Ups and Downs

I remember honoring the light and weather in Ireland and so I took my class outside on this most perfect of September afternoons. It didn't please everyone and there were distractions like sirens and cars whooshing by. We read Langston Hughes and Tony Hoagland under a spreading maple tree with leaves of polished green. Fall has not yet arrived. Soon it will be dark out in the late afternoon and the ground will be bare and hard. I won't take them outside again; I will have to bring the outside into the classroom, hum of the air conditioner and stiff wooden desks. Learning can happen anywhere. Distraction can happen anywhere. I remember looking out windows when I was in undergraduate college classes. Probably I could tell you everything I saw from the high window of the English building. In my graduate program, we held class in a fireplaced living room or a stone porch or outside on the lawn. Once we were even in a garage with hints of old gasoline and oil smudges on the floor. By then I had learned to listen. The words carried me away from the physical space so I was quite literally inside the images of the poem. I know I can't expect that to happen for everyone in an introductory undergraduate class. I keep trying to find an analogy they can relate to--how the movie theater falls away when you are immersed in a film. The truth is: I don't have the answers. I'm just a poet who teaches, hoping that beyond learning craft and reading good poetry, some of the magic will happen for a few of them. I know that poetry saved my life many times. We all need a lifeline from time to time. Unlikely as it may seem, words can serve that purpose--and they ask nothing in return.