“EVERY SINGLE SOUL IS A POEM:” POETRY, PEDAGOGY, AND THE PERSONAL
Leigh Phillips
This is the poetry of the past.
Fourteen years after leaving Hartford, NY, I still consider myself a country girl. I remember Mr. Robbins driving his tractor down rural route 40, waving hello on the way to his barn. I would wave back, watching the sun set around the shoulders of a man who worked in the field, under the shadow of the Adirondack Mountains.
I grew up in the same fields, with the same mountains. When Mr. Robbins would ring our doorbell with a bag full of corn he had grown, I would look in his eyes and thank him. Several times a year, my parents would bag up the fruits and vegetables harvested from our garden and have me bring them over to Mr. Robbins. Together, our families worked to provide a complete harvest. From an early age, I learned that community is essential; it must be preconceived, planted, nurtured in order for each individual to feast and thrive.
After leaving Hartford, I began to pursue higher education at Sage Junior College of Albany. There, I received a different harvest: the bounty of a liberal arts education. Once I said to my advisor, “All of my classes seem to be connecting to each other in mysterious ways.” There was poetry in biology lab and even mathematics; there was mathematics in music and history in art. My advisor looked at me confidently and said, “That’s how you know it is working.”
Through guidance of supportive faculty members, I stepped into myself as a poet and citizen of an academic community. In addition to perceiving the connections between disciplines, I started seeing connections between myself and those disciplines. Poet Audre Lorde wrote in The Cancer Journals: “In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light, and what I regretted were my silences. Of what had I ever been afraid?”
As an undergraduate, I read these sentences repeatedly and began to examine my own silences. On the first day of class, I entered the classroom with my eyes downcast. I wrote, but I did not speak. I was afraid that if I gave my opinions in class, my instructors or colleagues would tell me that I was wrong. I was ashamed of where I came from, and did not want anyone to know that I grew up forty-five minutes from a grocery store in a town that was most known for its Grist Mill. I did not want anyone in my women’s studies classes to know I was in a 4-H club called “The Laboring Lassies” and that I had won a blue ribbon on my presentation “How To Set a Table Properly.” I thought that if I remained silent, I would not have to become who I was, and who I was felt poor, rural, and...wrong.
The year I read Audre Lorde’s words, “Death, on the other hand, is the final silence” was the year Mr. Robbins was pinned underneath his tractor and died. This year, my English professor asked me to host a campus wide poetry reading, despite the fact that I had never once spoken in class. “Me?” I asked incredulously. And so I opened the reading with a recitation of Pablo Neruda’s poetry, my homesick voice cracking in half at the following lines: “There I was without a face / and it touched me. / I did not know what to say, my mouth / had no way / with names, / my eyes were blind, / and something started in my soul, fever or forgotten wings...”
Professor Bertagnolli’s eyes were shining after the poetry reading. She thanked me, and I replied, “Thank you for letting me know that Pablo Neruda exists.”
“You exist,” she reminded me. “And I knew you could do it.”
The liberal arts showed me the possibilities of the world. It taught me both about its beauty, through art, and its injustice, through history. I learned of institutionalized racism and sexism, and how power imposes silences and language can either reinforce or disrupt those silences. The root of my empowerment was learning how to write and speak to the silence. This was achieved in part due to faculty members who displayed a willingness to mentor. Each provided their students with provocative readings and challenging assignments. We were treated as students of the world and respected as individuals. In turn, I began to return what I had learned as a child growing up in the Adirondack Mountains: generosity creates partnership, solidarity, and community.
Within this nurturing atmosphere, I learned to recognize myself as part of an interrelated network of faculty and students. In my second year at Sage Junior College of Albany, I began to mentor younger writers and students who needed self-confidence to recognize their dreams. I also became the literary editor of our school literary magazine, The Vernacular. I flyered campus walls with signs that read, “Attention poets!” and waited for our journal’s mailbox to flood with submissions. None came. Finally, I began talking to writers individually:
“Tracee? I hear you’re a really good poet.” She blushed. “No, no, I’m not.”
“Is there any way you’d let me see your work?”
She removed a pile of handwritten loose-leaf from her desk, and looked down at the floor while she awaited my reaction.
