This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (or Books)

For poems are not words, after all, but fires for the cold, ropes let down to the lost, something as necessary as bread in the pockets of the hungry. -- Mary Oliver concluding her 1994 book, A Poetry Handbook

I finished reading Oliver's book Sunday morning, a book of only 125 pages where one-third (or more?) of the text is now underlined and/or annotated. I bought Oliver's book years ago, while stationed in Wyoming, after one of my instructors explained to me her fascination with, and attachment to, poetry. I was a serious reader and writer then, but had never delved into poetry except when required to in secondary school. And of course, like for many of us, what little I read back then was thoroughly ruined by the teachers' attempts to exegete the text...or worse yet, get us to.

Double Entendres Everywhere

I still remember. Sitting in a circle of standard classroom desks, all of us looking toward Mrs. Casper (name changed) as she bounced in her chair absolutely giddy. She had a copy of Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales open in her hands, the spine all but split in half. We'd been talking double entendre that day--and for many of the days preceding--and she was waiting, I think, for someone to catch yet another one on the prescribed page. Looking back, this was the beginning (or the middle) of the end of my love for books and literature and reading. Thankfully that end was temporary.

Why do we insist on ruining for kids what often starts as a real joy? I look at our two--at four and two--and the dedication they have to reading every night, and how often they'll simply pick up a book to leaf through it. Neither reads independently yet but both surely pretend as if they do. They have a natural desire for books that I vaguely recall in myself when I was their age. Which makes it all the more difficult to explain how little I read when I was in junior high, high school, and college...the time where, perhaps, you're getting exposed to the real stuff you should be reading to get ready for life itself.

But I didn't appreciate reading. Or literature. Or anything adjacent to it, despite the volumes of philosophy and commentary I had to consume to finish my degree. I read begrudgingly, if at all, and always dreaded the professor's call-out in class to ask for me some pithy-yet-profound interpretation that only the professor could come up with anyway. Between a sex-crazed teacher at high school and the rest in high school and college who had to psychoanalyze every sentence fragment they came across, I really started to wonder if the authors meant all that stuff we said they did, whereas when I tried to write, I wasn't thinking of anything near that deep or useful...I was just trying to get lines down telling a cool-sounding story. Was I really that dumb? Or was school really that hard?

Because "Learning" Means "Answers"

I've come to hate when someone says they have an "open door policy," because it's usually not true. Same when teachers say, "there's no right answer." I've said the same myself in many a class, and I think it's true in many more seminars than not. But when I remember hearing it, what quickly followed was a roundtable discussion of some esoteric literary device most of us students hadn't heard of. The teacher/professor expounds on it a bit, maybe explaining enough for us to get it before we're sent into the minefield unaided...then he/she starts probing the crowd, testing us to see if we 1) read the assigned sections and 2) were listening to the minute-long diatribe about some way to read we've never heard of, despite having been actual readers for decades. Of course there's a 'right' answer; perhaps not in reality, but in the teacher's mind at least.

Billy Collins was the first Poet Laureate of the millennium, appointed for a two-year term by the Librarian of Congress in 2001. I don't know how I found him, except that at some point (perhaps when I bought Oliver's book) I bought a book of his, The Trouble with Poetry and Other Poems . Well since learning more of Oliver's story and looking up when Collins has spoken to audiences in the past, I was intrigued by his own description of the "Poetry 180" program he led while in the Laureate's position in D.C. Aimed to (re)introduce poetry to American schoolkids, he built a collection of pieces that would be accessible--one poem a day for a standard school year, hence the "180"--and recited every day without the attendant need to quiz listeners on what meanings and devices they saw used throughout. Collins' was a project to hit 'reset' on secondary education's relationship with literature, and poetry in particular, given how distant and elitist many thought it had become. The poems and poets hadn't become any less human over time; turns out, we're largely to blame. And by 'we' I mean the education we expected for our children, gladly provided by English teachers who saw themselves less as literature's cheerleaders but more gatekeepers to the classics. You can see how that's turning out for us now...

Poetry 180 became multiple published collections, the first coming out in the spring of 2003. The first entry in the book is this beauty ?? written by Collins himself, titled as simply as it brings to light the very feeling I got sitting in English classes all those years.

This is what 'they' say about poetry, that it packs such emotional wallop is small packages. Smaller than novels, anyway; notwithstanding the "epics" most people know of--Iliad and Odyssey, Beowulf, Paradise Lost... Point is, Collins captures at the end what it feels like to "analyze" works we've read through secondary and higher ed experiences. His first four stanzas, meanwhile, describe what I do with stuff I'm reading now--holding it up and sliding across its surfacer, turning it every which way for no other reason than to react to it myself. Naturally, as myself, without bounds or limitations.

I don't remember the day...can't pinpoint the text or timing...but somehow, the joy returned. I started reading again, and reading all sorts of stuff. And when I catch myself trying to do too much with a book or magazine article, I remind myself that no one's testing or check up on my work--I simply should read because it makes me better at life.

How Do We Get Kids to Read More?

My wife and I love this cartoon, not because we're always the mom on the right but because it reminds us how simple some of these problems are. It apparently does wonders for your children's development if they grow up with books all over the house. The life in which they're immersed is full of stimuli, for better or worse, and so paying attention to the little things we say and do can go a long way too. I can't say I've ever been asked the question by another parent, but I've thought a lot about it for ours. And who knows if we'll ever 'crack the code,' but we've tried to keep it easy--we never hesitate to buy a book one of the kids gets interested in, and we talk about how fun reading is without ever stressing whether they should be "learning" something or "getting" something out of it. No doubt they will learn and glean great stuff from their reading over time, but maybe it's not necessary to make such a big deal about it before they're ready?