by Emma Harding
“You can’t buy a poem like you can buy a taco.” As a “Valentine for Ernest Mann” from Naomi Shihab Nye’s poetic mind, high schooler and jazz guitarist Jefferey Bean was opened to a new world of, not love exactly, but poetry. He carried, and still carries, this line in the back pocket of his mind and pulled this quote out during Nye’s poetry reading introduction. Nye’s line guides him in his teaching as he finds the poetry inside his students. Touched, Nye echoes this sentiment in her teaching of children. Children are a well of imagination, but sometimes they need a little help reaching down and pulling out the pennies they’ve piled up.
As a student in the creative writing pedagogy course, I’ve learned of several methods that could accomplish this, but Nye’s trash idea is one I’m especially fond of: grab the nearest trash can, turn it over, and tell the students to write a poem about something in the trash pile. This is similar to the “object poem” prompt where one writes about an object they brought in, but in this case, the objects were either brought in or already in the classroom. Due to the unconventional approach, younger students may find the activity silly and approach it with whimsy, thus relaxing their minds and opening their wells. One could even take this prompt a step farther and ask the students to write an ode about the trash as students in Bean’s class have with “unfavorable” concepts and objects. This may require reference material to be shown before or during the exercise based on the students’ collective experience with the form. But who knows, maybe this poem would become a coping stone for those who write and carry their poem.
According to Nye, the ambassador of Ireland views poetry as a coping stone. For those who don’t know what a coping stone is, think of it as the blankie you never gave up from your rock-a-bye baby days or a stuffed animal that you take to sleepovers. They make you feel safe and secure. For me, it’s a line from Olivia Gatwood’s poem “Addendum to No Baptism II,” “memory, too, / lives in my body / not my brain.” For professor Bean, and other poets, in this day of AI art, it may be “You can’t buy a poem like you can buy a taco.” Some things are replicable, some aren’t, but one thing Nye makes clear is that our imaginative wealth is endless.
So say you reach your well and you don’t know where to start, what do you? Just that—ask questions, crank out answers, and you’ll find your pennies then. Some may have corroded, but that’s okay. They’re still pennies; they just have some new details. Even if you think they’re just trash, remember Nye’s exercise: trash still has value if given value. So how about it, would you spare a penny for your thoughts?