Outside Harare International School

Cave paintings are a perfect metaphor for Zimbabwe, both are written in layers over thousands of years.  With a little Photoshop help, the layers become even more striking. 

Hiking up, way up, something like 1200 feet, to Domboshava with our able guide Hob, (Hurley Boazman) we saw these drawings dating back 4,000 to 13,000 years.  Drawn and re-drawn.  Seems like man has been rewriting history from the beginning of time.  

The vistas are spectacular.  The history beyond comprehension.  Unlike mountains in (say) Tucson, the rock surface is less craggy and where we are used to looking at formations of lots of boulders, this seemed like it was one big rock, which made for easier, but still challenging hiking.  Altitude, altitude, altitude.  No matter how much time smooth the rocks, it still leaves you breathless.

  

Who transcribed these messages and why?  Are they artwork?  Storytelling?  The answers, like the meanings behind the drawings are mysteries know only to the steady winds.  But it seems that we have gone from recording history in images, to using words, to images again.  21st century literacy means that we need to be able to read images.  Around and around we go.

Thanks to all the teachers who hosted us for dinner.  Niky and family (including the effervescent Scarlett) and special thanks to GoGo (please forgive phonetic spelling), who served genuine Zimbabwe cuisine at the home of Melissa Chifokoyo.  

Dinner by candlelight, which turns out to be a lot less romantic than it sounds when power outages last up to 14 hours a day.  

Many many thanks to Hob and Kari Boazman for hosting us with laughs, raisin bran, and Izzie, a therapy dog for weary travelers.

Everyday's an Audition: Tryouts

I wrote this poem for my daughter Katie when she tried out for a play.  She wanted the part of Peter Pan.  She got the part of the crocodile!  She also got a lifelong friend out of that little production and I think if you asked her, she'd say the experience was a positive one, even though the outcome was not what she went looking for.

We all try out all the time -- plays, sports, musical competitions -- the list is endless.  As a poet, everyday for me is an audition.  I'm submitting work to publishers, trying to win over audiences, and connecting with other writers, making plans.  I've always thought that being a poet is kind of like having a tag sale for my thoughts.  I lay stuff out on the table, people come and take a look. Some say, I don't need that. Some say, I have that at home.  And a few say, cool, I'll take that.  Sometimes life give me what I want, and sometimes I get the crocodile, but there are benefits to every experience.  Okay.  A few scars. But even those can make a good story or poem.

The important thing I have to remind myself of, just as regularly as the moon rises, is that I have to keep trying. It's scary. Sometimes it's just plain exhausting. Most times, I love the adventure of a new challenge.

I chose the changing colors of the sky to represent my moods when I think about trying something new.  Sometimes bright, occasionally dark, and ultimately sunny. This poem has been in two of my books: My very first book Nothing's the End of the World (now sadly out of print) and Zombies! Evacuate the School (Boyds Mills 2010).  But the thing I am most proud of is that Katie was chosen to speak at her graduation from Bay Village High School and she chose this poem as the theme of her speech.

A Library Poem: The Poetry Friday Anthology

I was so excited that Janet Wong and Sylvia Vardell chose my poem to illustrate a brochure about their fabulous resource, The Poetry Friday Anthology.  In case you haven't heard about it, it contains 36 poems for each elementary grade level so teachers can introduce a new poem every Friday all year long.  And along with the poems are gentle lesson ideas.  By gentle, I mean the authors don't suggest you dissect the poor poems and use the pieces to choke the creative life out of kids.

Here is a suggestion to go with this poem (can you tell this came a librarian?  Not just any book geek either, librarian extraordinaire Sylvia Vardell).

"And here's an idea for a 5 minute activity: Challenge kids to pick a topic on this list that they are probably NOT interested in, to find a book on that subject, to flip through it for 1 minute-- and then to share one neat little thing that they just read or saw."

Here is another fact you might want to share...this poem was once rejected by an editor who told me flatly, "Sara, this is not your best work."  I mention this to inspire those who may be discouraged by the entire submission process (me included) to keep trying.

While I'm passing out compliments, let me also say that Janet Wong is a terrific editor, as well as a stellar poet.  

What's Real? A Poem About War.

WHAT'S REAL?

Pictured between reruns

and what commercials want to sell,

explodes another war

in some far place

          that I can't spell.

