On May 2, those Lincoln High School students and their teacher joined my students at the Bennington Museum in Bennington, Vermont, for a wonderful afternoon focused on our mutual exhibits about family history, genealogy, and discussions of DNA testing (Please see the Facebook page:  https://www.facebook.com/groups/449904741747486/?fref=ts).  

The fifteen young men and two women from Lincoln High School were treated to all that SVC has to offer, including discussions with my twelve students and members of the College about what college life is like.   After it was all over, one young man, Jency Ahedo, sent this poem to me, which he read aloud at the museum.  I suggest that you read his description of why he wrote what he did after reading the poem.  Before you do either of those things, view this clip from Dr. Gates.  I submit that we have gone a long way to helping him (and Dr. King, Thurgood Marshall, and others, too) realize his goal.

http://www.svc.edu/pr/index.html?release_id=1322

Oh my great tree so many years yet you’re still growing

The formation of new branches and leaves 

The sprouting of different colors yet the branches now dangling

Those lost due to season change you still grow yet I still grieve.

I can’t say thank you for the protection which you provided from the harsh rays of the sun

As morning rises so do problems and hardship 

Try to climb on to you when things get rough but  how long can I hold that grip?

Constantly worry about the things I left for you to burden

The sun is  going down but my days only seem to darken. 

Oh my child, why worry?

No matter how deep in the dirt you are buried 

You in life shall use that sun to rise

And now to remove your mind from 

Those dark lies 

As your days are only to be bright 

Because all great trees blossom from sunlight. 

“The whole reason why I wrote the poem is that before my senior year I have never focused on school the way I should've and heading in to my senior year I felt as if I had no way of making a future for myself due to the fact of my low grades but every time things go wrong for me I always have my family to back me up. I understand that's the whole point of family but as an 18 year old I don't want to depend on everybody, I want to make a name out of myself. I didn't know how but with the support of friends and family I learned that life always has its downsides but that also comes with benefits and the ability to learn and grow stronger as a human and with that I will be able to achieve the things I yearn for. 

“For the first stanza I talk about the long history of my family and the leaves In the poem stand for the different people and colors they represent and the branches stand for the relationship that connect us together. The season change symbolizes the years that have gone by and the people I have lost. Yet my family still grows I still grieve for the loved ones I lost. Dangling branches stand for the connection or relationship I feel  I am losing with some members of the family as time and distance often destroys it. 

“For the second stanza I symbolize the sun with the hard times life can bring up as the new day arises. And every time things get hard for me I look back and see that I never dealt with things head on and always ran to my family for assistance. And even though they will help clear up any problems which I would be dealing with, which I symbolize using the sun going down, my days seem to darken symbolizes how unclear I am of my future and not sure what I'm going to do as I get older. 

“The third stanza as a whole symbolizes the wisdom which each member of my family and my family as a whole teach me and uses the family tree talking to me as a symbol. So though ending just means the lesson which my family has taught  me in my life. I learned that no matter how deep in a hole you’re in and the more problems you go through life is just a way to make you blossom into a changed person.” 

“You don’t really believe that this ‘positive intervention’ and ‘collaborative learning’ works for all of the students we see today, do you?  Half the freshmen can never be taught to write.  And then you want the students helping other students, as tutors.  That’s the blind leading the blind, don’t you agree?  And if you do, what is the point of collaborative learning and of writing centers?”

There had been long pauses in my life before.  When Dr. Barry, the doctor who would save my eye, asked me to count backwards from 100 while he gave me ether.  Or when I realized I was going to be attacked by the German Shepard after I reached out my hand to pet him.  (I still have scars above my left eye, the one Dr. Barry saved, the one with no sight, the one close friends call goofy.)  Or when I saw I was about to ride up the rear end of an Oldsmobile on the brand new bike my father bought me.  (The look on my dad’s face when I walked the broken bike home was more disappointment than I could ever conceive of causing.) 

This was another such pause. 

