NPM 2015: What Are You Wearing, Jane Elkin?

Find the official NPM 2015 poster
at the Academy of American Poets

At last! It's finally here -- that special season that we wait all year to celebrate.

It's National Poetry Month. 

If National Poetry Month were a party (it kind of is), what would you wear to the celebration? All this month, guest bloggers are putting on their finery here at Author Amok. We're doing a month-long feature on poetry about clothes. In addition to the guest posts, every Friday in April I'll post a round-up of original clothing poems. (Send those via email to laurashovan at gmail dot com or leave them in the comments). You'll find a writing prompt at the bottom of this post.

Why clothes?

Articles of clothing are symbolic. They represent choices people make about how they want to be viewed by others. But they can also represent a person's economic situation, relationship with gender, mood, and culture. A red tie or jacket can be a metaphor for strength.

From popular song, we have Prince's "Raspberry Beret," Elvis' "Blue Suede Shoes," and Nancy Sinatra's walking boots. But what about poetry?

Meet today's guest blogger, poet Jane Elkin. Jane has visited Author Amok several times, including when her book WORLD CLASS: POEMS INSPIRED BY THE ESL CLASSROOM was published in 2014. (Read the post here.)

The Parable of the Hangers

 by Jane Elkin

“If there were a fire and you had time to grab only one thing,” my roommate asks, “what would it be? Photos? Love letters? Your thesis?”

            A reasonable person might point out that if there were indeed a fire, they wouldn’t pause for any of those things, but not me.

            “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you,” I say. And with that one question, I am transported back to childhood.

My closet was full of someone else’s clothes. When I’d gone down for my nap, it held my brothers’ cast-offs and three cotton dresses. Now it was packed with girly surprises: a pink rosebud here, a lemon sash there, poufy dotted Swiss sleeves, and silken strawberries on chiffon. Scotty dogs walked the plaid field of a jumper and I swore I heard bagpipes. It was a whole rack of whimsy in thread. It was more clothes than I knew existed. It was the most beautiful sight of all my four years. It was Christmas in August.

            I had been living some other girl’s life in my primary colored play clothes. I was born for Sunday best, and now it appeared I would wear it every day. 

            My mother stood in the door frame, smiling mischievously. “Did you have a good nap?”

            “Mmm hmm.” I pointed. “What are those dresses doing in my closet?”

            “You’re starting kindergarten next week, so you need school clothes, right?”

            Really? I was going to school like my brothers? I had only begged because I was bored. Had I known it involved a makeover, I’d have asked sooner.

             “I’m going to school – in those pretty dresses? Where did they come from?”        

            “From Patty. They’re like new.”

             Patty was an only child with a charmed life –pretty clothes, piano lessons, a puppy. It didn’t matter what things cost because she was a lonely child and her father was a mailman who made a lot of money for not much work. But she was as nice as could be, not at all spoiled. And now her clothes would charm my life, too.

            I sock-skated to the closet and stroked a satin bow.

            “They’re so pretty.” I fingered the hem with the embroidered Scotty dogs. “Thank you!”

            “Here,” my mother said, setting a footstool in front of the closet, “you can take them down by yourself.” I slipped the jumper off the hanger to try it on and went to admire myself in my parents’ full-length mirror, turning to see myself from every angle and bouncing on tip-toe with excitement. I looked older and fancier, like I belonged in the Sears catalog.

            “Of course, now that you’re old enough to dress yourself for school, you’re old enough to learn how to take care of nice clothes, and the best way to do that is to hang them back up right after school.”

            Of course. There had to be a catch. Still, half a day in dresses was better than none.          

            “I’ll take care of them,” I vowed.

            “You have two choices,” my mother said. Some people hang them with all the hooks open to the back, like this.” She motioned to the hangers she’d arranged, all aligned in the same direction. “And other people hang them open to the front, like this.” She turned several to illustrate. “Pick one way or the other, but not both.”

            “Why not?”

            “Well, for one thing, it looks better if they all face the same way,” she began, “but that’s not the most important reason. I’ll show you why.” She flipped every other hanger in alternating directions, talking as she worked.

            “You see, there was once a lady with a whole closet full of beautiful clothes. She had a different outfit for each day and enough dresses to last a month of Sundays: short ones and long ones, silky gowns and woolen suits, sun dresses, party dresses, and even a fur coat – all from the best stores.”

            “Was she a movie star?”

            “Something like that. She had all these beautiful clothes, but she was careless with them. She was always in a hurry, so she had hung them up all haphazard with some of the hangers facing to the front and others facing to the back. Then one day there was a fire.”

            “Ahhh!” I felt sick with dread.

            “She ran to her closet to save her beautiful wardrobe, but when she gathered an armful and tried to run, they held tight to the bar.” My mother locked her arms around the lot and tugged, but the hangers wouldn’t budge.

