“Poets aren’t very useful.
Because they’re aren’t consumeful or very produceful.”
                -Ogden Nash

”To have a friend, be a friend.”
                -What My Mom Used To Say (And Sometimes Still Says)

                It seems about time, after two-hundred and twenty-two weeks of wandering around with all these words — mucking about in the mud, watching tadpoles, feeling storms — to stop, and sit, and yawn, and scratch my nose, and read some Nash, and remember that I don’t want — oh, please, no — to get produceful. 
                I think an emphasis on useful can push us towards using. It can show us a world of pulleys and levers, where I wonder what friends to make so I end up with friends in high places, what words to say so people like me, what trampolines to find so I’m launched up by springs others made to land high on ‘success.’ (I imagine it as the cement statue of a fat elephant, or maybe a heffalump, actually, decorated with plastic bits and mirrors). When I teach to be useful, I’m thinking about where to get my students to sit, what to lead them into doing, what habits to imprint on them, so they can make people like them and bounce on trampolines, too. And I don’t want that world. I get pulled there, I trick myself to going there, I get convinced it’s the only “here,” but it’s not, and I don’t want it.
                Nash doesn’t say that poets don’t do those things: they aren’t those things. Their world is a place of being and becoming. Be friends. Be kind. Be an actual elephant, peanut eating, water spouting, or a someone, evening yawning, nose scratching, water watching, or an uncle, baby holding, spit-up cleaning, feet planting so you can be the jungle gym on which your niece is climbing swinging. There is so much more to all of this than levers and pulleys. I don’t want to push and pull and calculate until my life falls out, fully wrapped, from the factory I’ve imagined. I don’t want to keep asking if I’m productive. Poets aren’t very useful. They make friends to be friends. If a teacher is a teacher like a poet is a poet, it’s something they are: supportive, open-minded, encouraging, attentive, silly, respectful, excited to see and ready to share. Poets are sayers of funny things. They’re listeners. They’re makers. They’re sharers. They are. And if teaching poetry taught me anything, it’s that everyone — everyone, everyone — can write a poem.

                “Gregor lost his boot in a mudhole, but I don’t think he ever got justice. Books can be nicer than life sometimes.” -Vera Brosgol, in her author’s note for Be Prepared, the mostly-true story of a nine year old’s summer camp
                “What we call retribution is the universal necessity by which the whole appears wherever a part appears. […] If you see a hand or a limb, you know that the trunk to which it belongs is there behind.” -Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation”

                When my little brother was younger I told him stories about fairies. We’d lie down and explore how different groups — the fairies who lived in forests, or mountains, or beaches — wove themselves into the world. What did they do when it rained? What were their clothes made from? How did they interact with seagulls and bats, swallows and squirrels and beetles? When he got older, when he asked, “Do you really believe in fairies,” I didn’t know what to say. Because the answer was, I suppose, and sadly, “No.” I don’t believe that there are little creatures with two legs and caretakers’ hands who walk beneath the leaves. I didn’t want to get him teased by his friends. But the answer’s also, “Yes:” I think there are caretakers. I think there’s magic, a world brimming with it, and it’s all the more wondrous for moving through light waves and roots and nitrogen. And there are so many little creatures, two-legged and otherwise, who wander through a world larger than they know.
                In writing this, I’m smiling, because I’m remembering sitting outside with my little brother. I’m remembering how he looked while he listened. I’m a child myself, going out to see how the bucket of rainwater has a face of ice in the morning. Last week, in a PhD physics lab at the University of Illinois, I listened to a friend explain equipment that she uses to grow crystals a few atomic layers thick. Listening to her I felt that same wonder. For me, I think, that wonder washes in on waves of fairy stories and scientific curiosity. 
                In Be Prepared, Gregor is the camp nerd, and Alexei is the mean, handsome boy who leads others in laughing at him. Brosgol gives Gregor and Alexei their “just desserts:” Gregor gets a moment of kindness and connection; Alexei finds a sketch of himself crumpled up and thrown into the latrine. He gets to see how some people view his meanness.
                “Books can be nicer than life sometimes.”
                Books can let us draw the resolutions we have in our heads, the movements we imagine, and where those movements end. I think sketching those arcs, as we grow and choose who to be, is incredibly powerful.At the same time, Emerson says compensation isn’t the heaven or hell we get for what we’ve done. Compensation doesn’t come later and somewhere else: it’s woven in here and now. I still believe in fairies, and when I move into that, the compensation is how I look at growing things and the equipment in the lab. I’m also mean, sometimes: I remember being thirteen and saying something I knew would hurt, because it would hurt. My “just desserts” weren’t only the feeling I had in that moment, but also the place I moved into by doing that: I’d treated a person as not a person, and to that extent, I’d moved away from the connection I really wanted.
                The back of Brosgol’s book shows a girl running through the woods with a flashlight. A story, sometimes, is the flashlight we shine to pick out details of what happened and how it changed us. Maybe that’s why books are “nicer:” they let us see the changings in our hearts that might, otherwise, go unseen (but still felt) in the dark.

