Friday

28 April 2017

— wet and soggy, but I need go nowhere!

Good Morning All,

Some morning along into eleventh grade, usually early in the second semester, as the students came in and took their usual sits, I would pass out photocopies of the italicized words below. After the usual settling in—hats and gloves and iPhones stowed, a little last-minute nattering, a few kids would start reading what was on the sheet. Then a few more. And within five minutes, there was solid silence:

The Colonel

Carolyn Forché

(Written in May 1978)

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistol on the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man's legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground. 

By the middle of 11th grade, I’d disembowelled enough poems and crucified enough works of fiction so that the kids were getting familiar with how literature worked. 

When they began talking again, usually to each other, and for the most part about what they’d read, I would inquire if they'd just read a prose passage or a poem.

With most classes, that was good for twenty minutes when I could just shut-up and listen. The class was normally pretty evenly divided. Sooner or later—and usually with no help from me--someone would say, “Does it make any difference?”

“Not to me,” I’d reply and then add they could find it on page 845 in the poetry book. Those who’d argued for poetry would slap hands, and the prose fans would tell them they could go do what the colonel had suggested.

I mention all this only because today is Carolyn Forché’s birthday, and she has a poem in the Day Book. 

Go Well and Stay Well,

Bhekaron

P.S. Yes, incidentally, fuck was actually there in the book, Perrine’s Literature,  published in 1998, during a brief lull in the attention span of the censorship mavens.