“Tracee. Do you have any idea how amazing you are?”
She met my eyes and said, “My roommate, she writes, too.”
Within three months, Tracee won first prize in our school’s poetry competition, and her roommate, Alicia, let someone read her work for the first time.
Later that year, the front cover of the 20th anniversary edition of The Vernacular featured a quote from one of Alicia’s poems: “Returning what I received and learned with twice the intensity”. It has now been twelve years since the publication of the Vernacular, and I remember these words. Although I am not in contact with Tracee or Alicia, their words remain in print, and their silences, broken. I hope that they still write, and I thank them. I am fourteen years away from the countryside and Mr. Robbins, both of whom taught me how to give. I am twelve years away from Albany, Tracee, and Alicia, who taught me how to teach. Today, I teach at Hostos Community College, where I am “Returning what I received and learned with twice the intensity.”
~~~
This is the poetry of the present.
As a poet, teacher, and colleague, I most value community. In the classroom, I strive to create an environment that privileges every voice, and recognizes the contributions of each member of our diverse student body. I aim to facilitate genuine dialogue between myself and the students, and the students and their peers. I present our semester as a journey that we collectively embark upon.
Within the first few days of class, the work that I assign may be met with a barrage of questions. Will there be a test on this reading? Am I interpreting it the right way? My response to these inquiries is simply that we are climbing a mountain together. What happens when we reach the top? The answer is best described in a Stephen Dunn poem, where he says, “Now here’s what poetry can do. / Imagine yourself a caterpillar. / There’s an awful shrug and, suddenly, / You’re beautiful for as long as you live.”
Learning, I tell my students, is collaborative and collaboration allows us to be infinite. Through critical thinking and participating in productive dialogue, we are widening the lens. Human perception is, after all, only partial. Together, we create an understanding of the world that is inclusive and representative of the vast com- munities which comprise the whole.
I followed my formative years in the Adirondacks with a decade as itinerant scholar, traveling from Albany; to Roanoke, Virginia; to Binghamton, NY. Literature was the anchor in my unmoored universe. As a poet in constant search of identity, I have always strived to build a homeland out of language. Today, I can proudly say that I have built a homeland out of Hostos, and Hostos continues to build a home in me. From The Adirondacks to the South Bronx and each place in between, I have learned that roots are established and most effectively nurtured by the presence of community.
Communities that have become a part of my daily life include that of the South Bronx, and also that of our student body. Here at Hostos, communities are created by common language, a shared borough or homeland, or merely an appreciation of our common experiences. As a full-time faculty member, I seek to cross the bridge between cultural and classroom communities, and the campus community at large. Through service to the English Department, I affirm my commitment to collegiality, and dedication to a network of educators who are passionate about their pedagogy. Together as a department, we can best address the mission of Hostos Community College, and work to ensure the successful future of our students, and The City University of New York.
As a full-time faculty member, I aim to integrate classroom and departmental communities through scholarly initiatives. Engagement with my scholarly com- munity allows me to live the working life of the poet-scholar by performing and publishing my work, and gaining inspiration through like-minded peers. My immersion in the poetics community only amplifies my classroom and departmental contributions and contributions to the culture of Hostos.
In the classroom, I teach writing from the position of a working poet. I envision the classroom as a language workshop, allowing us each to explore and refine our ability to most effectively communicate our truths. Students at Hostos Community College hold within themselves remarkable truths, and stories that need to be heard; as Michael Franti states, “every soul is a poem.” My scholarship as a poet nurtures my own strengths so that I may teach and “Return what I received and learned with twice the intensity.”
The purpose of this portfolio is to reflect on my personal and professional experiences up to my third appointment at Hostos, and to present a clear vision for my future. In the following pages, my commitment to colleagues, my discipline, and my campus community will be self-evident. With me, I carry the influences and words of Mr. Robbins, Audre Lorde, Alicia Kennard, Tracee Giles-Walker, Pablo Neruda, Professor Olivia Bertagnolli, and my students. Here, I have begun constructing a map. It begins with the Adirondacks, continues in the South Bronx, declares community, and arrives at infinity.
This is the poetry of the future.