Today as my co-instructor and I taught a course called “Teaching Poetry to Help Students Meet Literacy Standards,” something remarkable happened, something that often happens with poetry. I’d like to tell you about it because talking about what happened will help those of you who write from your heart affirm the value of what you do.

My co-instructor and I were promoting the idea that teaching poetry 10 minutes a day can help students develop important reading comprehension skills.  In light of the literacy standards they have to help students meet, we thought teachers might think that bringing poetry into the classroom is a frill, like dessert, something apart from the main meal. We know that poetry can wake up the mind’s taste buds, so we wanted to introduce them to using poetry as an appetizer.  We wanted to help teachers develop lesson plans and see for themselves how after reading poetry students exercise greater skill in reading prose.  They would leave with short-cut lessons for teaching about voice, tone, occasion, and figurative language, as well as analyzing theme.

Some of the attendees were teachers who described themselves as “afraid of poetry.”  Others were poetry enthusiasts who didn’t need the standards as an excuse for teaching poetry.  No matter the diversity of feelings about teaching poetry, in the company of the two poets we watched and listened to on videotape and read from the pages before us, the poetry we paid attention to brought us to an important place in ourselves. We read that an orange might seem like a fire burning in one’s hands according to Gary Soto in his poem “Oranges” and we sat and imagined that bright orange.  When Li-Young Lee asserts in “Eating Alone,” that loneliness is what a son needs when mourning his father, we considered how loneliness might not be empty.  Snails want to reunite with the sea, Soto claims in his poem “In Storm,” and we imagined how their shells look filled with water.  In “Eating Together,” when Li-Young Lee envisions death like lying down on a snow-covered road, we felt the cold as long and foreign.

 If we had uncertainties about meaning, we were able to sit with these, as John Keats wrote, “without reaching after fact and reason.” What is death? What is loneliness? What is passion? What is pleasure?  What is mourning?  We could ask without feeling we had to explain.  We felt like Lorca reported feeling when he said in a lecture, “As for me, I can explain nothing, but stammer with the fire that burns inside of me, and the life that has been bestowed on me.” In the shared experience of reading and hearing poems, each of us lost the brain that keeps us separate, the person in front of the room. We sat nurtured and satisfied in the presence of a wonder so comfortable we wore it like sweaters.

To be in the presence of those who make us consider the human condition but strive to explain nothing offers the opportunity for awakening.  We learn from them how to celebrate this life that has been bestowed upon us.

When I hear the word “bestowed” in relation to life, I think of the Jewish song “Dyenu,” which exclaims about the works of God.  The song reminds us that any of these works would have been enough and yet more were provided.  And more.  And more still. And the song celebrates the way we are humbled by the love that is bestowed with the plentitude of works.

As you set yourself the task of writing the poems and essays, stories and memoirs you have in you to write, think in this way about writing.  Say it like this and you will never allow yourself to feel that writing is not to be celebrated:

Had I but lived the experience, it would have been enough. Had I but remembered the experience, it would have been enough.  Had I but written one poem about it, it would have been enough.  Had I read that poem to one other person, it would have been enough.

If that other person laughs or cries or sits still after hearing that poem, it is enough.  If that person writes a poem because she hears mine, it is enough.  If that person’s poem goes into the world and helps someone settle into the experience of being human, of being mortal and alive, it is enough.

During today’s fall Saturday afternoon, I learned once again that we write to keep on showing ourselves and others what our hearts understand.  Because we notice that an orange is bright as fire, because we hear about a man picking onions for his meal and thinking he sees his deceased father instead of a shovel leaning against a tree, and because we consider what it means that a snail’s shell is empty, our hearts build a bridge to the world.

It is not bad to learn to articulate what that bridge is built of.  We can teach ourselves and others to go back into the source of our pleasure and name the parts metaphor and symbol, personification and alliteration, meter and rhyme.   We can discuss why saying the teachers “were too close to dying to understand,” in his poem about adolescents trapped in a small town, Gary Soto accomplishes more than if he said the teachers were too old to understand.  We should go where the mind enjoys itself if we like, but not at the expense of the heart, which likes the ride the words provide, which likes to travel with laughter and tears.  We so often rush over that part, whether as teachers or as writers who judge the time we want to take to write as frivolous and selfish.

I learned again that listening to poets is neither appetizer nor dessert–poets who write from the deep voice of their lives offer us a meal so complete that we don’t need anything more at the moment.  I can think of many interests who shudder to consider this–advertising agencies, food franchises, and school boards among them.  Yet, sometimes this is exactly how it seems to me.  Because of writing, our hearts expand and we are as satisfied as it is possible to be.  And perhaps as smart.