Next week, I’m fortunate to be participating in a reading with a former student named Anthony Zick. Anthony is now in his second year studying at Washtenaw Community College and he’s also in the process of deciding whether he wants to enter the priesthood. I’ve never had another student remotely like him.

When Anthony first entered my classroom, he was just beginning his junior year. Tall and gangly, he was a quiet kid who wore thick glasses and a blue hooded sweatshirt. He carried a trumpet everywhere and he had a James Earl Jones-type basso profundo voice that one could imagine reading promotional announcements for a classical music radio station. I didn’t know then he would take Creative Writing four consecutive semesters; that he’d write some of the most moving and poignant poems I’d have the privilege to encounter, and also some of the most hilarious; that he’d change the way I understood both teaching and performance poetry.

I remember thinking he was a bit of an anachronism in those early days. He spoke slowly and seemed to be thinking out loud in the midst of many of his questions. He was stubborn about his work and came off as a bit defensive when I or another student offered him feedback. I could sense his classmates growing impatient with him. Little by little though, he seemed to grow more comfortable. His comments and questions began to seem less halting and more the stuff of measured insight. His defensiveness softened.

And then he began to make jokes.

Really bad jokes.

Puns, mostly, and the more comfortable he got in class, the more frequently he’d make them. By the time he was a senior, he’d spit out three or four a day. The other students would groan appreciably, but they adored him. He also was unafraid to try all kinds of writing. He wrote satires and hip hop-styled rhymes. He experimented with formal verse. He wrote with a philosophical bent about God and about growing up and he’d surprise me by asking questions about technical terms or writers that we’d never discussed in class. His interest in writing was naked and unashamed and it was almost as if he were taking small bits of everything he was learning, every writing experiment he was undertaking, and piece by piece arranging those bits and re-arranging - trying different combinations - until he discovered a voice he was happy with. Halfway through senior year, things began to really click for him. He cultivated a style that was at once simple and unadorned in its language, but also layered and transcendental in meaning. Here’s an example of a few lines from a poem called “Oh Winter-Spring” -

now everything is wet and slippery and cold and not suitable to drive over in a van like ours but maybe it is so we drive for a while, slide and get stuck five or so times in all and I get out to push, each time harder than the last and there is help, a man who lives by the streetlight with his wife a restaurant owner a blanket out of the trunk for traction, another blanket because we left the last soaking up the street a mile back and finally I push without another push in sight push the great red demon rover the great great large metal chunk of metal and the Ford logo I push for the last time with a blanket under the wheel half a mile from home and I just say, “go, don’t stop, go ahead, I will walk home.”

And this is how I start to move from the intersection the way Charlie Parker must have held his saxophone fingers waiting for the bass on-two

Wow, I think that writing’s beautiful.

Especially after a day when I spent an hour digging out my plowed-in car.

I think I’ll use it in class today to talk about how poetry can leap from both inside and outside of itself, moving gracefully - sometimes startlingly - from one subject to another.

Anthony would go on to earn a spot on the highly competitive Ann Arbor Youth Poetry Slam team and to be featured as one of a group of Ann Arbor writers in HBO’s Brave New Voices documentary series. One of his poems would be chosen to be included in the Speak Green competition sponsored by the Sundance Institute at the National Youth Poetry Slam Festival. He would read a poem called “The Pundit” in Washington D.C., and he’d have the audience rolling with laughter and Joshua Bennett, one of the foremost youth poets in the country, would shake his head and say, “this guy’s brilliant.” Anthony would also write one of the most profoundly touching poems I’ve ever heard about a woman who tragically passed away in the middle of a reading at the Bear River Writer’s Conference.

What have I learned from Anthony? That poets don’t have to use profanity in order to be heard at a Poetry Slam. That writers can be both graceful and startling, often in the same poem. That there’s always a place for a good, or even a bad pun. That I need to be patient with my students and to give them the room they need to experiment, to piece it all together at their own pace and to find their way.

** NOTE - Anthony and I will be reading at the Writers Reading at Sweetwaters monthly gathering next Tuesday, February 16th, at Sweetwaters at 123 W. Washington St. The reading is free and starts @ 7pm. It includes an open-microphone segment for anyone who wants to share his or her work, so come on down just to listen, or so we can hear your voice too.**

Jeff Kass teaches Creative Writing at Pioneer High School in Ann Arbor and at Eastern Michigan University in Ypsilanti, and directs the Literary Arts Programs at the Neutral Zone, including the VOLUME Youth Poetry Project, which meets every Thursday night at 7pm. He will post new blog entries every Tuesday and Thursday morning throughout the school year.