Aerosolpoetic

My mother lifts her eyes from her paperwork and glares at me over her glasses from the other side of our round dinner table when I tell her I’m taking twenty-eight units my last semester of college, eight for no credit teaching with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People. I tell her I don’t care about the credit; teaching is not about the compensation, she should know, she was once an underpaid, overworked teacher herself. But she pretends not to hear me, lowers her eyes back to her paperwork and tells me I’ll never graduate if I don’t stop wasting my time with that class.

She always referred to Poetry for the People as “that class”, a “waste of time”. She told me I should pay more attention in legal studies and philosophy; work a little harder studying for finals in my major, classes that count, instead of writing and revising poems tirelessly every night at 2 a.m. She would scream from upstairs ordering me to go to sleep, I would crank up the volume on my ipod, and go back to the pile of poems, spread across our round dinner table, urgently needing revision, and pretend not to hear her; I didn’t want to argue, didn’t want to waste time.

My mother’s words echoing in my head as I write this remind me of the questions pinballing in my mind as I sat through junior high and high school, three years of legal studies and philosophy in college, searching for writers of color in PowerPoint presentations, course readers, or even, just maybe, optional summer reading lists. The same questions flooded my mind as I scanned every bullet-pointed syllabus looking for assignments requiring an anecdotal account of a young black man’s life growing up in Richmond. I wondered where the writers of color were, did my constitutional law professor forget to include them in his thick, two volume reader, did they not fit into a class on feminist jurisprudence? Where were they in junior high, high school English, did my teachers think studying their words, and reading mine was a waste of time?

Throughout my education, studying literature and poetry meant a long stint in a classroom trapped in an uncomfortable chair studying European history, Jane Austen and Shakespeare for hours, endlessly. I found nothing familiar in the dreamlike, often avant-garde literature I read in English classes and yearned for more from history books than a rerun reading of Martin Luther King Jr’s I Have a Dream speech during black history month every year. There was no equity in writing; amongst the pages and pages of reading and writing I was required to do, I found little space for my voice, my story or the stories of my ancestors.

With each new poem and every paragraph of prose, I think of myself as refusing to waste anymore time accepting the absence of black voices in classrooms. I see each word as a trumpet, ushering these voices into curriculums that ignore our histories. Writing about black love and heartbreak, about my own family’s history, about black public school kids in my neighborhood coldly handed failing report cards like prison sentences and death certificates bearing their own names, I demand space for our words.

When I was invited to teach with June Jordan’s Poetry for the People in fall 2005 I found myself among other students who were also searching for their own words and for writers whose faces and stories reflect their own. What stories did these poets have stuck in their throats? I wondered if they scoured the contents of their history books searching for the voices of their ancestors, stories of their homelands between the pages. Did they scribble poems about recent heartbreaks in the margins of Shakespeare handouts in high school? Did their mothers tell them poetry was a waste of time?

Attentive as I lectured on black history and affirmation and pushing themselves to write every new draft with fearless urgency, these poets ignited my faith in teaching. With every workshopped poem and each office hour they fueled my desired to teach in spite of the sleepless nights, no compensation or course credit, or even at the expense of my GPA. They taught me, as June herself proclaimed, “the art of telling the truth is a necessary and healthy way to create powerful, and positive connections among people who, would otherwise, remain (Unknown and unaware) strangers.” I watched them transition from shaky voiced students reading first drafts on the first day of class to poets unafraid of the fire in their own voices with words to still even the air in a packed room. Witnessing their journeys gave me the strength, as a teacher and writer, to continue my own.

I will not waste another second, I will spend my time writing about the exhale of relief after a breakup so that someone else will put down the bottle of tequila and let go of the fist full of Tylenol after the severing of their latest love. I will write of the lynchings omitted by historians making space for Christopher Columbus’ clumsy travel tales. I will write poems to make the West Contra Costa Superintendent a little less comfortable in his chair, so he will know the discomfort felt by kids at Stege School after he snatched theirs. I will be a writer; I will stop playing poet, pretending all I’ll ever be is a passive blogger. I will write with my mother’s words still echoing in my head: stop wasting time.