NOTE: Naomi Nye can be contacted through the Steven Barclay Agency:

12 Western Avenue, Petaluma, California 94952

Phone: 707-773-0654; Facsimile 707-778-1868 Toll Free 888-965-READ

Please contact: Eliza Fischer at Eliza@barclayagency.com

www.barclayagency.com

Monday, February 23, 2009.

"WHAT'S THE BUZZ? Encouraging the Hive of Voices," Naomi Shihab Nye.

MS. FORD: I met Naomi Shihab Nye when she came to speak at Westminster School in Simsbury, Connecticut, where my husband was a member of the English department. The reviews of the faculty and students alike were raves, and I had the pleasure of joining her and some others for dinner that night. Of course, I wanted her to come to Miss Porter's School, which she did this past fall, to everyone's benefit and enjoyment. The report was she was a hit throughout the school community, and the adjectives that followed were "delightful," "inspiring," "vibrant," "invigorating," "warm," "fun."

The more official language to describe her includes award-winning poet, writer, anthologist and educator. Ms. Nye describes herself as a wandering poet, as well she might. For the past 33 years she's traveled the world, leading writing workshops and inspiring students of all ages.

She was born to a Palestinian father, an American mother, and grew up in St. Louis, Jerusalem, and San Antonio. Drawing on her own personal heritage and exploration and experience around the globe, she uses her writing to attest to our shared humanity. The recipient of countless prizes and awards, Ms. Nye has also been a visiting reader and writer on numerous colleges and university campuses, has been the subject of NPR and PBS specials, and the object of great respect from her fellow poets.

Billy Collins said, "Naomi Shihab Nye is a voice that America needs in its time of trouble. Her clarity, combined with her verbal kindness and her knowledge of multiple cultures, provide a strong audible message that the only hope for reconciliation and understanding lies in the ideals set by the human heart."

Please welcome to NAPSG Naomi Shihab Nye.

MS. NYE: Thank you, Burch. What an honor to be with you all. I have never heard that Billy Collins quote, so it's very touching to hear it. And I want to thank Bruce for his exquisite organization of this gathering. He has been so generous and thoughtful about details, and I have been suffering the delusion, since I live here, that I'm somehow a co-host of this event. But I think Bruce makes us all feel that way -- thank you, Bruce -- because of his enormous compassion and generosity to all. So thank you very much for allowing me to be with you.

My special thanks to Burch at this beautiful time, for being here and sharing your colleagues with me, and for your kind words. When I went to Ms. Porter's, we talked about you all the time, and everyone was so happy to know that I already had met you. I just had a great time. I wore my Miss Porter's shirt and they all thought that I was a graduate, which I did not deny. That's how I am.

And thank you all for helping the down-turning economy by being here in San Antonio. I have heard from local shopkeepers and restaurant managers that educators are their favorite visitors, because you know how to eat well, and you are very civilized. So that's a stereotype that our city has about you. Thank you very much for coming.

I also wanted to say that after hearing the beautiful poem by Steve Nelson for Bruce and Karen last night, I just thought that was delightful presentation the way you all did it. I feel a bit daunted to talk about poetry after that. It was truly terrific. And I hope this time in our city feels restorative to all of you. I know how much you have going on at your home campuses, and you deserve a rest, a retreat.

I think of the words of a wonderful Iranian poet who has been e-mailing me in the recent months. Her name is Farida Hassanzada, and all of her subject lines are the same. "Many kisses from the far." That is her line. And it touches me to read that line. That's how it feels to be with you, but close. Thank you for all you do for so many people.

I did want to say, since I met some of you during a darker era, that I cheer with you for a new administration. As a Texan who has clung onto the late great Molly Ivans, friend of education, and our beloved Bill Moyers as state icons during recent years, I feel relieved. There is so much work to do, yes, but as a taxi driver in Washington, D.C. told me last week, "I heard President Obama is staying up past 1:00 a.m. just thinking. He likes to think."

That made me feel good. My personal pleasure over the inauguration -- I was working in China in two international schools during those weeks of the inauguration, and I had to watch it at 1:00 a.m., and it was censored in some ways that were interesting. But my pleasure over that inauguration was certainly dimmed by the sorrowful disastrous battling between Israel and Gaza. And I do want to mention that I can't stop thinking about many girls in Gaza who had devoted their lives to dialogue and peacemaking. Some of them are portrayed in a film made by a great Texan, Deborah Sugarman. The film is called "Dear Mr. President" and some are friends of the wonderful group called Seeds of Peace. Bobbie Gottschalk is a cofounder of that group. Bobby received an e-mail during the tragedies that said, "Does this mean we have failed?"

And she said back to this young person who wrote to her, "No, it means we need dialogue more than ever." And that is certainly something I think about as a writer.

I also want to put out my gratitude to Lake/Flato Architects here of San Antonio, people who are devoted to imaginative, inspirational building. And during a time when too much violence in the world causes shattering of what is built, I really feel happy that Lake/Flato is connected to education in the way it is. Thank you all.

Although jealousy has never been any kind of presence in my life, thank goodness, I must begin with a tiny confession. I have long lived in a house of boys. Boys, boys, boys. Golf tees in every washing machine. And to even think about schools for girls makes me feel better. I think about the dinner table at Miss Porter's during the weekly night when girls bring the plates to the table and serve everyone, pass them so graciously. Oh me, oh my. I think of girls at Hockaday where I visited for dozens of years as a poet, going quietly to the microphone in the corner of the dining hall every lunch period simply to say a poem, put a poem into the air, establish a kind of balance and graciousness in the room before eating. As a poet, I understood why Hockaday always felt such a great place to work, because there was a reverence for language in the school. I feel heartened. And also, I have never slept at La Cantera before, so that was a treat.

