CHAPTER 13

Whitman’s Sampler

An Assortment of Youth Poems

The holiday arrival of Whitman’s Sampler chocolates delivered one exotic pleasure of my Midwestern youth. Decidedly middlebrow, inexpensive if not cheap, a proverbial working-class splurge, the box wafted above the living room’s coffee table as if riding a cloud of its own chocolate potpourri. One never knew what one would get—euphoria from choosing a dark chocolate center or retching despair from plucking something jelly-centered, an orange hue not found in nature. By family edict whatever one picked one had to finish. Waste was no welcome guest in scrimping-by’s house. My younger sister, sly as only the youngest becomes from witnessing her elder siblings’ misjudgments, developed a covert strategy for discerning what lay underneath without first risking a bite. Skulking alone to her room with our pale-yellow-boxed heaven, she’d prick the candy’s bottom with her long thumbnail, penetrating just deep enough to detect an unnatural pink hue or the sticky jelly’s gloss. If that’s what she chanced upon—and not dark chocolate or almond fudge—she’d deftly plop the candy back within its paper wrapper and continue her quest until rewarded with not-so-hidden treasure. After a week or so, all the good ones were gone. What remained, hard cat’s hearts staled by my sister’s thumbnail prick, even my father couldn’t stomach. The Sampler rode the coffee table unmolested until Easter, when a fresh box met the fate my sister plied with subtle but earnest abandon.

In honor of those chocolates and in the spirit of Walt Whitman, America’s poet of man as well as woman, of child as well as adult, of rich and poor, of the learned and the ditch digger, our poet, let me offer up some surprising delights. These I’ve gathered, à la my sister, from my Whitman’s Sampler of youth poems. These I savored for myself; these I now offer up so you may do the same. Lest my previous discussion of why kids hate poetry leave us despairing, let me bestow upon youth poetry its rare moment on stage. True enough, poetry can be well taught by teachers both skillful and inventive. Likewise, students can write poems that rearrange the familiar furniture of their lives’ living rooms and of ours. Though most adults never read a word kids write, doing so ought to convince us the kids aren’t headed to hell in YouTube’s digital handbasket. In fact, Robert Graves’s notion that poetry is a form of “stored magic” finds ample support in the acts of conjuring evident in these kids’ poems. To be sure, these poems aren’t perfect, if one is foolish enough to believe any poem to be perfectible. So, readers, keep your red pens pocketed. Instead, relish how each shows poetry’s singular knack for expressing and celebrating our peculiar human pageant.

What follows is an assortment of youth poems featured on my Web sites. These poems embody several notable verse functions favored by poets over centuries: modes that celebrate, lament, give voice to the voiceless, and define one’s self- and group identity. These poems thus connect their young authors to literary history of which they’ve probably little conscious awareness, the young seemingly intuitively grasping poetry’s intrinsic ability to express the human condition. Let’s start with “Bread,” a group poem illustrating the most basic of poetry’s functions—joyful celebration. This piece, cowritten by three fifth-graders—Cole Anderson, Grant Dutton, and Eric Rosenwinkel—entices readers with its giddy playfulness.

Bread, bread, bread.

White bread, wheat bread,

stale, soggy, moldy bread,

soft, warm, cold, bread.

Those are just a few,

raisin bread, crazy bread

blueberry bread, too.

Thin bread thick.

Don’t forget corn bread.

Best of all I like French toast.¹

Each time I recite the boys’ poem before an audience, it elicits roaring belly laughs, a surprisingly uncontainable gush of hilarity made all the more enjoyable because its very uncontainability so surprises the audience. Listeners and readers love how the final line’s exuberant revelation simultaneously sustains and undercuts the poem’s ostensibly meticulous list. Instead of another invocation of “bread,” we get “toast,” a verbal bolt out of the blue. The poem’s timing, as with all things comedic, is impeccable.

Still, that stunning final flourish is nicely prefigured by several deft moves, each pulled off by three then-fifth-graders. Note how the poem charms readers whether they consider its voice to be choric or solo. If the poem’s voice is seen as choric, readers imagine the three boys spilling out their preferences in a sort of communal gustatory free-for-all. Each boy’s taste compliments but also defines the others’ preferences. What each says and how he says it alters with each boy’s judgment. Each phrase, whether compressing syntax or making use of rhyme, embodies a boy’s individual personality elbowing its way to the front of the line amid his schoolboy peers. Even the boys’ syntactic play in casting the line “Thin bread thick” breaks rules their teachers taught them about proper sentence structure. One boy’s direct address cautioning “don’t forget corn bread” can then be seen as spoken as much to the others as to the self or the reader.