                “One day, when the light was yellow, I turned to Bush and I said, ‘Something wonderful lives inside me.’
                She looked at me. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘The early people knew this, that’s why they painted animals on the inside of caves.’
                Something beautiful lives inside us. You will see. Just believe it. You will see.”
                -Linda Hogan, Solar Storms

                Maybe all stories are creation stories.
                Once, eight years old, when I was sitting near the wall of my mom’s African dance class, I looked at the movement and the swing, and I thought, that looks amazing. And I thought, I couldn’t do it. That’s not only the influence, of course, but still, I’ve now been scared of dancing for decades.
                Talking to a friend, senior year of college, I asked, “Do you think your high school in India would hire a young college grad to teach?” Later I spent a year in Rishi Valley, climbing rocks with new friends, learning what I hadn’t known I didn’t know.
                Maybe all stories are creation stories.
                Solar Storms is a book about becoming: it’s about how the land comes to be, about how people come to be, about how we all come to be, interconnected and together. And it’s a story that insists creation is not finished: it’s ongoing. In these, the last lines of the book, Hogan’s main character asks us to see something. To believe something. “Something beautiful lives inside us.” We can grow following that. Hogan doesn’t want this to be a book you finish and put down. It’s a story you follow and pick up, and it unfolds in front of you: the world, now, is different than it was. If you’ve read. If you believe. “You will see.”
                This isn’t something simple, like “envisioning the world you want” or “sending it out into the universe.” This is deeper than that, I think. This is relational, communal. This is the work of becoming. What we create, bit by bit, what we join together, day by day, becomes something; what we join ourselves to can draw something from us, and we change with it; and any time we tell a story, anytime we see something truly, another stream runs through us. After that we’ll move forward, but we won’t move forward the same way.
                I told myself, a month ago, that I wanted to try my friend’s Blues Dancing class. It’s been frightening. It’s been wonderful. I’ve never thought I could find the beat, to be honest, but on Monday there was this new thread I could almost follow.
                Maybe all stories are creation stories.

                “[…] students are taught that third-person statements are unbiased (objective) and those in the first person are biased (subjective). […] Delete “I believe” from “racism is on the rise in this country” or “racism has virtually disappeared in this country,” and [they’re taught that] the assertion assumes a reality independent of the writer, who is no longer the author but merely the messenger of news or fact.”
                -Linda Brodkey, “Writing on the Bias”

                When I started writing, I put “I think” or “I believe” before the first-ish claim in almost any discussion. Later I stopped: “If it’s in your writing, then of course it’s your belief. You don’t need to say that,” I thought. Although that doesn’t sound like a thought: it sounds like a rule someone told me. I just can’t remember who said it. It might even have been me, to a student; if so, oops, and I’m very, very sorry.
                Reading Brodkey, I realize what young me was instinctively doing: not telling the reader that this was my claim, as opposed, you know, to some other person’s claim sneakily camped out in my head, but reminding myself that I was sharing my perception. Clarity, argues Brodkey, doesn’t come from not having a perspective. It doesn’t come from cutting out “I think” and pretending that your thought now has no you in it. It comes from being aware of your perspective, and considering it, making adjustments for it, and being willing to challenge it. 
                Once I start examining it, my perspective is always incomplete, and sometimes it’s not even mine. Other people’s claims make it into my thinking (and writing) all the time. When I was twelve I told my older brother that tortillas were originally toys, not food: they were like frisbees. I’d read that on the back of a restaurant menu. The subtext I missed wasn’t “I [the writer] believe that,” it was more “We pretend, because it’s funny, while you’re waiting for your burrito, that,” but in the end I still accepted the statement as “objective truth” because it seemed to be written as a blurb about history, and I thought that’s what it was. It isn’t the only weird claim I’ve found, nestled away in my head, though it’s the only one with salsa on it and right now I’m a little hungry.
                My brother laughed at me, by the way. Which might be what should happen when we go about touting our perceptions as authorless news. If I’d said, “I think burritos started as toys,” even young me might’ve asked, “Wait a minute, that sounds strange, why do I think that?” I might’ve been more aware of the viewpoint I’d taken up, and then asked how I came to that viewpoint, and then asked a few more interesting questions. “I think” isn’t just a tag for the reader, and it’s not just a stylistic choice. It’s a reminder for the writer. For the thinker. If it’s in your language, it says, you’ve already translated it for yourself. What has that translation done, and what might you be missing?