Jack Kerouac once said that San Antonio had the softest air of any city he had ever visited, so I hope you have a chance to feel it and enjoy it while you're here.

And to welcome you to the city, I thought I would read a little piece from Honeybee. I think some of you may be going to the McNay Museum. Girls seem to have an innate understanding that we have a better access to the stories of our own lives if we get in the habit of writing them down. I do tell them that sometimes much patience is involved. In the case of this story, it took me more than 30 years to have a punch line. But because I had written the details of the story down when it happened, it's always been as if it happened yesterday.

"Museum.≤

"I was 17. My family had just moved to San Antonio. A local magazine featured an alluring article about a museum called the McNay, an old mansion once the home of an eccentric many-times-married watercolorist named Marian Koogler McNay. She had deeded it to the community to become a museum upon her death. I asked my friend Sally, who drove a cute little convertible and had moved to Texas a year before we did, if she wanted to go there. Sally said, 'Sure.' She was a good friend that way. We had made up a few words in our own language and could dissolve into laughter just by saying them. On a sunny Saturday we drove over to Broadway. Sally asked, 'Do you have the address of this place?' 'No,' I said. 'Just drive very slowly. I'll recognize it. There was a picture in the magazine.' I peered in both directions and pointed saying, 'There, there it is, pull in!' The parking lot under some palm trees was pretty empty. We entered, excited. The museum was free. Right away, the spirit of the arched doorways, carved window frames, and elegant artwork overtook us. Sally went left, I went right. A group of people seated in some chairs in the lobby stopped talking and stared at us.

"'May I help you?' a man said. 'No,' I said. 'We're fine.' I didn't like to talk to people in museums. Tours and docents got on my nerves. What if they talked a long time about a painting you weren't that interested in? I took a deep breath, moved on to another painting -- fireworks over a patio in Mexico, maybe? There weren't very good tags in this museum. In fact, there weren't any. I stood back and gazed. Sally had gone upstairs. The people in the lobby had stopped chatting. They seemed very nosy, keeping their eyes on me with irritating curiosity. What was their problem? I turned down a hallway. Bougainvilleas pressed up against the windows, maybe we should have brought a picnic. Where was the Moorish courtyard? I saw some nice sculptures in another room, and a small couch. This would be a great place for reading. Above the couch hung a radiant print by Paul Klee, my favorite artist, blues and pinks merging softly in his own wonderful way. I stepped closer. Suddenly I became aware of a man from the lobby standing behind me in the doorway. 'Where do you think you are?' he asked softly. I turned. 'The McNay Museum!' He smiled then, and shook his head. 'Sorry to tell you. The McNay is three blocks over on New Braunfels Street. Take a right when you go out of the drive, then another right.' 'What is this place?' I asked, still confused. He said, 'Well, we thought it was our home.' My heart jolted. I raced past him to the bottom of the staircase, and called out, 'Sally! Come down immediately! Urgent!' I remember being tempted to shout something in our private language, but we didn't have a word for this. Sally came to the top of the stairs smiling happily and said, 'You have to come up here, there's some really good stuff! And there are old beds too!' 'No, Sally, no,' I said, as if she were a dog or a baby. 'Get down here, speed it up. This is an emergency.' She stepped elegantly down the stairs, in a museum trance, looking puzzled. I just couldn't tell her out loud in front of those people what we had done. I actually pushed her toward the front door waving my hand at the family, saying, 'Sorry, ohmygod, please forgive us, you have a really nice place.' Sally stared at me in the parking lot. When I told her, she covered her mouth and doubled over with laughter, shaking. We were still in their yard. I imagined them inside looking out the windows at us. She couldn't believe how long they let us look around without saying anything, either. 'That was really friendly of them.' 'Get in the car,' I said sternly. 'This is mortifying.'

"The real McNay was fabulous, but we felt a little nervous the whole time we were there. Van Gogh, Picasso, Tamayo. This time, there were tags. This time, we stayed together in case anything else weird happened.

"We never told anyone.

"Thirty years later, a nice-looking woman approached me in a public place. 'Excuse me,' she said. 'I need to ask a strange question. Did you ever by any chance enter a residence long ago thinking it was the McNay Museum?'

"Thirty years later, my cheeks still burned. 'Yes, but how do you know? I never told anyone.'

"'That was my home. I was a teenager sitting with my family talking in the living room. Before you came over, I never realized what a beautiful place I lived in. I never felt lucky before. You thought it was a museum. My feelings changed about my parents after that. They had good taste. I have always wanted to thank you.'"

Well, girls are very forgiving, and so it's been a pleasure to read them that piece and say, "You know, write down the mistakes you make, because you may be given an incredible gift back someday, where someone thanks you for one of them."

And I wanted to read this to you, as educators. "Please describe how you became a writer," and I wrote this to one of those infinite questionnaires students send you over the Internet. "Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first-grade textbook. 'Come, Jane. Come. Look, Dick, look.' Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things. Why were they looking to begin with?"

Definitely, I became a writer partly because of my mom, who is still, at the age of 81, a retired teacher and a volunteer reading tutor in a Montessori school in Dallas. She sent me off to school saying, "Use your words." Our dad, who adored language, story-telling, and descriptive precision, had started out his life as a journalist by reading the evening news for BBC in Jerusalem at the age of 15. I never beat him in Scrabble once, although it always haunted me. English was not his first language. Why couldn't I beat this man?

My first-grade teacher, who allowed me to post poems on the hall bulletin boards despite considering me the class troublemaker and daydreamer; and my second-grade teacher, Harriet Lane, the oldest teacher in those days in the public schools of St. Louis, believed poetry was at the center of the universe. Her entire curriculum evolved from the poems her students read, memorized, and wrote. Her motto for second grade was, "When you leave this room, you will never mumble again."