To me,

war appears as broken bodies

burning buildings

and smoking gas,

interrupted by auto salesmen,

frosty colas

          and kitchen wax.

Every evening

around dinner

devastation

is served up with my meal,

then sprinkled with laughs and laundry powder.

Can you tell me

          which pictures are real?

---

©1997 sara holbrook

Am I Naturally This Crazy?

Boyds Mills Press

Although the copyright on this poem is 1997, my database of poems tells me that I wrote it in April, 1991.  A different war. Or is it?  War is always unfair.  How would more bombs help this little boy? His family?

The book this first appeared in, Am I Naturally this Crazy, is out of print.  How I wish we could make pain and chaos that is war go away as easily.

Emily, Julie and me.

It was a winter day in the late seventies.  I had been struggling with the joyless parts of stay at home mothering and not particularly well.  I wasn’t fitting in with my new neighbors, the junior women's club, or the corporate wives’ club.  I didn’t play bridge that well and I never could manage to get my hair dry before the guests arrived.  Any passing attraction I might have had to matching finger towels was always counterbalanced by my ability to grow dust bunnies the size of raccoons while reading or daydreaming. I was having trouble finding my place in the world.

That afternoon, I put both kids to bed for a nap and sat down to watch a much anticipated re-airing of Julie Harris in the Belle of Amherst on public television.  No “on demand” in those days.  I had to scramble like a dog on linoleum to get everything in order for the 1:00 viewing on our 22 inch black and white television.  I rolled the metal cart over by the fireplace, adjusted the rabbit ears, lit a fire and sat.  Probably munching on a bologna sandwich on white bread.  It was a long time ago.

But not so long that I have forgotten a moment of her performance. Julie welcomed the audience with black cake and dry humor.  The cake recipe called for 19 eggs and somehow she made that a laugh line.  I cried with her when her beloved nephew died (by that point in the play Harris WAS Emily), rooted for her birds as she shew-shewed her sister Lavinia’s cats away, and cheered as she stood up to the status quo.  Her neighbors thought she was strange, and instead of compliance with their standards, she just returned the sentiment, brushing them off as housewives do a fly. Who can't admire that kind of starch in her white frock?

Emily wrote with no audience to speak of.  Pre-internet, pre-self-publishing (so public, like a frog), she wrote and studied words and put them in a box.  Having already experienced rejection from Highlights Magazine, I identified with her rejections.  With those who called her rhymes irregular, rhymes which she herself dubbed “experimental.”  I had recently been told that my poems “exacerbate the insecurities of youth, dwelling on self-interest at the expense of others,” which I thought sounded like something I could do hard time for.  We were simpatico, Emily and I.  Ironically it would be that very magazine’s book publishing arm, Boyds Mills Press, that did publish my first book 19 years later, but at that point in my life, facing rejections, dust bunnies, and a never ending river of diapers, I had (frankly) come a little undone around the edges. 

Following this performance, I went downtown Cleveland and bought a properly leather-bound journal at Publix Bookstore.  Then I scrubbed out an antique wooden tool chest.  I read more poetry.  I copied poems onto index cards and tacked them up around the kitchen sink to memorize when my hands were wet and my brain was wandering. I studied the rhythm of language.  And my frazzled parts began to re-fuse. To this day, if I begin to fray, I know it is because I have not written for a while.  Not writing to sell, just writing to focus on what is real.

Subsequently, I would fill that tool box, floppy disks, CDs, hard drives, and now my space in the cloud. For all those 19 years, I would write, share with friends, and put the poems in the box. Harris-as-Emily had convinced me this was an acceptable pursuit. I developed my craft.  And because I wrote apart from the market place, I never sat down to write a single book containing 30 poems on dinosaurs or as a Scholastic editor once urged me, (gasp) on vampires. I have the meager monetary returns to prove it. I simply wrote what I saw and what I wondered about.

When Harris took her bow that afternoon, I applauded.  Right there in the living room.  Bounced up and down on the green flowered love seat clapping like a mad woman.  All by myself.  I applauded the performance and Emily’s spirit of rebellion, her ambivalence for organized religion, and her fierce love of family and words.  As a stellar performance should, Harris-as-Emily not only invited me in, but deposited a part of herself in my heart. I saw her later live at the Hanna Theater and the LP recording of her live performance as The Belle of Amherst is the only vinyl I have kept.  But that afternoon, just us in the living room, remains a sparkling blue sapphire in my frequently overdrawn memory bank.