            “She didn’t have time to turn them around, so she had to run out of the building without any of her nice things, and they all burned up in the fire.”                                 

            “That’s awful,” I gasped. “She wasn’t very smart.” I climbed atop the stool and got to work. “I’m keeping my hangers open to the back, like you had them.”

I’m still an open-to-the-back girl, as are my grown daughters, but I never told them why. Some legacies are too weird to explain. You just do them.

Jane is pairing her remembrances with two poems. In both, clothing becomes a metaphor for the parent/child relationship. The first, by Mark Irwin, begins with a closet.

My Father's Hats

by Mark Irwin

     Sunday mornings I would reach
high into his dark closet while standing
     on a chair and tiptoeing reach
higher, touching, sometimes fumbling
     the soft crowns and imagine
I was in a forest, wind hymning
     through pines, where the musky scent
of rain clinging to damp earth was
     his scent I loved, lingering on
bands, leather, and on the inner silk
     crowns

Read the rest at Poetry 180.

Jane's second featured poem is by YA author and poet Ron Koertge.

Negative Space

by Ron Koertge

My dad taught me to pack: lay out everything. Put back half. Roll things
that roll. Wrinkle-prone things on top of cotton things. Then pants, waist-
to-hem. Nooks and crannies for socks. Belts around the sides like snakes.
Plastic over that. Add shoes. Wear heavy stuff on the plane.
   We started when I was little. I'd roll up socks. Then he'd pretend to put me
in the suitcase, and we'd laugh. Some guys bond with their dads shooting
hoops or talking about Chevrolets. We did it over luggage.

Read the rest at The Writer's Almanac.

Jane Elkin is the founder and facilitator of The Broadneck Writers’ Workshop, as well as a theater critic and essayist for the Bay Weekly. Her prose and poetry have appeared in such journals as Kestrel, Kansas City Voices, Off the Coast andDucts, and she has won awards with the Maryland Writers’ Association, Poetry Matters, and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. A self-proclaimed Renaissance Woman, she works as a language teacher, singer, and handwriting analyst.

Next up in this series:

Friday 4/3

Tabatha Yeatts is visiting with a clothing poem by Greg Pincus.

*Your suggested clothing poem prompt for Friday, April 3: Storage.

Where and how do you keep your clothes? Do they hang in your closet, organized by color? Are they crumpled on the bedroom floor? Are you an organized packer, or do you toss things into a suitcase and hope for the best. I still remember the name of the long-ago camp counselor (Janice) who taught us how to roll our clothes up tight to maximize space.

Send your poems any time. I'll post original work on Friday.

Source Poems: "Hannibal Clim"

For National Poetry Month 2014, I have invited 17 authors and poets to guest post about source poems. In this series of essays, each writer will describe a single poem's significance in his or her life.

Welcome, Poetry Friday readers! Amy Ludwig VanDerwater is kicking off the Poetry Friday blogging community's National Poetry Month celebration. She's got a menagerie of poetry, reviews, and NPM projects listed at her blog, The Poem Farm.

Today's guest blogger is Maryland poet and adult ESL educator J. C. Elkin. Jane visited Author Amok in January to talk about her new poetry collection World Class: Poems Inspired by the ESL Classroom [read the post].

J. C. Elkin

I recently spent three days with my brother on a road trip home to New Hampshire. We’ve grown in different directions over the years, yet we still connect over the shared experiences of childhood: old television and radio hits, family anecdotes sparked by passing road signs, and poems learned before we could read.

Like an anonymous ghost with no descendants, the poem Hannibal Clim still haunts us fifty years later. Our mother would recite it in hushed tones and crisp consonants with three kids crushed against her in awestruck wonder as she illustrated each phrase with dramatic pauses and eloquent body language. My brother and I talked about that poem for half an hour -- how it had endured as one of our strongest memories and how we both were so frustrated at not being able to recall it in its entirety that we had each Googled it, only to come up empty-handed. Yet together we were able to recall most of the poem:

            Hannibal Clim was a very big dragon

            with a very long tail much too heavy for waggin’

            and very small eyes that always were blinking

            and a very small brain much too tired for thinking.

            Yep, Hannibal Clim was the biggest old dragon

            you ever did see, and that isn’t braggin’.

            But I wouldn’t dare tell you Hannibal’s size,

            for you’d shiver and tremble and roll back your eyes.

            You’d probably blame me, and you would be right,

            for it would keep you from sleeping at night. . .

            So I won’t.

