake. If my dad wanted to watch TV, the video games got turned off so he could. My mother went to the grocery store on Saturdays, and if we ate all of the Fruit Rollups in a day, they were gone until the next Saturday. If somebody was talking on the phone, anyone else who called got a busy signal and had to wait. There were no questions of appropriateness and manners; those were already answered. By contrast, this world of options and availability, of scrolling and choosing, of swiping left and blocking and un-friending is less like the South of the past and more like existentialism gone wild!
Our children are growing up in a world where a person with access to technology doesn’t have to face, endure, or even experience anything that they find unappealing or inconvenient. As parents my age enjoy the privilege of ordering groceries and Christmas gifts online, downloading apps and movies and music, and making reservations and arrangements quickly, our children have “learned” that transactions occur conveniently and that human contact can be avoided. Talking to another person face-to-face has become a “folk culture” thing to do— which is a major problem in a place with that built its new incarnation on a corporate service economy.
These days, I regularly lament the loss of good service. For example, the other day, I called my neighborhood pizzeria to order dinner. The young man on the phone was pleasant enough, but at the end of our conversation, when I said, “Thank you,” he replied, “Mm-hmm.” And when I said,” Goodbye,” he hung up without a word. That’s not service. Service is more than writing down what I want and giving it to the kitchen. The food was the reason I came, but service should be the reason I’m glad I came.
If we’re going to have this service economy, catering to beach-goers passing through and tourists mulling over lynching sites and truckers carrying goods north out of New Orleans and Mobile, we need that classically Southern folk-culture know-how. A person can’t provide service if he only looks up from his cell phone long enough to tell customers, “Use the kiosk over there.” We need not to lose that “How y’all doin’?” and we darn sure need to get back to “Thank y’all for coming, and have a good day now.” It just makes a difference.
“Dirty Boots: A Column of Critical Thinking, Border Crossing, and Noblesse Oblige” posts will be published regularly on Tuesday afternoons.
To read recent posts, click the date below:
Or to find and read earlier posts, click here for a full list.
March 25, 2019
A Moveable Feast: Vegetable Beds for a Rebirthed #schoolgarden
*If you haven’t already, you should read the previous post, “A Moveable Feast: The Rebirth of a #schoolgarden.”
It seems that my “rebirthed” school garden is almost up and ready. On a Tuesday morning, over spring break, I met the tractor man and showed him where to till up the soil that will be our vegetable beds for A Moveable Feast. That morning, he cut in two 10′ x 30′ tracts, and after he did his work, I did mine, covering them with plastic to warm up the soil and choke out the weeds. When we get back, we’ll see which students are ready to play in the dirt.
These two tracts will be a great improvement over our previous situation. By comparison, the old school garden at the Union Street Campus had six 8′ x 4′ raised beds, which gave 192 square feet of growing space. These two tracts, at 300 square feet each, will give us just over triple that amount of space.
March 24, 2019
Congratulations to the Winners in “What’s Old Is New”!
Congratulations to the winners in the F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald Museum’s annual Literary Contest!
Grade 9 – 10:
Anandita Abraham, “Breaking News”
Grade 11 – 12:
Nathan Phuong, “Six Raps for The Scarlet Letter“
Grade 11 – 12 Honorable Mention:
Madison Lazenby, “I Wanted An Older Sister So Badly”
Undergraduate:
Eliza Browning, “What Floats Between Us”
This year’s theme was “What’s Old Is New,” to honor the centennial of this daring and revolutionary couple’s first meeting in Montgomery, Alabama. The Fitzgeralds’ literary and artistic works from the 1920s and 1930s are still regarded as groundbreaking, and The Fitzgerald Museum is pleased to honor these young writers as daring and revolutionary writers of their generation.
The contest, which is open to high school students and college undergraduates, received submissions from around the United States and from overseas. Our four honorees attend schools in Indiana, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Malaysia. The three grade-level winners will receive a monetary prize, and all four will have their winning works published on the Fitzgerald Museum’s website.
For more information about the contest, visit the webpage on the Fitzgerald Museum website. Guidelines for next year’s contest will be posted in the fall.
March 23, 2019
Lazy Afternoon Reruns: “A Terrible Fisherman’s Summers at the Lake”
[image error]Standing on the floating dock and looking down through about eight feet of water at the bottom where they’re swimming, I am sure that the catfish are laughing at me. As best as I can judge, the three that are wriggling past my hot-dog-baited hook are about as long as my forearm. They must know that I find them delicious, they might be able to tell from my expression that I was picturing them fried up with a side of tartar sauce and a cold beer, and they may also have heard from around that I am a terrible fisherman. Those frolicking fish probably know they are safe.
March 22, 2019
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Just Wait”
This poem was written just over ten years ago, in February 2009. The poem itself is fairly blunt, though its title is a play on words. The admonition, “Just wait,” is a common one, though the words have multiple meanings. The word just can mean only, and also fair, as in justice; and the word wait means to pause for something that’s coming, but its homonym weight has other connotations, some negative, some positive. Thus, if the title were read as “the weight that comes from justice,” the poem will take on a different meaning than if it were read as the admonition. Ultimately, the poem is about recognizing that what we often regard as low may be more important than what we regard highly.
Just Wait
I’ve never seen a mighty angel’s feet
tread on this earth. However, the green growth
of a living God’s mightiest sprinklings sprout
from under the filthiest furrowed ruts.
With one finger, I have pushed down small seeds,
silent, steadfast, sturdy, into a few
inches of dirt and deadness, and witnessed
later the brilliant, blooming result. God
does answer prayers, He does love life, and all
things are sacred, even those we pass over
as decaying.
About ten years ago, I all but quit submitting poems to literary magazines and began sharing a few here. To read previous (Unpublished) #Poem posts, each with its own mini-introduction, click on the title below:
(Unpublished) #Poem: “I should’ve been George Willard.”
(Unpublished) #Poem: a haiku series
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Don’t Nobody Even Like You”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Yes, I Know”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “They Come, Growling”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Lost Things”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Taking Root”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Sabbatical”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Southern Soil”
(Unpublished) #Poem: [Untitled]
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Reading Kenko”
(Unpublished) #Poem: “Curb Market, Saturday Morning”
March 21, 2019
#throwbackthursday: March 21, 1965
It was 54 years ago today that the Selma-to-Montgomery March began in earnest, after two other attempts earlier that month. This time, a court order from Judge Frank M. Johnson, Jr. and 3,000 federal troops helped them along. However, not to be outdone completely, the Alabama legislature passed a resolution “urging all residents of Alabama to stay away.” The resolution, which was quoted on the front page of the Montgomery Advertiser, advised that “the tension created could result in violence and bloodshed,” proffered a course of action that would “show the world that Alabamians are a law abiding and peace loving people.”