We said, "What is it? Mumble?"

My second-grade teacher would have loved the late Linda Pace of Pace Picante sauce, a great San Antonian, who was a wonderful artist here in the city, a supporter of young artists, many young artists, and a philanthropist. And Linda said, "The willingness of artists to listen deeply, to strike out alone in terrain that the rest of us may not know about yet is what creates the possibility of transcendence."

Mrs. Lane believed that second-graders were transcendent in their possibilities. Nothing was ever above our heads. When we came to class having memorized a poem by Emily Dickinson, she never said, "That's a little hard for you; let's pick something easier."

She listened with reverence. She was always interested to know what had attracted us to any particular poem. One of Mrs. Lane's own heroes was William Blake, who said in the 13th century, "The unfolding of the imagination is the only true education."
All my life I have been thanking her. Looking back on her curriculum, I realize her emphasis on poetry cost nothing. We used the library: The public library, the school library. She didn't have any fancy equipment in her classroom. She taught us that the writer had the cheapest tools, the most portable tools. We could all own them. We could take them wherever we went.

I fell in love with poetry because poems didn't argue. They didn't say too much. They honored the listener. A poem was a beautiful small muffin or biscuit of words extended on a plate. There it is. Poems respected details, and connected them in unusual ways. Poems made the world slow down. That deep savoring, that sensation of a held moment that fed you and gave you something to think about. You didn't have to have big ideas. Small ones would carry you. You didn't have to be hugely talented. You just had to putter and pause a bit more often.

I think now poems also clear the air. All of these things I have said about what poems do are very relevant to current education and a world filled with so much. To cross the Mississippi River when I was a child, my family could drive over one of two bridges: A noisy bridge with a strange surface that made tires rattle and squeal, or a silent humming bridge with elegant spires. Of course, we all cheered for the noisy bridge, but once I started reading and writing poetry at age 6, and sending poems to magazines, thanks to my school librarian, at age 7, I realized quiet bridges had a deeper appeal. What if a girl far away read something you had written and knew what you meant? What could be better than that? What if you could be transported into many hearts and minds that had lived long ago? Those bits of wisdom could make your whole contemporary day swerve, sit up, take on a shinier, more attentive tone.

I always was interested in the bridges between images and ideas, conversation and written words, layers of thinking, reality and metaphor, and so far I haven't found any girls or any schools -- or any boys, for that matter -- who aren't interested in those things and who don't need them.

I'm happy to get older because I can say dramatic things now. It's more impressive to say, "In the approximately 1,999 schools I have visited , there has never been one place where poetry didn't live, including the school in the outback of Jordan or the frozen domain of Nome, Alaska, where they assigned me to do 13 assemblies back to back. The campus in Alexandria, Egypt, where the girls didn't leave after a poetry reading. They kept sitting there. 'What's going on,' I whispered to the head of the school. She whispered back, 'They want you to do it again.' 'What? The whole hour?' 'Yes,' she said. Or the remote rural school in west Texas that actually gave me a horse to ride back to the ranch I was staying on. I was shocked. I said, 'How do I find it?' I panicked. The head said, 'The horse knows the way.' My God. I had to carry my book bag on a horse, and the horse took me back to the barn of the house where I was staying."

I have had many great surprises, sometimes born of desperation. The anthology, What Have You Lost -- we were talking about it at the table -- came about entirely because of a wild fifth-grade class here in San Antonio. "Losing and finding" was the only list they would calm down for.

The insight which hit me once in the midst of another rambunctious class: Each thing gives us something else. They may not be that interested in the assignment you thought they were going to do, but they are interested in something. It's your job to figure it out. What is it, right now on the spot? A great teacher in Manitoba, Lisa Siemens, has said simply, "Exposure. Exposure. You don't have to be an expert on poetry. Just give them poetry. Surround them with poetry. Put it out into the air, see what happens next. Encourage them to know that the possibilities of interpretation are endless. How will that help their reading? How does someone else's poem trigger your own? Where do you enter that room?"

Lisa's belief, the regularity of poetry presence changes a student's belief in the power of words ever present around them? Absolutely true. I never could have guessed that simply by carrying fruits and vegetables into classrooms for two nonstop years, and reading only poems connected to fruits and vegetables -- the reason I did this was I found out that students, even in San Antonio, only knew a few names of the hot pepper sold in our grocery stores. Jalapeno was known, but many other names were not known. And I wondered, What are we losing if we're losing the vocabulary of peppers in a city where peppers should be indigenous and part of our knowledge? How can I assist? So bringing peppers into schools, bringing potatoes of different kinds, encouraging them to try kiwi fruits if they never had -- it became a kind of sideline, but also it encouraged some of the most wonderful poetry I saw in schools in all of these years.

The spoon workshop -- I don't know how I got into that desperate moment -- where suddenly I started asking students to bring spoons with them, spoons they had collected, spoons from their homes, and introduce their spoons to one another. How that became somehow a curriculum of graciousness and hospitality and tables that we share in the world.

I'm just putting these things out there, because they don't sound like expert things. They sound like things people would do when they're a little worried about what's being transmitted. But what I have to say about poetry is: It never fails. It always works.

I never understood the world of finance and investments, but I did know that in books and poetry, we were all very, very rich. And a tiny little investment of time on a regular basis, three lines -- I say to students, "Three lines every day, how long will that take? At the end of a month you have 90 lines that belong to you. One of them might glitter. One of them you might want to develop into something wonderful, a story, a poem. But probably more than one of them. That might offer you a tremendous payback." Is that what they call it? Or dividend or interest. Something you get back that's more than what you put in.

That kind of encouragement for students with poetry has been something very, very simple to do.

