“With This Quarter” (Thamar León)

The unfair swipe at Bill Knott aside, John Oliver Simon’s comment (following a rather heated comment thread stemming from—of all things—an appreciation of Hayden Carruth) is well taken… and the poem by one of his students deserves (more than) the tiny spotlight I can provide…

Unlike Bill Knott, who took the travelled path to teaching in a college, I work at the roots, where poetry begins, with third through eighth-graders, most of them bilingual, first through California Poets In the Schools, then as a full-time teacher in a leaky portable, and now with Poetry Inside Out, a project of the Center for the Art of Translation in San Francisco.

We find our texts online and also in dusty bookstores in León, Nicaragua, or the calle Donceles behind the cathedral in Mexico City, and we hand out our own poetry-pages from teachable poems by Neruda or Gabriela Mistral or Mariana Sansón, which we coach the kids to translate and thence write their own.

Here’s one by fourth-grader Thamar León. It’s a knockoff on Argentine poet María Elena Walsh, who isn’t in the Norton either, “Con esta moneda,” the assignement is, what will you buy with this… Thamar wrote it bilingually, but I’ll just give the English:

With This Quarter

With this quarter
I will buy
a suitcase full of Mexican ruins;
a thimbleful of joy;
a pocketful of voices;
a wagon full of dreams,
a teacup of nonsense,
and nothing else.

There is such a larger world beyond your narrow Norton-centered North American perspective!

(I took the liberty of correcting what I take to be a typo in the last line of León’s poem)