At the beginning of the late-morning class at the Hosmer School in Watertown, I offered a prize to the fourth grader enterprising enough to guess the year in which I myself began fourth grade at the Phillips School in Watertown. One of the boys immediately suggested the year 1776. That kid seems either an inspired comic on his way to Hollywood, or thoroughly confused about history.
Surprisingly, it took only a few more guesses by the children before a smart girl came up with the correct answer – – 1938, the year of the great New England hurricane. Another sophisticated youngster was able to supply the answer to my next question: What great world event followed in 1939?
My agenda for the class was to read and discuss some poems. Because I do not believe in talking down to young people, I chose some of the best contemporary poets in America who write for adults.
The first was the poem “The Promotion” which appeared in a recent New Yorker magazine. Written by James Tate, it begins “I was a dog in my former life, a very good dog, and, thus, I was promoted to a human being.”
The poet goes on for 20 or so lines to explain why he much liked being a dog, how good his life was tending the sheep, and how well the farmer and his children treated him. Eventually, however, the dog retired and died, bringing to an end an idyllic life.
Now life is not nearly so rewarding. The narrator lives in a high rise, works in a cubicle, and excites no fear from the human wolves he encounters. Sadly, he reflects, “This is my reward for being a good dog.”
In the course of discussion, the students came to see the point of the poem. A second reading, during which they remained attentive, clinched its punch for them. Some began to catch the irony in the title: what kind of promotion was it to live that kind of human life?
Then I introduced them to the current poet laureate of the United States, Billy Collins. This gracious 60-year-old has charmed America with his personality and his now wildly popular poetry. Unlike so many other poets of our era, Collins writes accessibly. His work can be understood on various levels, and, I discovered, by children.
The first poem by Collins that I chose was “Walking Across the Atlantic.” The narrator shares his feelings as he steps on the waves, looks for whales and waterspouts, and heads toward Spain. His concluding line is memorably playful: “But for now I try to imagine what this must look like to the fish below the bottoms of my feet appearing, disappearing.”
A second Collins poem I read is longer and more complicated. But “Afternoon with Irish Cows,” found in a recent New York Review of Books, also held the children and drew from them perceptive responses. Incidentally, only two of the kids had never seen a real live cow, proof that most of them have traveled outside Watertown.
The main action of the narrative is one cow’s thunderous roar, a sound that makes the poet put down what he is doing and go out to investigate. He discovered that the cow was “only announcing the large, unadulterated cowness of herself.” My auditors found this a difficult idea, of course, but it made them think.
I concluded the class with a brief poem, “My Goal,” written by my friend, the fine poet Robert K. Johnson, a resident of Needham. “My goal,” he tells, “is to write a poem whose form/disappears in the content like sugar in hot coffee; and whose content rivets the reader/the way footsteps in the next room/grip someone who had thought/he was in the house alone.”
Deliberately I thus left to the end discussion about what poetry is. My instinct was to raise this question only after we had studied individual poems. Then we could more profitably explore together what my friend writes about his aspirations as a poet.
A short time remained for student questions. A girl asked whether I wrote poetry myself. She and several others showed themselves disappointed in hearing that I do not. Pressed for a reason, I shared with them my feelings about lacking sufficient imagination to write well in that form. Yes, I had done so as an exercise when I was a student but did not then consider the product promising.
These kids, however, seemed to consider my answer a cop-out; they want me to try. This should serve as warning for readers of future columns in which I may, without provocation, burst into flights of poetry.
Being in that classroom was a rich experience. I came away from the hour spent with children once more reassured: yes, 73 can talk to 10; and 10 can talk to 73.
Richard Griffin