I visited a school recently where a first-grade teacher wanted me to see her students' novels. I said, "Wow, first grade. They're writing novels?" And she gave me two of them. By Megan. "A girl made a house. A boy broke the house. The sun is still shining."

Daniella. "A family went to the forest. Dad saw a bird. Dad shot the bird. But the bird flew away."

This first-grade teacher said she had discovered the magic of teaching writing at that early age was simply to let them feel they could grasp an entire story in a few phrases or lines. That's one thing I love about poetry -- it can grasp a very important big thought, a very important era, a pivotal turning point, in a very few lines.

It always seemed to me in schools, as a perpetual visitor, that the head of the school sets the whole tone. Do you all agree? I could tell even before meeting the head of a school whether that person had a sense of humor, was frustrated, was full of inspiration, believed in magic, or was aggressive, was controlling, strict, by the way everyone else in the school acted. The secretaries, the teachers, the women in the cafeteria who would slip me cups of coffee, and so on. The central office was always the central switchboard of mood.

Long ago, quite a while ago, when my husband and I were attending a Lamaze class, there was a principal and his wife on the mat next to us. And he said that he was the principal of a middle school in a tough little neighborhood on San Antonio's west side. He said, "I have always loved poetry, but what can I do with it? I'm the principal."

I said, "Wait a minute. Who has the intercom? Where is the intercom?"

He said, "It's in my office."

I said, "You could start every day by reading a poem you like. How hard would that be? A poem, maybe just a stanza of a poem you like. Maybe just a few lines. See if it works. I don't know. Try it out. You're the principal. You can decide."

Sometime later I was invited to his school by the librarian. I had sort of forgotten about him and what he was doing there. But when I got into the library, it was incredible. Here in this tough little school, the students were so tuned into poetry, they adored it, they felt it belonged to them, they wanted to stick around afterwards to talk about Carl Sandberg, Langston Hughes, Ralph Waldo Emerson. And then I said, "How come you all know so much about poetry here?"

And they said, "Well, every day our principal reads a poem. You missed the announcements today, but you can hear them tomorrow. He'll be reading a poem. He reads one every day."

I went to find him, and there he was, that guy. We talked about our babies, who had been safely born, and we talked about his experience reading the poems on the intercom. And he said, "Everyone loves it. The teachers say it gives them a nice little -- like a tuning fork for an orchestra, to start the day, instead of just all the static and crackling of the intercom. It just sets the tone."

The principal sets the tone, as the poem sets the tone in a room. And stretching a metaphor, as poets love to do, that is how the principal is the poem of the school. You all are the walking poems of the school, and you have so many opportunities to hand them out to people who might need them, to keep them on little cards in your pocket, give them to someone who might need them, to post them in the hall, to encourage them to be read at school meetings. Many of you have told me you use poetry in your school meetings. I have never heard anyone say that it didn't work. So thank you for setting the tone in your schools.

Guthrie Stafford, who's about nine years old, grandson of my favorite lifetime poet, William Stafford, recently attended a school in Scotland for one semester that claimed to have only two rules. Pay attention, be kind. Guthrie's father, Kim Stafford, sent an e-mail, "I had a good feeling about this school, when they said they had only two rules.≤ Guthrie said, "Those are the most important rules. That should be all we need."

Probably these have always been the rules of poetry, too. Very few. If you use them, you tune in, both to the world around you as well as that interior world where empathy and response dwell. Ms. Porter's school included these words in their introduction of me on the happy day I visited there. Despite great cultural and geographic divides, human beings are brought back through poetry to small acts of kindness that identify us as similar creatures. We all appreciate it when someone does or says something nice to us. We know that feeling. We make a spiritual connection with others when we act in kindness. We honor kindness as one of our core school values. It is the transcendental language.

I have long been hoping for countries to employ this simple principle in their dealings in negotiations. What would it be to have a country that cared for kindness above all else, that said, "Let's act a little kinder than other people do"? What would that be? I think it would help things.

It always seemed to me that the wrong question was asked about poems. "What does this really mean?" as opposed to, "Where does this take you? Does it remind you of anything in your own life?"

I want to read a poem by Mary Oliver. Now, I have never shared this poem in a class, but I just have gotten this book, What Do We Know, and I thought this would be a great poem to share in a school. "The Hummingbird."

"It's morning, and again I am that lucky person who is in it.
And again it is spring,
and there are apple trees,
and the hummingbird in its branches.
On the green wheel of his wings
he hurries from blossom to blossom,
which is his work, that he might live.

He is a gatherer of the fine honey of promise,
and truly I go in envy
of the ruby fire at his throat,
and his accurate, quick tongue,
and his single-mindedness.

Meanwhile the knives of ambition are stirring
down there in the darkness behind my eyes,
and I should go inside now to my desk and my pages.
But still I stand under the trees, happy and desolate,
wanting for myself such a satisfying coat
and brilliant work."

I love the "happy and desolate," and I think that juxtaposition would be one that students can all identify with on a regular basis. I always have told students who say to me, "Well, I don't really like poetry that much," "Read more poems until you find some you do like. I promise you will. Just because you don't like asparagus doesn't mean you stop eating. Please read more poems. It's your job as a reader. Poems will help you in your life."

I think of writing as physical fitness, and this is not just because I live in a town with the Spurs, whom we all love here. Writing is not just for professional writers. Writing is for every user of words. Writing is for all of us who will employ words in the devotion of whatever else we do. Writing will keep us warmed up for all of the occasions and all of the subjects in which we use words. It will give you many things. It will take nothing away.

This past summer, my high school senior English teacher from Robert E. Lee here in San Antonio returned some of my papers. I graduated from high school about 38 years ago. She wrote, "I realize it's been a while, but I found these in my file. I thought you might enjoy my comments."

