I LOVE SCHOOL

I have my syllabi ready.  I’ve got my red cotton dress ironed and ready to go. I’ll wear my black comfy shoes. The air has a fall tongue.

I can’t wait to meet my students.

The high point of my day yesterday was talking to my student L, who said, when I asked what she had learned lately, “In Oregon, I learned about myself. In India, I learned about people.” She elaborated, beautifully—conversation as a series of gifts we give each other, interior photographs traded back and forth.  There I am, in my office, getting paid to listen to story and insight and grace.  How did I get to be so lucky, so blessed?

I sharpened pencils. I cleaned off my desk. I cleared a shelf for each class. Everything will fall to pieces in about four weeks. But the pieces will be glorious—poem fragments, student work, notes and lessons.

I can’t wait for school to start.

I talk to my student writers about mystery and confusion, having learned from  both Jerome Stern and Bill Cobb to think about these false twins.

So I was thrilled to get the following email from my poet friend E, during her insomnia:

“We feel deeply intimate with what we do not fully comprehend—a feeling that is commonplace in human life (we often call it love) but rare in our experience of art because we expect to be the master of the poem we read. Mystery, says this poem, is a far more humane condition than mastery. And mystery, which depends on clarity, is the opposite of confusion.”  –Longenbach.

Mystery, which depends on clarity, is the opposite of confusion.

Mysterious things:

God.

Art.

Solitude.

The ocean.

Love.

Death.

Music.

A dog riding a bicycle in the ballet.

Confusing things:

Jealousy

Meat, cereal.

Fences.

Parades.

Dust

Happy endings

Death.

Sleepwalking.

“What is more yours than what always holds you back?”  –James Richardson

In a beautiful old carriage house, I attended a poetry reading by James Richardson, National Book Award finalist, and have been reading, absorbing, his new book, Poems and Aphorisms. He reads so beautifully: like a combination of Bob Newhart and Marcus Aurelius. It was such a great reading and I’m going to press his work on my students.

Elaine Sexton read at St. Paul’s chapel as part of the Bach At One (Bach atone!) series and my friend S wept and I had Kleenex.  Everything in this chapel, which has become a 9/11 memorial, is shadowed. Elaine’s work is so pure, the light came out of her mouth. 

I think of my favorite poems as really perfect essays, essays compressed. I always know where I am in Elaine’s work, and she teaches me something. I want that from poems.  James Richardson calls some of his poems “ten second essays.” Poetry = beauty + learning.