I thought about how far away Tempe was from Lawrence and about how little this important university man knew of teaching writing and what it meant for those who learned to teach others how to do it well.   Ten years later, Stephen King, of all people, gave the best advice about teaching writing:  “Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art.  The water is free.  So drink.  Drink and be filled up” (270).

I thought of Frost, who was from Lawrence; I thought of John D’Agata, who is from Lawrence.  Bill was far removed in space and in time from the kind of great writing these men produced. 

I thought of Michael Struffolino.  I thought of Tania Guimond.  They were student-tutors, one a Rush Limbaugh conservative and the other had the warmest heart I’ve ever known even if she couldn’t spell a lick.  They were great tutors; they knew how to give water to thirsty writers.  They worked and studied at Merrimack College, in the greatest writing center still (and I’ve signed the wall of Purdue’s Writing Lab and seen the Stanford Writing Center, close by Andrea Lunsford’s office filled with writing on collaborative learning and tiny red shoes).  Michael and Tania knew Lawrence, too.

It was a hard, working-class place, but it was a city of families and neighborhoods; it wasn’t one fashioned after other cities.  It didn’t sneer.

Finally, I answered Bill, realizing that I would make my line in the sand.

“Well, unless someone is born with an intellectual disability,” I started out, “I think everybody can learn to write.” 

“I think this dissertation looks really good.  Did you write it on a computer?” The committee member speaking now tried to loosen the moment’s tightness by this left-handed compliment.

“Yes, I did, a Mac 520.  But to answer Bill’s question, when writers work together, they gain a momentum that is truly inspiring.  A power coming all over them with words.  There is evidence, as I have suggested, which explains this power and how collaborative learning brings about knowledge and social growth for both the tutor and the tutee.”

“Well, it does look very nice–a sign of the times,” said the young professor on the committee, trying again to make things less tense.

“Thank you,” I said to the young professor.“Bill,” I continued to address him,“I would never (nor would you, if you knew them) call Tania or Michael or any of my tutors blind.  That’s the whole point of collaborative learning and peer tutoring:  when like-minded people work on a task that’s too hard for one of them to complete alone, together, they complete it efficiently and effectively.  Heck, my whole dissertation was revised in Atlanta by people who know writing, who worked in a writing center–people who knew that, by helping me, I would get the dissertation done and to get back to my writing center tutors.”

“Now, thank you, Al,” my advisor said.“We’re going to deliberate a little and we’ll talk to you after that.  Please wait in the conference room.”

When the committee members called me in again, they did approve my dissertation, grudgingly.  They wanted major revisions.  I suspect they would have preferred a rhetorical analysis of “Billy Budd,” because Bill was a Melville scholar and writing centers, peer tutors, the social construction of knowledge, and collaborative learning were still far out alternatives.

I completed the revisions.  While I have never been thrilled with the dissertation,  I was always pleased with my writing center work, particularly while at Merrimack and with the peer tutors I knew there.  I’ve learned from many good people through the years (Kenneth Bruffee, Bonnie Sunstein, Harvey Kail, Judith Stanford, Mickey Harris, Lisa Ede, Michael Rossi, Kathy Cain, Lil Brannon, Don Murray, and more).  Still, none of them taught me as much as the tutors did about collaboration and compassion and the power of those actions. 

I return to those lessons all the time in my position now. I am proud to think about and use what I learned about writing centers, peer tutoring, collaborative learning, and the justification of belief.  As I have done for the past 20 years, I use the experience of the Merrimack College Writing Center in every budget decision I make, in every hiring decision I make, in every curricular decision I make, and in every interaction I have with my colleagues. 

Though I am no longer at Merrimack, I can still see Frost’s bust on that campus and hear the last couplet of “The Tuft of Flowers”: “‘Men [and women] work together,’ I told him from the heart,/‘Whether they work together or apart.’”

