Poetry in and Out of the Schools

Recently on her blog, Barbara Jane Reyes agreed with Eileen Tabios's assertion that poetry is marginalized because it, like much of the arts, is absent from the K-12 curriculum. This discussion reminded me of a comment somebody in the audience at the Small Press Traffic conference on Aggression made about students needing to write poetry rather than memorize it in school. In an aside, Bob Gluck, suggested that maybe students actually needed to be doing more memorizing of poems. I think this is a good idea as well. Of course, not all poems are suitable for memorization, but how wonderful, to get some language inside you. My daughter Alex, who is now thirteen, had quite a bit of poetry while she was in a public Spanish immersion school here in San Francisco. There was poetry in Spanish and in English. Middle School seems to have offered less poetry though there are some popular books the kids are reading that are written in "verse."

Interestingly enough, I came home on Sunday night to find that Alex had posted up on her closet door a collage of pictures of herself from childhood to the present and a poem that she had written that day. Earlier in the week, half-jokingly, I had suggested that she should write an essay about why she wanted to redecorate her bedroom, a bedroom that has pretty much had the same funky collection of pieces of furniture for years. The bedroom had been a frequent topic of discussion in the previous few weeks. You can imagine how the suggestion of an essay was greeted. I guess the idea sat in the condensery as Lorine Niedecker would say, and then, out emerged, rather than an essay, a poem. This poem below, called "A Room." I love the restricted language and the way it is put through a machine of movement and repositioning. My friend Kathy Lou says that Alex should at least get her own copy of Gertrude Stein's work. Agreed. Alex has generously agreed to let me post the poem here.


A Room

a room with a view
a view remaining
changing
blossoming
but remaining

a room remaining
hopefully changing
staying
remaining
but not changing

a person with a room and a view
changing
growing
maturing
with the view but not with the room

a room with a view
a view remaining
changing
blossoming
but remaining

a room changing
hopefully not remaining
moving
changing
but not remaining

a person with a room and a view
changing
growing
maturing
with the view and with the room

--Alexandra Tremblay-McGaw
July 2009