Yesterday's jaunt to Bates turned out to be so pleasant. I spent an hour or so with a first-year class, whose assignment was to bring questions to class to ask me. Clearly, as good students, they tried to choose questions that would make their teacher happy. They were, on the whole, quite reminiscent of the kids I spent time with last month in Jersey City: career overachievers who had honed their ability to ace school. I recognize them: I went to Haverford, which is the same sort of college as Bates . . . though I personally had some serious gaps in my ability to ace school.

But at one moment yesterday, a change rippled the atmosphere. I'd been talking about a poem of mine that the class had been assigned to read: "Play Clothes," from Calendar. And I said casually, "I bet you all have a piece of clothing you remember loving to wear when you were young." Slowly, one student after another began piping up: the Sponge Bob shirt, the shirt with pink ladybugs . . . and then what they'd been doing while wearing these clothes . . . hugging a chinchilla, shooting their brother with a water pistol . . . It was poetry in action, that moment: these students suddenly saw that the detritus of life, our physical memory, holds intense emotion . . . saw that leading with things rather than abstractions is a way to tap into the depths.

It was a beautiful slippage.