“The fragility of mortals bred kindness and good grace.”
                -Madeline Miller, Circe

                It’s a beautiful thought, and it isn’t true. And it is.
                Circe retells pieces of Greek mythology from the witch’s point of view. Circe herself is immortal, the daughter of a god, and the first part of the book explores how vain and self-satisfied the gods are. They don’t work, and don’t learn from working. They’re fascinated by pain and their own perfection, and never see past either of them. Humans are different, Circe says. Humans are fragile, they age and hurt and move on, scarred, and in that they learn to help each other and be grateful. But in the pages right after she comments on their kindness, the people she was talking about turn on her. Their vulnerability and pain has made them vicious, not aware. They even use their vulnerability as a trap to catch and hurt her. It isn’t true: the fragility of mortals does not make us kinder.
                Except, sometimes, it does. I’ve seen people who, because they’re hurt, lash out to hurt someone. I’ve done it. I’ve tried to get even, I’ve tried to cause pain because I was in pain, I’ve refused to share because I was worried I didn’t have enough. My fragility can make me so intent on me that I won’t see you. But I’ve also seen people who know what it’s like to be hungry, and so want people to be fed. I know young people who are studying to be counselors and social workers–or just growing up to be supportive–because they are someone who has been hurt, like so many other people, and they’ve felt how someone who has been hurt needs someone to reach out. They’re practicing that reach. You don’t need to take the fact that you’d like to keep your fingers intact as a reason to be careful with the scissors around someone else’s hands, but you could.
                Mythology has magic. This is our kind. Not Helios’ flaming chariot, not Hermes’ winged sandals, but the quiet, human, inward transmutation that stands in what has been hurt, and tries to heal. I wonder how it happens: do I need someone to help me get there? If I’m hurt and hurt and never helped, can I learn to cast this spell? I don’t know. I hope so, but maybe not. Quests have guides, and children have parents. But this, says Madeline Miller, this is our kind of magic, and it’s a magic — a mythology — with which I hope we fall in love.

“Anytime we engage with mystery, a practice of mystery, we learn and unlearn.” 
                -TC Tolbert, while discussing his poetry at the University of Illinois

                I got to see TC Tolbert read last Thursday, and he read a selection I’ll never hear again. I won’t be able to: he didn’t read a sequence of poems, he read a collage of them, with lines and thoughts pulled from different places inside his work. I’d never heard a poet read like that. To be honest, I wasn’t sure about that at first, but as I wonder about it I love it more and more. It made the poems something halfnew, halfknown. It brought us–the listeners, the poet–to a new edge of the firelight, and past that edge are stars and ice and mystery.
                On Sunday night, for the first time in months and months, I let myself cry. 
                Tolbert describes writing poetry as the process of taking something that’s you, collecting it in your hands, and gathering it to a place just outside you so you can work with it. He showed what he meant with his hands. His motions reminded me of a potter working at the wheel: he gathered clay from his arms, his breath, pulled it out in front of him, turned it, shaped it. And then of course (he laughed) it becomes a part of you again and changes you, but because it’s you brought out of you and worked with and brought back in, it changes you “honestly.”
                Dr. Gordon Neufeld suggests that, once you’ve lost touch with your tears, you might need someone to help you find your way back. I didn’t cry alone. A friend sat with me, talked with me, gave me a hug. I’d been intentionally moving toward that moment, that accepted vulnerability, for a while. I’ve been practicing a walk toward the sea that I so often avoid. I don’t think my tears were over this incident, or that one. They were more roots than leaves, more subterranean than geographical. I started learning what they were as I started unlearning the habits that had held me back from them. I wonder, now, if I was feeling what TC Tolbert described.
                There is always so much more than we understand. There is always a mystery. When I’m intent on being productive and capable, on doing what I need to, I try to sail across the top of that mystery without looking too far down into it. When I swim down to float inside, when I practice being part of it, day after day, different things happen. Big things happen. Perhaps I find a part of myself, and let that part move out, let it live–in writing or a song or a friend’s words, or the pattern of roots in earth–in the world as I work with it. Then something that’s not mine but is me comes back to change me. To change me honestly, says TC Tolbert.

