S is for Susan

I received an incredible gift this week from my niece Dale and her sixth grade class. Last year I visited her public school in Chicago as a visiting poet. She is in a gifted classroom and these kids have been together since kindergarten. I have met their parents and heard about many of them for years in her stories. It is also my favorite age for poetry, 4th-6th grade, when I really started exploring what poems were and how they worked– and what they could hold and express.

Dale said that it was the first assignment that everyone turned in on time all year. They were asked on a Monday to bring a poem for the book on Tuesday, and all 21 students showed up with a poem. And not just a poem, but in most cases elaborately decorated pages with drawings.

The overall theme is memory– a favorite memory or strong memory. The poems are in different styles and form, some tightly rhymed and humorous, most more organic. I always am interested in forms they come up with themselves, like a few that use a sort of question and response, before and after structure. Some are funny, and others are full of feeling. It is always moving and exciting to me to see people, children or adults, working with words this way. It is what my new book, H is for Harry, is about– the way we make worlds, identity, our lives, out of words.

Here’s another in that style, which will resonate with everyone who was a perfectionist tween or teen! The Performance

And here’s a lovely emotionally honest poem by Dale’s friend Claire: Another

And finally, a poem about aliens with a great illustration, by Adamina, who has been watching The X Files: The Truth is Out There

But of course, I didn’t make it through Dale’s poem without crying. It is so beautiful and such a testament to our relationship.

It is called “My Memories of Your Memories,” and goes through a number of stories I’ve told her about my own childhood (and recent life) in an attempt to fill her endless desire to be told stories since she was about three years old. Each story is condensed into one or two lines, and the rhymes are there but subtle– and still, the rhymes guide some of the poem’s decisions, and it is the rhyme that sets up the last line, which is a gem.

And the illustration! It includes a drawing of the two of us on the couch, me in one of my hats and her with all her hair, based on a selfie we took during my recent visit to Chicago. And out of my mouth comes a series of bubbles with illustrations of the stories in the poem.

And of course, it isn’t lost on me how many of those classic childhood stories involve my sister Kathy. Those are my precious memories, the most fun times– going down a slippery slide during a rainstorm into wood chips, getting attacked in our snowsuits when we were little by two even younger boys at a park, losing my retainer in the ocean and waves lifting us up just as one of us would dive for it… Last night on the phone I shared the lines about those stories and we laughed and shared some more.

The stories sometimes have a dark edge: Ivan the indoor cat who we saw quite often outside before he disappeared, along with baby ducklings and muskrats and other helpless creatures on the farm. The Ebel boys who call our swimming hole “Leech Pond.” I gasped at the story about the truck and guns, which was not as dangerous or scary as it sounds, because her parents aren’t supposed to know I told her that one! It wouldn’t be the first time a poem and what is in there got me in trouble.

Cheers from here. Write poems. Tell each other stories. And love each other as fully and joyfully as Dale and I love each other. That is what I wish for everyone.