For what she gave to the world in terms of dignity and skill and for the riveting thrill she gave me that afternoon, thank you Ms. Harris.  

And please don’t rest in peace.  

Stay feisty. 

 Julie Harris

1925-2013

Poetry Feelings

Poetry is a way to express feelings.
Poetry rhymes, it's for girls, it's boring.
It's too hard!
Writing poetry is not part of the new standards, no can do.
I like reading poetry, but I'm no poet.
Poetry is something we do after the testing, so can you come visit our school in June?

We hear these arguments all the time, from teachers whose own education consisted of serial lessons in the follies of perfect form (points off for downbeat dyslexia) and "what does this really mean," intimidation.  From welcoming principals who smile indulgently as if a visiting poet is something akin to birthday cupcakes, a useless indulgence inducing real school work interruptus. From curriculum directors who aren't necessarily poetry adverse but have been benchmarked into scripts and graphs that only track the results of timed bubble tests and not careful or critical thinking.

First...on the feeling thing?  Maybe.  But, I'm mad, I'm so mad, I'm very very mad, grrrrrr may be writing about a feeling, but it is hardly a poem.  Poems are more often first person narratives, linking images to words that evoke a response in the reader or listener.  Poetry demands that we stop, look, and listen, noticing the details and putting them into words.  Spoiler alert, basically, the world doesn't care if you are hurt, angry or elated.  What they are interested in is when you the writer draws on images that make the say, ah, or whew, ick, or ouch.  Don't believe me?  How about this from perhaps the most quoted poet of all time:

Poetry is about experiences.  And that means the experiences we have in a flower strewn meadow, inner city street corner, kitchen table, or science or math class.  In order to write a poem we have to look at a subject carefully and contextually.  We have to think about it.

Poetry can take a lot of different forms, but it is definitely not a cupcake.

Poetry is the water and flour.

Bury the Beret! Nurturing Artists in the Classroom

Is artistic talent inborn or can we cultivate it?  I have always of an artist as one who envisions what wasn't there before and, through knowledge and experience, makes it happen.  In an article I wrote years ago, The Poet as Patriot (Journal of Children's Literature, v23 n2 p42-46 Fall 1997), I bemoaned the fact that the art room had been moved down the hall, outside of our typical classroom.  Since then, the art room, along with recess, has been moved right out of the school.  Useless! Is the cry.  Not rigorous. And worst of all from a tap-every-potential-market stand point, Untestable.   

Our vocabulary is SO not up to date.  Go to google images and type in ARTIST and up pops a picture of a cartoon character in a beret.  We are apt to define an artist as not only a person with bad taste in hats, but also 

1. Someone on the outskirts of society 
2. A person who makes up stuff that may get a response out of others, but is really not productive in a societal sense and 
3. Starving (see 2. re: non productive).    

Why doesn't an image search reveal a picture of Steve Jobs or Arianna Huffington?  How about plastic surgeons who construct intact smiles out of cleft palates or engineers who build skyscrapers out of glass and football fields out of old tires?  Are these people not artists?  What's worse than the perception adults hold of artists is the fact that we are teaching this same vocabulary to our kids.  I sometimes ask kids at school visits to go home and tell their parents that there was a poet and school and then suggest that now that they think about it, they would like to grow up to be a poet and watch the parental response.  It's a good laugh line.  A real knee slapper.  Even third graders know that their parents don't want them to grow up to be artists.

Michael and I just got home from an art show at the Geauga Nature Preserve where one end of the room was consumed by a big poster, "What if Art Ruled the world?"  My response?  It does!  Look around.  The people who come up with the new technologies and problem solving fixes wind up in charge.  The administrative types whose eyes are trained to look backward at precedent, only studying what has succeeded in the past, are doomed to fail.  I don't know if that is economics, poetry, or basic math, but it is true.  Ask the executives at General Motors who first laughed at the introduction of Honda cars in the U.S. and said, "let the kids buy those toy cars, when they need a real car, they'll come to us."  Ahem. 