We met for lunch. The most amazing thing: We had become exactly the same age. What she remembered and what I remembered from her English class varied widely. We did not remember the same people or passionate discussions, but we both remembered many meaningful things, and this was what counted. How William Wordsworth had saved some people's lives, and Ralph Waldo Emerson or Margaret Atwood had saved others. How people who normally might not have interacted much found common shelter in literary discussion. How we all crossed the aisles to say, "Well, actually, I read that another way," and how she gave us the space and the encouragement to do that.

I wrote a nasty little poem recently, remembering the frustration of my long-ago algebra teacher -- I just couldn't get algebra -- and the poem had this line in it, "Your sad eyes follow me down the corridor of the future where I win. I have not used algebra once." We all use English every day. And it heartens us and gives us a shared life to think about a sense of story and image undergirding our own stories, a rich context for everything.

Esther Mackintosh, who is a fabulous person and the director of the Federation of State Humanities Councils out of Washington, D.C., sent me a terrific essay a few month ago she wrote called, "Making Meaning of Our World and Our Lives: The Importance of Reading and Writing." She wrote this. "Reading forces us to slow down, to pause, to step back, to reflect. Today we need reading more than ever, because everything else around us constantly urges us to accelerate. Reading asks us to linger, and it is in that lingering that we give ourselves the opportunity to find and create meaning."

It's a bit embarrassing to say that only a few summers ago did I start giving myself permission to lie down in the afternoons in the summer, in San Antonio -- for goodness' sake, we have to lie down here, to get through the summers -- and read in the afternoons. I had always saved reading as a bedtime activity every day, and suddenly it struck me, why am I doing this? Because I always end up falling asleep before I want to. I should read in a more alert time of day, and afternoon would be that time. San Antonio at this moment is embarked on a library project to make sure one million people in our city have and use library cards. Right now I think they're at about 600,000 or 700,000. But that seems like a reasonable number to work for, two-thirds of the city. But sometimes, even at a later date, I tell students, "We have to give ourselves certain kinds of very basic permission. And you may have to claim those moments in which you write three lines a day, but I'll bet you can do it in two minutes and nobody will even notice if you sneak it in."

I'd like to encourage all of you, if you don't have the books of Wislawa Szymborska in your school libraries, to get them. I love not only this great Nobel Prize winning Polish poet's poems, but I love her theories about writing. One of them is an essay that was actually in Teachers and Writers Magazine. It's called "In Praise of the I Don't Know." When Symborska gave her Nobel acceptance speech, she said that she felt the phrase that had helped her most in her life was the willingness to say, "I don't know," not always to pretend you had an answer, because if you said "I don't know," you stayed honest, and then you often had the impetus to go find out, to do research, to ask others, "Well, what do you think? This is something I'm working on, something I'm trying to figure out."

I have found many students heartened by her theories about creative expression and questioning in their own work. The minute you acknowledge something you don't know as much about as you would like to know, it opens you up to further knowledge. So I urge you to have Szymborska's books for your students.

I'd like to read a few little pieces here, some from A Maze Me, which is a book of poems for girls. This is for all of you poet heads.

By the way, this book was intended for adolescents about 12, 13 years old. "Sifter."

"When our English teacher gave

our first writing invitation of the year,
Become a kitchen implement
in 2 descriptive paragraphs,
I did not think
butcher knife or frying pan,
I thought immediately
of soft flour showering through the little holes
of the sifter and the sifter's pleasing circular
swishing sound, and wrote it down.
Rhoda became a teaspoon,
Roberta a funnel,
Jim a muffin tin
and Forrest a soup pot.
We read our paragraphs out loud.
Abby was a blender. Everyone laughed
and acted giddy but the more we thought about it,
we were all everything in the whole kitchen,
drawers and drainers,
singing teapot and grapefruit spoon
with serrated edges, we were all the
empty cup, the tray.
This, said our teacher, is the beauty of metaphor.
It opens doors.
What I could not know then
was how being a sifter
would help me all year long.
When bad days came
I would close my eyes and feel them passing
through the tiny holes.
When good days came
I would try to contain them gently
the way flour remains
in the sifter until you turn the handle.
Time, time. I was a sweet sifter in time
and no one ever knew."

Well, as a frequent baker, and an old-fashioned one, I did not realize that a sifter has gone the way of the doiley. Students asked, "What is it? I can't picture it." Some nice girls gave me a miniature one that I could carry in my book bag to schools and demonstrate what it is. "Well, when we bake, we use presifted flour, so we have no idea

And one thing I have encouraged students to do -- not only do I think it's very important still to read print newspapers, I'm a big fan of print newspapers, and worried about them -- but as a child, my father, the journalist, insisted that we clip news stories from papers that we felt we needed more time to think about. He was deeply troubled by headlines that did not fit stories or stories that only shared one perspective. I used to wonder, do other people just relax when they read the newspaper? In our house, we were always the newspaper editor, somehow, along with him. But I have to this day continued clipping stories, and I urge students to do this too because many times you will get a good idea for something connected you want to write later. I sometimes demonstrate in different pieces the stories or headlines that have led me to a piece. This is a small poem that actually has two quotes within it.

"Feeling Wise."

A lady was quoted in the newspaper.
It's not so hard to feel wise.
"Just think of something dumb you could say,
then don't say it.

I like her.
I would take her gingerbread
if I knew where her house was.

Julia Child the famous chef said.
"I never feel lonely in the kitchen.
Food is very friendly.
Just looking at a potato, I like
to pat it."

Staring down
makes you feel tall.
Staring into someone else's eyes
makes you feel not alone.
Staring out the window during school,
you become the future,
smooth and large.

And I have had a long-time dream of doing a poetry reading where I only read the opening lines of poems. I will get brave enough to do that soon, but I'll do it on this poem. And this is for all of you and your many, many daily devotions that you have to do.

