The Figure a School Year Makes

This was the first official day of faculty meetings at school. Students return next week. For now, there's psychic space to consider what's ahead. After next week, the whole thing propels itself forward at (mostly) breakneck speed.

Today I was reminded about the inherently hopeful exercise of beginning. Starting a year of school is so much like sitting down to write. No matter what I bring to the table with me, one of the surest delights is the promise of surprise and the prospect of discovery.

I can't help but link the arc of the school year to Robert Frost's essay, "The Figure a Poem Makes." It's about the craftsmanship of poetry. Frost connects writing to love, and I think his insights apply to teaching as well.

"It begins in delight," he says. "It inclines to the impulse, it assumes direction with the first line laid down, it runs a course of lucky events, and ends in a clarification of life — not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion."

It took me a long time to wrap my mind around that idea of a "momentary stay against confusion," but I've come to see that when I read a poem that speaks to me, it brings stillness. It takes all the disorder of life and gives it -- maybe just for a moment -- a shape and a name. For as long as that feeling lasts, something makes sense, and from there it becomes easier to continue forward.

Working in a school creates the same possibilities. Luminous moments rise out of the tumult of the day, and as Frost says later in the same piece, "Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing."

Writing, love, teaching, and parenting are all acts full of promise. So much can surface at any instant and the richer the revelation, the more of a gift it is.

About poems specifically, Frost says, "It is but a trick and no poem at all if the best of it was thought of first and saved for the last... No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader."