Ghosts in the Workshop

by erica guo, poetry reader

There’s an old Chinese story (hey, I didn’t make this one up) about an artist who was asked what was hardest to paint and what was easiest. The artist said, “Ghosts are the easiest to draw. I haven’t seen one, so I can imagine whatever I want. Dogs and cats are the hardest. They’re in plain, everyday view, so people can easily point out the flaws in the artwork.”

We’ve established so many times that the best poetry is the kind understood by most people. I guess all poets have been through that when they started their craft. When I (not-so-seriously) began writing poetry, the feedback I received from my mentors was “Too Alice in Wonderland – y.” Naturally, the poems were full of words I had dug up from a thesaurus – I still had no concept of nuance – so the diction refused to mix, like oil and water. I’ll admit: It stung to accept that. Many budding poets want to be insular. We revel in being misunderstood. That’s what the outcast faces, right? I wish I knew earlier that “just because no one understands you doesn’t mean you’re an artist.”

When I conducted my first solo poetry workshop with kids, I reminded the kids, multiple times, not to “paint ghosts.” Don’t write about nationalism or first love if you’re only in sixth grade, and haven’t truly been in the army or down the aisle yet. (You’ve already heard this from Rilke, too.)

In a poetry workshop with sixth graders, I couldn’t jump straight into important social issues like racism, sexism, mental illnesses, and stigmatization of sexual orientation – I hadn’t told the teacher that I would even talk about important social issues. Most teachers, when starting a poetry unit with kids, would bring in a few poems and have the kids dissect all the instances of alliteration that Robert Frost or Emily Dickinson had left behind. I couldn’t do that, as I had to tug at their heartstrings before driving technique down their throats. But I couldn’t overwhelm them with themes grim even to me, lest I sound like Poe.

For heaven’s sake, Erica, they’re just kids. But even kids need to know.

All right, I reminded myself. I can’t talk about social issues immediately if I hadn’t practiced beforehand. I was inexperienced, and I had to establish their trust before proceeding. This was my first workshop, and I didn’t want to deal with a barrage of angry emails from teachers or a door in the face from the teacher herself (none of which ever happened, that was just my overactive imagination.) I’ve already planned my next workshop, in which I would emphasize what every American citizen should care about.

That didn’t mean I only had to talk about love or “road(s) less travelled” to the sixth graders in the first workshop. Painting ghosts is a no-no. After a fuzzy love poem, I had to slowly delve into a gray area they were only semi-comfortable talking about. I read them “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks; after, I prompted them to write a short story about the time they broke a rule they enjoyed breaking.

At the elementary school I used to attend, I was chided for writing about “inappropriate conduct” (the time I faked sick to skip school) and “condoning that kind of behavior” among my peers. But the point of poetry isn’t to encourage skipping school, or jaywalking, or eating the plums from the icebox someone else was saving. Nor is poetry a license to preach to the choir about all the things they should or should not be doing.

I spoke of Brooks observing seven pool players skipping school. The kids looked visibly uncomfortable; they knew I was about to ask them to write about something guilt-provoking. Several stole glances at the teacher and the parent chaperone (who, thankfully, were busy doing other things and/or smiling encouragingly.) I figured it helped to shine the cracks on my own mirror, which meant revealing the times I faked fevers in second grade by holding the thermometer close to a hot lightbulb.

Thankfully, it worked. The kids guffawed, and even the boys, who were previously trying not to let their eyes glaze over, started to verbalize their own experiences. The revelations ranged from ashamed to sheepish to delighted. A boy said on one occasion, he and his grandfather smuggled candy bars out of a store with no sensors. Another girl admitted she enjoyed provoking her sister even though her mother had explicitly said not to. I told them to put these incidents down on paper and to rewrite the stories as poems with enjambed lines.

They took great pleasure in ending the lines at unexpected places, so that the poem would sound ragged and a smidge more hesitant than when it was read through quickly. As Gwendolyn Brooks said, ending each line after “We” caused the pool players to sound “uncertain of the strength of their identity”, “which they don’t bother to question every day.”

Did these disclosures signify that there was no longer a barrier between me and the sixth graders? Absolutely not. As in all other social gatherings, there is always a filter between humans that selectively leaks pleasing qualities and blocks the undesirable ones. When I observed closely, however, there were times when the children’s faces flickered with darker thoughts.

A sweet girl pulled me over to her table, where she began a lively anecdote of all the times her father brought her out to restaurants. As she continued, her volume decreased. “I like pasta, pizza, and burgers! But he has unspoken rules of what not to order. And then I order something I think is healthy, and he asks me if I’m really going to eat that.” Her lips twisted for a brief second. It reminded me of the orthorexia I had already seen among teenage girls. Was wanting to eat something really so bad that it qualified as “breaking the rules”?

A boy that was considered an outcast by his peers (who was the only one to guess the correct meaning of “Oranges” by Gary Soto) looked sullenly down at his paper. On it he had scribbled a sentence describing the feel of ocean water between his toes: “…like chocolate milk.”

“The kind you’d drink?” I asked gently.

He shook his head. “Not the good kind. The bad kind that’s dirty and oily.” He jerked his chin at the other members of the group, who were brainstorming other similes.

Overall, I think this wasn’t so bad for the first workshop. One of the girls wrote me a “Good-bye Poem,” slipped it into my hand, and ran off before I could say thank you. Many wanted me to come back: “We don’t want a maybe, we want a yes!” Good sign, no?

Next time, I plan on reading “on being considered shy” by Meggie Royer to appeal to the more introverted kids and “Roll Call For Michael Brown” by Jason McCall. And for the workshop after that, I’ll add Chican@ Poetry to the mix. Every child in sixth grade goes through mental and physical changes – this is where shaping their social responsibilities and personal expression becomes the most crucial.

#ericaguo #misc