Artist Date: One Blackbird at a Time

In looking for a funny spoof of Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” to share with my high school poetry class, I came across a beautiful poetry collection by Wendy Barker: One Blackbird at a Time (BkMk Press, 2015). My “Thirteen Ways” lesson flopped, but Barker’s collection has become an inspiration as of late.

One Blackbird at a Time is Barker’s final collection of poems, written after 40 years of teaching poetry at the University of Texas at San Antonio. Each poem is about a particular moment teaching a particular poem to her students. The poems have telling titles such as, “After Spring Break Arriving at Pound’s ‘In a Station of the Metro.’” Many mix the tiredness, nostalgia, and renewal that a longtime teacher might feel teaching the same poem for the umpteenth time.  She weaves herself into each poem (the poem she’s teaching and the poem she’s writing).

Barker reminded me of when I was first tasked with teaching poetry early in my career. Coming from the community-building tradition of teaching students to write I am From Poems and Name Poems, teaching higher level IB students how to analyze Seamus Heaney, Elizabeth Bishop, and Dylan Thomas absolutely intimidated me. What if they were smarter than me? The poets and my students!

But it was with those lovely students in Turkey– whose English and critical thinking were far above that of the public-school Montanans I’d just come from teaching – that poetry opened up for me. Their intellectual curiosity and love of literature breathed life into my creative spirit.  They helped me unlock poetry.

In my free time, I began writing my own poems, and I put together a writing group with other teachers. After a few years, I committed to being a poet, which meant so much more than just writing. It meant reading widely, going on artist dates, journaling regularly, and journeying through life with a mindful, observant, sensitive spirit.

Reading Barker’s collection reminded me of my efforts to breathe that same spirit into my students in all the years that followed.  I, too, have taught William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” not 30 times, but enough to have stopped counting. And each time is a different experience, just as reading a work of literature at different times in your life has a different yield. But to teach it is to add a living element: breathing readers, who are encountering the poem for the first time. Their ignorance can be maddening, tiring, and refreshing all at the same time, which Barker captures so well in her poetry.

Excerpt from Wendy Barker’s Teaching "The Red Wheelbarrow" the Thirtieth Time

I know I've explained how
            Williams didn't like tapping
tired old symbols, but
                      these sophomores are
            not convinced. They've
got that wheelbarrow hard
            at work: It symbolizes life, since
it's red, like blood; they've
                      got it carrying feed, back and
            forth from the coop to keep
those chickens alive so
            they can be busy laying eggs,
though they're white, which
                      stands for death.

Barker’s frustration at this failing lesson causes her to pivot and tell a story about Williams that she’s not even sure is true. Not only does the story rescue the students from their mutilation of the poem, but also rescues the poem, and ultimately Barker herself. She ends the poem:

The poem itself is
                      silent. You can't hear
            any clucking.

Barker reminded me how failed lessons often yield new “poems.”

After taking a graduate class on poet Ezra Pound one summer in Italy, I came back to the classroom ready to infuse my students to “go in fear of abstraction” and aim for “direct treatment of the thing.” To teach Gillian Clarke’s poem, “Red Poppy,” I dug up a poppy from the hills behind our school, and brought the “thing” to my students so they could have a “direct” encounter with it.

The lesson ended up flopping. But this failure became poetry, appearing in one of my poems years later:

Excerpt from my poem: Four Poppies 

I taught my students how to climb
into the alley 
a lesson on metaphor 
preceded by how to launch oneself over a windowsill

The poppy I’d picked hours earlier
sat in a yogurt container of clay
already wilting in the piercing sun
an exercise in close observation 
displaced 
by refusing to kneel on the ground

Despite my cosmic enthusiasm for imagery
they didn’t want to get dirty

They won’t remember the poppy’s 
silk awnings or wine glass veins

Or how 
uprooted from its rugged steppe
something so fragile
lays down its scarlet skirt

So what is my takeaway from this artist date with Wendy Barker’s collection, One Blackbird at a Time?

I have been teaching English for 18 years. What I do in my classroom at times feels tired, hamster-wheelish, ineffective. But even the “misses” are opportunities for renewal if I remember that initial breath poetry breathed into me – to be mindful, observant, sensitive. Each time I teach a work of literature I’ve taught before, it is the first encounter for my students. Whether my lesson flops or not, there is a poem there. There is a poem in the life changes I’ve experienced since the last time I taught it. There is a poem in what this “next generation” of readers can or cannot bring to the table. There is a poem in how the poem itself stands up in the face of all these changes…or wilts. There are many poems in my classroom… if I just pay attention.