by Carolyn Praytor Boyd

“Look at people not like you.  Listen to conversations that don’t concern you.  Think about things that touch us all.”  With these instructions, I send out my junior English students to begin the process of becoming poets and, I hope, more attentive and empathetic people.  Rather than talk about the assignment itself, I would like to explain the words and thoughts behind my introductory directive and how they focus this particular assignment and, to some extent, our entire year of writing. 

“Look” that first word for the old see-and-say reading text.  “Look, Jane.  See Spot run.”  Nothing can come before Jane looks and really sees Spot.  “Look,” what every parent says to his or her child.  “Look at the bird.”  “Look at the big fire truck.”  And yet in the poetic sense, we are, more than likely, poor lookers.  In late March, I ask my students if they have noticed anything unusual on their way to school.  In The Woodlands where I teach, the medians and roadsides are seeded with wildflowers, and our red clover marks the beginning of spring.  Without exception no one has noticed and after several days of asking and describing, I stop on the shoulder and illegally harvest several specimens to share.  For a few weeks after that, class begins with comments about the wildflowers they have noticed, magically there with both the coming of spring and the coming of seeing.

“People” In our culture of labels (students, Hispanics, seniors (both the elderly and the lordly upperclassmen), homeless, CEO’s and geeks) students can easily pigeonhole types.  This assignment asks them to consider people as humanity without type.   Looking at others as part of the broader class, more of the same, others in the same boat, peopleness, gives them a new perspective.  It opens up the gates to the party for all comers.  We tie this discussion into Emerson’s call for a truly American poetry when we reconsider his statement that ‘the idiot, the Indian, the child and the unschooled farmer’s boy stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read than the dissector or antiquary.”   Students who have not read much contemporary poetry regularly respond that they don’t have anything to write about.  If they have not suffered for love or experienced the death of someone near, they couldn’t have the building blocks of poetry.  The first step into opening their poet’s eye to the world around them begins with their discovery that a poem hides in the smell of the new car, or the lost keys, or the guy at the carwash.

“Not like you” Returning to the classification system on which teenagers rely, this phrase gets them out of themselves and their comfort zone.  Mothers tell their children, don’t stare.  This polite lesson quickly becomes translated into don’t look at all, not only as a guise for politeness but also as a relief for responsibility and empathy.  If we don’t look at the child throwing a tantrum in the grocery store, we don’t have to consider the frustration of the totally dependent and the weariness of the constant caregiver.  If we don’t take the time to really look at the business traveler waiting in the airport, we can’t empathize with the parent who comes home devoid of energy to share with his or her family.  If we don’t look with an open mind at the man with the “I’ll work for food” sign on the feeder road, we can’t really understand ourselves as we eat dinner at the pleasant restaurant.  From the artist’s perspective, the looking comes without the weight of cultural induced judgment.  I ask my students not to assume that they know what is good or bad, what lifestyle or situation is desirable or painful.  This stance allows them to see both the grandeur in sleeping under the vaulted ceilings of an overpass and the cultural sterility of gated communities.  But not just that, a truly empathetic view allows them to write fully and openly about the panhandler in the Starbuck’s parking lot and their own first run at Snow King.

“Listen” starts with clarifying of the difference between that and hearing, as in “I hear you, I’m just not listening.”  We tend to think that teenagers have mastered the art of hearing without listening, but it patently isn’t true.  Students are great listeners; they just are selective listeners.  I have been appalled over the years by what students remember me saying years before in jest or exasperation while the words of wisdom about Eliot were never recorded.  This, then, becomes an exercise in mindfulness, in deciding to listen to everything they hear for a period of time.  Like a quick weight loss program, this has a time limit because it is difficult to do.  A training period is required.  In a world where cell phone conversations flood over us, we have learned to filter most of what comes into our ears.  This assignment gives them the directive to attend unfiltered to the world around them.

“That don’t concern you” again appears to fly in the face of good manners.  We discuss eavesdropping, but admittedly writers do it all the time, and certainly we want to avoid a stalking mentality that reduces others to prey.  Having clarified that, it is easy enough in any coffee house, airport, cafeteria or checkout line to hear phrases, topics and non sequiturs to spark a dozen poems.  I advise students to carry small, inconspicuous notebooks for copying those great finds.   I share with them some of the better bits in my own palm size lab notebook and the poems that have come from them.  This is also a great exercise for acting students as well as writer.  It is not only what people say, but how they say it, the expressions, wording and inflections that open our minds to the variety of life and language around us.

“Think about things” suggests one of my favorite words for class activities and assignments, ponder.  I once had a parent, upset about something else, take me to task for asking students “to ponder.”  The word, she said, was an adult word and not something teenagers did.  I spent some time of my own pondering her remark, and I decided she was wrong.  Teenagers ponder quite a bit although they may not call it that.  Thinking about things, or worrying, or sulking, or daydreaming are all forms of pondering, that slow mental process of letting an idea percolate and turn over slowly in one’s consciousness without a specific end in mind. Many assignments ask students to engage in closed circuit activities (write a paragraph, work some problems, observe a reaction) which have a beginning and an end.  To ponder something is open ended.  It asks us to bring back time and again an idea or observation and deal with it repetitively, each time somewhat differently because we are somewhat different each time, our knowledge and experience having changed in the course of a day or maybe even an hour.

“That touch us all” If the student has been successful so far in the assignment, this one is self-fulfilling.  Once we are able to see and hear the world we live in with this unanimity, we are, in a sense, tuned into the greater life.  No longer isolated in our own world with its pressing concerns and obligations, we are synchronized with what it feels like to be isolated or frustrated or awed or loved.  Because these represent the human condition, this exercise allows us to both observe its manifestations in others and touch its wellspring within ourselves. 

At the end of the week, students come back with an amazing array of poems.  They write about things they have seen and heard and experienced in their greater world.  Still they have not objectified these because they have not come to them through only themselves.  Instead, they have for a time tuned into others, whom they discover are not, in all their permutations, so different from themselves.  I take this as a goal, no matter the quality of the student’s poem, well worth the achieving.

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