The Poet’s Corner – July 10, 2020
with Eva Poole-Gilson
I talked myself into my first full-time teaching job–at a junior high school in Rockford, Illinois. I did not have the usual how-to-teach courses required for an official credential, but it was mid-August, and school would start in a few weeks and they needed an English teacher.
Young and arrogant, I guess I figured since both my parents had worked as teachers, the needed savvy was in my genes.
Wow, was I in for a steep learning curve! and numerous rude awakenings.
This was the 1960’s. I was the usual politically ignorant young white woman of the times. The school was about 50% Black, 50% White.
Probably the only “savvy” that helped me quickly was a lamentable realization: my many University literature classes had introduced me to no famous Black writers. On my own, I’d come across Nikki Giovanni who was just then breaking into print and being noticed. Maybe a few other Black writers had made a short walk in my brain, but I’d never spent time with Frederick Douglass, the famous abolitionist and writer. I knew nothing about the famous Black writers of the Harlem Renaissance, or unbleached American history: Before the Mayflower?
I dove! Had to find and grab lifesavers for myself and for my adolescent students so we could survive our captivity: no drowning! no classroom battleground! Peace not prejudice! Inklings of enlightenment…
This may be when Langston Hughes became one of my favorite poets. He wrote the line that Lorraine Hansberry chose for the title of her famous play, A Raisin in the Sun. Hansberry was the first African-American female author to have a play performed on Broadway.
***
Harlem
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes
1902-1967
**
Now I still invite Langston to inspire me and any students. I still like to open the first day of a five-day series of poetry-writing workshops with his 8-liner below. I suggest that the students can learn the poem by heart that day, or certainly by day five. And many of them do.
Dreams
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.