A Favorite Anthology

All the Poetry Friday posts this week can be found at The Iris Chronicles with Karissa.

It’s been a long week, yet I am being renewed by attending our state’s annual Reading Conference.  Some days are better than other days as all of you know and I am happy to be able to do something different besides my regular job. 

If I cannot run off to a conference full of inspirational people and conversation and books, often I turn to a book that was gifted to me a few years ago by a colleague.  It is a poetry anthology titled Teaching With Fire, Poetry That Sustains The Courage To Teach, edited by Sam M. Intrator and Megan Scribner.  Considering the year’s challenges to teachers and the newest steps to be taken with the common core standards, it seems that each teacher should be given this book, or at least a poem from it, for personal restoration when there happens one of THOSE days, sometimes weeks.  The book is organized into sections like Hearing The Call, Making Contact and Daring To Lead.  A brief essay from a teacher, sharing what makes the poem a special one in his or her life, prefaces each poem. 

As I browsed my copy of the book, I looked at the poems I had marked with sticky notes.  Three are from William Stafford, and those are the three I will share.  Each is one I love, and each connects to a personal story that makes me love it even more. 

     The first is The Way It Is, the whole of the poem found here.

          There’s a thread you follow.  It goes among

            things that change.  But it doesn’t change.

           People wonder about what you are pursuing.

When I moved out of the classroom a couple of years ago, my school held a party for me, and our head of school gave a speech of gratitude, something that was both lovely and a little embarrassing.  I had loved this poem for a long while, but he surprised me by using it as an example of my work.  It was such a compliment, and seemed magical that it was a favorite poem already.

       The second is You Reading This, Be Ready, all of which is found here.

            Starting here, what do you want to remember?

            How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?

            What scent of old wood hovers, what softened

            sound from outside fills the air?

When I taught, I was one of the Advanced School teachers teaching the middle-school aged classes.  Each year the school, and my colleagues and I, held the important ceremony of Continuation for our students who were moving on to high school.  It is a rite of passage of great importance to the students at our school.  Each student gave a speech; every student in the school attends, as do immediate families, close neighbors, aunts and uncles, and so on.  And my colleagues and I also spoke.  Each year I began a search for just the right tone, the right theme, and for me, because of my love of poetry, the perfect poem.  And this poem fits a leaving so beautifully, and holding on to a moment of time so poignantly.  If you can imagine:  our Continuation is held in an old gymnasium, with high windows streaming in the sun, onto an old wooden floor. 

      And the third poem, Silver Star, the entirety is found here. 

To be a mountain, you have to climb alone

and accept all that rain and snow.  You have to look

far away when evening comes. 

When in the past I have taken students on long overnight trips, I made a big deal out of students finding poems and/or quotes to inspire all of us on our journey.  One year I used this poem for our inspiration.  We were not going to the mountains (we live in the Denver, Colorado area), but we were going to see Mount Hood from the air, and I knew it was an amazing experience when that large mountain began to come into view.  It felt as if Stafford had written the poem for Mount Hood, and additionally one can see the verse as a metaphor for strength.  As I researched this poem, I also found that it is one of the Methow River poems published on plaques along the river that runs from the heart of the Cascade Mountains to the Columbia River.  In the year before Stafford died, he fulfilled a commission from some forest rangers who wished for better words for their interpretive signs.  Here is that wonderful story of some of Stafford’s last poems.

I realize I have only told you of the Stafford poems in this marvelous anthology.  There are others that I marked, and still others to be enjoyed, by such poets as Nikki Giovanni, Mary Oliver, Adrienne Rich, and Czeslaw Milosz.  If you are intrigued, please find a copy to browse, and find a poem that touches you in your own life, as these above have touched me.