“I wanted to love you better so I bought you a city.”
                -Dina Guidubaldi, “How Gone We Got”

                I was there for the beginning of my little brother’s first backpacking trip, but I didn’t do a great job of it. A friend and I were starting our own trip. My brother was going up with my mom. We arranged the two trips so we could all walk together for the first day. My mom was in full “help the little one love the mountains” mode, so she’d packed all the normal gear they would need, and then she’d packed what they would need: a kite, and paints, a floaty ring for the lake, and more. I helped carry all that up to the lake where they’d made their base camp. I wanted to.
                My friend and I were going to hike up farther into the mountains, but I asked him to hang out a bit while I helped my family set up. I started teaching my little brother how to hang their food out of a bear’s reach. He was goofy while we did it, and I got frustrated with him. I didn’t want to be keeping my friend waiting, but still, what I did was worse than goofy. I wanted to help my brother and mom because I wanted them to have a good trip, and because helping was a practical sign of loving them. Being goofy together is a sign of love, too. 
                Looking at my grandfathers, and at my community in general, I see men who have a hard time saying “I love you.” Weird, isn’t it? I didn’t think that was hard for me, but then, there I was, stomping along through some I-Show-Love-By-Carrying-Things-Sternly performance.
                At first, “How Gone We Got” is a story about a man who can’t love the woman he “loves:” he can control things “for her,” own things “for her,” make things as they should be “for her,” but only in as much as she fits into the construction of his own fairytale. When that blows up in his face, the man retreats to another kind of love: he’ll be a great dad. We know he’ll do the same thing: fill the relationship with his idea of what it should be, put everything “in place,” and leave no room for the other, the beloved, the love. He doesn’t see that. He learned that the strategy didn’t work with a woman: he’s sure it will work with a child.
                I wish I’d hung out with my little brother, up there beneath the big trees. I’m glad that, since then, we’ve made time to goof around. In the loves I feel, for siblings or partners or anyone, I don’t want to buy cities and buy cities and buy cities until I’ve made you see what I’m feeling. I want to come to a place between us, and make space for what I find there. I want to be open, and let the love I feel be. I want to play around together while we set up camp.

                “It’s not the cutting out of frustration, but the adding in, at the same time, of love, compassion, caring, alarm; it’s the adding in. It’s not the cutting out of ‘undesirable’ impulses, it’s the adding in of the thing that would bring us to stability, to balance. That is the idea. Everything has an answer. The goal is to be a well tempered person.”
                -Dr. Gordon Neufeld, in lecturing for his course, “Making Sense of Kids”

                My older brother paddled over to me, smiled, and said, “Go ahead and pray, but maybe pray with your eyes open.”
                Then he paddled off down the river.
                I had been floating along in the current. Two years before I’d had an ugly run on a river, flipping over in rapid after rapid, banging my face and my knee and my leg, and for two years I’d been too scared to go whitewater kayaking again. The moment I’m remembering now didn’t end all that fear, but it helped me to hold my fear in a different way. It helped me to add in other experiences, too. I could keep my eyes open, too. I could see the water, and how beautiful it was. I could see the current, the ways waves marked them: I actually knew a lot about how to “read” all that and maneuver through it. I was also a kid who loved just letting my fingers move through water: I loved the lift, the flow, the space of it, and all that was in the river, too. The river frightened me, but didn’t only frighten me.
                I’ve been wondering where else in my life that pattern holds true, and as far as I can tell, the answer is “everywhere.” Whenever I’m frustrated with a student, I’m not only frustrated. I’m hopeful for them, too. I wouldn’t be frustrated if I didn’t see how much was possible, how many different paths they could take, how many different places–to almost-Dr.Seuss–they could go. Of course, once I take the time to really feel all that hopeful connection, I’m not only frustrated. Not anymore. And once there are other elements, the frustration can’t push me around like it once did. I’ve found my mix. Right now, in my third week of grad school, I’m exhausted and stressed by everything I’m trying to do (including finish this). But I’m not just exhausted. I’m also thankful, and happy for the chance to share, and inspired by people I’m meeting. I’m about to eat something mysterious that my French housemate is cooking. I’m a mix. A “temperament,” Neufeld says, originally meant a “mix of attributes;” “well-tempered” means that the different attributes balance each other out. 
                When I get quick tempered (if you tried to mix something quickly, I suppose it might not end up that well mixed) and angry, I keep falling back to trying to cut something out. I try not to worry. I try to stop being so lazy. I try to put my sadness aside. And Neufeld says, “Stop:” stop trying to cut things out, and start adding things in.

