Took ten minutes to figure out how to post

A few quick thoughts before attending Terrance Hayes q&a which I'll record for "Misha's poetry podcast." WHAT AM I GOING TO ASK HIM? I spent several hours reading exceptionally insightful and lengthy interviews he's done--what a remarkable poet and person! How did a boy born in South Carolina to parents who have no college degrees (or even h.s.?) become one of America's leading contemporary poets? Where did the love of language start and how was it sustained? Were there any influential teachers in elementary, middle, high school that may have contributed to his love of words, music, poetry? Does he have any suggestions for how educators can nurture more students' love of language, literacy, line breaks and lyric? I remember watching a third grade African American boy read his poem to a teacher "The sun be shining./I be laughing./Folks be singing/on this beautiful day." I remember the poem because I felt its joy and rhythm and because the teacher took her read pen and crossed out all the "be's" in the poem and replaced them with standard gramar. ICK. I was furious and sad. The teacher herself was Puerto Rican and fluent in African and Puerto Rican varieties of English and was just doing as she herself had been taught: to anesthetize all vernacular and write white. Then I read Hayes poems, one like "Harryette Mullen Lecture on the American Dream" and I read a man who is in love with language, who is open to all that is play and to turn standard on its head, look at her and say "what's upside down?" Lines like: "Mud is thicker than what is thicker than water. Pull you head up by your chin straps. Put the pedal to the metal. Peddle to the middle. Put the medal on the pedestal. I pledge Sister Sledgehammer & Father knows beds, but I am not my breather's keeper...." Wow. I am dizzy, a giddy lizzy lady, luck of landing on language like a sack of mr. potato heads wearing disco clothes and we all know where the nose goes until we change face to fact and look like ducks in this lady land of rub-a-dub. It's getting late and I have a poetry date.

How's that for a public brainstorm?

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