Baby

Yesterday I watched the Harmony boys' basketball team play possibly the worst game I've ever seen, with a score along the lines of 60 to 7. Meanwhile, I got to spend an hour in the stands wincing at my own personal 8th-grade Drama King's flounces and groans. Sometimes it's just better not to watch one's children play sports.

On the bright side, James went to school with a fake mustache in his pocket, which he plans to don "at the perfect moment." He also spent some poker-faced time this morning earnestly explaining to me that I would be a better mother if I cooked more bacon. In addition, we had a long conversation about what we would say if we were talking stuffed monkeys with pull strings. Clearly he's in a good mood about something.

Unbeknownst to one another, my friend Baron and I have both been writing about the Dove-Vendler debacle. Here's a link to what he has to say about it. As one might expect, he's brilliant.

What I ended up doing yesterday was writing a teaching statement for the Frost Place. Here it is, in case you're interested. And thank you to the teachers who gave me the opportunity to see these particular students in action:

In November 2011, I visited a high school in rural Maine. Many of the students I worked with that morning were general-level ninth graders, most of them boys, all of them either resigned to boredom or openly scornful of academics. As one of their teachers told me, the school is so focused on making sure that these kids are barraged with "the basics" that there is almost no available class time for anything personal or creative. And yet, she said, so many of them long for the freedom and focus to express themselves.

This longing was evident to me and to all the staff members present that morning, even though our interactions were limited to the space of an hour-long workshop. These students, most of whom had few academic expectations, not only could write well but wanted to write well. They wanted to figure out what was going on in the work of poets such as Robert Francis and Richard Wilbur. They wanted to focus hard on subjects that mattered to them and that they knew a great deal about. They wanted to use exactly the right word for the situation they were imagining in their heads. They wanted to read each others' drafts and comment on them. They wanted to keep writing, even after our hour was up.

More than a decade ago, Baron Wormser founded the Frost Place Conference on Poetry and Teaching because of such students and their devoted, questioning, yet struggling teachers. Today the conference continues to build connections and confidence among educators who understand the value--the necessity--of creative independence and who believe that poetry is a way both to teach academic focus and to open locked windows. Poetry matters enormously--and not just to high-achieving or arts-oriented students. All children need the opportunity to wield the tools of language, to discover the power of speaking for oneself. It's entirely possible that those students I saw in November may never again get the chance to read a Frank O'Connor poem and to figure out for themselves how sentence structure can influence narrative and emotion because they, like O'Connor, got the chance to use sentence structure to influence narrative and emotion. Perhaps this will be the last poem these fourteen-year-olds ever write. Meanwhile, they have a life to endure, with all of its joys and tragedies. Surely, one duty of our schools is to give our children at least a handful of ways to articulate that endurance.

I have turned in my editing project. The library is closed on Mondays, so I can't go pick up my interlibrary loan order of anthology possibilities. The house will be quiet and empty until 2:30. Therefore, I just might write something today. I have been mulling over an essay, tentatively titled "Why I Don't Write about Cooking." Or I could go back to the western Pennsylvania poems. Or I could impose a few revisions on the forthcoming CavanKerry collection. I don't know. It's 8:15 a.m. and no one in the world expects me to do anything in particular for at least 6 hours. I may end up staring out the window at the apple tree that's collapsed into my garden, which would probably be fine too.

Finally, a quiet morning. No incipient 8th-grade craft fair or turkey dinner; no monitoring of arguments over who used up all the hot water in the shower. Merely a cold kitchen and strong coffee--a great improvement.

Yesterday, while Paul and I were craft-fair hosting, Tom and James went out into the woods and cut down a Christmas tree. It may be the ugliest tree we've ever featured in our home, although the competition has always been stiff. Living as we do on a 40-acre woodlot packed with conifers, we find it difficult to justify the idea of purchasing a pine tree, no matter how plump and shapely it might be. This particular tree is, in James's words, "skimpy." I'd say that's a kindly description of what is more or less an oversized twig. However, festooned with an inordinate number of lights, anything can look charming, and the twig looks quite cheerful in its tight corner.

I'm trying to concentrate on this cheerfulness; for while I was sitting beside the craft-fair's soup table, shell-shocked from playing Christmas carols for 6 hours, my friend Linda came over and put her arms around me and said, "Guess what? I found Baby."

Maybe you remember last summer's murders? Maybe you remember my telling you about Linda, whose daughter and grandchildren were killed by her son-in-law? Maybe you remember that I mentioned her dead grandson's rag doll, who used to be mine? That's Baby. On Tuesday morning I am going over to Linda's house and she will present me with Baby. And then we'll both cry. And then Baby will live somewhere in my house for the rest of my life. I feel terrible.

1. Today is December 9. I live in central Maine. The 45th parallel runs through my living room. Johnny-jump-ups are blooming in my garden. Something is wrong here.

2. College essay update: In what I hope will be the penultimate pass through J's essay, I finally laid a finger on the piece, which is to say I marked it up with queries without actually correcting anything myself. The queries ranged from typo notation, to grammatical inquiries, to questions about specific details. As with the other revisions, I emailed it to him, but this time he asked me to sit down with him and discuss each point of contention. In one or two places he was adamant and/or crabbily defensive about his original wording. His father, who was washing dishes and also hates having his writing marked up, chimed in on my side of the debate, which was a surprise. This made J slightly less defensive but still fairly crabby. Having reached this impasse, we closed up our computers, and he immediately fell into 12 hours of coma-like slumber. Last night he claimed to have revised the essay and emailed it to me; but as of this moment, no email has actually appeared. Thus, I cannot reveal his final decision. Whatever the case, the time has come for us all to let this piece go and make the best of imperfection. Here's hoping the admissions officers do as well. There are numerous interesting tidbits in the essay, he's seventeen years old, and how much delight can they honestly expect?

3. A soupcon of Milly Jourdain: Because I have to play Christmas carols for hours and hours tomorrow, I may have no available fingers for typing a blog post. So I'll give you the next two Milly poems. As the only living experts on her oeuvre, what do you think?

Beacon Hill

Milly Jourdain

I hear the deep sea sounding through the pines,

I breathe the wash of air, all cold and clear

And know the peace that lives among the stones

With nothing near.

And then I try to see my little life,

The huge and quiet earth around me spread,

And blue hills far away, that make me feel

Without a dread.

The freshness of this scene is with me still

--In Memory's freshness that can never wane--

And all the music of the many pines

I hear again.

A Phantom Sea

Milly Jourdain

We saw from dull suburban streets

A sudden space of light--

A level line of misty hills

And shiny spots of white.

O how it made me long to feel

The sea was really there

The sharp wind blowing on my face

And sea-sounds in the air!

The hills are like my shadowed life

Where only I can sea

The waves and white sailed ships that float

On its immensity.

Here's "Hated by Literature," another essay from my well published yet unpublishable manuscript, The Vagabond's Bookshelf. I'm grateful to the editors of Solstice because this was the one chapter from the manuscript that was difficult to place. I might draw the conclusion that most journals don't care to publish ambivalencies about Malcolm X, especially when a white woman writes them.