The Poetry of Transitions: Re-Shaping for an After-School Group

There's always someone creative taking charge of after-school groups of students who want to spend a few hours doing something "interesting."

So when one reached out to me a few weeks ago, asking what I could offer to her eager and probably very active students, I spilled out my enthusiasm about this new niche of mine, the poetry of transitions. I explained how it could become a nifty activity after school. I guess I had seventh and eighth graders in mind.

But these kiddos are younger than that, it turns out. So, the leader asked, what did I have up my sleeve that might suit that crew instead?

It took me back to my early years of poetry, when my mother modeled how to craft a birthday or Christmas card by making up a rhyme about the person, the occasion, or the things you love, like snow falling on a quiet evening or the first ringing bells of a holiday.

I emailed back:

How about "poems for special occasions" -- where we could lay out a range from birthdays and Christmas to completed homework, awesome book reports, new friends, broken friendships, and more. 

And that, of course, spun me into wanting to write some of those childhood rhymes again. It's always fun, and often surprising. The following is NOT, of course, for an after-school program, but thoughts on where my own poems have been wandering.

Over Labor Day weekend, one of the poets I studied with, Rachel Richardson, suggested ways to make a collage out of lines that others had already written. Using lines from e.e. cummings, Walt Whitman, Ted Kooser, Dyaln Thomas, and Nick Laird (new to me that day), I put this together:

my father moved through dooms of love
Captain, oh my captain
although I miss you every day
do not go gentle into that good night
what are the ceremonies of forgetting?

It's actually not a bad place to start, as I approach another anniversary of my father's death. And indeed, what a "transition" that was, 27 years ago, for me and for my siblings. 

Now, where will I take this? Where will you take your own? Can you still talk with your father face to face, or do you summon up his spirit for conversations while you're making a long drive? What would he say if you surprised him with --

Go ahead. Let a line form in your thoughts. That's the point of poetry ... or one of them, anyway. 

By the way, if you're curious about what poet Rachel Richardson achieves with her poetic collages -- check out her newest collection of poems, SMOTHER. I bought a copy to treat myself. 

Acceptance Can Take Time

Dad, around 1965.

One of the gifts of history is understanding.

I say this today with a lot of gratitude. It's an intense writing time for me, working on several books at once, with each one approaching Life from a different angle. The most directly personal is a memoir that I'm gradually building, each chapter created when I have time for it, in an online publication called Medium. It has a "pay wall" but you can access quite a few items before it will ask you to ante up. (So far, my biggest paycheck from writing there was $1.09, for a month of labor. I guess I'm not one of those wealthy writer types. But I love being able to share the material.)

You already know that writing changes with time -- the hope of any writer is that it gets better, gets more "worth reading." Maybe we forget that it also has to be worth writing. And that's where yesterday's writing surprised me with an enormous gift:

I adored, and still deeply love, my dad. As a kid, I never questioned his opinion; as a teen, I wrangled with him about the Viet Nam War, but his knowledge always overswept mine (though my sense of what was wrong and right grew in power).

When, at midlife, I found myself in recovery from alcohol abuse and trying to clean up some major messes, I tried to hold my dad to account for some things he'd taught me about being a woman, that had resulted in, to put it kindly, an Epic Fail. He laughed at me and made a rude joke. It was one of those unforgivable moments that life hands out sometimes: someone I idolized, making me smaller.

Yesterday's memoir piece, which dealt with my college escapades, also framed some "life instructions" my dad provided. How amazing it was to discover that I'm no longer enraged at what he taught and said! Learning more about his life, especially his childhood as the Nazis overtook his birth country and turned him into a refugee (an identity that I never associated with him when I was a kid, honestly; he was just smart, educated, funny, and all-powerful of course) ... well, I have learned what History does to people's thinking and to the soul. And somehow, in all that learning:

I learned to accept and forgive my father.

Looking back, I don't think that was on the goals list for Advanced Placement History class. Guess I learned something more this week. Glad to be paying attention.