"Sometimes I pretend I'm not me. I only work for me."

And also copying down quotes from neighbors is something I have always urged students to do; or just people in their communities whom they don't know. It's another way of listening to language. And this was actually something said to my son when he was very young by a neighbor of ours who told him that her father had owned the seventh car in the state of Texas. And our son said, "Oh, my goodness. The highways must have been so empty then." And she had to inform him.

"Every day."

My 100-year-old next door neighbor told me:

every day is a good day if you have it.'

I had to think about that a minute.

She said, Every day is a present

someone left at your birthday place at the table.

Trust me! It may not feel like that

but it's true. When you are my age

you'll know. Twelve is a treasure.

And it's up to you to unwrap the package gently,

lift out the gleaming hours

wrapped in tissue, don't miss the bottom of the box.

And for the hospitality you all share, this poem called "Red Brocade." I would like to mention that when this stranger actually did show up at our house when we were living in Jerusalem, it was a woman, not a man.

"Red Brocade."

The Arabs used to say,
When a stranger appears at your door,
feed him for three days
before asking who he is,
where he's come from,
where he's headed.
That way, he'll have strength
enough to answer.
Or, by then you'll be
such good friends
you don't care.

Let's go back to that.
Rice? Pine nuts?
Here, take the red brocade pillow.
My child will serve water
to your horse.

No, I was not busy when you came!
I was not preparing to be busy.
That's the armor everyone put on
to pretend they had a purpose
in the world.

I refuse to be claimed.
Your plate is waiting.
We will snip fresh mint
into your tea.

And just two others, very short ones. I find myself continuing to write about my father in the year since he died. And maintaining that essential conversatio with him,, as the great Scottish poet Alistair Reid said in a poem about his father's death, "Now begins the conversation going on and on and on."

This is the most comforting act to keep him feeling close. I encourage students to think about those little important scenes, odd scenes, precious people, they carry in their memories as treasures in their own storehouses. They have no idea sometimes how much those scenes may connect to everything later.

I was grateful as a child to have a father who was a bridge-maker. He always said in his own talks that Arab people and Jewish people were cousins, not enemies, and it was a sad disaster of politics that they hadn't lived that way in current times, and he always held the hope that he remembered from his childhood in Jerusalem that it would end up being a mixed country again of many people, of many different backgrounds, Arab people, Jewish people, living as the cousins they really are. And when students ask me -- and this is often the first question they ask me -- "So, do you seek out Arab poets?" I say, Well actually, I have always sought out Jewish poets more, because the world might think of Arabs and Jews as being opposite sides of the bridge. But I wasn't brought up that way, and I have never thought that way. So poets such as Yehuda Amichai and Chana Bloch and Dalia Ravikovitch and all the great poets of Israel and other countries have meant as much to me as poets like Mahmud Darwish or Taha Muhammad Ali or Fadwa Touqan, great Palestinian poets. Anyway, this little poem, "What Kind of Fool Am I?"

He sang with abandon,
combing his black, black hair.
Each morning in the shower
First in Arabic, rivery ripples
of song carrying him back
to his first beloved land,
then in English, where his repertoire
was short. No kind at all! we'd shout,
throwing ourselves into the brisk arc
of his cologne for a morning kiss.
But he gave us freedom to be fools
if we needed to, which we certainly
would later, which we all do now and then,
perhaps a father's greatest gift --
that blessing.

I have said to students, "My hope is not that you will go off thinking of my grandmother or my father, but that you might go off thinking about something you could write about your own." And that's the happy-contagion of poetry that would encourage you to think, Oh, there, I have that little scene. Or that's the song my father sang repeatedly that none of us liked.

And with that in mind, just one poem to my Palestinian grandmother, who lived to be 106 and used to say to everyone she didn't want to die until everyone she didn't like died first. But that made no sense, because she liked everybody. And I adored her. "My Grandmother in the Stars."

It is possible we will not meet again on earth.

I thought that many times.

To think this fills my throat

with dust. Then there is only the sky

tying the universe together.

Just now the neighbor's horse must be standing

patiently, hoof on stone, waiting for his day

to open. What you think of him,

and the village's one heroic cow,

is the knowledge I wish to gather.

I bow to your rugged feet,

the moth-eaten scarves that knot your hair.

Where we live in the world

is never one place. Our hearts,

those dogged mirrors, keep flashing us

moons before we are ready for them.

You and I on a roof at sunset,

our two languages adrift,

heart saying, Take this home with you,

never again,

and only memory making us rich.

I would like to close with one more piece after our questions or answer periodä But I just want to say something to the students -- and they are everywhere -- who go a little farther even than we encourage them to go, the students who become advocates for something we may have talked about – all power to them. I have had girls show up at my door here in San Antonio telling me that they are now the main character, Florrie, in my second novel, Going, Going. They say, "We are Florrie. We are doing what Florrie does in that book."

This is the greatest book review of all time to me. I don't care about any other book review. I just want students to identify in a way that's a little larger -- to get a letter from a student five years later who says, "Because of what we talked about regarding poetry in the Middle East and the poem you read from the poet in Iraq, we've never been able to read the newspaper the same way again."

The gift of poetry encourages us to think a little farther. The girl in Ohio I met last year, it was actually April 17th -- you might want to write that in your notebooks which is now officially Poem in your Pocket Day – or maybe this year theyπre changing it to April 30^th -- you're supposed to have poems in your pocke that day and hand them out to people that you encounter during the day. Well, this young girl, Cherise, thought that wasn't enough, to have just one day a year. She now does it every month on the 17th. She sends me a poem in the mail every 17^th. She enlarged the tradition immediately!

