Alicia Hokanson
Lakeside Middle School
Seattle, Washington

I want to thank Pamela Michael, Bob Hass, Sasha Rabin, and all those involved with River of Words for this honor. Thanks also to John Cole and the Library of Congress Center for the Book.

This award marks for me a personal confluence of the two passions in my professional life: teaching and writing. To be honored by an organization which shares these passions is thrilling for me.

I also want to acknowledge two colleagues from my school with whom I have worked over the years and who have fully supported my work with young writers as we’ve taken our students out into our local watershed—my teammate, science teacher Scott Jamieson, and our school’s long time ecological studies coordinator, Peter Hayes. Without their joyful dedication to experiential education our students would not be producing the evocative poems for which I am being honored here today.

It was just before spring vacation when Pamela called to tell me I had been chosen ROW’s teacher of the year. And so, as I retreated for spring break to my special place, an island in northern Puget Sound, I ruminated on what I might say here today. All that week in early April the war in the desert was on the radio, but I was in the green room of my forest clearing watching the rain come down in sheets, as it’s wont to do in the Pacific Northwest. The old plum tree at the corner of the yard was in nearly full flower that week and I was hoping the rain would stop for the bees to come out to the blossoms. That was a week of listening to the wind, worrying about the war, waiting for clearings in the rain, and marking the day’s work in the garden by the daylight there was to do it.

As I planted new raspberry canes I kept backing into the huge clumps of new nettles coming up. They reminded me of an annual trip we take each year with our 6th graders to a piece of old growth forest preserved in West Seattle. And I thought, well that’s where it begins for us each school year— I should talk about that.

When we enter the forest of Schmitz Park, the first thing we do is place each student in his or her own special spot along the trail: above the creek on a rock, underneath a huge cedar, or on top of an uprooted hemlock that has become a nurse log. Each student has time for silent observation, opening eyes and ears and fingertips to their sensory world and recording what they experience. Each year they surprise me anew: they hear deeper, see farther, play longer with the language to say what they’ve seen. They are newer to the world and its wonder is not dimmed for them. Claire hears, streams pound, sink, blend. Their swishilling sound wafts through every leaf. Eliot sees, a gibbering creek riding down the forest, sparkling in the sun hot rays. Leah feels, the eerie presence of nothingness radiating from every forest object. Kate writes, I rest my mind in the calm of nature.

After these solos in the forest, we gather everyone for a scavenger hunt to find and name the native plants they’ve studied in science. Who can find those pesky nettles, or the firm silky leaves of salal, or point out oregon grape, big leaf maple, western red cedar and tell us how they know them? When they do recognize the nettles by the trail, the braver ones will fold a leaf inward, curling it, then pluck it and pop it in their mouths. Mr. Jamieson has shown them how to approach a nettle and not get stung! A few kids, recognizing the soft leaves of thimbleberry, will also find red caps still ripe for eating. This touching, tasting and naming of things in the forest is a crucial start for our poets.

A first lesson: not “tree” but the name—fir, alder, maple, pine—hearing the sounds and the music in the specific, and tasting the word on the tongue. Not “flower,” but nootka rose, anemone, columbine. In their writer’s notebooks they’ve started recording their observations, fuel for poems later.
Closer to school, we explore our neighborhood Thornton Creek watershed. In October we head out with knee high boots and rain gear, with clipboards and plastic sheets. Rain or shine we’ll observe, listen, smell, touch and write. We stop frequently along the way: from the swampy section of the creek as it daylights after running under Northgate shopping mall, to the free full-flowing creek at Matthews Beach where it flows into Lake Washington. We see mallards, kingfishers, heron, a few returning salmon, and find lots of muck to stomp in! Our almost-teenagers are just 11-year-old kids today, wading out into the lake until, inevitably, the water comes over their boot tops and they shriek. Before we leave, there’s time to sit at the edge of the creek and write together. A recent group poem:

I flee from a machinery world
Leaving worries behind. At the creek
the flowing waters form a bridge between worlds.
Sun glows through the trees and its reflection
is like a pathway to heaven.

Under grey sky, under gold leaves
dark birches are wavering
on the surface of the creek.
A trickle of water shimmers
as it dances over the rocks
creating a waterfall,
changing the pace of the world.
Returning to school we’re suddenly back in the clatter of returning clipboards, stacking piles of soggy papers, hosing off boots and racing to lunch! By January we are reading T’ang dynasty poems and Japanese haiku. The students immediately take to these forms with their close dependence on images of the natural world. They understand the ancient impulse and find their voices taking up again the old song of praise.
Joseph writes: green moss on a rock / water-christened / deep in the rain- draped ravine. Madeline sees: sheets of rain / the cherry blossoms turn skyward / to drink.
And Leo knows how to win an English teacher’s heart. His first haiku is an ars poetica:
Capture the moment/ Observe nature as best you can / Preserve the image.
Perhaps this gives you a sense of why I love sharing poetry with middle schoolers and encourage them to write it. They are not jaded, they notice more than I think they will, they continually surprise me, they are still in the world with all their senses, and like sponges they soak up what each poem they read has to teach.

Why do I teach poetry? Because I want poets running my neighborhood council, my city, my country. I want poets tuned to the changes of light and season, who know the names of all the birds and will notice if fewer of them return in spring. I teach poetry because I want a richer world for all of us—where the truths of the eye and the heart are valued more than those of the pocketbook. Where students who experience the balance of a mind at rest in nature, will turn away from war as a solution to anything. I want my world governed by writers/thinkers/feelers like Madeline who can feel as sharply as those ancient masters, LiPo and DuFu, the pangs of loss when in autumn the geese depart, and who know the experience of loss resonates in every human soul. I teach poetry because I know it teaches us to enlarge our compassion for all peoples and creatures, for all of nature in its renewing beauty.

So my wish for all of you young poets and artists here today is that you continue to experience the world with your senses wide open, taking my student Nicole’s advice: Open your ears, your heart, your mind and listen. Can you hear the rhythm of life? And I hope your own artistic process will bring you to know what Katrina does when she writes:

Down by the river—
a serene breeze
Down by the mountain—
prayers and courage
Down by the desert—
grief in beauty
down by the prairie—
hidden secrets
Down by the river, mountain, desert, prairie—
all you need to know:
the ways of the human
the ways of the world.
I’d like to close with a poem of my own because it’s on my theme, and it has a River of Words sort of title. It’s called “Confluence” and was written at the joining of the Snake and Salmon rivers in western Idaho.

Confluence
Like this one blazing through
rock canyons and heat:
a river in the body.
The same river in the stars
streams through the blue dome
of our tent, through our dreams
bubbling up like river boils.
We wake into dry air
heavy with their dark freight.
When my kayak floated into backlit
clouds, no line between water and sky –
when I stood in the rocky meadow
under the mountain, skin
and blood in the same dance
with the small grasses –
when my body was water and sun
circling an island of light –
that was current, wave pile,
whirlpool I moved in:
the river of the world.
Thank you.

—Alicia Hokanson