Truth and Poetry, Part One

Truth has been troubling me lately.  

By "troubling," I mean that it insists on being considered from more than one perspective, and it will give me no peace until I do that.   

By "Truth," I mean truth itself in as much as I experience it.  

As a Quaker, I am a Friend of Truth, which means that I do not have a double standard that lets me lie if I have not taken an oath.   Telling the truth got me in lots of hot water when I was a child, but I could not even lie to avoid punishment.   I laugh about that now although I would live it the same way again.  But I did not discover Friends of Truth until I was fully 30 years old and working alongside them to create the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice.   

Early Quakerism (1660-1760) believed so much in truth and individual experience that it warned against the art of theatre.  Theatre encourages people to act, speak, show things that are not themselves, and deliberately participate in untruths.  It was seen in the same light as gambling and horse racing.  

Things change.  In my 1980s political activism, I had experienced theatre as an essential tool.  It (1) communicates to and convinces audiences of hard truths and (2) re-energizes those who already believe its message.  And when I discerned that my ministry would be in theater, members of the Friends Meeting in Albany, NY helped me season the decision that moved me across the country and earned me a PhD in Dramatic Arts.  

When I moved to Philadelphia 20 years later, I planned to research and write about the late addition of theatre departments at Quaker Colleges—not until the 1960s.  I had just been part of a controversial staging of a “gay” play; and I wanted to examine religious strictures on theatre, dance, and certain populations.   Instead my ministry took me to inner-city public school teaching for the next eleven years. 

Now I am a retired teacher and a poet.  Truth has been troubling me again.  In my poetry I make up persona and experience; I invent situations rather than always tell my own.  Indeed, I distance myself deliberately at times when I seem to be spilling my guts.  It doesn’t always interest me to be plain and simple and straight forward; and if it doesn’t interest me I do not think it will interest my reader.   I use devices to get at a Kind of Truth, but not the one I was talking about earlier.  This behavior borders on equivocation.  "But everyone does it."

Two nights ago, however, I found myself playing the poetry game in front of a Meeting for Worship.  I entertained instead of telling the truth.  I wanted to get a laugh and I did.  Does everyone do that? I wanted to hide that I was in physical pain (chronic condition, long story), and so I talked about going to graduation at my old high school.  This was not a lie, but it was an omission of truth that could ultimately mean I did not ask for help.  Does everyone do that too?  And who cares?

I do.  I told the truth before worship ended, and the corrected lies became a ministry in our silent meeting.

But I believe now that there is a place for a Poetic and Literary Truth that is both different from  and more inclusive than Day to Day Truth.  It doesn't belong in between God and I, but it is part of a God-given ministry of some importance.  

(to be continued) 

The Gift

Yesterday I went to the Last Poetry Cafe of the 2012 high school seniors at my old place of employment to hear poems from and to read poems to those I abandoned by retiring back in March.  I was surprised and moved when they gave me a little sculpture of 2 white geese, mother and child.  I immediately associated to the fairy tale about the Golden Goose and imagined myself as a guide into a marvelous world.  An instant later I associated this with an undergraduate memory from my sophomore year of college in 1970 when I gathered a tiny contingent of friends for a follow-the-leader to a bar.  The drinking age was 18, not 21 as it is now.  

The way led through a snow and ice encrusted park--according to Worcester, Massachusetts legend, the oldest public park in the USA.  One image stands out in my mind even without a photograph:  Walking single file across a wooden fence rail, I looked back and laughed at the line of "baby ducks" imprinted on me as if a Mom.  I won't tell you about the awful end of the tale where two of us incited a bar fight by pretending we were native Americans (Indians, then).  I don't remember how I got home.  What I remember from the chilled park is the laughter and clouds forming in our breath and lack of fear and delight in being alive.  I remember that I couldn't lead them had they not wanted to follow.  

And that is what I felt yesterday in the school library setting of the cafe, a feeling reminding me of what work had been like a few years back before my actual pinched nerves worsened under the terror of metaphorically pinched ones.  What a gift!  