Any profession taken to its highest level becomes an art form, a place where we take knowledge and experience to create something new.  The label has become so stigmatized over the years that we keep coming up with new names for artists.  We call them entrepreneurs, inventors, creative problem solvers.  Maybe if we started calling the artists in our midst by their true names, we wouldn't be so hesitant to spend some time nurturing artistry in our schools. Seth Godin in his article, 3 Essential Skills Every Entrepreneur Should Cultivate, cites three qualities to nurture: 1. Quiet the Lizard Brain, which means silence the resistant part of your brain that is responsible for fear and rage. 2. Think like an artist, where he notes that, "Art requires the artist to care, and to care enough to do something when he knows it might not work," and 3. Connect the disconnected, this he recommends as a route to problem solving.  I haven't read this guy's book, but I like his line of thinking in this article. It gives credit where credit is due -- to the artists and the risk takers.   

I hate when a well-meaning educator introduces me to a kid at a school as: This is our poet.  It discounts the other kids in the room or school who are also nurturing poetical observations and metaphorical connections they just haven't found the words for yet.  Or maybe they will never express themselves in words, maybe they will use mathematical equations, chemical formulas or organizational genius.  It implies that as long as we have one kid with a poetic eye in our midst, the rest of the kids can (should?) stand down, not risk their own self expression.  The fact is, every one of them will need the careful, observational skills of a poet at some point.  They will need to be artists, to draw on their creative abilities to problem solve. 

As Susan Ohanian points out so eloquently in her article: Against Obedience Critical Education, 3(9).,  "We need artists, bakers, lumberjacks, manicurists, welders, and yurt builders, as well as people who study math and science in college. Let's respect the variety of skills needed in our communities--and make sure everyone receives a decent wage." Of the wild flower bouquet of skills needed to make society function, we need an artist at the velvet heart of every blossom.

Enter uniform proficiency tests and standards that reward conformity and compliance and it becomes evident that our schools may not be preparing kids for all of their tomorrows.  Being able to black out little boxes with a number 2 pencil is not going to help students care for future families in a precarious world.  We are feeding these students a false narrative: If you fall in line and memorize what we ask you to, you will reap rewards.  Not true.  If you are creative and an evaluative risk taker who uses knowledge and experience to make stuff up, that's what is going to put food on your table and advance your pursuit of happiness.  In order to respond when the future asks, how do we position this product? How can we cure this malady or design this to be more efficient in terms of cost and resources. How can we expedite this procedure?  The adult, 2.0 versions of the kids sitting in classrooms today will most likely be collaborating and making up stuff like crazy, connecting all kinds of disconnected dots and inserting a few that weren't there before trying to service the needs of future generations and clean up the messes previous generations have created.  Successful adults are their own bosses, whether working inside of some institution or self-employed.  Kids will need to be so much more than compliant.  

We need to find a way to reward thoughtful risk taking in school. Eleanor Roosevelt advised, "do one thing every day that scares you."  We need an assessment rubric for that one, accomplished, showing signs of progress, or needs improvement. Or make this a criteria for assessment: Student applies logic in assessing risks.  How about: Student demonstrates an ability to discover and achieve as part of a team (not involving a ball)?  Or:  Shows unlikely but valid connections across content areas and is able to communicate ideas in a convincing manner using words, images, coding, mechanical devices or movement. Where is the assessment rubric for curiosity or tenacity? Most of all, schools need to stop buying programs that promise to help kids on tests and start looking for ways to foster creativity. Toss the fill in the blanks worksheets and bring back the crayons and blocks.

We need to bury the berets and bring out the true artist in every child, every day, in every academic discipline. 

Having Principals

I first met Principal Seamus Marriott and his wife Theresa in Wisconsin at a Walloon Institute and later traveled to work at his school in Shanghai, then in Cairo, and most recently in Balikpapan. Not only did he invite us to great locations, he helped us plan side trips, introduced into other schools, fantastic teachers and enthusiastic kids, and even took us for a spinning time at a Scottish Ball.  While we have had a great time working for him in each location, the visit to Pasir Ridge was special indeed. 

Twenty years of visiting schools has taught me a lot of things, but one fact gets reinforced every visit: Principals set the tone of the school.  The good ones are out of their offices more than in, poking heads in classrooms, attending assemblies and after school basketball games.  They know the names of the kids, the parents, and who likely had breakfast that morning.  The faculty comes to these principals voluntarily; they know the names of their teachers' dogs, spouses, and if their parents are failing. Part counselor, part boss, always setting a standard for professionalism.  I have to say, when I was just a parent, I had no idea how the important the role of a principal is.  Some manage staffs of dozens of people making sure that standards for learning are met right along with cleaning the white boards when needed.  But over the years I have learned.  It takes about 10 minutes for a consultant to discern if they are walking into a healthy or an unhealthy school, and undoubtedly, the diagnosis can be traced right to the principal’s office.  In a world of great diversity when it comes to principals, Seamus is a gem.

Turns out that not only should Seamus be giving principal lessons, he is a poet!  Seamus wrote us a poem for our final assembly.  Not just a poem, an ODE. 

Ode to Our Visiting Poets

By Seamus Marriott

Poets pick their words for clarity and prose

Crafting a bouquet for the reader’s nose

They paint a picture and tell a tale

They can make us happy or can make us wail

Words are their tools like an artist’s brush on the page

Embossed in the ink or even digital in this new age

Our learning this week has been rewarding and fun

And we are sad that our time together is done

Thank you for enriching our words and encouraging our PIPES

We will remember you fondly and proudly wear our new poetry stripes

You have truly developed our poetry lens

Best wishes from PRIS and all your new poetry friends.

Thank you my friend.

International School of Rumbai, Sumatra: Not just Monkeying Around.

 

Ever look out at the sliders, swingers and tag players on a lively playground and think, what a bunch of monkeys?

At the International School of Rumbai, playground monkeys are not just metaphorical.  The school’s campus, carved from the jungle by an oil company (now Chevron) 50 some years ago has become a sanctuary for wildlife – short and long-tailed macaques,  gibbons, monitor lizards – as the jungle around the compound has been clear cut to make room for palm tree plantations. 

Although the macaques beat us to school in the morning, they went back to their forest to nap while the students of Rumbai made poetry about dim sum, recess, conflicts, people, places and experiences in and out of the classroom.  I don’t want to say that ONLY at an international school might a first grader write a refrain poem about dim sum, because there may in fact be a Chinese dumpling enthusiast in Houston or Salt Lake City.  I’m just saying I haven’t met one yet. This is what makes working in international schools a constant surprise.

 

We wrote about what was real and closed our eyes to search our imaginations for ways to stretch our observations.

The classes are small and the school itself has only 65 students.  They come together every morning for a meeting and a few quick exercise moves lead by a rotation of students.  Teachers, imagine this: you teach for 10 or so students for the morning, walk home for an hour lunch and then come back for the afternoon?  People who teach at small schools such as this have made a quality of life decision to destress.

 

The middle schoolers gave us a percentage poem to help us remember them and then a second poem, explaining what our bus trip to visit their sister school in Duri. 

 

Thank you to all the teachers and students in Rumbai for a grand and memorable visit.

Pasir Ridge International School

Coming around again to something brand new is traveling to a foreign port and being met by familiar faces.  Didn’t we meet before in Seoul?  Didn’t we have dinner in Kota Kinabalu? I remember you from Cairo!

Michael and I have been on the international circuit long enough that we are more certain to be greeted by folks we’ve met before than not.  Still this trip was extra special as this is the third time we have had the privilege of working for Principal Seamus Marriott and his dynamic teaching wife Theresa.  First meeting in Wisconsin, traveling to work at their school in Shanghai, followed by Cairo American College and now Balikpapan, Indonesia. 

Pasir Ridge is a small school by any measure except quality, where they are overflowing, stacked to the ceiling tiles and busting out the windows. 

But, by far the best part of the week was Friday afternoon assembly -- they came with poems about happiness, anger and frustration, from the points of view of slaves, sun bears and the Empire State Building. They spoke with the kind of confidence that comes from feeling safe, to parents, teachers and their classmates.  Every voice blending into a harmonious chorus celebrating individuality. Thank you Pasir Ridge, Balikpapan.

Changing Perspectives

When Michael Salinger and I were teaching in Morocco, we were introduced to a new fashion trend.  Teen girls were wearing the shortest of short shorts over tights and patterned stockings.  They obviously had studied the student handbook, which probably said "no bare legs up to your bum" or some such language, and found a creative way to stay in compliance.  They saw their window, and they took it.

The CCSS are market driven, of that there is no doubt.  But much like commercials in between segments of a sitcom (say, the sitcom that masquerades as school reform) people will learn to live with them the same way we have learned to live with fast food, once size fits all, and bigger is better -- with a healthy dollops of irony and skepticism and a little of what Michael calls middle school logic, "Hey, they didn't say we couldn't!"

