All quarter long they’d come into my office to recite a poem of their choice, nearly fifty students acting out the principle that a poem is not truly known until it enters the body like good medicine, courses through it in the blood. On the last day of class, regretting that no more poems remained for me to hear, I instructed the students, as a permanent on-going assignment, to recite the ones they’d memorized once a month for the rest of their lives, to keep the lines fresh, promised I’d somehow check up on them, adding, without forethought, “As a last review, I should make you all stand up and recite your poems simultaneously, like some kind of Tower of Babel devoted to poetry.” As soon as I had said it, I knew my joke was no joke. I told them all to rise—their subdued shuffling and banging could have been a congregation at church rising to sing a hymn—and then, like some Lawrence Welk of poetry, conducted their start, uh-one, uh-two, uh-three, and we were off on our adventure: Whose woods these are I think I do not go gentle into that good woman, lovely in her bones, her thighs caressed by the dark webs, the art of losing, and he was always human when he talked, surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space, whose frown, and wrinkled lip I more than once at noon have passed and polished my good shoes as well, a strain of the earth’s sweet being is captivated, and proves weak or untrue. I myself was adding Stevens’ “The Pleasures of Merely Circulating” to the mix, reveling in the challenge of accurate and steady recall of lines in that environment of sonic chaos which nevertheless teased with accidental meaning none of us dared let distract us. Some of us upped the volume; others closed their eyes, apparently thereby seeing the text in front of them. And the whole earth was indeed of one language, but not of one speech, and, lo, the simultaneity was beautiful, its random combinations, the postmodern chanting in the temple. Soon it came to pass that laughter arose and threatened to confound recitation in such a way that if the Lord had come down to listen he would have been well pleased to see, that is, hear, the shaky tower of breath sway spectacularly in the wind—or was it a quake?—but never tumble, holding its own, a self-delighting, indeed even self-celebrating, free-for-all of tongues, their vigorous exercise, a form of mud-wrestling for the English language, and said, “Highest marks to everyone!,” though no one, of course, could have heard. And, behold, the voices began reaching their final lines, but at different times, so that as those students still standing became fewer and fewer and more and more self-conscious, they picked up their paces, lest each be the last, exposed one, and raced to their closures, the garland briefer than a girl’s had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on, then pushed her over the edge into the river, and no birds sing, until the listening silence surrounding the one voice left was like all the animals gathered around the Christmas crib, and the voice delivered, with obvious relief yet not without, I surmised, a touch of regret that the experiment was over, though I sang in my chains like the sea. Applause for ourselves broke out like confetti thrown down from the windows of the tower we had built, wobbly though it was. I think we all reached to heaven that day, and the Lord blessed—or at least didn’t rain down burning flakes upon—the students scattering from the room like a great nation of vessels for poetry who would go forth and someday beget other such vessels who would beget and so on to keep the sky divided and the cosmos whole, a tall force against forgetting.
Originally Published in Cider Press Review, Volume 2.
