Remix of The Knowing Book by Rebecca Kai Dotlich and Illustrated by Matthew Cordell

     For today’s poem, I am drawing inspiration from our Young People’s Poet Laureate and poetry community friend, Margarita Engle and her piece, “Yes, Boys Can Dance!” from the Writers Craft Beginnings and Endings section of Amy Ludwig VanDerwater’s Poems are Teachers: How Studying Poetry Strengthens Writing in All Genres (Heinemann 2017).

 

     Engle’s poem “stems” from a question presented in the first stanza for which the three following stanzas provide a response as the narrator of the piece consults his mother and father and his own sense of what it means to dance as provided by Don Quixote (“The Flying Cuban”).

 

     The affirmation that can come of asking whether or not it is okay to make or to create or to write is matched and sometimes eclipsed by the doubt in regard to whether or not the person is the right one to do this by way of skill and/or pedigree or produced materials.

 

     Other times, the messages received in one’s formative years can carry over into the later years and smudge at the soot and the spit of confidence found within our creative selves. Our sense of poiesis is stymied by the proclamations handed down to us, whispered into our ears, communicated to us with the shaking of a head or the the “tsk tsking” of a finger in disapproval become early discrediting.

 

     Anecdotal evidence suggests that James Castle’s nickname about the farm and about his community was “C.J.” (which stood for “Crazy Jimmy”) or “Dummy.” In this regard, I am closer to my subject than we could ever be otherwise for the name that we have shared. While today’s poem is not designed to malign the memory of the departed, it does make some comment on the importance of how words are chosen and how words are timed.

 

     To this end, a piece that “Begins With a Question.”

 

“Yes, Dummies Can Do.”

 

I love and  to make and to create,

but what of the aesthetic and artistic value, is it okay

for dummies to experience poiesis?

 

If I ask the muses, they show me the masters;

with those singular names familiar to the ear

and complex verses I should’ve known by heart

but I was humbled; they got stuck in my head

and were lost for years to my fumbling hands.

 

But that could me someday, a man of words and of art

on the wall,

in a book,

that others might read or see;

they might call me  “artist” or “poet.”

 

But only if I know the verb behind the verse

and I recognize the verb worked into a visual,

and listen to the lesson of a learned friend:

 

If I do the verb, then I am the noun.