So, until the next set of standards is cooked up to be stuffed down the digestive tract of public education, creative teachers will be heartened to find that although the CCSS don't specifically mention writing poetry in the W strand, they don't say you can't write poetry as (say) informational text.  They don't say you can't write a poem to demonstrate understanding of point of view.  They don't say you can't write a persuasive poem.  What the heck is a persuasive essay anyway? Certainly that's more of a stretch than a persuasive poem -- persuasive essays don't even exist off the educational verbal playground.  Poets have been trying to change hearts and minds since the days of foot-binding.  If it was the intent of the marketing folks who created these standards to eliminate poetry from the curriculum, the CCSS are a pitifully poor attempt.

In RIT 4, it says that students should "interpret words and phrases as they are used in a text, including determining technical, connotative, and figurative meanings, and analyze how specific word choices shape meaning and tone."  But in the fine print it says, that these analyses will "serve as models for students' own thinking and writing."  In other words, it is in the reading standards that the CCSS recommend using poetry as writing models, not the writing standards.

That's one window.  There are plenty of others.  Those of us who know that poetry works as a means to lead young people to a better understanding of their world need to remain confident that jamming poetry into the windows of these standards will help young people grow in both their communication and thinking skills.  Subversive infusions of poetry may even help kids on those bubble tests that no one has ever linked to success or happiness in life.  It remains part of our jobs to open the windows and let poetry work in to work its magic.

Baby Talk 2013

I recently wrote on a friend's Facebook wall, joking about emotional displays in public, that I had thrown up while watching Bonnie and Clyde. True story, no flu symptoms. 

I have no trouble suspending disbelief in a movie. If someone sets a table for tea, I lean in to blow steam from the cup. When the bullets started flying into their roadster tearing Warren and Faye to pieces, I jumped around in my seat, taking it all to heart (and to the gut). That's when it happened. Barf.

Fact is, it was 1967, I was a teenager and had never seen anything like that before on the screen. I'd seen Spartacus, but that was from a time, oh like, a couple of hundred years before 1967, right?

Sometimes at school visits I ask kindergartners if the have seen Star Wars, and 94% of them say yes (the other 6% are braiding each other's hair, so this is not exactly a scientific sampling). This means they have seen bullets tear through bodies, dismemberment, decapitation, torture, and every type of mayhem very creative Hollywood brains can invent to visit upon the human body. Before they are six.

There is no putting this huge rhino back in the closet. It's out there. But I wonder if we maybe need to be having some more conversations about it. Instead of laughing at each other when we cringe (yes, I still cringe and get laughed at) and admonishing each other to toughen up, maybe we need to talk a little to kids about the differences between film and reality. That head shots aren't necessary, that people have families who love them and that's one reason you never shoot first and ask questions later. That people are people and that real life isn't a carny shooting gallery.

Michael's son Frankie was a primary student  on 9/11/2001. A few days after the tragedy, he asked, "when will the bomb hit here?" We thought he understood, we thought he felt safe, we thought he wasn't paying attention. He was.

Even though 1967 is to 2013 what 1921 was to 1967, kids listen when we tell them stories. When we tell them how it was and how it really is. Heros don't spray the room with bullets and then get the pretty girl and live happily ever after. Being strong means to be able to say the words, "I don't like that," not get off a head shot.

 

When we take time to explain the difference between fiction and reality to kids, they get it. But we have to say the words. We can't assume they already know or that they are not paying attention. At home, at school, everywhere. We have to say the words.

Frank and his brother Max grew up to censor movies for me, as in, "don't come in here right now Sara, this movie will upset you." Last weekend, my grandson Dan said something similar about a video game. This "protect Sara," action has become a family story to chuckle about. 

Only, it's not a joke. Not really. It is and should be a discussion starter.

This year my resolution is to follow up my question about Star Wars with, "you know, that really isn't how most people settle fights. Mostly we don't shoot and chop one another to pieces. Mostly we talk things over. Sometimes we even use poetry. Here, let me show you."

 

Hate Was Not his Normal State

War is the Fiercest Art

The Luc Bat poet knew

His country broke in two, therefore

He had to go to war.

His wife and child, heartsore, waved bye.

The poet dared not cry.

He needed a clear eye to spill

Blood, strangers he must kill

To stay alive until the time

He could again in rhyme

Make images sublime. His heart

Was wracked and torn apart.