The girls in China in January who said, "Well, we want to give you some assignments." And they were quite serious... "We like those things your son said when he was little, that you have written about in some of your poems, but we want you to do a whole book just of your son's saying, and you can just stay out of it. Just put ONLY your son in there, and put his name on the book." I said, Okay, if I do that, Iπll dedicate the book to you.

So the ways students continue to educate us beyond our times with them has been a great gift. And so I'll read you these two poems by girl writers which changed my life completely, both of these poems.

The first one was by what I would only deem a really reluctant writer, and she was quite outspoken about her reluctant desire to write anything. And her teacher kept kind of giving me little hints that I wasn't going to get anywhere with this person. She ended up being the star poet of the class, and I don't know what it was exactly that snapped her over to writing, but it was two small brown sacks. That was on the day I carried two small brown sacks, a noun sack and a verb sack, into her room and the students each took a few nouns and a few verbs, and it was their challenge to put them together in a poem. So Vangie Castillo wrote this. She was in eighth grade at Ralph Waldo Emerson Middle School here in San Antonio.

"As I walk in moonlight, I sing of darkness. I sing of clouds, big clouds, how they change like people. They meet and they flee. I sing of people, rainbow's light, empty roads, wooded nights. My voice is deep. It sparkles to your ears and swirls dust away. My voice flaps and moves like a river. It whispers to the world. Sometimes it shouts, but always has a heart. My voice can be a swan and speak with its wings. But behind it is a shadow that looks like the world."

The day she gave me that, I said, "You know, Vangie, you have really been making a big fuss about not being able to write poems, and so now I urge you never to write a poem. Just continue to write things like this. You can call them whatever you want. Call them sticks. Call them buckets. I don't care what you call them. ≥

And I thought, how ironic, that someone who's been denying and doubting her own voice would write a poem that says, "My voice is deep and has the power to swirl dust away."

Years later I met her in a local department store and she said, "Did you save, by any chance, those poems of mine that weren't poems? I need them now."

And here's a poem by Brenda Burmeister, whom I still know. She wrote this when she was in fourth grade. It was a very sad day for her/ She was staring into a broken compact mirror on her desk at Cambridge Elementary, in San Antonio, and she wrote it in seven minutes.

"Alone with my mirror, dreaming of love, wishing for love. Thinking of my dear old grandmother. My eyes represent my grandmother. My nose represents my grandmother. Suddenly my face turns into my dear old grandmother. I start to speak. I hear my voice. I hear my grandmother's voice. I say to myself, 'That can't be my grandmother. She is dead.' She says to me, 'It is your grandmother.' I had trust in my grandmother, so I believe my grandmother lives beyond death in my mirror."

When she handed it to me, I started crying, but I tried to hide it, and she said, "I had trouble with the last line, but I think I got it." It was all smudged.

And I said, "Did you know what it was going to be when you started writing the poem?"

She said, "No. No, I had no idea what it was going to be. But I'll make you a copy, because I need to keep this poem to remind myself beyond death in my mirror."

And I know as a reader of poems, when my own grandmothers died, when my father died, this was a poem I needed to go read again. And Brenda says now that she would never have believed in the creative process that enabled her to become a film maker, had it not been for something that snapped open in her that day when she realized she already carried the wisdom that she needed.

So thank you for listening to me. Any questions? You're the best. You're my heroes. Thank you so much for listening. I love your schools. It's been a huge honor to visit many of your schools. Thank you so much for listening.

Is there anything, before I read my little last closing piece, that anyone would like to talk about? Question? Answer? For the last eight years I was asking

publicly for answers, and I still accept them. Or questions about anything.

Do talk to Jeanne Whitman from Hockaday about that, if you don't know about the microphones in the lunchroom, I say that everywhere, all around the country. There's a great way you can get poetry into the atmosphere that costs nothing, out there every day. Yes.

MS. POWERS: My name is Eileen Powers, and I'm from the Louise S. McGehee School in New Orleans. I'm the headmistress there, and at a conference I went to, I heard Robert Pinsky -- this was a number of years ago -- and I was struck by the poetry project and how this was an easy way to get poetry into the air at our school. When I came back to McGehee -- we're a New Orleans school, and April is Poetry Month, as we well know, and April is also Jazz Fest. So we constructed something which we called Bards at the Gate. The gate is our symbol. And we had a student contest as to who would name this event that we were about to do. And we modeled it on Jazz Fest. So we had an evening of poetry and we had every constituency in the school agree to recite his or her favorite poem, tell why it was his or her favorite poem.

The first time we did it we had 300 people. We're a small school, and it was all over campus. We started with the center stage, the way Jazz Fest happens, and we had quite a heterogeneous group of people on stage. We had our oldest living alum, who's was then 95 -- she's now 99 -- and she read Kipling. And she spoke about her tutor, because she was raised on a plantation downriver before she came to McGehee's and it was obviously an opportunity for her to get back in touch with her tutor. We had our maintenance, the head of maintenance, who read his poem. He really wants to be a minister, and he read a poem called, "I Must See Jesus," and it was phenomenal. It brought down the house. And when they asked him why did he choose that poem, he looked at the audience and said, "Because Mrs. Powers said I had to."

And then we had a student. And in subsequent years we've had the Blanchards, who are very famous; we've had the mayor's wife, we've had Terrence Blanchard come and play while his wife read Langston Hughes. It was a way to get all the students involved, all the parents involved, alums, everybody, the whole community, around poetry. And it is one of my favorite events that we do. We do it every other year, but we make a really big thing of it. Everybody loves it. Good food, good poetry, good companionship, and it really works for the community and it's not that difficult to do.

MS. NYE: And it doesn't cost anything. Bravo to you. That's such a model activity, and everyone in every school could do that. You could do such a reading during the day for students alone, that's a great thing to do, but to involve many people who connect to your school community, that just lets us know that we're all living poems, all carrying a poetry channel. We're all poets or poetry readers, and that's the greatest activity.

