Poetry & Pedagogy: Recent Episodes
Neill Korobov
In this episode I discuss the poem 'And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes' by Hanif Willis-Abdurraqib
And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes
And What Good Will Your Vanity Be When The Rapture Comes says the man with a cart of empty bottles at the corner of church and lincoln while I stare into my phone and I say I know oh I know while trying to find the specific filter that will make the sun’s near-flawless descent look
the way I might describe it in a poem and the man says the moment is already right in front of you and I say I know but everyone I love is not here and I mean here like on this street corner with me while I turn
the sky a darker shade of red on my phone and I mean here like everyone I love who I can still touch and not pass my fingers through like the wind in a dream but I look up at the man and he is a kaleidoscope
of shadows I mean his shadows have shadows and they are small and trailing behind him and I know then that everyone he loves is also not here and the man doesn’t ask but I still say hey man I’ve got nothing I’ve got nothing even though I have plenty
to go home to and the sun is still hot even in its endless flirt with submission and the man’s palm has a small river inside I mean he has taken my hand now and here we are tethered and unmoving and the man says what color are you making
the sky and I say what I might say in a poem I say all surrender ends in blood and he says no, what color are you making the sky and I say something bright enough to make people wish they were here and he squints towards the dancing shrapnel of dying
light along a rooftop and he says I love things only as they are and I’m sure I did once too but I can’t prove it to anyone these days and he says the end isn’t always about what dies and I know I know or I knew once and now I write about beautiful things
like I will never touch a beautiful thing again and the man looks me in the eyes and he points to the blue-orange vault over heaven’s gates and he says the face of everyone you miss is up there and I know I know I can’t see them but I know
and he turns my face to the horizon and he says we don’t have much time left and I get that he means the time before the sun is finally through with its daily work or I think I get that but I still can’t stop trembling and I close
my eyes and I am sobbing on the corner of church and lincoln and when I open my eyes the sun is plucking everyone who has chosen to love me from the clouds and carrying them into the light-drunk horizon and I am seeing this and I know I am seeing this the girl who kissed me as a boy in the dairy aisle
of meijer while our parents shopped and the older boy on the basketball team who taught me how to make a good fist and swing it into the jaw of a bully and the friends who crawled to my porch
in the summer of any year I have been alive they were all there I saw their faces and it was like I was given the eyes of a newborn again and once you know what it is to be lonely it is hard to unsee that which serves as a reminder that you were not always
empty and I am gasping into the now-dark air and I pull my shirt up to wipe whatever tears are left and I see the man walking in the other direction and I chase him down and tap his arm and I say did you see it did you see it like I did and he turns and leans into the
glow of a streetlamp and he is anchored by a single shadow now and he sneers and he says have we met and he scoffs and pushes his cart off into the night and I can hear the glass rattling even as I watch him become small and vanish and I look down at my phone and the sky on the screen is still blood red.
In this episode I discuss the poem 'French Horn' by Jane Hirshfield
French Horn
For a few days only, the plum tree outside the window shoulders perfection. No matter the plums will be small, eaten only by squirrels and jays. I feast on the one thing, they on another, the shoaling bees on a third. What in this unpleated world isn’t someone’s seduction? The boy playing his intricate horn in Mahler’s Fifth, in the gaps between playing, turns it and turns it, dismantles a section, shakes from it the condensation of human passage. He is perhaps twenty. Later he takes his four bows, his face deepening red, while a girl holds a viola’s spruce wood and maple in one half-opened hand and looks at him hard. Let others clap. These two, their ears still ringing, hear nothing. Not the shouts of bravo, bravo, not the timpanic clamor inside their bodies. As the plum’s blossoms do not hear the bee nor taste themselves turned into storable honey by that sumptuous disturbance.
In this episode I discuss the poem 'The Art of Disappearing' by Naomi Shihab Nye
The Art of Disappearing
When they say don’t I know you? say no.
When they invite you to the party remember what parties are like before answering. Someone is telling you in a loud voice they once wrote a poem. Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate. Then reply.
If they say We should get together say why?
It’s not that you don’t love them anymore. You’re trying to remember something too important to forget. Trees. The monastery bell at twilight. Tell them you have a new project. It will never be finished.
When someone recognizes you in a grocery store nod briefly and become a cabbage. When someone you haven’t seen in ten years appears at the door, don’t start singing him all your new songs. You will never catch up.
Walk around feeling like a leaf. Know you could tumble any second. Then decide what to do with your time.
In this episode I discuss the poem 'Gate C22' by Ellen Bass
Gate C22
At gate C22 in the Portland airport a man in a broad-band leather hat kissed a woman arriving from Orange County. They kissed and kissed and kissed. Long after the other passengers clicked the handles of their carry-ons and wheeled briskly toward short-term parking, the couple stood there, arms wrapped around each other like he’d just staggered off the boat at Ellis Island, like she’d been released at last from ICU, snapped out of a coma, survived bone cancer, made it down from Annapurna in only the clothes she was wearing. Neither of them was young. His beard was gray. She carried a few extra pounds you could imagine her saying she had to lose. But they kissed lavish kisses like the ocean in the early morning, the way it gathers and swells, sucking each rock under, swallowing it again and again. We were all watching— passengers waiting for the delayed flight to San Jose, the stewardesses, the pilots, the aproned woman icing Cinnabons, the man selling sunglasses. We couldn’t look away. We could taste the kisses crushed in our mouths. But the best part was his face. When he drew back and looked at her, his smile soft with wonder, almost as though he were a mother still open from giving birth, as your mother must have looked at you, no matter what happened after—if she beat you or left you or you’re lonely now—you once lay there, the vernix not yet wiped off, and someone gazed at you as if you were the first sunrise seen from the Earth. The whole wing of the airport hushed, all of us trying to slip into that woman’s middle-aged body, her plaid Bermuda shorts, sleeveless blouse, glasses, little gold hoop earrings, tilting our heads up.
