海角大神

I am in seventh-grade language arts class in an upstairs room in the old red-brick junior high school building. The afternoon sun streams through high windows that face onto the playground and athletic fields. It is the day I remember hearing this phrase for the first time: 鈥渢he little/ lame balloonman.鈥澛�

It鈥檚 from 鈥淚n Just-,鈥� the E.E. Cummings poem we are reading in our anthology. Mr. Katz is trying to loosen up our adolescent imaginations to the point where we might appreciate figurative language. Why are 鈥渆ddieandbill ... running from marbles and/ piracies鈥�? It鈥檚 not, evidently, a spelling or grammar question.

Then along comes another phrase: 鈥渢he world is mud/ -lucious,鈥� then 鈥減uddle-wonderful,鈥� and 鈥渂ettyandisbel come dancing/ from hop-scotch and jump-rope.鈥� Something begins to blossom in me as a reader: the melding of descriptive words and words embodying action.

Words could be and do what they describe! The April day effortlessly bespoke the poem, and the poem bespoke the day. I鈥檇 like to think Mr. Katz was conspiring with the poem, sun, spring, and kid energy, not just a lesson plan. From then on, I was a new reader and writer. I look back on that poem as a starting line.

I heard the call to poetry.

I would see 鈥淚n Just-鈥� in practically every subsequent anthology in my language arts life. It was in my dog-eared 鈥淎 Pocket Book of Modern Verse,鈥� edited by Oscar Williams (high school); in 鈥淎n Approach to Poetry,鈥� by Wayne Shumaker (college); 鈥淎n Introduction to Poetry,鈥� by X.J. Kennedy (teaching); and in 鈥淭he Language of Spring: Poems for the Season of Renewal,鈥� which I just acquired. It is not included in 鈥淭he Oxford Book of American Poetry.鈥� Pity. They all reside on my shelves, a chronology of anthologies, a syllabus of my reading life.

I began to understand that a poet is describing the world, experience, or concepts in a way that antidotes dullness, commonness, and indifference; that stretches the possibilities of language; that sings and beckons. A poem is a discrete vessel of clarity and understanding. 鈥淧oetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another,鈥� Robert Frost explained. And poems of all eras live in a kind of simultaneity in their anthologized universes.

Reading poems became a daily practice. I collect them, anthologizing my own favorite expressions of life鈥檚 joys and tribulations 鈥� the record of the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the most capable commentators on how to sail any waters. I鈥檓 fond of Billy Collins鈥� view: 鈥淭he history of poetry is the only surviving history we have of human emotion. It is the history of the human heart. There is no other one. Without poetry, we鈥檇 be deprived of the emotional companionship of our ancestors.鈥澛�

As bipeds, we walk in iambs. The four chambers of our heart cannot help giving us the tempo of a 4/4 march. We are intrinsically called to poetry.

The decades of my teaching career burgeoned my personal anthology with the poems I taught or that have taught me, the ones I shared or were shared with me, the ones that have given me the insight, love, truth, and beauty of which poetry is uniquely capable. My criteria: poems that are instantaneously valuable or impressive; poems that sound good, feel good, or go swiftly into one鈥檚 mental hip pocket. I link poems to distinct times and places, people or experiences: an inspiring or mirthful thought, a heartbreak or infatuation. I have an almanac of readings. My collection of poetry is an emotional companion to my life.聽

The special ones lead back to an inaugural memory of a sunny classroom in junior high school when Mr. Katz carefully broached new territory 鈥� a moment that suspended my preoccupation with middle school mundanity. The dance on Friday, my drum lesson on Wednesday afternoon, and even Caroline鈥檚 beguiling ponytail yielded. I was smitten with a poem. The 鈥済oat footed/ balloonMan,鈥� as Cummings wrote it, still 鈥渨histles/ far/ and/ wee,鈥� makes the world 鈥渕ud-lucious鈥� again and again, making spring a poetic rite. And every time, I come running.