                “The writer, like the teacher, needs to understand each individual act more generally, as a specific variant of the kind of situation for which the procedure was designed.” 
                -Kathleen Blake Yancey, “Only Connect”

                Yancey’s exploration of “reflective teaching” probably connects to reflective just about anything: learning often involves doing something, stepping back to look at what you did (and how it played out), and then doing that thing again. Reading her work, I think, “Yes:” until we’re willing to connect this moment to other moments, look for the pattern, and try again, we’re navigating a sea whose every wave hits us as unknowable, unpredictable, unfamiliar. But I also think “No no no:” any time I’ve abstracted this actual person, Sam, into a student, and my interaction with Sam into a situation for which I have a designed “procedure,” I’ve felt gross, and Sam has felt what I’m doing, and he’s been (justifiably) pissed off at me. There’s that old saw: “You don’t teach English, you teach people.” We don’t live procedures, we live lives.
                Still, Yancey and I probably agree more than we don’t. She is suspicious of “gifts” and “talents,” preferring something like “skills,” and I can understand that. Everything can be practiced. We do nothing but practice, every day. If it can be practiced, then a companion (call them a teacher, if you want) can probably support you in practicing, and a companion (call them a student) can consider your example. Her essay gives us one example of how you could form that practice, but growing up is personal. Whatever life I grow, it grows in my soil. I don’t think you can graft a practice from one person to another. You can describe the seed you started with, and how you planted it, and how you cared for it. But you can’t push me through the seasons. You can’t even give me the seed: I go out into my own wilds, and look for it. I want what Yancey wants, I want more people, changed by and changing a more connected world, but I’m worried when we try to lay down roadmaps instead of encouraging countryside wanderers.
                I suppose I’m worried by abstractions. “The writer, like the teacher, needs to…” I need to connect. To you. You may not want to; then I need to connect with your unwillingness to connect. I’ve had that experience with a student before, and when I let him be him, not a collection of my intents and practices, it worked well. I need to listen. I need to be open, not to what I expected, but to what is. I need to offer, not what I’ve practiced, but what I am. In the end, I think, Kathleen Blake Yancey’s students will be inspired by her or not at all. A friend will know her, or they won’t. Her lovers will touch her, or no one. I will give my heart, my mind, my work, give it to you, because there is no one else here, no average student with a notebook, and because I have–I am–nothing else. I need nothing else. This is wonderful, joyous and frightening and true.
                Only connect.

                “With small cuts Cro-Magnon man recorded the moon’s phases on the handles of his tools, thinking about her as he worked. Animals. Horizon. Face in a pan of water. In every story I tell comes a point where I can see no further. I hate that point. It is why they call storytellers blind–a taunt.” -Anne Carson, Short Talks

                Ursula Le Guin comments that humans use sight as their primary tool in exploring the world, and that of all our senses, sight gives us the most control. Try as I might, with my hands holding my head, I can still hear. I can feel what’s against my skin. But I close my eyes, and you disappear. Even with my eyes open, there’s too much in any space to take in. I see what I focus on, what I turn toward. I see what I choose.
                In every story I write, I stumble to the point Anne Carson describes, the point where I can’t see what’s next. We don’t live fictions, but we do live narratives (or maybe we tie our lives to narratives), and I have the same experience there: I can almost never see past where I’m standing. I can see duties, possibilities, friends, and sometimes when I work at it I can see where I am, but anything “further” is on the other side of the water’s surface. (“I am to imitate a mirror like that of water (but water is not a mirror and it is dangerous to think so),” writes Carson in her introduction). I’m not sure I ever knew why I was teaching high school, except that it felt important and I could do it. I’m not sure I know why I’m at the University of Illinois, or where that’s headed, except that it felt like the most balanced step I saw how to make when my foot was coming down. Looking forward from this point, looking at the water’s surface, I see reflections of what’s behind me and shadows of what I hope for and ripples from the current. I can see no further.
                Maybe the trick is to go on anyway. Maybe we’re not supposed to be able to see the next step, and the next, and the entirety of a path. Maybe storytellers stumble through their hopes, keeping their fingers on the wall, their toes on the floor. (What philosopher was it who pointed out that, as two legged creatures, we move forward by starting to fall?). Maybe you can learn where you start and balance for your steps, and walk, choosing your direction, but you can’t see where you’ll end up. I wonder what the world would be like if our society focused on touching or hearing, instead of seeing. If we started with the roughness of bark against fingers, the touch of a dog’s bark in our ears, instead of the light that plays tricks with our eyes. We call our prophets seers. What would our world be like if we pulled our wisdom from a different sense?