Teaching had been my ministry and I had loved waking up in the morning to go in, revising long laid plans in my head as I drove: what had worked and what hadn't, which students needed more practice etc.  Driving was for planning and centered prayer, noticing what was new, grinning at yesterday, being friends with Jesus.  Each day I remembered and smiled at my Grandmother's admonition to "be kind."  She had been my art teacher in high school, and she was not kind to me.  In an attempt to avoid favoritism, she had aimed her sharpest comments at me.  Now I wonder if she just wanted me to be excellent, but she was decidedly not kind and I often fought back tears while trying to meet the goal just out of reach by time or by talent.  

As a teacher in love with learning, I think I was kind.  To my own surprise, I was also very conservative in demanding students learn basic skills and formats as well as the creative writing and inquiry that I so loved releasing. Hard that, to want to follow them into the future but to demand observant attention to their artifacts, a kind of meta-learning.  They always "got it" by the end of the year when they put together portfolios of their work along with self-evaluation essays.  These were the real gifts to me and to themselves.  Not everyone cared (understatement) and some hated the classes I taught, but I hope that some will remember how it felt to know they were good because they knew what to look for--to know they were good because they applied this skill to things that mattered to them, not to me or anyone else.  I hope someday when raising children or singing to fans or studying or pumping gas, they will see that as a gift.  Meanwhile, the gift I gave myself is that I did not compromise what education is to me.  I did not cave in to the conformity forced around me.  

I think that same strength is motivating me now as I keep writing and practicing both revision and talking to a public that so far is on-line and very small.  I need the practice.  Yesterday, again, students and a faculty member urged me to publish. I will break through that stay-back-stage, ride-in-the-back-seat mentality with practice.

And the public schools--in the midst of the financial crisis and the unbearable number of pink slips and lost programs--have been re-valuing creativity.  The younger teachers have that covered.  I don't have to be there because, in fact, they are better than I could be with my hit-and-miss methods of finding what works.  If anyone can help students overcome the "I-know-better" mentality they have developed over the last few years, it will be these brave new ones.  I shift my focus to re-directing me, to refuse to compromise on the move toward publishing.  I will try to remember not to aim at perfection, but to get on with it, to finish, just as I told my students.  Honing skills comes with practice.  Meanwhile, do not hide thy light under a bushel.  No more standing behind and pushing others forward without moving myself however small my steps are at first.

I thank my poets for this reflection, for this gift.

About my poetry

This one is about me, sitting here and getting more and more excited about the number of public demonstrations against the latest proposals--travesties all!-- for school reform. I listen and watch from a side-balcony, the bay window desktop connection to the world that I have in this second-story apartment in the suburbs.  Can you picture it?  I used to be out in the crowds.  Now I write poetry every day and must decide a path for it.  Publish for real?  Make available on the web?  Save for something?  Read in public?  Give them to Alice? 

Let me explain.

I have an intent to open my closet door and go through the hidden and crumbling boxes to (1) find the poems that I have written most of my life, and (2) rediscover the experience that shaped Alice's thinking.  Alice is the character in my novel.  As yet mostly unwritten, Alice is the novel itself waiting, as Pirandello said, for an author.  I think the author is in the boxes with my selected history of partings.  History of the passion before leaving and of the partings themselves. And about today's wonder: Can I rebuild the burnt bridges to those who peopled my past?

Which brings me back to the poems.  Today I noticed a common theme in what I had thought was random responses to prompts, considered explorations of how I might play with poetic devices if I followed my instincts.  And if I deliberately tried to play.  The theme is separation and return.  Separation and the impossibility of return, snippets of joy in the most vivid of memories until I try to live them backwards and then what?  The poems are grieving though they are not all sad.  They are the painting and the frame of "thinks" to store or to hang, of "thinks" like irrational impressions of something past and let go of, and also present journeys into the past. 

They are not current in a political sense, which surprises me, knowing myself pretty well.  They are surprisingly self-indulgent despite the fact that I have "invited strangers" to narrate.  Why am I surprised?  Read a person's journal and see how they lie.  Read a person's poems and fiction, and learn her deeper secrets and truths.  I have seen that in others and now open to myself.