Yesterday, our nation celebrated the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., while it will also hosted President Barack Obama’s Second Inauguration.  Dr. King’s real birthday.  Every year on Dr. King's real birthday, January 15, as a gift to myself because that is also my birthday, I re-read Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, which he delivered in Washington, DC, in August 1963.  I offer here four A's, or reasons, why I think that speech is excellent:  allusion, analogy, antithesis, and anaphora, figures of thought and figures of speech that you may want to look for and listen to in President Obama’s inaugural address.

Dr. King employs:

(1)  allusion-a reference to persons, places, and events of note in history.  (For example, Dr. King alludes to Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln authored one hundred years earlier as well as to the arbiters of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence who guaranteed all Americans the rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness);

(2) analogy-an extended comparison of two dissimilar things so as to make a point more effectively. (In the beginning of the speech, for example, Dr. King makes a comparison between African Americans who have marched to Washington in search of civil rights they have not been able to claim and those same African Americans trying to cash a check with insufficient funds.  Dr. King goes on to say that people’s presence in Washington in August 1963 shows that they do not want to believe the vault of justice is bankrupt and that they do believe there will be an opportunity for ALL people to prosper economically, socially, artistically, etc.);

 (3) antithesis-a figure of speech in which a statement’s syntax takes us from what is or was, usually something unpleasant, to what could be, usually something pleasant. (For example, Dr. King says, “Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. . . . This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.”); and 

(4) anaphora-another figure of speech in which the same words are repeated in the same order in successive phrases, clauses, sentences.  (For example, Dr. King repeats these clauses and phrases in key parts throughout the speech:  “I have a dream today. . .”; “Now is the time. . .”; “With this faith . . .”; and “Let freedom ring. . .”).

I hope that the above has some meaning for all of you and that you saw some of what I have pointed out when President Obama addressed us. 

Finally, as the 19th is the birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, I’d like to remember Poe, too, and try to link him to the great leaders mentioned above.  In “The Poetic Principle,” Poe says the poet “recognizes the ambrosia which nourishes [the] soul in the bright orbs that shine in Heaven.” 

I think that great leaders–Lincoln and King and Obama–are like Poe’s poet.

With all good wishes,

Al

Dear Everyone.

In addition to sharing my sorrow and that of my wife, Ann, upon losing a dear friend–so elegantly expressed by Shakespeare through Malcom in that chilling scene from Macbeth when Macduff is told of his family's slaughter–I share the obituary of Polly Ridlon Wilson, a woman who is linked to the history of the Everett Mansion and SVC: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/bennington/obituary.aspx?n=polly-wilson&pid=160594563&fhid=4792#. 

Polly's dad, Harry Ridlon, was the orchardist for the Everett Estate, and Polly grew up in one of the houses on Corey Lane that many of us drive by each day before turning up Mansion Drive. 

Polly and her husband, Zip, also deceased, interacted with many in the Greater Bennington area during their long lives.  They were our neighbors in the apartment complex on Main Street when Ann and I first came to Bennington in 2008.  Among the many stories they shared, we learned from Zip about his interaction with Norman Rockwell when the artist was working out of Arlington.  Zip had been working for a carnival in town and Rockwell needed a carousel horse delivered to his studio for one of his more famous paintings (perhaps you've seen it).  Zip told us that he and his co-workers delivered the horse, never to be asked to reclaim it!  Polly told us of her "date" with Robert Frost's grandson.  They went sliding down one of the Mansion's hills back in the day.  Zip and Polly had so much to share, and Ann and I are grateful for the brief time we had with them. 

As you all meander in the halls and rooms of the Mansion and in and around its grounds, do pause to think a little about Polly.  When you do, keep in mind this peaceful poem from Wendell Berry:
 

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

In that spirit, last weekend my wife and I visited her parents’ grave site as well as my parents’ grave site, putting a solar lamp near each headstone–a kind of night light for them all.  On the way to my parents’ grave site in Methuen, MA, we pass through Dracut, MA, and by the farm of Captain John Ogonowski, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 which was hi-jacked and flown into the North Tower of the WTC in NYC.  Ogonowski was an avid agriculturalist and his farm is still kept by his family.  In fact, we purchased the pumpkin displayed at our home in North Bennington from this farm.

