海角大神

A springtime discovery

I聽am in seventh grade language-arts class, an upstairs room in the old red brick junior high school building. The afternoon sun streams through its high windows that face onto the playground and athletic fields. It is the day I remember hearing a phrase for the first time: 鈥渢he little lame balloonman.鈥� It comes from 鈥淚n Just,鈥� the 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.聽

Then along comes another phrase: 鈥渢he world is mud-luscious,鈥� then 鈥減uddle-wonderful,鈥� and 鈥渂ettyandisbel come dancing from hop-scotch and jump-rope.鈥� And 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 that Mr. Katz was conspiring with the poem, sun, spring, and kid energy. Not just a lesson plan. Whichever 鈥� so be it. From thenceforth, I was a new reader and writer. I look back on that poem as a starting line. I heard the call to poetry.

I will begin seeing 鈥淚n Just鈥澛� by e.e. cummings in practically every subsequent anthology in my language arts life: my dog-eared 鈥淧ocket Book of Modern Verse,鈥� edited by Oscar Williams (high school); 鈥淎n Approach to Poetry鈥� by Wayne Shumaker (college); 鈥淎n Introduction to Poetry鈥� by X.J. Kennedy (teaching); and 鈥淭he Language of Spring: Poems for the Season of Renewal,鈥� which I just acquired. And it is, of course, in the 鈥淐omplete Poems of聽 E. E. Cummings, 1913-1962,鈥� a Christmas present when I was a senior in high school. It is not included in 鈥淭he New Oxford Book of American Verse.鈥� Pity. They all reside on my shelves, a chronology of anthologies 鈥� a syllabus of my reading life.聽

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, which I saw applied in poem after poem. Alternate universes abound. Poems of all eras live in a kind of simultaneity in their anthologized universes.聽

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 thoughts, feelings, and experiences of the most capable commentators on how to sail any waters. I鈥檓 fond of Billy Collins鈥� view that the history of poetry is 鈥渢he history of the human heart. Without poetry, we would be deprived of the emotional companionship of our ancestors.鈥� Furthermore, as bipeds we walk in iambs. We are intrinsically called to poetry.聽

From decades of teaching, my 鈥渁nthology鈥� burgeons with poems I have taught, or that have taught me; that I have shared, or have had shared with me; that gave me the insight and love, the truth and beauty, of which poetry is uniquely capable. My criteria: Poems must immediately reward having been read; be instantaneously valuable or impressive; sound good, or feel good, or go swiftly into one鈥檚 mental hip pocket. I link poems to distinct times and places, people and experiences; a laugh, a slant of light, an inspiring or mirthful thought; a heartbreak or infatuation. I have an almanac of readings like stations in the metro.聽 聽

Now, my collection of poems is a close companion to my own life, myriad volumes documenting that companionship one poem at a time. The special ones even lead back to an inaugural memory of a sunny classroom in junior high, when Mr. Katz carefully broached new territory, a moment that suspended my preoccupation with middle school mundanity. The Friday dance, my drum lesson on Wednesday, even Caroline鈥檚 beguiling ponytail, yielded. I was smitten with a poem. The 鈥済oat-footed balloonMan鈥� still 鈥渨histles far and wee,鈥� makes the world 鈥渕ud-luscious鈥� again and again, and makes spring a poetic rite. Every time, I come running.聽