Sandra K. Friday
"Locked In"
We will wrap up this section of the unit with a quintet of poems that progresses from the protagonist, in the poem "Locked In," who laments that he lives, of all places, in a coconut, and is waiting to be extricated, to the protagonist, in "The Journey," who announces with conviction in the very first line of the poem, "One day you finally knew what you had to do, and began. . ." (Oliver, 38). These five poems may appear eclectic at first glance, but the feelings and attitudes expressed by the voices progress from one who sees himself as a willing victim, cramped up in a dark coconut, hoping someone will rescue him so he won't spend his entire life there, to one who has empowered himself to walk away from the forces pulling him down and holding him back, and finally listening to and following the lead of his own voice:
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do -
determined to save
the only life you could save (Oliver, 38).
While the free verse poem "Locked In" by Ingemar Leckius is a mere thirteen lines long, the image of someone trying to manage to live in a coconut, and "shave" every morning, is so bizarre that it challenges the reader to wonder just why a person would
choose
to spend his entire life in a coconut, and it makes us feel how hard it is to do even ordinary things in as un-free place. He declares:
A person who chooses to live in a coconut!
Such a person is one in a million (Nye, 152)!
At the same time, he says he is most pained by the thought that he has no way to get in touch with the outside world; miserable as he is, alone in his tight, dark space, his liberation seems totally dependent upon someone from the outside world stumbling upon the coconut and cracking it open:
If no one out there happened to find the coconut,
If no one cracked it, then I was doomed
to live all my life in the nut, and maybe even die there. . . (Nye, 152)
The final image with which he leaves the reader, and his
take
on it, is, perhaps, the most bazaar, and students will probably have varying interpretations of what this reveals about the coconut-dweller's feelings and attitude about himself:
But, I have a brother-in-law who
lives in an
acorn (Nye, 152).
As students give voice to the protagonist through reading this poem aloud, I will challenge them to brainstorm about the feelings and attitude behind the voice. This could present an opportunity to think and talk about what living in the coconut might represent and how any of us may from time to time live there, hoping to be rescued from situations and lives over which we feel we have no control. It could also be a metaphor for one's voice being locked inside himself or herself, waiting to be liberated. I am excited by the prospect of students illustrating both "Locked In" and the students' poems that it generates.
"Saturday at the Canal"
One of my favorite lines from this set of five poems is the opening line of the free-verse poem, "Saturday at the Canal," by Gary Soto:
I was hoping to be happy by seventeen (Soto).
While the man stuck in the coconut gives the impression that he has been there for a while (he, at least, is old enough to shave every morning), the protagonist in Soto's poem is a high school student adept with metaphors and indictments:
School was a sharp check mark in the
An obnoxious tuba playing at noon because our team
Was going to win at night. The teachers were
Too close to dying to understand (Soto).
Revealing his feelings and attitudes about his present incarceration in school, he and a friend sit by the canal on Saturday, planning their get-away to San Francisco, a place on a picture postcard he has pinned to his bedroom wall:
Hitchhike under the last migrating birds . . .
. . . By bus or car,
By the sway of train over a long bridge,
We wanted to get out. The years froze
As we sat on the bank. Our eyes followed the water,
White-tipped but dark underneath, racing out of town (Soto).
Unlike the victim of life in a coconut, Soto's narrator is making his own plans to get out. At the end of the poem, however, it appears that life is passing him by, and he is still sitting by the canal, watching water racing out of town. Students should be able to relate to this protagonist because he is a high school student and he doesn't like school. What I want to know is what feelings and circumstances may have held him back from his dream? Why didn't he make it happen? We will brainstorm about these questions and they should provide a good segue for students to write their own poem or prose piece beginning, "I was hoping to be happy by. . . ." or, "I was hoping to be . . . . by . . . ."
This poem also offers an opportunity for students to practice the third question on the Language Arts section of the CAPT: "With which character, event, or events in the story can you most closely relate? When have you or someone you know needed or tried to make a similar decision or been able to have a similar realization? Use examples of the specific actions, reactions or feelings of one of the story's (or poem's) characters and connect them to your own experiences or other experiences you may have read about or seen." Obviously, the question will have to be tailored slightly to fit this piece.
"The Prison Cell"
The next poem in the quintet is titled simply "The Prison Cell" by Mahmoud Darwish, a famous Palestinian poet and dissident, who was in fact imprisoned for his political activism. While his title is simple enough, there is nothing simple about the poem. Like the others, it takes the first person narrative stance and puts the author in close proximity to the reader, inviting identification. The narrator in this poem has been imprisoned, but the poem begins by emphasizing possibility:
It is possible
It is possible at least sometimes. . .
It is possible especially now
To ride a horse
Inside a prison cell
And run away . . .. . . (Nye, 48)
This poem includes a dialogue between the prisoner and the prison guard in which the prisoner gradually turns everything in his cell into objects of liberation, i.e. his chain into a pencil, the ceiling into a saddle, and the cell itself into a distant land. And the guard attempts to keep locking him down and bolting him in, declaring ". . .he didn't care for poetry." Poetry and speech, of course, allows for freedom, even when one is confined in prison.
The prison guard got mad:
He put an end to my dialogue.
He said he didn't like my poetry,
And he bolted the door to my cell (Nye, 48).
In the end, the prisoner/poet had liberated himself and it was the guard who felt imprisoned:
The prison guard grew so sad. . .
He begged me to give him back
His freedom (Nye, 48).