I also love Robert Pinsky's emphasis that every student should make a poetry anthology in school. That's what Mrs. Lane essentially had her second-graders do in St. Louis, that it's important just to identify what poems you like, and why. Why does that poem speak to you? Why do you connect to this poem? Because you'll learn about yourself and you'll learn new words, vocabulary, and you'll end up having this wonderful sheaf of poems that you can keep alongside you in your life.

That's a great activity. You do have a fantastic school. I love going there so much.

Any other wonderful activities you'd like to share? At St. Mark's in Dallas, which I realize is a boys' school, they do the literary lunches where the boys, during lunchtime, read through the entire lunch, which is also fantastic. When I was there, they would have boys coming over from other schools to participate, wanting to share their poems. And they also had quite a sneaky little way, if no one had brought poems, of getting you to write on the spot as you're eating -- this is quite a trick -- and then present that poem that you had just written.

So you know, whatever milieu you're in, whatever timeframe you have, is something that can be organized often quite easily and students love to be the emcees, too, and introduce one another.

MS. NYE: Poets are very happy to visit your schools. There's no luckier venue for a poet or any kind of writer. And I love what you said about the McGehee School, too, how you connected to something else in your city using the jazz, using some curriculum that's going on already in your school, using some event in your city, something else, and that way, it has a larger impact.

MR. GALBRAITH: Who are some bright stars in the poetry world on your horizon?

MS. NYE: Well, I just mentioned to someone from Atlanta that I have a poetry anthology coming out called Time You Let Me In: 25 poets under 25. So I have 25 new young poets that I'm very keen on. One of them is named Laura Lee Beasley. She lives in Atlanta. She's going back to school, a phenomenal young writer. I think we'll be hearing about her.

There's a wonderful woman here in San Antonio, Jennie Brown, who's a terrific young poet, teaching at Trinity University now.

There are great poets all over the country, and whatever your taste, whatever your style, whatever your own ethnic interest, you can find a poet who connects to that.

MR. GALBRAITH: What are the differences in the audiences when you read in the Middle East and so forth?

MS. NYE: You know, I think people are so keen on feeling closer to the sense of poetry of their own lives that there's really a strong similarity wherever you go of people wanting to feel that calm sense of, you know, I'm carrying poems with me. My life is poems. My dinner table is poems. The people in my family speak poems to me. I would say that there are not huge differences, but many, many likenesses.

In the Middle East, students are quite obsessed with wanting to be pen pals with students in the US. They're very troubled by world news, as much as students here might be. They don't like it. They don't want to be looked at as being part of a dangerous, violent region of the world. They want to be in touch. And you know, they're not running their countries.

So they always ask me who could they trade poems with. I just got a group of eighth graders in China to be pen pals with students in Driscoll, Texas, a community of less than 1,000 in south Texas, and they are now poetry pals, exchanging their poems. That makes me very happy when that happens. But it's not hard to do. And again, it doesn't cost much.

But thank you, Bruce, and thank you, Burch, for inviting me to this group. May I just close with this one?

This is called ≥Gate A4≤ and it's about the conversations that we have in our lives which change everything even though we weren't expecting to have them.

Wandering around the Albuquerque airport terminal after learning my flight had been delayed four hours, I heard an announcement: 'If anyone in the vicinity of Gate A4 understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately.'

Well -- one pauses these days. Gate A4 was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian embroidered dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. ≥Help,≤ said the flight agent. ≥Talk to her. What is her problem? We told her the flight was going to be late and she did this.≤

Actually, we all wanted to do that.

I stopped to put my arm around the woman, and spoke to her haltingly. ≥Shu-dow-a, Shu-bid-uck Habibti? Stani schway, Min fadlick, Shu-bit-se-wee?≤ The minute she heard any words she knew, however poorly used -- and by the way, if I did take the Arabic class at Roland Park a little longer, my Arabic would improve dramatically -- she stopped crying. She thought the flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for major medical treatment the next day. I said, ≥No, we're fine, you'll get there, just later, who is picking you up? Let's call him.≤

We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother until we got on the plane, and would ride next to her -- Southwest. She talked to him. Then we called her other sons just for the fun of it. Then we called my dad and he and she spoke for a while in Arabic and found out, of course, they had ten shared friends. Then I thought just for the heck of it, why not call some Palestinian poets I know and let them chat with her? This all took up about two

hours.

She was laughing a lot by then. Telling about her life, patting my knee, answering questions. She had pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag -- and was offering them to all the women at the gate. To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the mom from California, the lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There is no better cookie.

And then the airline broke out free beverages from huge coolers and two little girls from our flight ran around serving us all apple juice and they were covered with powdered sugar, too. And I noticed my new best friend -- by now we were holding hands -- had a potted plant poking out of her bag, some medicinal thing, with green furry leaves. Such an old country traveling tradition. Always carry a plant. Always stay rooted to somewhere.

And I looked around that gate of late and weary ones, and thought, This is the world I want to live in. The shared world. Not a single person in that gate -- once the crying of confusion stopped -- seemed apprehensive about any other person. They took the cookies. I wanted to hug all those other women, too.

This can still happen anywhere. Not everything is lost.

Thanks again. My love to all your schools. Thank you so much.

MS. FORD: Naomi, thank you for the gift, your gift of the contagion of poetry. I suspect that part of what the initial silence was about, probably not unlike Gettysburg, was that you had touched the poet in every one of us, and that that was part of what we were all feeling and thinking.

I'm glad to say that Naomi will continue to be signing books outside, so please take along with you some of the memories of what you have just heard. And thank you again, Naomi. Wonderful, wonderful gift for all of us.