Nature: An InsideOut Approach

My students and I focus on nature as a prompt for thought and feeling, and as a tool for eventual descriptive drawings and poetry. I swear by the amazing outcomes of using the nature journal as a tool for learning. The landscape recorded by the journal can be the playground, trees, plants, and grasses surrounding the school. The tools needed are very inexpensive. As Gary Snyder wrote: “To see a wren in a bush, call it “wren,” and go on walking is to have seen nothing. To see a bird and stop, watch, feel, forget yourself for a moment, be in the bushy shadows, maybe then feel “wren”–that is to have joined in a larger moment with the world,” –Gary Snyder, Language Goes Two Ways, 1995. To see the nature that surrounds them and is part of their neighborhoods and communities is an important way for students to develop a sense of a caring community. By the way, this natural approach has been evaluated and documented in my classes. It works, and it’s fun. I love being in IO classroom with the DPS students.

Kathe Koja Moved By City Wide Poets

Kathe Koja, dear friend , writer whose curiosity is mystically ubiquitous, and soul whose empathetic interest in the lives of youth infuses her many young adult novels,was moved physically and emotionally by the words of our City Wide Poets last night at the Coming Up Taller celebration. Read her blog, and her books. http://koja.wordpress.com/

Poetry as an Act of Courage

It never fails. Whenever I walk into a classroom as a visiting writer at a school, I am typically met with a tug of the sleeve by a student who wants me to take a look at one of his poems.

Yesterday it was a young man named Treshon who, as I was leaving his class after some brief first-day introductions, handed me three poems, each one sheathed in a protective plastic sleeve.

I felt as if he was giving me something fragile, something that, if the wrong eyes looked upon it, it might possibly break.

I thanked him and asked if I could hold onto the poems until after an assembly that they were about to attend so that I could take them into my own private space (where poems ought to be read, in the quiet of such places) in order to give them my fullest of attentions.

The poems didn’t blow me away. It wasn’t one of those moments. In fact, the poems were pretty typical and at best lukewarm in terms of their abstract language and generic rendering of human emotion.

But what remains most vital about this encounter is the fact that here was a kid who, in his own private landscape hidden somewhere safe inside himself, he was doing his best to attach language to experience. If nothing else, Treshon was entrusting a part of his most sacred self to a complete stranger. That, in and of itself, is nothing short of an act of courage.

I’ll be keeping a close eye on Treshon during my weekly visits to his school. His advantage as of now, right out of the gates, is the fact that he’s already making self-motivated attempts towards the writing of poetry. That said, I suspect that he is a poet still living and writing in the closet, that he hasn’t yet made his private world public to the eyes of his peers. What I hope to create and cultivate, within his classroom and within his school, is a learning environment, an open venue, where poets and their poems can claim a visible and viable presence for all eyes to see, for all ears to hear, and for all hearts to keep beat to.

I Wish I’d Written This

SCARS

My face
is a book

of invisible
scars. Each

scar tells
a story.

Each story
begins,

Back when I
was small.

Alex G.
Southwestern High School
InsideOut Student
Detroit Public Schools

This bit of tenderness from a six-foot tall, puffy-faced high school student who didn’t like to talk.

I wish I’d written this, yes, for sure.

But I’m glad that, as a kid, I didn’t see myself in this particularly skewed way—or maybe I did but I simply didn’t know how to put words to what I was seeing—a way that made Alex, when he looked into his mirror, see a face that was “a book of invisible scars.”

Only the poet in us knows what I like to call “the real me, the one nobody sees.” I borrow this line from Sandra Cisnersos’ The House on Mango Street and use it to get students to look closely, to dig deeper, to feel and then speak and make art from that feeling.

Sometimes that “real me” is larger than life, a spiritual giant of sorts.

Take a look at this poem by Quin’dara, one of those rare students who was born to be a poet.

THE REAL ME

The real me
that nobody sees
is walking
on mid air.

When the wind
blows hard
I do not fall.

