Vu de Berkeley

On Wednes­day after­noons, I teach cre­ative writ­ing to young peo­ple. I car­ry my class sup­plies in a can­vas tote bag that sports the phrase “poet­ry keeps” in a bur­gundy ser­ifed font, once across the front and once across the back. There’s no design apart from the words, this phrase that reminds me of why I write and why I teach.

This fall, I have been tutor­ing two pre-teen Kore­an girls who moved to the Unit­ed States  a few years ago. Each week, I incor­po­rate a poem into my les­son. We’re just embark­ing on our jour­ney into Amer­i­can poet­ry, most­ly from the last cen­tu­ry, and so far each girl has found some­thing that moved her.

We read through a few dif­fer­ent poets before I pulled from my tote bag a voice that spoke to me when I was their age, Langston Hugh­es. After read­ing “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” one of the girls leaned back in her chair, and looked at me. “Whoa,” she said. I smiled at her, “I know.” We had been talk­ing about water­shed moments, life-chang­ing moments, those instants, small and large, that change the way you think about some­thing. We had been talk­ing about his­to­ry, about roots, and how expe­ri­ences shape a person.

When I asked the younger girl about the poem she has liked best so far, the answer was Robert Frost’s “Stop­ping by Woods on a Snowy Evening.” She said that she feels like that last line a lot of the time: And miles to go before I sleep. I am often sur­prised by which poems con­nect with a stu­dent, but it’s my favorite per­son­al chal­lenge to find the poem that will make them go, “Whoa.” I know by heart the first poem that made an impres­sion on me when I was a child: “Dreams” by Langston Hugh­es. It still car­ries depth and mean­ing for me, and it opened the door to metaphor and poet­ic lan­guage as a means of under­stand­ing and expres­sion. There’s a poet out there for every­one; you just have to find the right poem at the right time.

In that way, read­ing poet­ry is an act of open­ness. When I browse the poet­ry shelves of a book­store, my fin­gers tin­gle with antic­i­pa­tion. I open the book and my mind at the same time, look­ing for­ward to what I’ll find in the pages before me. Poet­ry is a place where there is no sin­gle right answer; it is a med­i­ta­tive and ever-chang­ing space where peo­ple can take risks, dive into the unknown, or re-eval­u­ate the famil­iar. The great­est reward in read­ing poet­ry is in the sense of dis­cov­ery it gives me. And when I teach a poem and see my stu­dents con­nect with the words of some­one who lived and wrote decades before they were born, I am filled with awe and sat­is­fac­tion. Lan­guage holds pow­er. It can bring peo­ple together.

Poet­ry keeps. It won’t spoil. You nev­er lose it; it will wait for you even if you neglect it for a while. There is always more to read, more to think about. When you dis­cov­er writ­ers who spark some­thing in you, their words enrich and change you. Poet­ry keeps me engaged in life, keeps me think­ing about how things work, what they mean. Poet­ry keeps peo­ple con­nect­ed through a means of dis­course that bridges dis­tance and time. Poet­ry keeps sto­ries alive; it keeps per­spec­tive in its lines, and it encour­ages analy­sis. Poet­ry keeps explo­ration in the everyday.

Every les­son is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to influ­ence the kind of peo­ple my stu­dents will become. I hope that my stu­dents become peo­ple who pay atten­tion to the world around them, who pay atten­tion to lan­guage, who like to think things through, who don’t give up when some­thing is con­fus­ing or chal­leng­ing, peo­ple who find sat­is­fac­tion in learn­ing and the explo­ration of ideas. I hope that poet­ry keeps bring­ing togeth­er writ­ers and read­ers. May it keep won­der and dis­cov­ery present in our days.