I thought she read it from a book because I had a clear image of the dragon illustrated in vibrant peacock colors with a brontosaurus-like head, but my brother said I was confusing it with another story about a dragon who was so large and slow that he had to bite himself each night when he went to bed in order for the pain to travel up his long tail to his brain and awaken him in the morning. [AA: This one sounds familiar to me, too. Maybe it's in Dr. Seuss's The Sleep Book, or a collection by Shel Silverstein or Jack Prelutsky.]

I had forgotten that story until he reminded me. He argued that if Hannibal Clim had ever been in a book, Google would have found it, so maybe he’s right. Our story, then, is a testament to the power of oral tradition, and I wonder how many generations of mothers have told it? Maybe one of my readers knows the answer along with the missing couplet and author’s name.

With dragon stories figuring so prominently in my youth, it’s a wonder I’m not a fantasy writer, yet I see in Hannibal Clim two elements that are central to much of my poetry: narrative and rhythm. Storytelling with descriptive imagery has always been my main concern, and as a singer I am equally obsessed with the rhythm of speech. I’ve learned to live without rhyme, but admit I’m still a big fan even though it has fallen out of fashion.

Hannibal Clim also taught me a lesson about content that I still strive to remember in my work: the power of mystery. Just as Anonymous never told me Hannibal’s size, I need to resist the urge to spell out the answers to all the questions I pose, because writing is about communicating a universal message that each reader internalizes in his own way based on his own experiences. After all, my definition of a “big” dragon may not be the same as yours. Best to leave the reader wondering a little.

Are you Hannibal Clim?

Jane Elkin is the founder and facilitator of The Broadneck Writers’ Workshop http://www.broadneckwritersworkshop.com/jane-c-elkin.html%20, as well as a theater critic and essayist for the Bay Weekly. Her prose and poetry have appeared in such journals as Kestrel, Kansas City Voices, Off the Coast and Ducts, and she has won awards with the Maryland Writers’ Association, Poetry Matters, and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. A self-proclaimed Renaissance Woman, she works as a language teacher, singer, and handwriting analyst. 

Jane's poem and the story behind it remind me of my family's love of Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky." [The Muppets perform the poem here.] My brother, daughter, and I all know the poem by heart -- to the sometimes dismay of our other family members. Jane's post speaks to poetry as a shared experience.

Is there someone out there who shared Jane's experience of hearing "Hannibal Clim" as a child? If you know the author or source of the poem, please leave a comment. Perhaps you have a source for the long-tailed dragon who uses its tail as an alarm clock? Join the conversation and let us know what you know.

[Update -- there IS such a creature in The Sleep Book, but it may not be a dragon. Check back for an update on the update.] 

Previous posts in this series:

Laura Shovan on "This Is Just to Say" by William Carlos Williams

Dylan Bargteil on "On Moral Leadership as a Political Dilemma" by June Jordan

Poetry Friday: Meet a World Class Poet

Writerly Friends and Poetry Friday followers, I have a HUGE treat for you. It involves a wonderful poet, a book that will break your heart, and a giveaway!

Meet my friend, J. C. Elkin.

After you say "hi" to Jane, visit with
the rest of the Poetry Friday party guests
at the Miss Rumphius Effect.
Tricia is hosting this week's blog roll.

Jane is a poet. Like many of us in the Poetry Friday community, she is also an educator. Jane teaches adult ESL students here in Maryland.

This is the melting pot she explores in her new book, World Class: Poems Inspired by the ESL Classroom. It's a fascinating, poetic look at the lives, stories, and struggles of one adult ESL community.

Jane is stopping by to talk about her book today. I know it will appeal to many of you who work in the classroom. World Class goes on sale tomorrow, 2/1, so happy book birthday, Jane! If you'd like to win a copy of World Class, leave a comment.

Buy the book at Amazon.

5 Questions for J. C. Elkin

Author Amok: The double entendre of the title is very apt. The world of the adult ESL classroom is one that most people don't see. Could you talk about what it is like to create a sense of community in a group where languages and cultures are so varied?

J. C. Elkin: First, I have a rule that people who speak the same language cannot sit together. That forces students to develop friendships outside of their normal sphere. After that, our sense of community just develops from our shared humanity. Everyone has stories: the luckiest thing that ever happened to them, their favorite foods, bad coworkers, getting lost… These are the kinds of topics that crop up on a daily basis in our readings and conversations. It’s like an extended cocktail party with notebooks – minus the alcohol. Rarely have I experienced cultural insensitivity or animosity between the students.

Amok: In the introduction, you mention "accentual verse." Would you explain what that is and why it was a good fit for these poems?

Elkin: Accentual verse is poetry with a fixed number of stressed syllables in each line, and it’s as old as oral tradition – from Beowulf to Mother Goose to Rap, (though it doesn’t need to rhyme.) Take the poem “Adios Fernan,” for example. I’ve rewritten it here with capitals to represent the strong syllables of each line, and you can see how the speech falls into a steady beat, like a walking gait:

FerNAN wears his CAP Gangsta-STYLE.