If, on the other hand, the poem is imagined as a solo speaker’s recitation of his favorites, the crazy syntactical give and take appears equally if differently energized. This time it’s heard emerging from the mouth of one boy not only dutifully cataloging his preferences but also barely containing the excitement of listing his darlings. All that syntactic variety and play express the process of the boy’s coming to know the self, even if the agent and the topic of such knowledge is as mundane as bread. So the list’s intent is to be exhaustive and to be celebratory, directed as much to the self as to the reader/listener. The line about not forgetting corn bread thus becomes both his direct address to the reader and his Post-It note addressed to himself. In the end, the poem’s final invocation of “French toast” nicely undermines the speaker’s mechanical list-making and enables the speaker’s personal taste—in both bread and syntax—to burst forth in comedic eruption. We readers receive it, with guffaw and glee, as the solo speaker’s consequential if frivolous revelation to himself.

However readers envision the poem’s speaker(s), by the time we reach “Don’t forget cornbread,” we are implicated in the poem’s list-making. We’ve no doubt begun to compose a parallel list of our own, an act of personal discrimination owning peculiar communal properties. When the boys thus swerve into direct address, they playfully tie their poem to poetry’s ancient lineage, linking fifth-graders’ joyful flippancy to traditional poetic rhetoric. The line between poet and audience mutes in the process. Above all else, the sense that the authors had great fun writing the poem pervades the entire piece, and their personal delight becomes the readers’ as well. Simply read the poem aloud and savor its crazy music, the plodding, exaggerated thump of “bread” against the sudden cymbal splash of “toast”!

“Things I Hate,” a poem also curiously invoking soggy bread, demonstrates another of poetry’s fundamental purposes: to speak not just of joy but also of lament. Amid a humorous series of items the youthful poet doesn’t care for, the poem’s bad manners become its redemption. It dares to undercut poetry’s prissy reputation for extolling only what one “loves.” And this piece by Chicagoan fourth-grader Marisa Rosario shows how in poetry humor and seriousness often hold hands. Note how its tongue-in-cheek list of hated things abruptly closes with a swift gut punch to the unwary reader, a gesture both socially specific and universally evocative:

[To view this ........, refer to
the print version of this title.]

As our earlier chapter’s discussion of voice suggested, most young poets fumble for a manner to speak their poems in ways that sound peculiarly their own. But this poet’s sassy voice bristles with personality figured in precise detail. The young poet seems instinctively to understand poems are as much ways of seeing things as they are ways of saying things, as Karl Shapiro has noted. With each brush stroke, the young female speaker paints a portrait of her life’s concerns—soggy vegetables, homework, and dance class. And she does so while paying considerable attention to frisky rhymes like math/ scratch, sport/warts. She has a bundle of opinions, too, and she’s not shy about sharing them with the reader. In fact, for a Chicagoan to dis basketball in the city to which Michael Jordan delivered multiple NBA championships is itself an act of personal defiance. Still, it’s the speaker’s final allusion to her city’s torn social fabric that turns her childlike complaint into larger social commentary. Even her use of the singular “mom”—a choice at odds with grammatical agreement—emphasizes the singularity of each gangbanger’s decision to reject the home front for the street. Finally, it’s worth noting the final line’s the only one not to rhyme, adding even more punch to her complaint. This speaker deftly uses music as well as dissonance. What the speaker hates, unrhymed in the end, adds compelling conflict to her earlier playful litany, lifting her personal complaint to heartrending cultural implication.

Yet another of poetry’s principal functions is to serve as mouthpiece for the silenced, a way to give voice to the voiceless. This notion gains a keenness all the more moving within this poem by a young girl who understands how self-imposed silence can be the agent of defense against a world seemingly out to get her, a way to keep part of herself inviolable and unsullied. As a sixth-grader at Gwendolyn Brooks Middle School in Oak Park, Illinois, Ryan Vince wrote “She Sits by the Window,” portrait of a girl whose feelings of isolation the poet must well understand:

She sits by the window

wondering what day it is

what time it is, looking

out the window lost like

a snowflake wondering which place

to land. She rocks in

her rocking chair lonely, the only

sound is the angry wind

pounding against the fragile window,

fiddling with her fingers, sitting

by the window, looking at

the lonely street, longing

for a friend. It is a ghost town,

white snow and dark

out, and she sits

by the window.³

What’s striking is the poet’s deft use of enjambment to verbally and physically express her isolation as well as her desire to join with others. Repeatedly, she shows an awareness of how enjambing a line creates equally a sense of separateness and of union, one playing against the other as syntax plays against meaning. And she shows a seemingly innate sense of music, making much from the assonance within the lethal chiming of “lonely,” “only,” “snow,” and “window.” The speaker figures herself in the lone snowflake searching for an hospitable spot to call home and the rocking chair holding solitary vigil beside the window, empty with or without her. Even the window expresses victimhood, the “angry wind” pounding so violently the reader winces to ponder how the same fate may have befallen the speaker. Paul Célan once called a poem “a message in a bottle, sent out in the—not always so greatly hopeful—belief that somewhere and sometime it could wash up on land, on heartland perhaps.” Consider, then, this poem the speaker’s message to a world that seems to have turned its back on her, the voice she cannot bring herself to voice in public.

Our final poem conveys poetry’s elemental ability to interrogate the intricacies of individual and group identity. Given our nation’s founding in the immigrant experience and our current multicultural milieu, this mode has proven to be particularly keen within recent American poetry. Here, Jessica Johal’s “Punjabi American” examines how immigrant families labor to span their collective loneliness, the sense of being simultaneously a part of something and apart from it. As with most poetry, such awareness issues primarily from attention, the poet’s careful looking at ways the habitual looms exotic. As Malebranche reminds us, “Attentiveness is the natural prayer of the soul.” Living between two worlds neither wholly her own, this Chicagoan high school senior turns her attention to her parents, discovering in the midst of their homey routines a way to reconfigure both them and herself.

I walk through the front door,

the scent of Mati’s

tandoori chicken curry

sticks to the air.

In the kitchen

she stands before the stove

adding masala spices

in a beige and white salwar kameez,

the baggy pants I know,

tied with white string, but covered

by the short-sleeved kurta

that reaches just above her knees.

Papa sits at the kitchen table

reading the Punjab Times newspaper.

Bill Clinton is in India,

he flips the page, Aishwariya Rai

starred in the new movie,

Pride and Prejudice.

For just a split second,

the steel kara on his wrist

reflects the sun shining

through the window behind him

and causes a glare in my eyes.

Naniji sits beside him

sipping a cup of strong Punjabi cha

the familiar tea spices

mix with the masala,

and make my tongue go dry. I sit at the table,

Mati places in front of me

a bowl of tandoori curry,

steam from the chicken hits my face,

her lips brief to my forehead,

she says, “Morning, Beta,

careful, it’s hot. “⁴

The speaker’s ancestry washes over her waves of recognition she half accepts and half rejects. Her mother’s native dress she knows as intimately as randy Bill Clinton’s wanderings and American movie fare. Her father’s traditional wrist bracelet—emblem of her ethnic heritage—shimmers in this American morning, a combination nearly blinding her with recognition of where her family comes from and where they live now. When the mix of spices and tea makes her “tongue go dry,” the effect is both literal and figurative—the speaker as much silenced as enthralled by the scene. Even the curry she knows so fondly both welcomes and threatens her mixed state of Punjabi American, the curry so hot it may burn her lips as does the mother’s loving morning kiss. She resides in the midst of what and whom she loves, she the distillate of two cultures and thus partly if not wholly other to them both. As such, the teenager’s plight is familiar to generations of immigrants who endure what the African American writer W. E. B. DuBois calls “the double-consciousness”—being both American and other, caught somewhere in the netherworld between. In its subtle and incisive recounting of one Punjabi American morning, the poem becomes the speaker’s vehicle for expressing this bewitching blend of personal yet cultural condition.

~ Coda

These poems by youth of various ages pose an articulate and persuasive rebuttal to those who would have poetry dead in the mouths of our young. In meaningful ways poems make family of strangers. They open the door and usher in a reader the poet’s never seen before. That gesture makes of poems a risky venture for both writer and reader, for one never knows what one will reveal or discover. In engaging the dialogic experience of a poem, as Hans-Georg Gadamer remarks of engaging even in casual conversation, “one never knows what will come out.” Written in solitary labor, worked over endlessly in isolation, often read and enjoyed best alone—the poem yet embodies a communal act. It is the extension of the human hand to another, reaching across the chasm of time, place, social status, even death. This is what makes the writing of a poem, even in desperation, an ultimately optimistic human deed. Writing a poem presupposes a necessary reader, one who shares the writer’s breath and thus breathes life into the poem. When Yeats claimed of his poem, “I made it out of a mouthful of air,” he subtly acknowledged both the intangible source of the poem and its paradoxically tangible end product. Made only of breath, the poem rises stolid from the page, rises from one person into another.