Just saying.  I thought it was time to let my reader know where I disappeared to.  And that I am happy.

Money and profits

I have never been convinced that throwing money at a problem is the best way to solve it.  Indeed, having a problem to solve is the best way to ask for money.   Funding a study and delaying the application of what we know can be regressive as well as progressive.  That aside, public school administrations throughout the United States have been clamoring about budget deficits which result in the need to (1) lay off professional personnel and (2) give away public schooling.  And they've been persistent enough to convince even me. 

But I am uneasy.  Perhaps the loud howl about money is a diversion?  Am I just a conspiracy theorist from the old left?  My ex-students don't think so; they think I just care too much about everything.  I know we are in a world-wide financial depression.  I also believe that this truth is covering other moves of a regressive nature, and the public education crisis is just the one I am most familiar with.

Here in Philadelphia, the hidden agenda is to destroy powerful unions which really do have the quality of work and the quality of schooling as top concerns.  The last two Superintendents had been very successful at what the state wanted them to do: break the back of public schooling in order to make possible business deals in the profit sector of our economy.  I was astonished that President Obama didn't see this ploy as he turned the heat up from "No child left behind" to "No teacher doing a good job."  I watched my own school aim for higher scores on tests which falsely evaluated the system while teaching children that anything goes if they win and are not caught.  By the time I retired with disability, my heart was as broken as my back was tired.  My mind was as pinched as my spinal chord.  The work atmosphere in my school was at a life-time low. 

Articles like today's "Cash on Hand" at PennLive.com raise different questions:  If there is a monetary surplus within the Pennsylvania budget, why is that not being applied in a way to save public education?  Who and/or what sees privatization as a solution to what they see as problems?  Ample warning has been given that privatizing education breaks the constitutional guarantee of free education for all and builds in automatic privilege for those who make the schools look good.  This is the aspect of testing that has not gotten enough publicity:  Public schools test everyone whereas private schools test those who they wish to include.  Who loses?  Democracy as a whole loses its argument for itself when it goes back to the leaden age of equality for the few.  Class-ism trumps racism.  As James Baldwin noted, long ago: For these are all our children. We will all profit by, or pay for, whatever they become. 


I note that I have a few passive statements above;  my analysis is not complete and my links could be more complete and persuasive.  I hope my readers will correct this deficit in their comments, be they for or against my argument.

 

Brag a little

Check out "Science Reveals Why We Brag So Much" in today's Wall Street Journal.  I had thought the reason for bragging was compensation for self-doubt or for being neglected as a child.  What science revealed, however, is that bragging stimulates pleasure synapses in the brain: "Generally, acts of self disclosure were accompanied by spurts of heightened activity in brain regions belonging to the meso-limbic [sic] dopamine system, which is associated with the sense of reward and satisfaction from food, money or sex."  In other words, we brag because we cannot help it.   The scientists gathered statistics and drew their conclusions by testing whether a person would rather give their thoughts than accept money. 

If I were still in the high school classroom, I would do a study on this.  There it might be more pleasurable for students to succeed in pretending a degree of disinterest in self.  I had to beg students to brag about what they were doing better and what they liked--except for the domineering 3 or 4 students per class who were the disciplinary challenge.  Those loud few seemed to enjoy hearing the sounds of their own voices and even silencing others.  The few were bragging, for sure, but the self-disclosure was often inappropriate to the classroom and to the activity.  However, there was always a small audience to entertain, a few who enjoyed and approved the interruptions. To me, the behavior--whether they could help it or not--seemed like a love of power rather than a love of bragging.

How would offering monetary awards for  "bragging" or for not bragging alter classroom behavior?  What other nonverbal behaviors were observed in addition to preferring talking over money?  Did scientists consider the myriad distinctions between bragging and self-disclosure?  Or is this provocative journalism making sensation out of a more modest scientific study by  skewing the terms under examination?

If anyone knows more about the where, why, and how of this study, please let us know!