I have attached Captain Ogonowski’s memorial headstone so that, in this month of September when there have been so many poignant occurrences, we will remember our fallen comrades.

Hope

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune–without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I’ve heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

Emily Dickinson

Invictus

William Ernest Henley

At the opposite end of the cemetery, close to the road, the attached headstone may be viewed, and it is a famous one, too.  Charles Cresson Jones, a Bennington shepherd, and his family were passengers on the S. S. Titanic, as the headstone indicates.  His family survived, but Charles did not.

Incredibly, his body was taken back to Bennington and interred in the same cemetery as Frost and White are buried.

If you come to Bennington, you may want to take a walk to view these famous headstones.

So, as we start a new academic year, I offer you this gift–a few lines from the former poet laureate, Billy Collins, and his poem “Aristotle”:

 
This is the beginning.
Almost anything can happen.
This is where you find
the creation of light, a fish wriggling onto land,
the first word of Paradise Lost on an empty page. . . .
This is the very beginning.

It has been a week of poetry for me.  Last week, my wife Ann and I discovered that Natasha Trethewey has been named the country’s poet laureate, and we have been devouring her story (born of a white father and black mother and then living through her mother’s murder at the hands of her step-father) and her poetry (which is filled with voice and imagery and multiple comparisons).  We also went to hear Vermont’s newly appointed poet laureate, Sydney Lea, at the Red Barn on the property of the Robert Frost Stone House in Shaftsbury.  He, too, has a great story (a terrific literary scholar, especially of all things Frost) and is a fabulous writer.

Below is a poem from each writer.  I think you’ll see why they have been appointed poet laureates.

Enjoy!

Domestic Work, 1937—Natasha Trethewey

All week she’s cleaned
someone else’s house,
stared down her own face
in the shine of copper-
bottomed pots, polished
wood, toilets she’d pull
the lid to–that look saying

Let’s make a change, girl.

But Sunday mornings are hers–
church clothes starched
and hanging, a record spinning
on the console, the whole house
dancing. She raises the shades,
washes the rooms in light,
buckets of water, Octagon soap.

Cleanliness is next to godliness …

Windows and doors flung wide,
curtains two-stepping
forward and back, neck bones
bumping in the pot, a choir
of clothes clapping on the line.

Nearer my God to Thee …

She beats time on the rugs,
blows dust from the broom
like dandelion spores, each one
a wish for something better.

To a Young Father—Sydney Lea

This riverbend must have always been lovely.

Take the one-lane iron bridge shortcut across

the town’s west end and look downstream

to where the water backs up by the falls.

Boys once fished there with butterball bait

because the creamery churned by hydro

and the trout were so rich, says my ancient neighbor,

they tasted like heaven, but better. Try to

stop on the bridge if no one’s coming

to see the back of the furniture mill

in upside-down detail on the river,

assuming the day is clear and still.

I’ve lived here and driven this road forever.

Strange therefore that I’ve never taken

the same advice I’m offering you.

I’ve lived here, but I’ve too often been racing

to get to work or else back home

to my wife and our younger school-age children,

the fifth and last of whom will be headed

away to college starting this autumn.

I hope I paid enough attention

to her and the others, in spite of the lawn,

the plowing, the bills, the urgent concerns

of career and upkeep. Soon she’ll be gone.

Try to stop on the bridge in fall:

that is, when hardwood trees by the river

drop carmine and amber onto the surface;

or in spring, when the foliage has gotten no bigger

than any newborn infant’s ear

such that the light from sky to stream

makes the world, as I’ve said — or at least this corner –

complete, in fact double. I’d never have dreamed

a household entirely empty of children.

It’ll be the first time in some decades,

which may mean depression, and if so indifference

to the river’s reflections, to leaves and shades,

but more likely — like you, if you shrug off my counsel

or even take it — it’ll be through tears

that I witness each of these things, so lovely.

They must have been lovely all these years.