For our multigenre project, T.H.I.S. in Room 407, students who are on the poetry track commit to writing two Spoken Word style pieces, one about the subject and other about a contemporary issue related to their subject. 

The often narrative approach, feel, and sound of the Spoken Word poem are also found in the Story Poem. Today, instead of using a poem from POEMS ARE TEACHERS, I am going to share and look at the poem Amy Ludwig VanDerwater wrote this week at The Poem Farm for her 1 Subject 30 Ways invitation found there. 

From Amy Ludwig VanDerwater’s The Poem Farm

We see here an “invitation into the poem” in the salutation, the “you understood” that makes the call here both timeless and timely at the same. . .time. This could be a story that had been told to our ancestors or shared with our adolescents yesterday. 

In thirteen sentences with one parenthetical addition, Amy tells a story of her subject. And of the scorpion. Here is a fun fact for you. Scorpius has thirteen stars. And Amy’s parenthetical is more an aside than it is a part of the story so we have a really neat structure choice here even it were accidental. (Some poems are just star stuff anyway.) 

There is a natural rhyme that appears through Amy’s piece that comes in, shines bright as an expectation of poetry when read and then fades back into the quiet of a poem fading away, leaving with the light or the dark of a page or a screen where no words appear. . .or do they still?

Since I must write a Spoken Word piece for the project I am doing with students, this piece will be a little bit longer (positioned to be at least three minutes read/performed aloud):

 

“Under the Door/In the Box”

 

I was seven years old

when James Castle drew

his last two pictures.

 

The story says that he

depicted the room perfectfully.

 

The Walls. The Curtains. The Bed.

 

Even the television in the corner

it’s blank screen without

soundtrack or story to offer the moment.

 

James drew himself in these drawings,

lying in the bed where he’d die that day.

 

He was there.

I was not there.

 

He was seventy-seven.

I was seven.

 

He from the gem state

and I from the mitten.

 

I would be forty-seven

before I began to hold

the gem of his work in my hands.

 

I’d meet James Castle in a book.

This large, oafish man

with bright eyes that seemed to flash

even out of old, grainy black and white

photos captured of an artist who

might’ve been; could’ve been

my brother.

 

And I would have to know more.

 

And my own hands would try

to render the walls; to smooth the curtains;

to make the bed.

 

To make some sense of a shared bed

that two artists might sleep in, a slumber

party of two two silent scraping at the dark

in order to create and to share the picture

of who we were; what we saw;

what we brought back in art

and in poetry.

 

On the day he was born, God struck a match

and lit the old snag tree on the hill behind

the Castle home.

 

Those who were home took buckets of water

the spring to put out the fire which left the ash

that would welcome the baby who was only

seven months into what could be called his prequel.

 

To keep him warm, they filled a box with cotton batting

and placed him by the stove. The ash that was his warmth

would one day become his body of work.

 

Later in his life, they would try to teach him

to blow out a candle in order to create words out of silence

but James refused knowing that he would need that flame

to burn what comes out of the wood, under the door

and become the ash that might be the answer to the asking.

 

He would use what came under the door

or came in a cardboard carton or box.

 

Would scrape away at the waxy coating

to prepare a surface for the receiving

of the treatment of soot and spit.

 

And I get it. The doors and the boxes

and the scraping and the absence of hope

that this new creation or this new poem

will make sense. It does not.

 

It only has to be.

 

What comes under the door (from the very first day):

 

Apgar

age-level milestones

achievement

Assessments

decrees

documents

papers

proclamations

reports

registries

orders

reviews

evaluations

transcripts

notices   

 

They all come in envelopes

and he would have reshaped them

into mysteries and revelations:

 

A mailer is now a word specimen.

A page an attempt to work with words.

 

This cancelled postcard is now a rooster.

This dead letter is now my brother.

 

The artist would take a box

and he would make it into a book.

 

A room settles onto the surface

as the Royal Jello sets in the icebox.

The purified saltine wafer box

becomes a person same soot & spit.

 

The matchbox from which a fire might be struck

is now a book

of enigmatic and strange authorship.

 

He was seventy-seven on the day he died.

I was seven and I had not even known that he had lived.

 

But our stories are now tied together, loosely

in a way that makes sense to us, not stitched

with the discipline and the precision of the lines

created by the thread, but by what is revealed

when the dust settles at the end of the day

 

when the setting of the sun, gives way to dusk

slips under the door of the world

and leaves a clear, gray screen the size of the sky.

 

This must be what heaven is for the man

who blows in from the dust of the day

to spit into the stuff of our stories just

to tell the world that we have been born

and another man takes notice and time

to say,

 

“I see you.”