Questions for my students are, "Does the narrator really leave the prison? If not, how does he manage to free himself and imprison the guard to the extent that the guard is begging him to give him back his freedom?" I will ask students to observe techniques that the poet uses to convince the reader that the prisoner is truly liberated. I am counting on them identifying the use of imagery; for example, in the very first stanza, the prisoner describes riding a horse inside a prison cell. He describes bringing water from the Nile, and trees from the orchards of Damascus, the moon from the nights of Baghdad, and wine from the vineyards of Algiers.
Of course, there is the over-arching question, "How does the voice of the prisoner express his feelings and attitude about himself, and how does the guard do this as well?"
Here, a man in a prison cell tells us in the first stanza that it is possible to run away; in the second stanza, to make the prison walls disappear. This is certainly not a fellow feeling stuck in a coconut! The character of the guard is very interesting because at the outset, he is the in-charge prison guard, using conventional means such as chains and bolts on the cell door to confine his prisoner. But, by the end of the poem, as he has gradually come to realize that his conventions don't work anymore, and he has lost his power; he is pleading for his freedom from the self-empowered prisoner. Students will grapple with how it happened that the prison guard felt that he had to plead to his prisoner to have his freedom returned.
This poem could lead to a discussion about one's sense of freedom. To what extent does being imprisoned determine one's freedom? Are those who are not in prison cells free? Do they feel free? Malcolm X said in his autobiography, an excerpt of which we will read in this unit, ". . . and my reading of books, months passed without my even thinking about being in imprisoned. In fact, up to then, I never had been so truly free in my life."
"The Calling"
In "The Calling" by Luis J. Rodriguez the protagonist takes the first person narrative stance as in the other poems in this group, and he too is imprisoned, but he too infuses hope in his first line and first stanza:
The calling came to me
while I languished
in my room, while I
whittled away my youth
in jail cells
and damp
barrio
fields ( Rodriguez ).
Using the verbs
languished
and
whittled
to refer to how he spent his youth, he goes on to say that the calling brought him to life out of this captivity. Rodriguez uses strong images to refer to his body as street-scarred, a brown boy without a name, hidden from America's eyes, before the calling made him feel visible. He says he waited sixteen years for this calling, for this time:
It called me to war,
to be writer,
to be scientist,
and march with the soldiers
of change (Rodriguez).
This is no conventional war to which he is being called. I will ask students to speculate on what kind of war this is and on what feelings and attitude his voice expresses in this poem. What did he go through before he heard the calling? Of course, the "calling" he hears is an experience he is having with voice. Is the calling coming from the outside or inside him? If outside, what or who could it be; if inside, what is it? Is it a positive voice? How do you know? He says he waited sixteen years for this time. Why was he waiting? What happened that caused this voice to call him
now
? How did it happen that the voice was calling him to be
writer
, or
scientist
? Are those simply two contrasting careers he is juxtaposing? I have way more questions than I have answers, so I hope my students will be able to come up with some possible answers. And then, I will encourage them to try writing about whether they have experienced
a calling
to
make a change in their
lives, or, to explore if they were to hear
a calling,
what might it be calling them away from, and toward what is it calling them? Once we have followed the progression of Rodriguez's eight stanzas, possibly using a graphic organizer to chart this progression, students may choose to follow Rodriguez's format to develop the progression of
their
calling.
"The Journey"
In the last of these five free verse poems, the narrator in "The Journey" by Mary Oliver speaks of the main character in second person, and with clear conviction from the first lines:
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice__ (Oliver, 38)
And in spite of the familiar tugging and voices imploring the protagonist to stay, the lines unfold:
But you didn't stop.
You knew what you had to do (Oliver, 38),
And from a dark, stormy night, and a street strewn with branches and stones, the protagonist pushes on, and eventually sees stars burning through the night sky and hears, not the voices pulling him back, but his own voice keeping him company, as he strides out into the world. Oliver's poem is rich with images that enhance the trepidation and difficulty the traveler must be experiencing, and the word
finally
that appears in the very first line, implies that the he has been entangled back in that trembling house for some time. But in the final lines in the poem, the reader learns that the traveler is:
determined to do
the only thing you could do--
determined to save
the only life you could save (Oliver, 38).
There is a momentum that builds in Oliver's poem from the very first line. It carries the protagonist forward and contributes to his/her determination to escape. There is no stopping. I hope when my students read "The Journey" out loud, they will be able to sustain this driving force that I think is an integral part of the poem. The phrasing, the images, the progression of the traveler stumbling from a terrible, stormy night to one of stars and adventure helps convey how the protagonist feels about him/herself.
The second part of the Language Arts CAPT questions asks the students to choose the most important passage from the story they have read and discuss what it means and why they think it is the most important. They may write about what the quote is saying or showing about a character, the theme, or the conflict. I think "The Calling" and "The Journey" would be excellent choices for this activity.
For these five poems, I am planning to have the students complete a chart or graphic organizer that compares the voices of protagonists who see themselves as victims and stay victims, and who see themselves as victims or caught in some way but are trying to liberate themselves, and those who actually succeed in liberating themselves. (See Lesson # 3.) I am exploring the idea that in our lives we all feel caught, from time to time, by various situations. When do we give up and remain caught, and when and how do we try to free ourselves and fail, and when and how do we succeed in liberating ourselves? The voices in these poems express these alternatives. I want to challenge my students to think about these questions in relation to their own lives.