More Quiet Than You Can Imagine

As I mentioned in my last post, in the mid to late-1970s I was a bit of an itinerant creative writing teacher. I worked for the Virginia Poets-in-the-Schools program and traveled from school district to school district, teaching creative writing to elementary, middle, and high school students.

I also held teaching and writing residencies during the summers at the Richmond Humanities Center, and Norfolk’s Center Theater. I was so busy that I actually managed to make something approaching a living. For the Norfolk Theater, I taught adult classes, nursing home residents and inmates at the Norfolk jail. I also wrote a few longish prose poems that the theater’s resident dance troupe would perform (these pieces, “Silence,” “Shadow,” and “The Distance,” eventually made their way into my short story collection, The Art of the Knock).

The classes at the nursing home didn’t start out too well. I made the mistake of using some of the exercises I’d honed in my teaching to middle and high school students, like the “verbal dueling” form I discussed in my previous post. There I stood, a twenty-something young man enthusiastically pitching magical transformations to a group of elderly people. One man grumbled that this was “kid stuff,” and everyone else in the room nodded in agreement.

What to do?

I knew that the poet Kenneth Koch had written a book about teaching writing in a nursing home, I Never Told Anybody, and I belatedly searched out a copy, in the hopes that I could redeem myself in the next class meeting, only a week away. Finally paging through the book, I came upon a section titled “Quiet,” and I thought I’d give this a try. Old people liked quiet, right?

Today, in my last few hours as a 63 year old (I’m on the cusp of being the subject of a Beatles song!), I think, Quiet? Anything but!

And sure enough, the initial reaction to the Quiet assignment wasn’t promising. Luckily, a single line in one of the examples Koch gave from one of his nursing home students stood out:

The quietest time I ever remember in my life
Was when they took off my leg.

Here was a quiet that had nothing to do with a peaceful sunset. This memory had some teeth in it. And only then did my elderly students dig in. I wish I could find the examples of their writing now, but apparently they’ve been lost in one of too many moves in the past. But I do remember one poem that spoke of a man’s nearly drowning, seeing the bubbles of his breath reaching up to the water’s surface that he couldn’t yet reach. It was a powerful moment, a perfect blend of quiet and drama. And it opened up a host of varied memories in the other students, because quiet, as it turned out, has many different flavors.

I’d managed to salvage that class, so I wondered if this exercise might transfer to different types of students. I was also leading a writing workshop with prisoners at the Norfolk City Jail.

I decided to give it a try and discovered another kind of quiet, in this unsettling student poem:

The quietest moment that I can remember
was when I first arrived in Vietnam
and stepped from inside the plane. It seemed
as though all the bombing stopped, and the
killing ceased, the workers who were building
the remaining parts of the airstrip stopped their
work. It seemed as though someone dropped
a needle among the haystack of dead bodies
and I heard it as it fell through the air.

–Ellery P.,
Norfolk City Jail

This writing exercise soon developed legs. Even young people, of course, host powerful memories (Flannery O’Connor would certainly agree), so the following fall I brought my inmate and nursing home students’ examples to the high schools I traveled to.

It was 2:17 in the morning
when the next door neighbor
had a stroke.
My mother went over there—
there was no sound
of their watchdog barking
because of her entrance in the yard.
She forced open the back door and
the watchdog was silently
lying in the corner.

–Laura Travis
Manchester High School, Virginia

What impresses me most about this poem is that it isn’t the student’s own memory, but a story that had been told to her by her mother. And yet it seems remembered, the image of the normally threatening guard dog transformed into a quiet, mourning pet becoming the writer’s own.

I discovered that there was nearly no end to the types of quiet that could be conjured from memory, as in this poem of temporary quiet and its jarring end:

The quietest moment I can remember is when I fell off a roof.
The moment my foot left it all time slowed down then stopped.
I was floating down to the ground, all was quiet.
When I hit the ground the peace was broken like a glass.

–André Baskins
Matoaca High School, Virginia

And this last poem achingly combines external joy with internal sadness:

When I was small, I became very sick.
I had to stay home from school and couldn’t see any of my friends.
As I looked out my window, I saw all the other kids in my neighborhood,
next door playing a game I liked.
They were all yelling and making a lot of noise.
They were having fun.
But from up in my window, looking down upon this scene, inside I felt
very quiet.

–Kim Hawkins,
Charlottesville High School, Virginia

Those early teaching days of mine certainly focused my respect for the art of pedagogy, and above all for its unpredictable discoveries. My idea of “quiet” until then had been fairly ordinary—soothing silence, mostly. But my students taught me more than I taught them. They gave me something to take out of the classroom: a sense that the world offered layer upon unsuspected layer, if one only chose to look or listen.

More Quiet Than You Can Imagine

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