There is always a piece
of mid-air wind
that I alone
am walking on.

No one understands
that I am the one
bringing the wind
its destination.

The wind stands over
and watches over
everyone. I am like
another God

that nobody sees
walking across the sky.

Quin’dara G.
Southwestern High School
InsideOut Student
Detroit Public Schools

Once again, I wish I’d written this.

The Third Grade Sea of Spirit and Joy

The Third Grade Sea of Spirit and Joy

At 10:30 in the morning on a cloudy Tuesday morning, twenty-eight baffled third graders watch warily, as a grown woman asks them to close their eyes, listen to the music of Debussy and paint images in their minds, all while drifting on a stream of consciousness.

Startled, their thoughts bounce around the room: What are you? Who are you? What are you talking about? I don’t see any water rolling by my desk. When is recess? I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I want my mother.

I am the poet in front of the room, the grown woman, who believes in magic and the endless poetic possibilities of giving these eight and nine year olds the space to imagine.

Slowly, quiet settles in the sparsely furnished room, as, one by one, boys and girls surrender, some reluctantly, to the soothing sounds, then embrace them.

Maybe this poet lady is telling the truth. The music does sound like something, like colors, like pictures, like how I feel. Mmmmm. Pictures make sounds. Sounds make poetry. Is poetry this? The way I feel and see and become me.

The eight year old in the corner collects his musical pictures and cradles words like soft souls: “We are in a museum making music/ happy song/ nice song/ up and down.” Bunched together in the back row, two girls, best friends, sway to the rhythm, discovering streams of themselves. Up front, a group of boys embarks on the journey together. Curious and unsure, sounds pour out as songs: “We are coming in the world / /How are you doing my world? /You are like a windy song / A rainbow song/ How we love this place/and care for everything.” The loner in the third row scrawls down his paper: ”I will raise to the sky so I can open my soul to the poetry of my life and yours forever.”

The music crescendos. A desk shakes, as a hand forcefully writes about a quest: “It is like you are swimming in waves of change. You are fighting for freedom. You look at the waves smoothly running down your skin. Look at what you see. I will set you on a mission, a journey, out in the world. On your way, get the sword of the wind water. Farewell, unconscious man. Farewell!”

In the middle row, a dreamer finds in the music a way to state her secret fear, the potential for loss: “Tell, me, girl, why are you sad? / You’re staring at the wall of memories/Are you thinking about your mother dying? /or your father? / or is your fairy godmother gone?” Next to her, a young girl whispers to me that she thinks heaven is everywhere in a garden of imagination. She writes “In the garden I have on blue like the clouds/The sun is smiling at me/When I smile I hear the clouds talking in sweet voices.”

Magically, now, by 11:45 on this Tuesday morning, the calm flow of sounds and words creates this third grade sea of spirit and joy. This sanctuary from time. This poetry.

Letter from Peter Markus

I’ve been a writer with InsideOut since its inception. It’s a part of who I am in the world. I can tell you, first-hand, that the work that we do changes lives.

When a child picks up a pencil and is asked to gaze up inside it, anything—no everything—is possible.

When you write it down, I often tell them, people have no choice but to listen, to see what you see, to know what you know.

See for yourself. Check out this poem written by a 4th grader at Fitzgerald Elementary.

Until Dark Time

–in memory of my mom

 

Back when I was five

something bad happened.

 

I’m nine now. But back

when I was five

 

my mom worked

at a job

 

in a big black

building. I kept on

 

bugging her

that day

 

to let me come

to work with her.

 

My mom kept saying

no sweetheart

 

you can’t come

to work with me

 

because, she said,

she had to work.

 

When my mom went to work

that day, my mom,

 

she never came back.

My brother and me, we waited

 

until dark time

for our mom to come back home.

 

I waited and watched

for the car

 

to drive up

to drop off my mom.

 

My neighbor came over,

her name is Monique.

 

We went inside our house

and ate, and drank,

 

then I played

with my neighbor Miranda

 

until Bookie came over

with her white car.

