photo courtesy of Miss Porter's School, Farmington, CT

IN THE PALE, SINKING LIGHT of a late-winter afternoon, I read Jane Kenyon’s February: Thinking of Flowers, and wondered if the biting wind, the endless, colorless sky and unforgiving frozen ground would ever allow the small, tender shoots of early spring another season, another chance. As spring arrives, tentatively and without great fanfare, slipping softly into being and rousing us from dreamless sleep, we see the promise of the eternal return, know the fecund scent of possibility and the slow waking to our own renewal. Isn’t this the mirror of the natural world in our own human experience: the length of dim light that provides a stark contrast in reflection to our own yearnings and desires? “A single green sprouting thing/would restore me…” writes Kenyon.

Across the field, small, tight buds of forsythia form on supple branches spilling onto the ground in ways yet to be revealed. Tiny white snowdrops emerge from the darkness of hard soil: a whisper; a raised eyebrow, an indication, a small but persistent voice—here! look! watch!— against the loosening hold of winter. So today when the sun extended itself into the invitation of evening and the evening takes on its own Eliot-like poetic resonance, I think of what I wrote to my friend after a particularly challenging stretch of days:  “I believe poetry can save the world.” I do. Poetry can save the world.

We are both healed and healing when we read poetry. It is in the elemental structure of language where we try to find our place, where word gives way to a reaching out into the larger world. As much as that process is what defines as humans, it is perhaps what we struggle with most resolutely to make ourselves fully human. The inexpressible nature of human experience that challenges us to come into being transcends language, yet the limited and limitless experience of being in a poem is one that expands and often confronts our understanding of what it means to be human. A poem demands an imaginative capacity to see the world differently, to experience “the world imagined” and envision—even for brief moments—another way to see ourselves and navigate a place on the face of the deep.

Poetry steers us into the world beyond object and category; it guides our eyes, our ears, and imagination toward the space around the object, the experience, and into the experience itself. Perhaps the most beautiful thing about poetry—about any art—is the empty space it creates for discovery, history, and vision.  Like painting or architecture, poetry asks us to explore the space around the poem, and in this construct, we are required to write ourselves, imagined, into the world as it might be. It is in our pursuit of the unknown that we discover what we know, or at least what we think we know. And poetry does that for us: it allows us to think about what we know, and it dares us to consider what we think we know in new or unencumbered ways.

I believe poetry can save the world because it has anchored us to our shared human experience since time began. Within the function and elasticity of time and history, poetry comes to meet us as an honored guest, the remote villager at the gate, an occasional tourist, an old friend holding a place at the hearth. Poetry is that thing to which we return to feed our dire human needs beyond food and water, aside from warmth and shelter; it is poetry that houses and harbors our human experience. Poetry dares us to do more, to be more. In poetry, we find possibility.

—Kate Doemland

Led by Chair Kate Doemland, the Miss Porter’s School English Department issues a Call for Papers to independent school teachers of high school English. Topics of interest include Modern Poetry, American Literature, British Literature, and Multicultural Literature. Papers will be shared at an academic conference held at Miss Porter’s School on May 13, 2010. For more information, including conference schedule, please visit www.porters.org/academics .

AllGirls is delighted to welcome guest blogger Jeff Harlan,  sixth grade English teacher and Director of The Dream Flag Project at Agnes Irwin, a K-12 girls’ school in Rosemont, PA. In the tradition of Tibetan prayer flags, Dream Flags elevate, honor and transmit gently on the breeze, the dreams, hopes, and wishes of young people the world over. (In addition to many states in the US, Dream Flags have been made and flown in China, Japan, Costa Rica, Canada, South Africa, Rwanda and Nepal.) Jeff and colleague Sandy Crow are the inspiration and energy behind this enchanting and heartfelt project.

“And according to Winnicott, this transitional space is the space of play and creativity — where love can grow, where teaching and learning take place, where art is made, and where culture is created.”

I loved this comment that Sally made in her last blog entry about Donald Winnicott’s writing. When I think of it, I think of those spaces we make in our classrooms where play, creativity, teaching and learning take place—almost by themselves. It’s the feeling we get when some lesson we dreamed up takes hold, and we know it really works.

That’s exactly what happened with our sixth grade girls in English class eight years ago when we first made Dream Flags. Our girls created poems about the value of dreams and their own dreams—for themselves and for the world. But we do lots of poetry writing assignments. This was just another good one, inspired by our reading of Langston Hughes poems. What made it take flight and create that transitional space was when the girls put the poems on fabric, created a visual space around them with watercolor, and then sewed each one to a line to imitate the form of the Buddhist prayer flags we had seen in a school assembly by National Geographic photographer Anne Keiser just a few weeks before. When the lines were hung outside, when the beauty they felt free to create fluttered in the breeze on a spring day as sixty silent girls quietly read and admired each other’s work, (When do quiet girls and spring go together??) that’s when my colleague Sandy Crow and I knew we’d stumbled on something that worked. Maybe it was a transitional space, and we didn’t yet know the word for it.

And, as it turns out that, it’s worked for many others as well. As soon as we saw how the form of this poetry—the art, the metaphorical connection of the dreams to each other, the public good it all did—was a way to build our community, we could see that it could connect us to others. And it has in more ways than we could possibly imagine.

The next fall, we made a web page and a flyer to give out at a local Philadelphia conference. We invited our fellow schools to join in and we thought a few might. But twenty-six schools joined us that first year—both independent and public–and the idea of connecting the Dream Flags in our gym just wasn’t going to work. A few phone calls later, the doors of Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center for the Performing Arts (home of the Philadelphia Orchestra) opened for us and we were invited to have our first Dream Flag Celebration right there with dozens of student poets reading their work, musicians improvising while they read, and with the connection and exhibition of more than 1,000 Dream Flags, all in one great line. This was a transitional space—a place to play and learn and love—that we never imagined and that we never in a million years could create by ourselves.

From then on, it’s been one opening of doors after another. This April, we’ll celebrate again, as will more than 90 schools in 36 states and four countries who are creating Dream Flags with us this year. Since we first started, a total of more than 50,000 Dream Flags have been created by students in K-12 from Alaska to Florida and from Nepal to South Africa. And we know it’s because teachers tell teachers about what happens when students look in to dream, look out to create, and find in the space between, something that transforms us all.

We’d love to dream with you too. Check out our web site and join us.

Yours dreaming,

—Jeff Harlan