Tzivia Gover

(This essay appeared in Hampshire Life Magazine and was broadcast on WAMC, an affiliate of National Public Radio)

By TZIVIA GOVER

"What is Poetry?" I pose the question to my students, young women in their teens and early twenties. I am answered with silence. Seconds slink past. Finally, one student, who is meticulously made up from her mascara-ed eyes to her silver and blue polished nails offers, "I think it has to rhyme."

"It's boring," another says.

Most say they've never read a poem. None show any sign of wanting to do so now. It is the first day of class. I am not discouraged.

The people I teach are by no means English majors. In fact, many are learning English as a Second Language. They are enrolled in adult basic education classes in Holyoke, and in addition to studying for their GEDs, they are looking for ways to feed their children, cover the rent bill until their boyfriend gets out of jail or just generally improve their lot in life. My experience with these nontraditional students has shown me the value poetry has for people who may never before have read a book, and who have little hope of ever publishing a word they've written.

And yet they are brimming with poems.

On the first day of class I say that studying poetry will not put food on the table, it won't make their lover stick around and it won't keep their children safe from neighborhood violence. I go on to promise: "It will however feed a part of you that food can't."

But then I overhear one of my students on the phone begging the electric company not to shut off her service, or an 18-year-old girl gives birth to her third baby, or another stops coming to class after the building she lives in burns to the ground in a suspicious fire. Recently, a student who on the first day of class wrote a poem describing her dream of marrying her baby's father and living in a nice house was arrested for aiding an armed robbery.

And my conviction wavers. Am I wasting their time? Am I wasting my own?

My first several times visiting a class of teenage mothers in a GED program, I delivered my introductory spiel about the power of poetry while the students glanced past the handouts I distributed to study the coupon inserts from the newspaper, or scribble notes to boyfriends. I kept talking, not knowing what else to do.

Months later I learned that one of the students had begun to keep a journal, another was writing her own soap opera. I ran into one young woman, who wouldn't put pen to paper for weeks then went on to become a prolific poet, as she rushed between classes at Holyoke Community College. Another received her GED and got a job at a local hospital.

I've learned to assume the best of my students. The icy stare from a young woman who refused to write two weeks after September 11, turned to tears after we began to talk about what was on her mind. "I'm thinking of my dark room at night and the sound of a plane going past," she wrote.

I define poetry to my students by quoting Pulitzer-prize winning poet Gwendolyn Brooks, who said just a few months before she died, that for her poetry is "telling my particular truth the way I see it." When I teach poetry I encourage students to do just that.

As Audre Lorde says, "Poetry is not a luxury." Even in a culture of crisis--especially in a culture of crisis--the time we spend deciphering metaphor and struggling through stanzas, might just prove to be time well spent.

And when Yaritza, a teen mother, is rushing off to pick up her sick son from day care, and she stops to tell me that she found time the night before to write a poem--then I can say I am convinced.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Tzivia Gover