In this episode, I discuss the poem 'Postscript', by Seamus Haney.
Postscript by Seamus Haney
And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that the ocean on one side is wild With foam and glitter, and inland among stones The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans, Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white, Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads Tucked or cresting or busy underwater. Useless to think you’ll park and capture it More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there, A hurry through which known and strange things pass As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.
In this episode, I discuss the poem 'Kindness', by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Kindness by Naomi Shihab Nye
Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever.
Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive.
Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing. You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you everywhere like a shadow or a friend.
In this this episode, I discuss the poem 'What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade', by Brad Modlin.
What You Missed that Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade by Brad Modlin
Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,
how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.
After lunch she distributed worksheets that covered ways to remember your grandfather’s
voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—
something important—and how to believe the house you wake in is your home. This prompted
Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,
and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts are all you hear; also, that you have enough.
The English lesson was that I am is a complete sentence.
And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,
and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking for whatever it was you lost, and one person
add up to something.
In this episode, I discuss the poem 'Wishing Well' by Gregory Pardlo.
Wishing Well by Gregory Pardlo
Outside the Met a man walks up sun tweaking the brim sticker on his Starter cap and he says pardon me Old School he says you know is this a wishing well? Yeah Son I say sideways over my shrug. Throw your bread on the water. I tighten my chest wheezy as Rockaway beach sand with a pull of faux smoke on my e-cig to cozy the truculence I hotbox alone and I am at the museum because it is not a bar. Because he appears not to have changed them in days I eye the heel-chewed hems of his pants and think probably he will ask me for fifty cents any minute now wait for it. A smoke or something. Central Park displays the frisking transparency of autumn. Tracing paper sky, leaves like eraser crumbs gum the pavement. As if deciphering celestial script I squint and purse off toward the roof line of the museum aloof as he fists two pennies from his pockets mumbling and then aloud my man he says hey my man I’m going to make a wish for you too. I am laughing now so what you want me to sign a waiver? He laughs along ain’t say all that he says but you do have to hold my hand. And close your eyes. I make a starless night of my face before he asks are you ready. Yeah dawg I’m ready. Sure? Sure let’s do this his rough hand in mine inflates like a blood pressure cuff and I squeeze back as if we are about to step together from the sill of all resentment and timeless toward the dreamsource of un-needing the two of us hurtle sharing the cosmic breast of plenitude when I hear the coins blink against the surface and I cough up daylight like I’ve just been dragged ashore. See now you’ll never walk alone he jokes and is about to hand me back to the day he found me in like I was a rubber duck and he says you got to let go but I feel bottomless and I know he means well though I don’t believe and I feel myself shaking my head no when he means let go his hand.
In this episode, I discuss the poem 'Living Together' by David Whyte.
Living Together by David Whyte
We are like children in the master’s violin shop not yet allowed to touch the tiny planes or the rare wood but given brooms to sweep the farthest corners of the room, to gather shavings, mop spilled resins and watch with apprehension the tender curves emerging from apprenticed hands. The master rarely shows himself but whenever he does he demonstrates a concentrated ease so different from the willful accumulation of experience we have come to expect, a stripping away, a direct appreciation of all the elements we are bound, one day, to find beneath our hands. He stands in our minds so clearly now, his confident back caught in the light from pale clerestory windows and we note the way the slight tremor of his palms disappears the moment they encounter wood. In this light we hunger for maturity, see it not as stasis but a form of love. We want the stillness and confidence of age, the space between self and all the objects of the world honoured and defined, the possibility that everything left alone can ripen of its own accord, all passionate transformations arranged only through innocent meetings, one to another, the way we see resin allowed to seep into the wood in the wood’s own secret time. We intuit our natures becoming resonant with one another according to the grain of the way we are made. Nothing forced or wanted until it ripens in our own expectant hands. But for now, in the busy room, we stand in the child’s first shy witness of one another, and see ourselves again, gladly and always, falling in love with our future.
In this overview to the podcast, I discuss how I use poetry to invite my students to consider the larger questions for which the intellectual language they’ve inherited is inadequate. The language we use in our teaching is often too small and too impoverished. It isn’t large enough for the territories we want to explore and inhabit.
Poetry offers us a language that is more expansive, more generous, deeper, and more worthy either of the identities we are on the hunt for or the ideas we are trying to make peace with.
Welcome to the Poetry & Pedagogy podcast. My name is Neill Korobov. I am a Professor of Psychology at the University of West Georgia. I’m also a lover of poetry. One of the ways I stay in love with my teaching is to bring poetry to it. I regularly bring my favorite poetry to my students and I invite them to listen closely to how poetry asks us to live more spaciously and courageously and humbly, how it teaches us to listen more carefully, and how it creates in us, if we let it, a kind of robust vulnerability.
In each episode, I guide you through a poem that I use in my teaching in order to explore how that poem might open us to become more expansive and imaginative in our teaching. Although it’s a podcast geared towards those of us that teach, I think you’ll see when you listen that it’s really for anyone in a leadership position, or anyone who wants to live at the forward edge of their own growth.