"A poem is an empty suitcase..."

I’ve started a new residency as part of my teaching artist work with the Just Buffalo Literary Center. I’m at a school on the East Side of Buffalo, which is primarily African-American. The culture of some of these schools is challenging. I hear more yelling in the classrooms than I did at my elementary schools, and I definitely feel like the kids hear more yelling than they need to. Someone said to me yesterday that if you lower your voice, kids have to force themselves to listen. It makes sense: adults tune out loud people. Wouldn’t kids logically do the same? My first grade teacher Mrs. Ehrlich was a yeller, and was known as a yeller. It was not an enjoyable experience, that yelling, and I can’t imagine that these kids enjoy it either. What they do enjoy, and what I enjoy, is working with each of them one on one during the writing sessions. I like crouching down beside their desk and looking at each of them in the eye, and talking to them and listening to them and helping them work through a little problem in their poem. I like seeing them with two front teeth missing. I like trying to reach out to the kids who seem to have the most “issues”. That’s part of the fun of creative writing—your “issues” can be turned to power. The theme of this particular residency is “identity” and I’ve been trying to push the kids to write away from the subjects and ideas that are typical of this age and demographic—sports, video games, money, food. But sometimes I’d rather have them write period, and writing about what they know (or think they know) is the best way to get them to write at all.
On Thursday evening I am doing an event with the Tuscarora Indian School and Niagara Wheatfield High School. I was tracked down on the Internet by a high school English teacher who wanted an American Indian poet to conduct a poetry performance workshop and then appear as the featured reader. I was a little surprised by this, and have been thinking about what in the world it means to be recognized as an American Indian and a poet to boot when I still have no idea what those things mean to me. And having never conducted a poetry performance workshop before, I had no idea what to do, but I came up with a lesson plan and was really helped by the recent residencies I did in conjunction with Arts In Education. Those residencies involved how to connect creative writing to the processes of Afrorican jazz, and I had to work with a music teacher. She is also an actor, and having the chance to co-teach really gave me confidence about doing the Wheatfield performance workshop. The workshop was a lot of fun. It’s so inspiring to see kids using their minds, both the creative side and the thinking side. I had them blindly pull objects out of a box at one point and use them in a recitation of their team poems. One kid had “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and he pulled a basket out of the box. He laid down on the floor of the gym and held his arm up with the basket inverted on his fist. When we asked him what that was supposed to be, he said, “The lamp next to my bed,” and I just thought that was so wonderful and imaginative. Kay Ryan, the current U.S. Poet Laureate, says in the current Paris Review that "a poem is an empty suitacse you can never quit emptying." She means that it's a like a clown suitcase, or Mary Poppins' magical carpetbag. You can keep pulling things out of a poem. I can’t wait to hear the students own poems, which I haven’t heard yet, and discover what they've packed into them.