One summer, I took a graduate-level workshop in jazz poetry. For two weeks, I went to a classroom in the music building of the university and learned about John Coltrane, Louis Armstrong, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dave Brubeck. We listened to blues, dixieland, bebop, and funk. And we wrote poems in response to the music, poems that were supposed to mirror the rhythms and turns of the notes, the instruments, and the singers.
It was a pretty good gig, I thought, and the class was blessedly clear of the ego and one-upmanship that usually permeates graduate-level classes. Let me explain something about higher education. When you move past the bachelor's degree level, into the Master's and Ph.D. realms, you find yourself in rooms full of people who are used to being told they are the smartest and best students. These are the kind of brown nosers whose every doodle in art, every 100 on spelling tests were plastered with gold stars and magnetized to the refrigerator for visitors to gawk at. "Look at little Johnny's haiku he wrote in kindergarten yesterday," a typical parent of a future graduate student might say. "I think it reflects the deconstructive pull of modern capitalism." I can make fun of these overachievers because, for most of my adult life, I have counted myself among their numbers.
By the time I hit this jazz poetry workshop, I was nearing the end of my tolerance of this tiresome game of jockeying to be professor's pet. Besides, the instructor was a good friend of mine who already knew I was the best writer in the room. I just had to watch my back for the second-rate poets who might want to pull a Tonya Harding on me.
The very first time the class met, however, I knew this wasn't going to be a typical graduate seminar. I was acquainted with every other student present except one. This stranger came limping through the door, assisted by a cane. She had a tattered notebook under her arm with a cheap Bic pen jammed into the spiral. She sat in the front row, which is a faux pas in graduate classes. Such an action smacks of hubris, indicating you think yourself better than the rest of the attendees. The seasoned grad students sit in the back of the room, trying to be unobtrusive until their true geniuses are revealed and they are led to the front of the lecture hall in glory. I was seated in a dark corner near the back. I watched this woman claim her unearned place of honor near the grand piano that dominated the front.
As we got started, I was convinced that this stranger might have just wandered in from one of the several adult foster care homes that dotted the perimeters of the campus. However, when the instructor went over the computer roster, the woman's name (let's call her Lynn) appeared on the roll. She was legally and officially one of us.
As that first day proceeded, Lynn would, on occasion, laugh loudly for no apparent reason, pound her cane on the floor when other students read poems, yell things like "play motherfucker" while we were listening to musical selections. At the end of that first meeting, I think every person in the class, including the professor, had come to the same conclusion: this woman was from another planet. (Much later, I found out she suffered from schizophrenia.)
The rest of the week pretty much continued in the same manner. Sitting in the seat of honor, Lynn managed to call the resident lesbian poet a dyke several times. Lynn read several of her compositions, which were peppered generously with words like "pussy," "cock," and "cunt." And, near the end of the first week, she told one African American man in the class that his mother was a "lazy nigger who should get off welfare." (That statement prompted the strongest reaction to Lynn. The man threw a chair across the room.)
At the end of the first week, the professor spoke to us before Lynn arrived for class. She told us that Lynn was going to be removed from the roster and asked us to put up with it for one more day.
That Friday, Lynn was unusually quiet. People read poems, and we commented on them. We listened to some Miles Davis. We were almost home free. As the class was just about over, Lynn said, "I have a poem."
The instructor looked at her. "I'm not sure we have time."
Lynn got up from her chair and went to the piano. She sat down. I was expecting her to start clubbing the keyboard with her cane. She put her fingers on the keys and started to play.
Angela of the Cross Guerrero founded her religious order, the Congregation of the Cross, on August 2, 1875. The women under her direction lived like the people they served . Caring for the outcasts of society, the orphans and sick and poor and mentally ill, Angela and her crew begged for food, medicine, clothing, and shelter. They never kept any surplus for themselves, only enough to survive. Per Angela's isntructions, they were to "live with and like the poor." Angela died on March 2, 1932, at the age of 86.
The song Lynn played that afternoon was slow and sad and beautiful. As she played, she read a poem from her notebook. It was about the loss of a daughter, the ache she still felt in her womb for the child's birth, the pain of not being able to care for her baby and herself. When she finished reading, she closed her eyes and continued playing for another ten or fifteen seconds.
When she stopped playing, nobody said a word. The room remained silent.
Angela of the Cross once wrote, "The nothing keeps silent, the nothing does not want to be, the nothing suffers all. The nothing does not impose itself, the nothing does not command with authority, and finally, the nothing in the creature is practical humility."
That day, I sat, staring at nothing.
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