War is the fiercest art. Trading

Pen for gun, evading Death,

Armies invading. This hate

Was not his normal state.

One question would frustrate, for he

Knew not this enemy.

Might you love poetry?

     I, too.

sara holbrook

America at War

ed. Lee Bennett Hopkins

When Lee sent out the invitation to poets to write poems to chronicle each of the wars that America has engaged in over its lifetime, I remembered a story I had seen on 60 Minutes (as I recall).  It told the story of an American soldier who found a book of poetry on a dead Vietnamese soldier, poetry that he himself was writing during the prolonged tragedy that we call the Vietnam War and that the Vietnamese call the American War.

In the story, the American soldier traveled back to Vietnam 30 years later to return the book of poetry and a photograph to the Vietnamese soldier's family.  I can't find a link on line, but I remember wondering as I watched the narrative: what would that be like?  A poet called to war?  In the US, some men and women served, but most did not.  There were no such choices to be made for the Vietnamese as the war exploded all around them. The image of a poet does not come to mind when we think of Rambo.

So, doing my best to follow the Vietnamese poetry form, I wrote a Luc Bat from that imaginary (to me) soldier's perspective, which now appears in Lee's book, America At War.  Luc Bat (to my understanding) means six eight, alternating lines of six syllables, eight syllables, with each rhyme repeated three times, interwoven and snaking down the page to whatever length the poet chooses, rhyming the last line with the first.

Last weekend Michael Salinger, Nancy Johnson and I were having a quiet dinner in Ho Chi Minh City when our young waiter whispered that the man sitting at a table in the back of the restaurant was a famous poet.  The young waiter,  Ngô Tiêů Lân, had studied him in school.  He explained that the poet, Nguyên Quang Sáng  had traveled to the US to read his poetry.  The 23-your-old spoke with great reverence.  When we told Ngô Tiêů Lân that we too were poets, introductions were made.  Pictures taken.  Friendly nods and smiles exchanged while Ngô Tiêů Lân busily translated.

After we went back to our table, Mr. Sang slowly came over to our table.  He wanted to talk about how the US and Vietnam were friends now.  We need to come together, he said.  Move forward together, he said, bringing his fingertips together in a tent.  He does not like to think about the war, in fact he comes to this restaurant on Saturday night to drink whiskey and forget about the war.

Mr. Sang is the winner of the Ho Chi Minh award that is only given every twelve years.  He is the author of not only poetry, but children's books, plays and movie scripts.  Not only did our young waiter know the significance of his contribution to Vietnamese literature, the desk clerks at our hotel were astonished that we had met him in person.  Where?  Where?  They wanted to know.

He is a poet who was a soldier because the times demanded it.

We paid for his whiskey.

Art for Malala

 

I received this email from a teacher I have corresponded with in Pakistan, who is looking to create the "the longest and most colourful card in the world’s history" for injured student activist  Malala Yousufzai.  Will you please help her reach her goal and have students email their artwork to her by October 20?  Read the letter below and it will tell you what to do.

I was introduced to Basarat Kazim by Margariet Ruurs and we are in the process of scheduling a SKYPE school visit with her students. 

 

Dear Friends,

I write to share with you news from Pakistan that has saddened the hearts of all. On the 9^th of October, Malala Yousufzai ,aged 14, who has been active in denouncing the closure of girls schools by the Taliban in Swat in 2009, and who continued her education despite threats, was shot in the head on her way back from school. Two of her friends, also in the bus, were injured as well.

Malala epitomizes courage and allows all of us to see that single acts of bravery can, and, do become movements. We are grateful to this young campaigner for encouraging Pakistanis to stand up and be counted.

Alif Laila/IBBY Pakistan is setting up a library in Malala’s school and has organized a KEEP SMILING card campaign for Malala and her two friends. We aim to make this the longest and most colourful card in the world’s history.  For this we need your active support.

Please become a member of this campaign by encouraging  children to write messages and create drawings that are full of hope and will make the girls happy, and hopefully, assist in their recovery.  We also want them to know how compassionately the world has responded to their plight and how they are not alone in their struggle.

Please email us your contributions by the 20^th of October. Emails can be sent to:

aliflaila_lhr@yahoo.com

aliflaila1978@gmail.com

bmk_al@yahoo.com

Thank you for your time and support.

Basarat Kazim, President

Alif Laila Book Bus Society
IBBY Pakistan