TALL and STRONG and PROUD

and MUCH less SURE than he LOOKS.

He STAYS after CLASS with QUEStions,

TOO shy to ASK in CLASS.

It was an apt fit for this collection because I focus so much in class on the stress patterns in our language. Some students need to be taught to hear and repeat intonation and stress patterns because it is absent in their native tongues. Others, who speak Romance Languages, may place the stress on the wrong syllable, modeling their pronunciation on a similar word from their native tongue.

Also, as a singer, I naturally fall into rhythmic patterns when I write, so I decided to go with it, as I would in class.

Like the United Nations, students in Jane's ESL
class must learn to communicate with one another.

Amok: I like that you addressed people who might say your students "should speak our language or just go back home" in the poem "World Class." How do you help your students cope with such push-back?

Elkin: I encourage them to use their limited English because it not only sharpens their skills but also demonstrates their desire to fit in American society. That’s something most people respect.

Having lived abroad and felt the arrows of linguistic snobbery myself, I can vouch for the fact that there are nice people and insensitive people in every culture. Those who would denigrate a foreigner’s earnest efforts to communicate in a second language display their own lack of empathy and (often) monolingualism.

One student told me how his American-educated coworker insisted he was mispronouncing a certain word, so I checked by having him spell the word for me and repeat both pronunciations. He has an exceptionally good ear for pronunciation, and he was in fact right and she was wrong.

He asked why his coworker was always doing this, looking for opportunities to point out his short-comings and insisting she was right because she was born here.

           

“Some people,” I said, “just have to feel smarter than someone in the room.” The whole class laughed with recognition.

Amok: Do you use poetry in your ESL classroom? How and why? How do your students react to poetry?

Elkin: My students are at the basic level of English acquisition, rather like the base layer of meat in a club sandwich, so imagistic or ambiguous poetry is beyond their grasp. Sometimes, though, I teach them simple childhood chants such as Rain, Rain Go Away, and they like to read the lyrics to popular songs on YouTube. Because they’ve already encountered the words so many times in the real world, they can focus on vocabulary and grammatical structures.

Amok: There are so many stories in World Class of students who touched you. Why did you decide to turn these stories into a book of poems? What do you hope readers will take away from these stories, and from your experiences?

Elkin: The collection began with two stories that haunted me for months before I was able to write them: “Young Means Forever Unchanging” about a seemingly hopeless student who demonstrated progress in a most poetic fashion, and “Adios Fernan,” about a student whose unexpected departure saddened and worried me. Once I told their stories, the others came pouring out as if I’d opened a faucet, and I realized I had created a profile of a unique segment of American society that we all need to understand.

The immigration story that is as old as our country continues today. It just wears different garments. Even if I never publish another word, if I can help 1,000 readers to appreciate the immigrant population and their shared human condition, I will consider my writing career a success. 

Thanks to Jane and her publisher, Baltimore's Apprentice House, for giving me permission to share "Adios, Fernan" today.

Adios Fernan

by J. C. Elkin

Fernan wears his cap Gangsta-style.

Tall and strong and proud

and much less sure than he looks.

He stays after class with questions,

too shy to ask in class.

A waiter who can’t take orders,

he thrusts his notebook at me.

“What drinks you want? You write.”

It’s more command than request

but his smile is pure gratitude.

One day he stays to tell me

he must go bury his mom.

Home to El Meximala.

Who knows when he’ll return –

if he ever returns.

I don’t know if he’s legal.

I picture him sprinting at night

trying to cross the border.

Mentally cheer him on,

though once I’d have been livid.

When did I change my mind?

Vaya con Dios, my friend.

Your seat is empty today

but will be filled tomorrow

with another young dreamer.

The wait-list is long as the fence.

Jane Elkin is the founder and facilitator of The Broadneck Writers’ Workshop, as well as a theater critic and essayist for the Bay Weekly. Her prose and poetry have appeared in such journals as Kestrel, Kansas City Voices, Off the Coast and Ducts, and she has won awards with the Maryland Writers’ Association, Poetry Matters, and the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. A self-proclaimed Renaissance Woman, she works as a language teacher, singer, and handwriting analyst. 

Jane has a hot-off-the-presses copy of World Class for one lucky reader. Leave a comment on this post, and you will be in a drawing to win the book. I'll announce winners on Monday.

If you don't win, help support the student run press Apprentice House by purchasing World Class through their website after 2/1: www.ApprenticeHouse.com. Want to know more about the nation's only publishing house run  entirely by students? Of course you do! Go here to get the scoop.

Thanks for visiting, Jane! Congratulations on World Class

J. C. Elkin featured at Bay Weekly online.