The Cloister Walk (9 page)

But one of the Australian sisters insists that Benedictines “be willing to admit to the angelic charism. The best thing we can do,” she says, “is to praise.” I tell the story of a monk I know who dreamed one night that armed men in uniform had entered the abbey church, and when he tried to stop them from approaching the altar, they shot him. As he lay by the altar, he saw Christ standing before him. “Am I dead?” the monk asked, and Christ nodded and answered, gravely, “Yes.” “Well, what do I do now?” the monk inquired, and Christ shrugged and said, “I guess you should go back to choir.”

The laughter comes as blessing; women, youthful and aged, with nubile limbs and thick, unsteady ankles, graceful, busy hands and gnarled fingers slowed by arthritis, making a joyful noise. Our talk is light-hearted, easy as we clear the table.

So that we might sing vespers together, one sister has brought booklets that her home community devised for “Evening Praise, Common of Monastic Women.” Its cover is filled with their names: Scholastica, Walburga, Hildegard, Mechtild, Gertrude, Lioba, Julian, Hilda. The antiphon is from the Song of Songs: “Set me as a seal on your heart, for love is stronger than death.”

Our reading is from Gertrude, a recasting of the ceremony of monastic profession: “I profess, and to my last breath I shall profess it, that both in body and soul, in everything, whether in prosperity or adversity, you provide for me in the way that is most suitable . . . with the one and uncreated wisdom, my sweetest God, reaching from end to end mightily and ordering all things sweetly.”

I am pleasantly distracted by the echo from “O Wisdom,” one of the antiphons I am just learning to sing, that we will be singing in choir a month from now.
All things, sweetly.
I find my place in the booklet as our leader intones, “Jesus called them away to be alone with him.” To be alone with Jesus is something I can hardly fathom, but the words we sing in response are words that have in some sense been realized in these holy women, past and present. I am aware of a difference between us, although we share in some sense a monastic call; maybe it is our very differences that have drawn us together to celebrate Gertrude tonight. “They arose and went to the mountain,” we sing, identifying ourselves with the disciples at the Transfiguration: “They went to be alone with him, and when they raised their eyes, they saw no one but Jesus.”

—Eavan Boland, OBJECT LESSONS

—John Keats

A strange thing happens when I enter an elementary school classroom as a visiting artist, to read some poetry and eventually get the kids to write. It has much less to do with me as an individual than with the power of poetry, and may also be a side effect of the simple fact that I come to the children knowing very little about them. With me, they are suddenly handed a fresh slate. But no matter if the school is rich or poor, in the country, a suburb, or city, I've found that the kids that the teacher might have described as “good students” will inevitably write acceptable but unexceptional poems and stories. The breathtaking poems come from left field, as it were, from bad students, the ones the teachers will say don't usually participate well in classroom activities.

One day, when I was engaged with fifth-graders in a working-class neighborhood in North Dakota, I glanced down at a boy's paper and saw the words “My Very First Dad,” and that alerted me that something very personal, very deep was going on. I no longer remember what my assignment had been, but I know it was nothing as invasive as “write a poem about someone in your family.” Most likely it was an open-ended challenge to work with similes. Given the freedom to write about anything at all, this boy had chosen to write about his “very first dad,” and while I left him alone to work it out, I did have several conversations with him. He was pleased, and surprised, when I pointed out to him that his similes were so good they had quickly led him into the deeper realm of metaphor. He'd written of his father: “I remember him/like God in my heart, I remember him in my heart/like the clouds overhead, /and strawberry ice cream and bananas/when I was a little kid. But the most I remember/is his love,/as big as Texas/when I was born.”

The boy said, rather proudly, that he had been born in Texas, but otherwise told me nothing of his story. It was his stunned teacher who filled me in. She said things that did not surprise me, given my previous experience as an artist-in-residence—“He's not a good student, he tries, but he's never done anything like this before”—but then she told me that the boy had never known his father; he'd skipped town on the day he was born.

Oddly enough, hearing this was gratifying. Just a poet's presence in that classroom, on behalf of similes and metaphors (officially, to justify my presence in terms recognized by the educational establishment, that's what I was “teaching”), had allowed this boy to tell the adults in his life—his teacher, his mom, his stepfather— something they need to know, that a “very first dad” looms large in his psyche. Like God in his heart, to quote the poem, a revelation from the depths of this boy's soul.

There are no prescriptions, no set of rules that will produce a poem like this; no workshop could teach a method that would replicate exactly what went on between me and the students in that room. But I have some idea as to how and why it happened. A teacher once told me that having an artist come to her classroom was like letting a cat in—and I'll risk a bad pun by saying that I think it's more like dropping a catalyst into a chemical solution in order to stimulate a reaction.

What
is
happening in that classroom, when the poet acts as a catalyst? Well, first of all, before I ask students to write, we always have a long discussion about rules. I tell them that for this adventure of writing poetry, we can suspend many of the normal rules for English class. No, you don't have to write within the margins; no, you don't have to look a word up in the dictionary to make sure you're spelling it right—we'll do that later. For now just write the word the way you think it's spelled so you don't interrupt the flow of writing; you can print or use cursive (that's a
big
issue in third grade); you can doodle on your paper; you can scratch things out (here I show them my own rough drafts, so they can see that I mean it); you can write anonymously or even make up a name for yourself as a poet.

