The Truth (the hardest things to say out loud) Is In Parentheses

Lessons from my Introductory Poetry Class

This year, I’ve had some of the best students of my career. I’ve been saying that for months. Current students, you know how I feel about you. We watch OK Go videos when it’s dreary, we work on independent consult projects even though none of us are getting credit for it, we bring stuffed animals in on Friday. I’m so taken with this group that I’ve actually completely broken out of my comfort zone: I’m going to be acting in a ten minute play with a student director. I haven’t been onstage in fourteen years: I trust and love these kids enough to show them a rusty, old side of me.

(Hayden giving me my sweet kitty Dragon, one of the sweetest things a student has done for me: we celebrate comfort and joy in my room)

That said, this year has had some complications that were unavoidable. We lost a lot of professors and didn’t get any lines to replace them. I’m often the last cowboy at the rodeo (and speaking of last cowboys, if you don’t think my next post is going to be about MY MAN DAK PRESCOTT winning WALTER PAYTON MAN OF THE YEAR, you haven’t spent a lot of time with me). That means I’ve had to completely rebuild some classes, especially last semester’s Editing and Publishing (you can see the brilliant work that group did for their independent magazine Mania HERE ) and this semester’s Introduction to Poetry. I didn’t want to teach it the way it has always been taught. I wanted there to be an urgency to it. I wanted them to understand that poetry is not only not dead, it is vibrant, and to take these words completely out of the context Danez Smith so beautifully imbues them with in “Dinosaurs in the Hood,” I wanted my students to know poems— including formal poetry but not EXCLUSIVELY formal poetry— were “possible, pulsing, and right there.”

The class used to be exclusively formal, but I’ve been experimenting as I go. Sometimes that makes me insecure. I’m willing to live with discomfort if it results in me finding a better way to do something. This week, one of my students, M*, proved to me that whether I’ve cracked the code or not, these students know how to apply poetry in the real world, and even better, they WANT to.

(One of our first stuffed animal days)

We don’t talk about all the garbage Gen Z has been handed. They’re living in Billy Joel’s proverbial “Allentown,” but they had to walk through metal detectors, learn to laugh off mass casualty events, and survive a pandemic during their formative years. I’d like to say I could have done that with grace. I don’t know that I believe I could have, though.

So for the most part, I’ve been looking, even in formal poetry, for contemporary models, especially from BIPOC and women, but I’ve been using canon poetry as well because, in a survey, I want them to come away informed. This week, we looked at Sylvia Plath’s villanelle, “Mad Girl’s Love Song.” An Ophelia-esque fever dream, one of the repeating lines is— in parentheses— “(I think I made you up inside my head.)” This line messes me up every time I read the poem. Does she doubt that he was ever real? Is she abandoning her standards and acknowledging they were too high? Is she mourning the fact that the man she loved was not who he thought she was? The line is riddled with ghosts.

So, like every year, I asked “why parentheses,” and I got great answers— “she’s trying to convince herself,” “she has to keep that thought inside,” etc. Then M was brave enough to say, “It makes me think of something, but it’s kind of stupid.”

This is, if you’ve ever been a teacher, the magic moment. You know it. This is when there’s going to be a next level connection.

“I promise if it’s dumb, I’ll find a way to make it look smart. It’s a trick they taught me in grad school,” I said, or one of the various other ways I try and cajole vulnerability from a generation whose vulnerability is often used against them.

“Well,” she said, “It reminds me of a way people tell stories on Tumbler they say one thing in a sentence and tell the story in parentheses, so the sentence may seem harmless, but the story is more effective that way.”

This was the example she used:

We all reacted visibly. Some people flinched, some folks gasped, some laughed. All of those are valid reactions: it is a horrible story of child abuse being presented in a way that shows the utter ridiculousness of child abuse in the first place. But that is an AMAZING connection to “Mad Girl’s Love Song!” Think about how complicated the critical thinking leap was for M: she had to evaluate whether parentheses were functioning the same way in a canonical villanelle as they are on Tumbler. And she was RIGHT.

We bury the truth in parentheses more and more. We don’t tell each other the truth in our feelings because we’re scared to have them used against us. We also hide pain— one of the truest, most biological responses to stimuli— in humor and by embracing the ridiculous. By pointing out the absurdity of child abuse, this Tumbler post manages to tell an uncomfortable truth in a way that doesn’t force the reader into discomfort.

(I think I made this up inside my head.)

So on a random day in February, we talked about the way we cope with trauma, the ways we lie to ourselves, the way that learning a person isn’t who we thought they were makes us doubt ourselves in the future, and the ways in which vulnerability has been weaponized against my young adults. And friends, you know what that means?

Sylvia Plath is relevant to them. She is urgent. She is pulsing and possible and right there. And us? We’re just getting started. But I’ll never forget the bravery it must have taken for M to raise her hand and connect Plath (canon! Academia! HIGH ART!) to a trend on Tumbler (something for young people and entertainment, so inherently low art and easy to disregard). For a moment, everyone in that room was living without parentheses.

The kids are all right.

(*M is obviously not a full name, trying to protect student privacy.)