Breathing in the Fullness of Time by William Kloefkorn

Author:William Kloefkorn [Kloefkorn, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4962-1016-6
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2018-06-19T16:00:00+00:00

I went first into Hawthorne Elementary. I was accompanied by an aspiring young female poet, Nancy, who served as my apprentice and, at the end of two residencies, would become officially what I had become by way of a thump on the head—a master poet.

You judge a school not only by its curriculum and its staff, but also by its aura, most especially its vigor and aroma. My apprentice and I arrived several minutes early, in time to be welcomed by students in several lines streaming out through several doors, a welcome that we soon recognized as a fire drill. It was a Monday morning, and early, but the kids were all energy and spice. A few minutes later, walking down the hallway toward Mrs. Andersen’s classroom, I inhaled the ambience of sawdust swept over tongue-and-groove floors, and the odor of paste on multi-colored paper. It was an old brick building whose interior was trimmed with pine that had never been painted, and its pine floors creaked underfoot.

Mrs. Andersen met us at the door of her classroom. She was a pleasant woman in her mid-thirties, full of the same zest we had seen in the students. This is Nancy, I said, and Mrs. Andersen shook hands with my apprentice. Through the open door I could see a classroom full of students at their desks, and suddenly it occurred to me that, though I had four of my own and thus believed I knew how to handle children, I was now about to launch into new territory—that is, I was about to confront a swarm of fourth-graders, five times more children than I had ever faced before. The poet, though having been smartly dubbed a master, was nervous.

Probably Mrs. Andersen spent too much time with introductions. She wanted her students to know that they were being visited by living poets, so she repeated herself, saying more times than necessary that her visitors, both of them, were alive and writing poems, and that the students were fortunate to have them here in the classroom, alive, to talk and to write some poems with them. The unspoken assumption, I suppose, was that in order to be a poet one must not only have written poems, but also must be dead.

Nancy was sitting on a wooden chair near one of the windows. She was a tall, pleasant woman whose face dimpled when she smiled. Mrs. Andersen stood at Nancy’s left. She was willowy, with a fair face and short blonde hair cut neatly in bangs across her forehead. Having established that Nancy and I were alive, she explained that we would be returning each day for one week, then gave me the floor.

I said, Good morning. The students responded: Good morning!

How many of you have written poems? Every hand went immediately up.

How many of you have written stories? Every hand shot up.

How many of you have written a book? Approximately half of the hands went up.

Has anyone written a best seller? Two hands went up, but not all the way.

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