The One Strong Flower I Am

THE ONE STRONG FLOWER I AM / Donald Morrill THEY ARE RUNAWAYS, THROWAWAYS, "problem" teens; cuUs from meager schools and emissaries from questionable homes; bearers of "emotional disabitities" and lurid autobiographies for which they are medicated elaborately and counseled when possible; products of biology, famUy, community—of fate, impure and hardly simple. They have landed here, in the group home school, where Sarah, their instructor, and Bob, her assistant, try to give them enough structure and knowledge to function in the working world beyond graduation. In the middle of this task, for two hours each week, I am to teach them to write poetry. Poetry: a marginalized art form for marginalized people, I think, as I puU into the school parking lot on the day of our first session. I've taken this assignment because I am a poet and have Uved into middle age believing the golden assertions of poetry's proponents: that poetry matters because it somehow enlarges the individual imagination, it articulates the Ufe of the soul, it makes the world cohere. I have beUeved this because I love poetry, but now I suspect my love is rather effete. What place does poetry really claim in this culture, when advertising is the current school of eloquence, and the metaphor, of the marketplace devours aU other figures of thought? If poetic art is supposed to be so fine for the soul, I wonder, why don't more people care about it, and practice it? Only the fierce grandchUdren of the Beats, who dominate poetry slams and spoken-word performances, and coteries of university professors seem interested in it. What would a group of hardening and hurt kids think of a poem? The impUcation in hiring someone Uke me is that poetry is only seti-expression, and self-expression is therapy—something the suffering and disenfranchised need. I enter the front door of the school—a seedy starter house from the 1940s in a scruffy working-class neighborhood. The organization that operates the school and several runaway shelters in the area subsists on government grant money; thus, the faculties are humble and the salaries slight enough to attract only the professionally transient or moraUy committed. Once inside, I see that many of the inner waUs have been removed, and aU those remaining have The Missouri Review · 227 been painted a calming pale mauve. I'm introduced to a dozen or so students spread strategicaUy across desks and tables, a map of emotional nation-states, I wiU learn later, aUiances and betrayals. Frankly, I'm scared, accustomed to the hierarchy of the coUege classroom where no matter how antagonistic or aUterate the students are, the professor is stiU endowed with enough symbotic power to make them comply with the day's agenda. But what do I do here if these kids merely sit before me, a Mount Rushmore of indifference? I keep the formaUties short, and the explanations. This is no land for lecturers. Activity—the pen chasing the completion of the assignment across a page—is my hopeful lubricant. I have assignments—exercises gleaned from the cottage industry of textbooks on teaching chUdren to write poetry, from my coUeagues and friends who have taught for years in the Poets in the Schools Program. AU assure me that these teens wUl want to write about themselves, so we begin with a poem by Donald HaU, "SelfPortrait , as a Bear." Though two of the students, boys, refuse to write, they do so out of a sedate shyness, preferring to sit quietly whUe the others work. In minutes, the rest of the class produces self-portraits as manatees, junkyards, great white hummingbirds. It seems simple, natural. Each wants to read his or her poem, and it thereafter becomes our custom to "read around" the room after each writing session. Often arguments and fights erupt over who wtil read next, though some of the students struggle to articulate their words when their turn arrives. One of them, Becky, becomes so overwrought by the waU between her abUity to write words and read them that she throws herself down in her chair and shrieks. Seemingly obUvious to her torment, the class explodes into a flurry...