“Who can tell me something about Joyce Kilmer?”
Jay Lombardi looked around at the class of thirty-five eighth graders, smiling expectantly, as if he actually thought he was going to get a bunch of responses to his question. He didn’t have any such expectation, or course. This was a North Philly middle school, a junior high school, and he was facing an overly large group of youngsters in an age group when powerful hormones that stimulate organs other than the brain are in control. Youngsters tuned into survival in the toughest part of the city. Youngsters who equated poetry with rap.
If he were lucky, he would get out of here in another half-hour in one piece with no worse memories than the uncomfortable realization, a realization by now all too familiar, that almost no one outside a tight little circle of Philadelphia poets and their friends and families, and maybe a few hundred college students who regularly attend poetry slams, gave a rat’s ass about the art form to which he was devoting his life. If he were less lucky, one of the kids he was addressing, several of whom were as tall and far wider than his own stringbean physique, would take a dislike to something he said and beat him to a pulp.
He was counting on Mrs. Emma Gray, the regular English teacher for this collection of young toughs, to protect him for just another twenty-eight, no, another twenty-seven minutes. She was a small, very dark-skinned women with close-cropped hair and an absolutely no-nonsense approach to her work. From previous presentations he’d made at this school he knew her to be utterly devoted to her teaching and to her students, and utterly fearless when it came to keeping them in line. She would look up at a budding giant who was on the verge of making trouble and have him droop-headed and pliant in a matter of seconds. If anyone could get Jay Lombardi through this ordeal, Emma Gray could.
Twenty-six more minutes said the clock on the rear wall of the classroom. Twenty-six minutes and counting.
A hand went up from a student so bored with this cultural enrichment session that she had decided to break the tedium by attempting an answer to Jay’s question.
“
Yes? What can you tell us about Joyce Kilmer?”
“
It’s a rest stop on the Jersey Turnpike.”
“That’s right,” someone else in the class offered. “I peed there a couple a times.”
“I pee at Molly Pitcher,” someone else stated with a touch of pride.
“They never clean them toilets at Pitcha. You crazy to sit down there.”
“Who sits down?”
“How you do it, you don’t sit down.”
Before anyone in the class could attempt an answer, Emma pounded a ruler on the blackboard for silence. Curiosity, however, got the better of one young lady in the third row.
“How you pee if you a girl and you don’t sit down?”
“Enough!”
Emma had spoken. There was silence. “Mr. Lombardi will now continue telling us about the poet...The Poet....Joyce Kilmer. Please continue, Mr. Lombardi.
He attempted to do so. “Before Joyce Kilmer died in the First World War—he was from New Jersey, by the way, which is why they named a rest stop on the New Jersey Turnpike after him—before Joyce Kilmer died...”
“Joyce was a he? Joyce Kilmer was a homo?
Emma Gray was on this fullback-sized questioner in a flash. “You ever use that nasty word in my hearing again, Rashid, I’m going to turn you into something that ain’t a he anymore. You understand what I’m saying to you?”
There were titters behind Emma’s back. Rashid, however, was cowed. At least Jay wouldn’t hear from that kid again in the next...Blessed Virgin...the next eighteen minutes. And counting.
Jay Lombardi hated these gigs. But how could a poet hope to make some money these days without doing this sort of thing when the opportunity arose? For “Trees,” Kilmer’s most famous work, that poet had received seven dollar from the magazine that first published it in 1907. Seven dollars was more than Lombardi had ever made selling a poem. When one of his efforts did get accepted for publication in the small quarterlies where they mostly appeared, he not only didn’t get paid, he was expected to buy a dozen overpriced copies for personal distribution. The little chapbooks of his work that he published at his own expense were an even worse loss leader. He occasionally sold one or two after a reading at an art gallery or a library. Mostly, they were just giveaways.
What especially irked Jay Lombardi was the fact that the subject of his recent poetry had tremendous potential to reach a huge audience, but no one seemed to take it seriously. Lombardi billed himself “The Market Bard,” and his poems were all about stocks, bonds, and other financial instruments. Last year he’d even done a knock-off of Kilmer’s “Trees” called “T’s,” a tribute to treasury bonds. Kilmer’s effort ended with the lines: “Fools like me write poetry/But only God can make a tree.” Lombardi’s ended with the couplet: “Junk abounds that double-B’s/But only Sam could issue T’s.”
How could the poetry world, and indeed, the world generally, not rally to such extraordinarily poignant and contemporary work? Why was someone as manifestly talented and innovative as himself still doing these awful teach-ins?
Lombardi was here, among these conspicuously uninterested kids, because the Philadelphia Board of Education, after cutting back on teaching poetry on a regular basis in order to focus on the reading and writing basics that would hopefully improve city-wide test scores and enable the Board to shake the federal money tree for a few extra dollars, tried to compensate with a program that brought local poets into the schools from time to time to dangle the works of great poets before the young people incarcerated here during daylight hours. Jay had begged for Whitman and would have settled for Longfellow. Instead, he drew the short straw and got Kilmer.
Two more minutes. His sentence was almost served. A check for a hundred and fifty dollars, less federal, state, and local taxes, would be in the mail sometime in the next sixty days. Or ninety days. At this juncture it didn’t seem to matter. As long as he didn’t have to come back here to cash it.
“Any questions? Last chance?”
Emma Gray was standing next to him now, about to thank him and ask the class for the ritual round of applause.
“I have a question,” came a voice from the back of the room.
“Yes?” said Jay.
“How you pee without sitting down if you a girl.”
Then the bell rang.
