In Seventh Grade, Again

I got a little out-of-touch with my regular postings to this blog, but blame can be assigned to other work and not laziness or procrastination. Last week I was the resident Teaching Artist at Dr. Lydia T. Wright School PS 89 here in Buffalo, and the week prior was assembling a major grant application, then I received two assignments from a magazine I write for. So the last two weeks here in Buffalo have in fact been incredibly busy and productive, and now I’m trying to get back on track.
What can I say about my first residency? The school was right around the corner from Erie County Medical Center, in a neighborhood called Delavan-Grider. It is just east of NY State Highway 33, which links downtown Buffalo with the airport. The 33, as it’s called, divides parts of the city from and prevents them from interacting with each other the way urban highways tend to do—like the BQE in New York City, the old Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco, and all the freeways in Los Angeles.
From the get-go, the seventh graders were a challenge. I’m lucky in that I’m a strong presence—which simply means I don’t wear my insecurities on my sleeve—so I wasn’t about to let the kids walk all over me. And those who kept trying to act out I refused to give up on; I don’t know…maybe kids who act out need something besides discipline. We read five poems in five days, and I used the work of Nikki Giovanni and Frank O’Hara and Joy Harjo and Cathy Song. It is both familiar and unfamiliar for me to be so immersed in poetry again, to talk—or try to talk—about rhyme and meter and form and detail and imagery again on such a constant basis. I discovered poetry a long, long time ago—writing Robert Frost imitations in fourth and fifth grade, but that’s also when I realized I wanted to be a writer. For much of my life I have struggled with what that meant—it often seemed something external, an identity, like a mantle, that I would find someday in a store, off-the-rack, discounted, yes, but inarguably designed for me. I didn’t realize that I had to work at being a writer; I didn’t realize that although I had a gift, I still had a lot of weaknesses, a lot of work to do to repair them or to make them seem like strengths or to concentrate on forms of writing that worked with my strengths. It has only been in the last few years that this has finally happened at all, so perhaps it is no surprise that I did not find this kind of work as a teaching artist until now. And honestly, I could not have done it a few years ago; I would have been terrible and egotistical about it. Instead, I was humbled by these kids and their lives. I came away grateful for the fact that I don’t have to go to seventh grade now, or ever again. There was one boy whose uniform shirt was filthy dirty, and I thought, My God…my mother was able to send me to school each day looking not just clean but sharp. My parents were able to do that for all of us kids.
I wondered about the disproportionate number of girls to boys. Is this a simple statistic? Or does it reflect, as I fear it may, the fact that boys of twelve, thirteen, and fourteen in parts of our society are no longer part of our society? That we consider them lost causes, might as well, they aren’t going to make it anyway? What do they turn to, these boys? Those who were in the class were in the throes of puberty—and yet they were still children. And many of the girls were the same. But when they wrote—when they got down to brass tacks and wrote about themselves—and what adolescent doesn’t want a stage to himself or herself?—they wrote deeply and honestly and openly, and at times I was moved as no poetry has moved me before. I wasn’t writing honestly at thirteen—I was trying, but I couldn’t—how could I express what I needed to? I want to look to these children for strength and courage to become the kind of writer many of them allowed themselves to be, at last.