“A powerful agent is the right word.” Mark Twain
If someone asked if I was a poet, I’d answer that I never felt like one. However, evidence, seeming to fall from my pen and computer, appears to be poetry by me.
Did it start many years ago with silly rhymes, couplets, parody versions of songs; all for fun through elementary and high school?
One semester at Thomas More College, during my teaching the course on language arts instruction, a poem fell from my pen. Was the impetus the intensive focus on the developmental aspects of our English language?
The course was such fun to teach. The content was all about language acquisition and use, how to facilitate a student’s development in language: listening, speaking, reading, writing, vocabulary, handwriting. One of the lessons dealt with vocabulary development.
Then for the next class, each of us would bring a new word that no one in the class might know. That person would teach it to us in such a way that the new word would be added to our listening/reading vocabularies.
One of our all-time favorite new words was “zymurgy.” Is it a new word for you? Not one of us had ever heard of zymurgy. Now, zymurgy is forever part of my vocabulary.
During that rich semester, my poem “Words” fell onto paper. What to do with this?
Eventually, I took the mysterious thing to my good friend and colleague, Joe Connelly, a TMC professor of English and an internationally recognized poet. In my baffled state, I watched as Joe read the poem.
“Send it in.” What? He repeated, “It’s good. Send it in.” Send it in?
Where? A student came to see him, so I left, still confused but with something to think about.
With the course on language arts and membership in the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), I always had NCTE’s current Language Arts journal. I had noticed an occasional poem published among the articles.
I sent the Words poem to Language Arts.
As a peer-reviewed journal, a panel of experts in the field reads submissions and decides if the submission meets the NCTE standards for publication.
Imagine my shock and delight when the letter from the editor congratulated me with the news this poem would be in the next issue!
Over the next years, other poems “fell” and were published in journals, NCTE and others. I have never been able to determine exactly why, how, or what generates them. I can’t create a poem at will. As you see, I’m still clueless but the poems keep coming.
WORDS
Words
Chosen carefully
Communicate
The elusive thoughts of man
Which lacking
Precision in expression
Are lost
In a tangle of
Confusion.
(NCTE Language Arts, April 1986)
LAND OF POET
I approach ephemeral borders,
Responding to
Out-stretched hand
Of master-mentor
From the inmost region.
I enter, unsure of my power
To establish residence.
Their vernacular,
Concise, precise,
Defies the casual hand.
The briefest sojourn
Inspires, humbles.
Retreating to the more familiar,
I assure
My eventual return.
(NCTE Language Arts, February 1990)
Judy Harris is well established in Northern Kentucky life, as a longtime elementary and university educator. A graduate of Thomas More, she began her career there in 1980 where she played a key role in teacher education and introduced students to national and international travel experiences. She has traveled and studied extensively abroad. She enjoys retirement yet stays in daily contact with university students.