This World Ringed Round
Teacher Lady: a villanelle, a teaching contract, a leaving, and a return
If you are here for my memoir-in-essays project At Home with Books, the next installment runs next Friday. (“In the Bedroom with the Children’s Books of Margaret Wise Brown”! There will be a solar eclipse and My Little Pony figurines!) The first two installments are here.
Today’s post is a Teacher Lady story. A version was published at Tweetspeak in 2021.
In her book How to Write a Form Poem,
begins with the villanelle. Nineteen lines, two of them repeating four times each, and a rhyme scheme that never deviates from A or B. Complicated and simple at the same time. It’s a mode made for nursery rhymes, I thought three years ago, or a literary trainwreck waiting to happen. Still, I intended to try my hand at the form, and I heeded Tania’s call to look around and write the first line that came to mind. I found it easily, just outside my window: The birds in the yard sing,And then what? I’d figure it out later; time to take my daughter to her counseling appointment. In the waiting room, I breathed deep, a moment of peace, and dug a dog-eared notebook out of my purse. The birds in the yard sing. I wrote it down, then opened my phone to the email that, just the week before, had offered me a tenth-grade English teaching position for the fall. Did I want to talk about form poems and free verse and, goodness, all the American Lit I might fit into a school year? It was hard to believe the answer was “Yes.”
“I’m not made for classroom teaching,” I’d said to anyone who asked me the last twenty years. I held a hardly-used degree in Secondary English Ed. “I got the wrong degree.”
“I haven’t taught poetry yet this year.” It was the week before the counseling appointment and the nascent villanelle, and the ninth-grade teacher was helping me plan my observation lesson for the interview for the job I wasn’t sure I wanted. “Maybe you could do the sonnet with them?” she wondered. I grinned. I’ve loved poetry ever since an especially good Intro to Poetry course in undergrad–a class I took my final semester, instead of completing student teaching for certification.
“Yes.” I swim in poetry. “I can teach the kids about the sonnet.” The sonnet chapter of Runyan’s How to Write a Form Poem helped my planning for that under-the-microscope class period (not least her inclusion of Tom Hunley’s delightful It’s Not So Hard to Write a Sonnet, Man, with its stop-you-in-your-tracks turn at the end. This would make the kids laugh—and think). What I wasn’t sure of was myself, my ability to take the passion I had for the written word and gift it to a group of young souls ready to be fed the things that matter.
I still don’t understand what happened that morning. I walked into the class, chatted nervously with the teacher, sketched a journal question on the whiteboard: “What is poetry?” and returned smiles for each student’s quizzical gaze: Who is this lady? What is she doing here? I’m wondering the same thing, kid.
But then the students began to share their answers, and suddenly, I was nowhere else but there, hearing from them what poetry might mean, might be, might do, and returning my own guiding thoughts on the matter. The hour flew. They wrote and they shared and I wrote and I shared and we all read and laughed and wondered, and five minutes before those fourteen-year-olds who I was dying to teach again had to walk out the door, I realized I hadn’t gotten to the sonnet.
“You’ll just have to wait until I can teach you again sometime,” I told them, but one bright-eyed student was having none of it.
“Can you just tell us what a sonnet is?” he pleaded. Who can say no to that? I grabbed the dry-erase marker and drafted the verse and rhyme scheme as quickly as I could: those three Shakespearian quatrains, then the couplet, ABAB CDCD, and onward. No real time to explain the volta, which is my favorite thing about the form. I swifted copies of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s monumental “Ozymandias” to each desk as a volunteer read it aloud.
“Spend some time with this one,” I encouraged. “There’s so much there.”
“I don’t know,” that first student said, furrowing his brow at the formulated ABC’s I’d written on the board. “It sounds constraining.”
I paused for a beat, unsure what I could give him in twenty seconds. Only this: “I would love,” I told him, “I would love to get the chance to show you the ways a form can open up so much creativity.” And I meant it, not just about the sonnet, but about the chance to keep doing this thing, to be a classroom teacher.
After typing an acceptance and hitting send on my phone in the counselor’s waiting room, I turned back to that starting line of my first villanelle. It needed a second repeating line before I could work within the parameters to get at some meaning. Runyan explains that this form’s tightly-regulated approach opens up the chance for cyclical thinking, for ebbing and flowing with a particular thought or need. I thought of it as a worry stone to turn over and over until I’d gotten truth out of it, till I’d arrived at resolution in the grasp of that final, sixth quatrain.
That idea struck home: new teaching job notwithstanding, my family’s life was in flux in other ways familiar to many after walking through a full pandemic year. Who knew where we would land after all the changes had cycled through? Everything that once felt settled was up in the air: work, town, church. Especially church. I kept asking, When may I leave?
That was it. My second villanelle line, my life right now. The birds in the yard, coming and going, and myself needing to make changes.
The birds in the yard sing,
but I am grounded. I need to know:
When may I leave?In the waiting area, I chewed the pen tip. All the things the last year had delivered: senseless deaths sweeping the world on the heels of a virus resisting control, senseless killings going viral on social media. The ways originally tight-knit communities had diverged over pandemic response and political angst. There was so much breakage and a lot of leaving–and a lot of inner conflict over the decision.
I cannot stop thinking of this thing
between us, the pain that won’t go,
though the birds in the yard, they still sing.Now I was touching something that was true. I scribbled on the little, lined page. This was the question I needed to circle:
How can we see this same world that’s ringed
round with all the goodness we know,
and still,Say it, self:
I must leave?
An intake of breath, a huge sigh of relief. What now? I walked around the question once more. What worried me? I knew right away: I was afraid that the community that mattered most to me, the church I would be leaving, would not understand.
When you’re told, the truth may wing
its way to your heart, or it may not, though
either way,What will make this okay?
the birds will sing,
And hearing them will bring
the peace that unknots and lifts, because, oh,Say it now, self:
I’ll admit: I do want to leave.Circle that question a last time. Admit more:
It’s likely you won’t see. That’s okay. God’s wing
reaches over us both; I can go,
and the birds in the yard, how brightly they sing
of how happy I am to leave.My daughter and her counselor emerged from the office, my girl with a smile on her face. The session had gone well; she had been seen and understood. I stuffed the poem into my bag. I had found a place of understanding, too, the poem’s form opening a space where I could add words to more clearly see. My ten-year-old and I held hands—a rarity—as we walked through the door. There were birds in the trees that late spring day, and they did sing.
When I stood in front of the ninth-grade students the previous week for my observation lesson, when I opened my mouth and my mind and my heart to them and to poetry and linked the two together, the sensation was one I had never felt. There was an invisible mold in the air—I’ll swear it—shaped just for me, my now-self. Twenty-five years before, my college self had broken free from the bonds of classroom teaching that were too burdensome to bear. That was okay at the time, even good. A choice for health and healing.
But now I cycled back, my life its own poem of leaving and return. I stepped into the space made for me, and the mold locked into place, and I was unbound and free: Teacher Lady. This world ringed round with all the goodness that I know.
That was absolutely beautiful -- and how satisfying to see the ways life shaped your poem, and poetry shaped your life. Just stunning!
‘I swim in poetry’ love this line. I still don’t but know that some time I will, like a reverse of your teaching story 🤗