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Thursday, June 25, 2009
Poems Add Rhyme, Reason to Uneasy Season
By Leslie Linthicum
Journal Staff Writer
I don't fall in love easily or often; we'll put that on the table right here at the start.
But I have twice in the past couple of weeks.
Both of the objects of my desire are poems.
There are poems meant for winter — dark, heavy and intricate, like the stews that warm on the stove. And there are poems for summer — airy, light and simple, the root beer floats of wordplay and a perfect antidote to the nasty news that has swept in already on the winds of this young season.
These are both new poems, short poems, summer poems. And, yes, they rhyme.
One was written by Sherman Alexie, a big-league talent known more for novels and short stories, and it was published in The New Yorker. It's titled "Survivorman," and its premise is contained in its first line, which I'll give to you — "Here's a fact: Some people want to live more than others do."
Look it up in the summer fiction issue (June 15) and give it a read.
The other poem is by Jacob Furgason of Santa Fe. His poem is titled "Mushroom Kingdom," and its premise is also spelled out right at the start: "What if mushrooms ruled the world?"
Furgason wrote the poem this spring at Capshaw Middle School in Santa Fe, where he is in the seventh grade. Or was in the seventh grade. School's out and Furgason is officially an eighth-grader now.
The 13-year-old is spending his summer hanging out, playing games and reading. Right now he's deep into T.H. White's fantasy novel "The Once and Future King."
His mushroom poem originated from New Mexico CultureNet's Poets-in-the-Schools Program. It's a program (funded by grants) that puts poets in classrooms to encourage literacy. A dozen poets taught about 4,000 kids in Santa Fe Public Schools last year, and others were in schools elsewhere in New Mexico.
Break beat poet Idris Goodwin worked in Sue Nichols' classroom at Capshaw, and he got the kids writing and counting syllables and rhyming. Best of all, he got the students thinking.
"This is not about poetry," New Mexico CultureNet's director Alex Traube tells me. "It's about building students' confidence and literacy competence and giving them a record of success. We use poetry because it works."
On the days the poets are in the classrooms, Traube says, nobody ditches.
Kids are familiar with the building blocks of poetry — whether they know it or not — because hip-hop and rap and other kinds of music are part of their lives, and lyrics are poetry.
Furgason, although a reader, hadn't had much exposure to poetry until Goodwin came into his school. He learned from the poet to trust his inspiration and look for rhymes.
Furgason chose mushrooms as his topic "because they taste good." Then, he says, "I really just wrote whatever popped into my mind. Then it just flowed."
Will these middle schoolers go on to become poets? Probably not. But they might be more likely to go on. Through high school. Maybe to college or to a job where they can use the reading and writing skills and thinking they had some fun with when they were 12 or 13.
Maybe later they'll read a poem and they'll enjoy it and by doing that they'll find their lives and their spirits elevated just a little — to a place that makes the crime blotter of these hot summers a little easier to bear.
Traube says he chose to use "Mushroom Kingdom" to illustrate what comes out of Poets-in-the-Schools because he liked the poem.
Me, too.
Here it is, short and sweet:
What if mushrooms ruled the world?
Would they have genders, such as boys and girls?
How would it be if mushrooms could ride a bike?
Now what would that look like?
Would the air be clouded with spores?
Or would they just infest the air of Al Gore?
Would they have an Olympics for Fungi?
Could they ride in airplanes, high up in the sky?
Now the biggest question, please stay in your seat,
Would it be us that they would eat?
UpFront is a daily front-page opinion column. You can reach Leslie at 823-3914 or llinthicum@abqjournal.com.
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