Poemcrazy: Freeing Your Life with Words by Wooldridge Susan G

Author:Wooldridge, Susan G. [Wooldridge, Susan G.]
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Crown Publishing Group
Published: 2009-09-25T16:00:00+00:00

30

I dress myself with rain

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I thought I had it all worked out in a workshop session funded by a grant to teach poetry and ecology. I wanted my students to know the names of local plants, animals and land-forms to help them connect with their surroundings. I compiled lists of place names in Butte County like Bald Rock, Feather Falls and Table Mountain, along with names of flora and fauna like water ouzel, man-zanita, ceanothus, fiddleneck and owls clover. I planned to talk about the watershed and local Maidu Indian words like talulu (squirrel), pompoko (moon), and kasa kasa (blue jay). I was superprepared.

But at Park Avenue—an alternative high school—the students weren’t interested in my agenda. They had little patience for the outer world and for names of things. Quotes from famous poets made no impression. They didn’t want to hear about Walt Whitman. They wanted to be Whitman, and in the spirit of freedom, plunge into writing about the self.

Admiring these freedom fighters, I chucked my agenda, passed around word tickets and let them do whatever they wanted. With photos of landscapes, I suggested they write about where they come from, on the inside as well as the outside, so they could write about themselves. But most of them took off on their own.

Erica made long rows of word tickets as if they were a magic pass to her inner ocean. Playing with word tickets, for some people, is almost like discovering a new language to express what can’t emerge in normal “talk” or writing. Using the language of the word tickets, Jeremy finally pulled out of his “nobody loves me” mode from earlier sessions and began writing more expansively about how “the patter of rain falls like tears” with the impact as powerful

as the swirls of lightning

the sky’s tunnels

hurl at us.

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