A while ago, Vanessa Wells invited me to lead a poetry workshop with her grade 11/12 English class. My mission, should I choose to accept, was simple. She wanted me to demonstrate a few basic ideas:
1. Not all poets are dead. (That one was easy. I just had to show up.)
2. Poetry is not some inaccessible arcane subject that only Ph.D’s in university English departments can understand. Instead, it’s immediate, and if it’s for anybody, it’s for real people with real concerns who are in the midst of real lives.
3. To be poetry, the ends of lines don’t have to rhyme, it doesn’t have to be written in iambic pentameter, and it doesn’t have to involve somebody in love who’s pining for somebody he can’t have.
Since it sounded like fun, I accepted the mission. I found myself in a classroom with Vanessa and five teenagers. Normally there are eight in the class, but three were either sick or afraid. Two were ESL students, but I found that more helpful than challenging. The “grammar” of poetry isn’t the same as the grammar of formal English composition and ESL students can help a group break out of their language straight-jackets.
Things started off in a conventional way. I scattered a few books of poetry across the table and named each of the authors, where they live and work, and how far away they are from the school. In the case of A.F. Moritz, who had just won the 2009 Griffen Poetry Prize for The Sentinel, he was probably only a couple blocks away sitting in his office at Victoria College.
Next, I pulled out a poem I had written, called The Third Man, which I knew Vanessa had used with her students, so it would already be familiar to some of them. I didn’t want to rehash it. Instead, I wanted to set it beside two previous drafts to illustrate that poetry isn’t simply the gushing of the heart’s deepest feelings. I rarely write that way. In fact, those who do begin by throwing all their crap on the page still have to moderate it, work at refining it, crafting it, struggling with it, often for months before they’re satisfied with the result.
Then I turned the tables. I wanted the students to write. I asked each person in the room to call out an idea, theme, thought, concern, news item they’d heard that morning. I wrote each item on a slip of paper and put it into my hat, then asked one of the students to pull out one of the slips of paper. Whatever he pulled out, that would be the theme they would have to write on for ten minutes, subject to one priviso: they couldn’t use the word on the slip of paper; they could only write around it. So, for example, if the word was “glue”, they could use words that describe glue, like its stickiness or its smell, but they couldn’t include the word “glue.”
The word—a phrase really—was “crazy love roll.” It turns out I was with a cohesive group. The students get along well with one another and do things together socially. No one is excluded. The Saturday before, they had all gone out to a local restaurant to commiserate with one of them who had just broken up with his girlfriend. They ate Crazy Love Rolls. I have no idea what a Crazy Love Roll is. It sounds like a Chinese/Japanese hybrid dish – Chinese food wrapped like a maki roll. But I could be wrong.
Whatever the food, the writing was good. There was a good mix of teen angst and supportive friendship. Vanessa collected all the poems and later, after the words had time to settle, they collaborated and produced a single class poem. This is the result:
Crazy Love Roll
our mouths are quite big
by soo min, jack, dennis, catherine and rose
the house structure of red pudding, stinky cheese, black wall around the heart doesn’t hold
raw fish has a white friend
ring, bracelets, earring, shirt, rose petals on a violin, mementos
never again
I think I succeeded in my mission, or at least in all of it except the part about steering the class away from the angst of lost love. But how was I to know that’s what would come from a crazy love roll?