THE POWER OF THE WORD

Heroic Teaching in Troubled Times

By

Les Standiford  

          Shortly after the events of September 11 had unfolded, I found myself in the car on the way up to school, listening to an interview with Billy Collins, our new Poet Laureate, conducted by Terry Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air.  Terry asked Mr. Collins if he had any poems to recommend that listeners might go to for comfort in these troubled times.  Mr.Collins seemed caught off guard by the question—or perhaps I am simply projecting—in any case, he told Terry that poetry tended to be about love more than war.  He thought that readers might want to go to a good poem about love, or hope, or possibility.
         
        Not a bad suggestion, mind you, but I found myself wanting to go to the phone tocall in a few suggestions of my own.  I didn’t think it was time to read “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” or “Gunga Din,” of course, but I did think of W.H. Auden’s masterful poem “MUSEE DES BEAUX ARTS” which begins, if memory serves me, “About suffering they were never wrong, the old masters,” and ends with the lovely ironic lines that go something like: “And the expensive, delicate ship (he’s describing the Brueghel painting “The Fall of Icarus’), which must have seen something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, had somewhere to get to, and sailed calmly on.”

        And there were other lines that arose in my mind, also from Auden, in memory of W.B. Yeats, “Ireland has her madness and her weather still,/ For poetry makes nothing happen:  it survives/ In the valley of its making where executives/ would never want to tamper, flows on south/ From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,/ Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,/ A way of happening, a mouth.”

        But more than any poem, I longed to remind Mr. Collins of a wonderful work by Jack Gilbert, a much undervalued poet, if such a phrase is not a redundancy, one I would like to read to you in whole, because it bears on what I wanted to talk a little bit about this evening, The Teacher as Hero.  Let me first read Gilbert’s poem: 

                                    Jack Gilbert, “The Abnormal is not Courage”

                    The Poles rode out from Warsaw against the German
                    Tanks on horses.  Rode knowing, in sunlight, with sabers,
                    A magnitude of beauty that allows me no peace.
                    And yet this poem would lessen that day. Question
                    The bravery. Say it’s not courage. Call it a passion.
                    Would say courage isn’t that. Not at its best.
                    It was impossib1e, and with form. They rode in sunlight,
                    Were mangled. But I say courage is not the abnormal.
                    Not the marvelous act. Not Macbeth with fine speeches.
                    The worthless can manage in public, or for the moment.
                    It is too near the whore’s heart: the bounty of impulse,
                    And the failure to sustain even small kindness.
                    Not the marvelous act, but the evident conclusion of being.
                    Not strangeness, but a leap forward of the same quality.
                    Accomplishment.  The even loyalty.  But fresh.
                    Not the Prodigal Son, nor Faustus. But Penelope.
                    The thing steady and clear. Then the crescendo.
                    The real form. The culmination. And the exceeding.
                    Not the surprise. The amazed understanding. The marriage,
                    Not the month’s rapture.  Not the exception.  The beauty
                    That is of many days. Steady and clear.
                    It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.
                                                                                           (1962) 

            Now isn’t that last line a wonderful one:  “It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.”

            It’s a truly remarkable poem, I think, and especially rich for us to contemplate at times like these, for I fear that in such circumstances we may have the feeling that we, as teachers of language and literature and composition, are on the sidelines of a much bigger and more important battle than the ones we wage in classrooms, where such imponderables as irony, allusion, parallelism, and basic clarity of expression consume our working days.

            Well, there are immense real-life battles going on as I speak, no doubt about it.  And so many of us and our students and friends and fellow citizens have suffered losses and continue to experience enduring feelings of frustration and anger and sorrow and immense yearning that the world somehow be set back on track.  We hear, over and over and over, that we are engaged in a type of conflict never seen before, one that will take years to resolve, one that will not be played out before our eyes on our living room television sets…day after day of stern talk and disheartening news…

            …and beset with all this and more, we may well wonder, what on earth has my work in English class to do with making the world right again?

            Well, my answer is:  Just about Everything.

            That is the message embedded in Jack Gilbert’s poem, for my money, at least.  We yearn for some grand gesture of rectification, on some level at least; and yet, we sense the wisdom contained in those lines:  what sustains us, what must sustain us, is the realization that the part we play in this struggle is as important as any.

            Literature is our most sophisticated and intricate form of communication.  It educates, inspires, entertains, and, yes, sustains.  The understanding gained over centuries of human experience has been distilled and stored in books and libraries.  It is a record of success and failure and of priceless advice.  As the adage goes, “He who ignores the lessons of history is doomed to repeat them.”

            The poems I turn to may not be the poems you would turn to.  The stories you recall or revel in may not be those your neighbor does.  You may think of some stack of papers sitting on your desk back home as I speak and think to yourself, “Literature?  Is he crazy?  I’d be happy if I could get them to understand subject, verb, direct object.”

            But ultimately, such mean struggles bear their fruit.  You all have seen your success stories.  Every one of you can think back to a student who came in struggling and went on to success.  An English-as-second-language student who graduated and got a job.  A troubled student comforted by the shared experience in a piece of fiction.  A would be writer who finally published a poem.  These are life-altering, even life-saving events.    

        You may have heard some of the stories reported in the aftermath of September 11 of young people in certain parts of the world selected for terrorist training at an early age, educated in a system where access to books and information is denied, for one simple reason:  because reading and open communication fosters the basic human impulse.  To revere above all things, the sanctity and the gift of life itself.

        To conceive of such a system of education is almost incomprehensible to us, even to call it education is a travesty.  And yet, by considering such a thing, we come to understand the crucial importance of what we do when we tussle with those “hairy, irregular verbs,” each and every day.  When we attempt to weave subject, verb, and direct object into something resembling persuasive thought or—egad—lyrical phrasing, we are much more like Penelope working patiently at her loom while the suitors storm the gates than we are like the Poles riding out against tanks on horseback with sabers in hand, but as Jack Gilbert reminds us, we are doing hero’s work just the same.

            There’s one other passage in this vein I’d like to read you, an entry in a public school competition called “Reflections” where grade school students across Florida, and the nation, are invited to submit compositions on a subject that varies from year to year.  This Fall’s theme is “I hold in my hand,” and here’s one response that has come in that I thought had particular resonance, given what I’ve been talking about:

I hold in my hand
All the answers to all the questions
In the world.

The secrets of science,
Cures for diseases.
Even recipes for wonderful meals.

I hold the basis for languages, codes,
And all forms of communication.

In my hand I hold poetry, novels,
The potential for awesome plays,
And the script of a blockbuster movie.

In my hand is the very key to civilization,
The instrument that has built the world.
In my hand, I hold…a pen.

            Now the author of that piece is 10 years old.  His name is Alexander Standiford, and he’s sitting right over there.  Stand up, Xander (and I should tell all of you he had no idea I was going to do this)….Thank you.

            Well, I’ll stop short of quoting any other lines about the power of the pen, but I stand by what I say.  You are doing heavy lifting in those classrooms, folks.  It is hard work and it is essential work, and the issues are those of life and death:  As Jack Gilbert would say, “It is the normal excellence, of long accomplishment.”  Thank you for doing what you do.
                                                                (Sanford, Florida, October 18, 2001).  

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