If you're really stuck, I tell them, you can collaborate and work on a poem with someone else who's also stuck. This means you can
talk
in the classroom, so long as you don't disturb your neighbor. As we're working, I often have to reassure a student that it's all right not to finish a poem if you really can't. You can let it sit for a while and maybe come back to it, or maybe not. And if you really get carried away by an assignment, it's all right not to go on to my next one—just keep going with what you're doing,
take your time.
(Often, by this time the students are looking at me gratefully but a bit warily, wondering if they've fallen into the hands of a lunatic.)

We talk about the ways this kind of writing differs from learning spelling or math, where there are right and wrong answers. I tell the kids that in what we'll be doing, there
is
no one right answer, not even a right way or wrong way to do it. And if, in a particular writing assignment, I do suggest some rules to follow, I always say, if you can think of a way to break these rules and still come out with a really good poem—go right ahead. I see this as a way to get beyond paying lip service to children's creativity and encouraging them to practice it. By now the good students may be feeling lost. They're often kids who have beaten the system, who have become experts at following the rules in order to get a good grade. And now, maybe for the first time, they're experiencing helplessness at school, because the boundaries have shifted; without rules to follow, they're not sure how to proceed. They may sulk, or even cry, although they usually come around and have a good time.

But it's the other students, the bad students, the little criminals, who often have a form of intelligence that is not much rewarded in school, who are listening most attentively. It's these kids, for whom helplessness and frustration are the norm at school, and often in life—maybe their mom's boyfriend got drunk and abusive the night before—who take to poetry like ducklings to water. And sometimes, as with that fifth-grade boy, they find that adopting a poetic voice can be a revelation. It's as if they're free to speak with their true voice for the very first time. It is always a gift—to the teacher, the class, and to me—to have a child lead us into the heart of poetry. That boy spoke to our own loneliness and exile and reminded us that our everyday world is more mysterious than we know: who would have guessed that an ordinary boy, in an ordinary classroom in North Dakota, was walking around with a love, and a loss, as big as Texas in his heart?

Often, when I'm working in an elementary classroom, my mind pitches back to my own school days. I enjoyed school wholeheartedly until third grade. My mother was an elementary-school teacher, and that may have helped me develop early on a sense of what was expected of me, and the confidence that I could learn new things. Then, as we moved from adding and subtracting to multiplying and dividing, I had my first taste of failure. I'd grown used to counting on my fingers and panicked when the numbers became so big so fast, literally untouchable. I became enormously frustrated trying to grasp concepts that remained tantalizingly out of reach. I still excelled at English and found spelling easy. But I began to fall behind in math.

One day, in fourth grade, I had an epiphany about the nature of numbers, and a peculiar taste of otherness—the unmistakable sense that I'd seen something that my teacher, and the other students, could not see. My teacher that year prided herself on being tough. She had warned us on the very first day of school that she expected us to work, and to work hard. That was fine with me; I wanted to learn. As I was one of the better students in English, however, my teacher seemed unable to forgive me for being so backward in mathematics. I believe she thought that if she pressured me enough, even ridiculed me from time to time, I would simply apply myself and learn. Thus, one day, in exasperation at some muddle I'd made with a math problem on the blackboard, an experience that always terrified me, she grabbed my chalk, solved the problem, and said, in a sarcastic voice, “You see, it's simple, as simple as two plus two is always four.”

And, without thinking, I said, “That can't be.” Suddenly, I was sure that two plus two could not possibly
always
be four. And, of course, it isn't. In Boolean algebra, two plus two can be zero, in base three, two plus two is eleven. I had stumbled onto set theory, a truth about numbers that I had no language for. As this was the early 1950s, my teacher had no language for it either, and she and the class had a good laugh over my ridiculous remark. I staggered away from my epiphany and went back to my seat, feeling certain of the truth of what I'd seen but also terribly confused. Briefly, numbers had seemed much more exciting than I had been led to believe. But if two plus two was always four, then numbers were too literal, too boring, to be worth much attention. I wrote math off right then and there, and, of course, ended up with a classic case of math anxiety.

In a way, though, this experience had a positive side, as the beginning of my formation as a poet. Whenever definitions were given as absolutes, as
always,
I would have that familiar tingle
—that can't be—
and soon learned that I could focus on the fuzzy boundaries, where definitions give way to metaphor. Even though “negative capability,” like set theory, was a term I wasn't to hear for years, I had stumbled onto it as a way of being, a way of thinking, a way of intelligence that largely defined me. It was there in that ambiguous world that I resolved to dwell.

I have since met visual artists who as children were so intent on playing with the shapes of numbers and letters that they fell behind in both English and math, to the despair of their teachers, who recognized that these were intelligent children. Yet visual intelligence, even more than poetic intelligence, can be a handicap in this culture. Years ago, when I was a kindergarten aide at a Quaker school, one little girl demonstrated a capacity for attention unusual at the age of five; every afternoon, she would paint huge blocks of color onto newsprint, working for nearly an hour. Then she would ask me to hang the painting to dry so that she could work on it again the next day. The teacher and I were fascinated but soon found that we had to protect her from the other children, who, once they noticed that her paintings didn't “look like anything,” made fun of them. The girl, remarkably, was undeterred, already adept at exile.