#20: bet you never / had to ask.

Dear Readers:

You will receive an email from me each month containing one boredom, one horror, and one glory. This is the twentieth one.

Boredom. I took a class in college taught by the brilliant poet Mary Jo Bang, and every class period we did the same thing: turned to some seemingly random page in the pale blue Norton Anthology of Poetry and talked about the poem on that page. It was in the innocent days before phones, so everyone else in the class stared off into space or slept. But I was spellbound, quite literally at the edge of my seat sometimes. The class was an hour and a half long, and I felt like there wasn’t enough time for me and Mary Jo to talk about the day’s poem. I don’t think she would remember me. She seemed to see the poems in the room, not the people, and I loved that about her and about the class. In our discussion about Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know,” we talked about the epigraph

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

for long, heavy, meaning-soaked, thrilling-to-me minutes before we even started talking about the body of the poem.

We had no homework for this class, just a four-page paper due during finals week where we could choose any poem we wanted from the book and write about it. This course design (I feel nearly certain Mary Jo would not have used that term) has had more influence on me as an educator than all the formal training I’ve had and all the professional development things I’ve done put together. Rigor without busywork. If I had a university, that would be my motto.

Horror. I’ve always believed—no, understood—that there are unfathomable depths to any piece of writing, from the instruction manual for the microwave to the first paragraph of James’s The Ambassadors. Teaching has taught me that other people need to be convinced of this. Mary Jo didn’t try to convince anybody. And nobody was convinced, except for me—but she utterly changed my life. Would convincing even work? You quickly get into exactly the kind of justifying that Stanley Fish has been saying for the past decade (in a patient yet condescending tone that I find delightful) we shouldn’t do:

The person or persons who ask us as academic humanists to justify what we do is asking us to justify what we do in his terms, not ours. Once we pick up that challenge, we have lost the game, because we are playing on the other guy’s court, where all the advantage and all of the relevant arguments and standards of evidence are his.

Why spend an hour and a half talking about “The Truth the Dead Know”? I don’t know, and if I knew and said why, it wouldn’t convince anybody who wasn’t already sympathetic to the endeavor. It’s like how Brian asks me why would anyone listen to the news all the time like I do, what’s it for? I don’t know! It’s for me, okay? And when I listen to the news, I rarely even get to the information. I’m listening to the tones in peoples’ voices, seeing if I can figure out how they really are in the pauses between their words, trying to hear how they feel about one another.

I don’t know why I do this; it’s just the way I am. I couldn’t justify it, I am it. And I try so hard in the Intro to Creative Writing class I teach every semester not to convince students or to justify to them being this way but to invite them to be it, too.

Glory. This intro class, as I ideally imagine it, at least, is about how to read a poem. It’s about depth, not coverage. So that you can learn what a poem is, not what all poems are. We read three poems a week for the four weeks we study poetry. I chose these twelve poems pretty quickly. I liked them fine, but more than that, they served my purposes: I needed poems that don’t rhyme and use reasonably casual language, to show students that contemporary poems probably aren’t what they think of when they think of poetry. I’ve continued to assign these poems every single semester out of laziness, but I’ve learned so much about them and from them. I love them more and more each semester.

My favorite one this semester is “beverly, huh.” by Jamila Woods. My students often describe this poem, a screed voiced by a girl against a wealthier, more privileged girl, as straightforward, but it has depths that are hard to see if you haven’t read it a thousand times. There’s way too much to say about this poem; I can only dance around the edges here. My students tend to think it’s about a girl named Beverly, but it’s about the Chicago suburb, Beverly. (Like, "you’re from beverly, huh., let the judgment begin.) That used to annoy me, but this semester I realized we are being instructed to read it the way they do by both the enjambed first line and the punctuation in the title:

you must be

Enjambed means no punctuation at the end of the line, so (in this case), the line boomerangs back to the title: you must be [beverly, huh.] It makes a subtle sentence.

Other students think the title refers to Beverly Hills, which also used to annoy me. But this semester I started thinking that there is a sort of joke-y flavor of Beverly, this middle-class Chicago suburb, presented as being like Beverly Hills. Like to the speaker of the poem, reveling in, celebrating, the specificity and lushness of her own judgment against this other girl, Beverly might as well be Beverly Hills.

The second line of the poem is “made of money,” and the greenness that is introduced with the word money tinges the poem with green: there are trees, golf, a credit card, bills, green day, al [green], a frog’s belly, grass—lots of green things. And there are the lines from which I stole that phrase:

bet you’re black

tinged with green.

My students think this is another way of saying “you must be / made of money.” So did I the first hundred times I read it. But now I think it’s a description of a black person with green eyes—and maybe a tinge of “made of money,” too.

I have to stop here or I’ll go on forever, but one more thing I just learned to love this semester is the shape of this poem, how it builds and builds, visually. First the “bet you,” “bet you” charges wrap around the line—

bet you played

with bills for toys.

bet you chew

them up for dinner.

Then they start taking up the whole line:

bet you listen to green day.

Then they get longer and longer, horses galloping right to your front door:

bet you feel like a princess.

bet the police protect your house.

bet you know their first names.

bet your house has a hundred rooms.

This poem has a hundred rooms. I feel like I’ll never be done wandering through them.

Sincerely,

Lucy

Recommended: If you have full access to Project Muse (which I don’t), you can read an excerpt from my novel-in-progress about the Salem Witch Trials, which appears in the new Early American Literature, here. I’ll tell you more about it next month.