Certainty, Uncertainty, Sand, Sphinx

"Probably some of us were taught so long and hard that poetry was a thing to analyze that we lost our ability to find it delicious, to appreciate its taste, sometimes even when we couldn't completely apprehend its meaning. I love to offer students a poem now and then that I don't really understand. It presents them with the immediate opportunity of being smarter than I am. Believe me, they always take it. They always find an interesting way to look through its window. It presents us all with a renewed appetite for interpretation, one of the most vibrant and energetic parts of the poetry experience."


This sense of undetermined meaning is something I think poetry excels at, and, like Naomi Shihab Nye, who is quoted above, I love offering up the mysteriies of it to children. Kids spend far too much of their time in school being taught specific, determined answers to specific, determined questions. It's not the fault of the teachers, but of those people who ask for "measurable" progress....the Assessment Squads with their standardized tests. Where does poetry (much less mystery) fit into standardized curriculum? One of the great joys of being able to come in as a special guest to schools is the permission I have to send kids off into mystery and uncertainty. They take to it like fish to water.

"If we can offer each other a cognizance of mystery through the poems we share, isn't that a greater gift? Won't a sense of inevitable mystery underpinning our intricate lives serve us better than the notion that we will each be given a neat set of blanks to fill in -- always? Poems offer that mystery. Poems respect our ability to interpret and translate images and signs. Poems link seemingly disparate parts of experience -- this seems particularly critical at the frenzied end of the 20th century."

Again, Nye captures something with I agree completely - that a sense of "inevitable mystery underpinning our intricate lives" is a more useful philosophy than a sense that the answers are the point. That's why I filled my latest book, IMAGINARY MENAGERIE, with questions, not answers. And one of my favorite poems from that book is the one that I allowed to stay the strangest. I love to think a child will go to bed thinking about this:

Sphinx

The riddle maker
is silent now.
So the sand asks:
How?
Why?
When?
But the cat-man sleeps.
He never even stirs.
No one can answer
the sand.


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Poetry Friday this week is hosted by The Holly and the Ivy. Though April, you can find out who's hosting by going to A Year of Reading, where Mary Lee is taking over the organizational responsibilities of lining up hosts for awhile. Thanks to Kelly Herold, Organizer Extraordinaire, of Big A little a for all her hard work keeping Poetry Friday healthy and hosted - she'll be taking a break now.