When lilacs last in the schoolyard bloom’d

A few years ago, I had the privilege of interviewing Billy Collins, the U.S. poet laureate at the time. Now, every time I read a poem, I think of something he said.

“The history of poetry is the only surviving history we have of human emotion,” Collins said. “It is the history of the human heart. There is no other one. Without poetry, we would be deprived of the emotional companionship of our ancestors.”

Collins used his poetry pulpit at the Library of Congress to put fresh verse within reach of American high school students with Poetry 180 (http://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/), a Web site that supplies a poem for each school day.

One could argue that other arts, music, painting, dance, are coded with our ancestral emotional DNA. But I’m a word guy, so I love the sound and sense of language.

“Once you have language,” Collins said, “you will have poetry, just as once you have sound you will have music.” We walk in iambic pentameter. We are bipeds, with four chambers in our heart, so we’re built for 4/4 time. Since we are hard-wired for cadence, we can’t help being poets.

As an English teacher, I have an interest in perpetuating this love of the muse in a new generation of readers and writers, but it’s an intimidating prospect. I’ve mentored many young teachers fresh from high-caliber undergraduate literature programs that nonetheless balked when it came time to teach poetry. Many of my own attempts foundered on adolescent shoals.

Take Imogene’s typical response in one class. “That was the stupidest poem ever,” she said, critiquing my favorite poem.

I thought the group discussion of “Year’s End,” by Richard Wilbur, had been a success. I had done a good job answering the question, “Why do we have to read this poem?” But the real question had been, “Why do we have to read poetry.” This was Imogene’s lament and it made me feel like a defender of the faith – the English teacher standing solitary against the forces of darkness and rhetorical chaos.

The resonant literary image, the ordered experience and cadence of the sentence, the counterpoint of the paragraph, the music of the heart – they need preservation, though we may be bloodied in the attempt!

The Billy Collins approach might be teacher as carnival barker. To teach a poem one must entice the wary or jaded ninth-grader into the tent of poetry: “Pssst! Hey kid! Wanna see The Greatest Poem Ever Written! Hurry, Hurry, Hurry!” Once inside, the poetry circus works its magic.

Poems are fully capable of rescuing themselves. “Year’s End,” for instance, counters the indifference of an Imogene, and confirms my faith in the urgency of teaching poems in the face of today’s 30-second attention span and the abhorrent “sound bite” as valid unit of thought.

I ventured forth. “Imogene, when you’re 35 and sitting in a Laundromat in desperate need of inspiration, a poem, perhaps this very poem, will call to you. Its words, lying dormant in your heart, will have been waiting to be needed. And then you will respond to its truth and beauty.”

Perhaps this exceeded beckoning people into the carnival tent. This was juggling flaming batons on the high wire. Imogene, in appreciation of my spiel, snapped her gum.

I was undeterred. “Didn’t you at least admire that gripping couplet in the last stanza?” We had decided that two lines in “Year’s End” had a particularly haunting appeal.

We fray into the future, rarely wrought/ Save in the tapestries of afterthought.

Such taut musical beauty is central to the rhetorical power in poems – and to the logic of insisting that freshmen read them. There is power in the irony of Wilbur’s imagery: advancing into the future is an unraveling; a fraying of the fabric of past and present; or it is a ragged skirmish between what has been and what will be.

Teaching poems to young readers is done with the hope of stocking afterthought, creating a background of powerful words that will call to us if we unravel. The fray, like the foreground in a painting, is the immediate action, the apparent subject. But the foreground is not the complete picture. Often it’s only a distraction, a truncated view, dumb to a breakthrough of one kind or another that might be tucked into the corners.

Tapestries contain many foregrounds, but the grand movement of the story is in the background. These poems will be on the test you take when you marry, choose a job, have a child, teach. It’s a leap of faith that the emotional companionship in poems, shared with Imogene’s past and present, will blossom in afterthought.

It’s a lens, after all, that focuses us on what we truly are, as when remembering a past teacher’s inspiration, years later, and understanding it for the first time, or seeing the wisdom entrusted to us for discovery at some later date – a rendezvous with Whitman or Wilbur or Collins. It’s something we shouldn’t be deprived of.

April is National Poetry Month.

Todd R. Nelson is principal of the Adams School in Castine.