 

We drove

in that white car

 

to the church

to see

 

my mom. At church,

it was blue

 

inside there

like the sky.

 

Three days later

it was Christmas.

 

The bus that hit

my mom as she waited

 

at the bus stop—

the driver

 

of that bus

was drunk.

 

He didn’t even know

what he did

 

when he ran

that bus up against

 

the bus stop bench

killing my mom.

Let me tell you what I knew about Dion before he wrote that poem.

Dion was that quiet kid in the back of the classroom. Before he wrote that poem I can honestly say that I didn’t know who Dion was. He was just a faceless name. A nameless face. When, at the end of our session together, I collected what the students had written on this particular day, and when I found what Dion had written down, I couldn’t believe what I was reading. I couldn’t put a name to its face.

So I walked back into Mr. Pettis’s room, apologized for the interruption, and whispered into his teacherly ear, “Which one is Dion?” He pointed to a small, frail-looking child in the back of the room. Dion reminded me of a bird that had fallen out of its nest. I couldn’t believe that such big words could be contained by such a small body.

I don’t recall the actual assignment that triggered Dion’s poem. I know with complete certainty that I did not ask the students to write about loss, or the death of a loved one. I tend to use language as a tool to celebrate and revel rather than to grieve. There is enough grief in the worlds of these children without me forcing them to look in places where they might not want to look.

It’s possible that the assignment that day was simply to write about something happened back when you were little. Maybe I had asked them to write about a “first” in their life: the first time they rode a bike, or flew a kite, or went fishing. You get the picture. I didn’t expect to find a poem about a young boy losing his mother to a drunk driver.

I was torn up and blown away by what I found and so I pulled Dion out of the classroom and we sat down in the hallway and we spoke about what he’d just a few minutes ago written. I remember telling Dion that the poem he just wrote was really powerful and beautiful and sad and I remember also asking him if what he’d written down was true. Why I asked this I don’t know the reason why. Maybe I was hoping he’d made it up so that I wouldn’t have to imagine his grief.

But he nodded yes, mostly with his eyes, and said that it was and from here he went on to re-tell me some of the details of what had happened. It was a crushing half hour that we spent together out in the quiet hum of his massive inner city elementary school with close to two-thousand other Dions sitting in classrooms just like his.

I know I’ll never forget it. I hope that Dion remembers it still. I like to believe that moments like these don’t simply disappear. For me the moment is forever fixed in time because of the poem which, whenever I return to it, I am transported back to that day when this little bird of a boy whose life and name I hardly knew changed my own life forever.

Dion went on, later in the year, to read this poem in front of hundreds of people at our year-end InsideOut gala celebration. Here again Dion’s works left their mark on all those who were there to hear it.

That’s just one story behind just one of the many poems written each year in an InsideOut classroom. Now that I’ve been taken back, through time and space, by Dion’s poem, I remember now that this was a poem written in the year immediately after the events of 9/11. That same year a 5th grader at the same school wrote this short poem:

In My Hands

 

In my hands

the twin towers

still stand

like waterfalls

always falling.

The world, though, thank goodness, is not always so dark. I’d say most of the poems written by these young poets sing and celebrate what to them is beautiful and loved in their lives. I could bombard you with a whole slew of poems here, but instead I’ll hit you with just this one, a poem from a 3rd grader called “A Love That is Bigger Than Me.”

A Love That is Bigger Than Me

 

I love the moon

when it is shining

 

big and white

over the whole world.

 

I love the touch

of red fresh apples.

 

I love the power

of my magic pencil.

 

I love the song

of birds singing

 

in the morning.

I love the moon

 

singing at night.

My mother

 

is more beautiful

than the moon.

 

She smells better

than ten-thousand

 

flowers growing

across the world.

 

If you’ve stayed with me this far and have read the poems up above then I believe that you have begun to see and to believe in what we do at InsideOut.

If you’d like more information, check out our website: www.insideoutdetroit.org

And of course follow this blog.