By Mary Swander

(Professor of English at Iowa State University)

I was teaching in the Artist-in-the-Schools program through the Iowa Arts Council in the early 1980s, spending a week’s residency in Burlington. I came into a fourth grade class as I had so many times that year with a worn copy of Howard Norman’s translation of the Swampy Cree Indian trickster tales called the Wishing Bone Cycle. The poems are short and lively.

The students in Burlington readily understood the sense of play the poem engendered. Like the farm women, the fourth graders could instantly engage their imaginations, picturing the scene of a crow outside in a tree making a huge racket with a frustrated father inside trying to rock his baby to sleep. Many of the students had younger brothers and sisters and could relate to the event from their own experiences. Did the fourth graders understand the deeper meaning of the metaphor of the crow noises and why the innocent daughter wasn’t ready for them yet? Of course not. And I didn’t attempt to explain. We were working on the language level of poetry and enjoying the magic of what words could do.

The fourth graders jumped right into writing poems of direct address of their own. They wrote poems to their dogs, cats, goldfish, to bicycles, sneakers and school lockers. They waved their hands in the air, longing to be the first to come up in front of the class and read their creations out loud.

A girl in pigtails fixed her gaze on me, her deep brown eyes intense and focused.

I called on her to be first.

She stepped up to the front of the classroom and began to read. The rest of the class let out a gasp. I couldn’t figure out what was happening. I glanced to the back of the room at the regular classroom teacher but she just stood there, her eyes wide.

The girl in pigtails read her poem in a clear, strong voice. The whole class hung on her every word. When she finished, the students burst into applause. I clapped along with the rest but didn’t grasp the significance of the moment until the class was over and the teacher pulled me aside and said, "Do you know that that girl in pigtails has never, ever in her life talked in class, never opened her mouth? We didn’t know if she was autistic or what. Now you come in and read poetry and she jumps up and volunteers to read in front of everyone!"

Again, the power of poetry amazed me. There was something so commanding, so alluring in the language of the poetry of Native Americans with their oral tradition that stirred this young girl who had never articulated a sound to speak. Here was a girl who spoke her first words in class inspired by a poem that said, "Sit down and shut up."