Poetry Unit, 2021
- 2 days ago
- 6 min read
By Sara Mann
Eating Celery
The 12th grade creative writing class is in their poetry unit, and 1 assign the kids to write a "fantastical poem." I do this because there are two poems they tend to like that could be construed as examples of such a thing Charles Webb's "Retreat" and David Ignatow's "The Bagel."
You have to start with a mundane situation and then introduce a bizarre or impossible element. Some of the kids get this right away, but Kevin (of the "Doritos Are Unethical" essay) says he wants it explained, so we brainstorm mundane situations on the board.
Taking a shower.
Coming to school.
Sitting in math class.
Brushing your teeth.
And then, out of nowhere, the kid who is either physically or mentally absent approximately 100% of the time says, "Eating celery." Now, that's a good one.
Okay, so what can we introduce to this situation that would be bizarre or impossible?
Kevin says, Your house burns down." I will tell this to my husband later and we will be crying-laughing.
That could be, I say, but honestly I was hoping for something that related to the celery. "The celery catches fire," he says.
Silas says, "You're eating it and your rotten tooth becomes detached from your gum." With that one, I laugh right here and now.
Shruthi steps in to help. "The celery eats you," she says.
When I have imagined getting devoured before, it's been by an internal agent, like cancer, or at least a fierce external one – an octopus that strangles me (thanks to Cathy Park Hong) or a grizzly bear. Being eaten by celery is less unpleasant than I expected. It hurts a bit at the nose, when my cartilage is being wrestled off. Once most of my face is gone, 1 get used to it. It's a bit confined between these fibrous strands, but everything is a soothing, calm green. This is what they mean by "being present," 1 realize. I am water. I travel up the stalk and then back down, up and down, and when there's nothing left of me, everything goes dark.
Analytical Papers Collected
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.
– Thomas Lux
Some of them have written about "Refrigerator, 1957" by Thomas Lux, which I provided as an option because I think it'll work with the critical lenses we've covered this term, but mostly because I love it. Those cherries! I made a painting in homage to this poem once, a red jar in a gray fridge, and my mother said, "Fantastic! Wish I had made that." Which is exactly how I feel about the poem.
One student attempts a New Historicist reading. She seizes on "1957" and, 30 lines later, the word "Bohemia" and decides that the poem is about sex trafficking in Czechoslovakia after WWII. I can't understand how someone can have such good abstract reasoning skills —the close reading is phenomenal —and such a tenuous grasp on reality. A second student argues that the non-cherry food in the refrigerator represents planned obsolescence, as (unlike the cherries) it gets eaten and will need to be replaced. To the first, I offer congratulations on the close readings, point out that the narrator's family was in the area at one point known as Czechoslovakia two full generations before the war, and blame my failure to accept her argument on New Historicism. (For this to really work you'd need to either provide proof that Lux was concerned about sex trafficking in Czechoslovakia in the 1950s or claim to be using a different lens." Maybe the Czech sex trafficking lens.) I would like to tell the Marxist that I don't think home-cooked food can ever count as planned obsolescence, even as a metaphor. (Also, wouldn't the cherries- plucked, bleached, dyed, sugared, pitted, packed and sealed, glowing for all eternity in their neon cage-be the more plausible reference to capitalism?) But instead I leave this alone; he and I need to work on thesis statements.
I look over my own annotations of the poem, the three different versions I made through the three different lenses. "Family's refusal to consume the cherries → opposite of alienation," I wrote. "Jar as heirloom = not just delight but self-ownership + control of narrative." I sigh. Even if the Marxist had fleshed out that idea, I don't know that I would feel much better about having selected this poem for the assignment. Because really, why am I making us rip apart something that is more than the sum of its parts? Don't I know by now not to devour that which rips my heart with joy?
Car Maintenance
The seniors trickle in past the bell this morning, which they say is because of traffic in the parking lot due to someone's grille having popped off and their being stopped in the middle of the drop-off lane. The actual reason they're late is that it's first period and they are always late when this block meets first, but I take it, because I'm not really ready to start class either. I don't even know what part of a car the grille is, and by free association with that fact, I tell them that last night I put air in my tires, which I found very stressful.
My husband came with me, which I do not add-because even in this moment of transparency, I'm not willing to go that far, and also because the people identifying as women in here do not need the kind of role model who requires a male chaperone for errands pertaining to car maintenance. But I'll tell you that my husband found it stressful as well, which was thrilling.
Why would that be stressful? they want to know.
"Because I have a fear of not knowing how to operate machinery in front of people who do," I say. "Secondarily, I have a fear of letting the air out rather than putting it in."
Silas asks if I'm a Triple-A member.
"I am," I say. "I'm also afraid of using AAA. I mean, I've called them before, but I fee mbarrassed and incompetent when they show up." As I say this, I am thinking the word guy–when the guy shows up-but this is another inclination I hide from them.
Silas, who has just failed and retaken the grammar quiz, seems like someone who would be utterly devoid of anxiety about using a quarter-operated air compressor. I expect his next line of questioning to be about whether I've considered taking a class in car maintenance, and if not, then whether I know I should–so I'm surprised when what he actually asks is, Well, do they know how to use a semicolon?"
Mr. Barrett Discovers Poetry
At the end of the poetry unit, class clown Sawyer Barrett writes this:
What I learned about myself during this unit is how poetry is almost like your own counseling session. I wouldn't call it therapy, but it is therapeutic. It allows your brain to spill what's been held up inside of you, and create a form of art that others can relate to. I learned that being honest with yourself, and doing reality checks through poetry really helps us strive to be our best selves. We all have a persona in our minds that is the best self we can be, and I feel like being able to open freely about thoughts and feelings in your mind is how we can better ourselves, and each other.
I agree with him, of course, but this is emphatically not anything I have ever uttered in a classroom, and especially not to seniors in November. The goopiest thing I ever said or wrote with regard to poetry in this unit was the set of essential questions I introduced four weeks ago:
1. How do we find beauty in things that are broken? Is that a worthy pursuit?
2. How do we balance a desire for permanence and the reality of transience?
And I didn't dwell on those, because, yuck. The word "beauty" is too much for me right now. What is this, 2009? At the beginning of the unit, I posed the questions, defined "transience" ('ephemerality" got blank stares and "fleetingness" only a few nods, so I said, "temporary. Not permanent."), and let them talk about their ideas, face to face / mask to mask, in a speed share. Then we moved on. Occasionally I referenced these themes in discussions, but only because they gave me an easy way to remind the kids that even poems like Silas's language-bending one, taking the idiom "same shit different day" literally, needed to involve at least some underpinning of actual thought.
So although Sawyer could have found this sentiment somewhere online and copied it into his chapbook, he isn't the kind of guy to go out of his way to Google anything. And I have to say, his family photo poem inspires my trust. It's possible, I think. It's possible that this is one of those times when poetry really did mean something to someone.
Sara Mann taught 11th and 12th grade English in Massachusetts for ten years. After school let out in 2022 — conveniently, just before the roll-out of ChatGPT — she and her family moved to Canada, where she has now gone back to full-time art school and is working as an "Occasional Teacher" a.k.a. substitute in the Ontario public school system. Her writing has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine, Unbroken Journal, Prose Online, and elsewhere, and you can find out more about her visual art at www.saramann.me.
