A place for poems: poetry urges us to see, even momentarily, the ordinary as extraordinary, and the extraordinary coexisting with the ordinary. It both elevates and grounds; excites and subdues.

Much has been written since Sept. 11, 2001 about the healing powers of poetry. Accompaniments to suffering, poems in local newspapers and on the walls of makeshift shrines, have helped us talk to each other through our grief and confusion. Poems have also helped us occupy intimate silent public spaces, as I recall doing at the World Trade Center site reading children's poems through my tears.

I recently spent more than an hour with a group of middle school teachers reading and rereading Walt Whitman's "The Wound Dresser," and without having to explicitly connect this Civil War poem to the Iraqi battlefield, we allowed it to take us there. The poem forced us to consider how we respond to children's questions about war. It opened the doors of memory, reminding us how soon "what is over [is] forgotten, and waves wash the imprints off the sand."

Softened by the poem's invitation to slow down, open up, admit confusion, value patience and honor bewilderment, we came to know one another in its presence. We tuned our ears to Whitman's language, grateful to those sitting with us in the school library as we contemplated war's legacy.

What hasn't received much attention is how poetry might keep us from violence and how it might nurture new sorts of leadership so desperately needed in our schools. Shelley's observation that "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world" CA Defence of Poetry," 1821) may sound terribly inapt in this day of sound bytes and a language-impaired president. But even without making such a grand claim about poets, I think that poetry belongs in a conversation about leadership. It can inspire and provoke people to take on new roles.

I address this possibility with teachers and school administrators in mind, since for almost three decades I have worked to explore the role of writing to enhance democracy. Reading and writing poetry have been part of the Central California Writing Project's efforts to nurture creative, imaginative and effective school leadership.

In our four-week summer institutes, kindergarten through university teachers write every day, reflecting on our own composing process to inform conversations about writing pedagogy. Teachers' inquiry presentations to the group emerge from practical teaching questions, such as: How can composing poetry help reluctant writers? How can we teach students to combine the evocative and the persuasive? Once students are inspired and motivated to write, how can we teach them to craft their work?

Since our institute is both a pedagogical think tank and a writing workshop, participants often invite the group to write in the same genres as they assign their students to write in. It isn't unusual for a sixth grade teacher, for example, to demonstrate how she teaches the haiku or sonnet and then to prompt us to compose one, using the scaffolding of her presentation to get us started.

What happens when a group of teachers who aspire to provide school leadership write poetry and are invited to share it? Predictably, teachers reenact their students' shyness, and the room is filled with nervous energy. When we read what we've written, the disclaimers are as creative as the poems, and the "stars" in the room, those who introduce themselves on the first day as poets, shine. We appreciate how they seem to work directly from their source, avoiding extra words and the didacticism that signals distrust of their readers.

But we also appreciate the efforts of those who rarely write poems and who risk a great deal by reading aloud in uncertain voices their tentative efforts. These poems often move us to tears, and when we're ready to move on, someone gratefully acknowledges what has just occurred. Somehow, after reading these fragile creations, we become more generous with each other.

Reading our poems aloud enables us to deepen how we know one another. For the institute teacher who wants to become a staff development leader, and for the principal or assistant principal in our group, this experience reveals a sort of leadership that values metaphor, imagery, meditative space and wonder. It is a leadership aware that we earn clarity about difficult issues, but rarely start with it. It is a leadership attentive to language as both the expression of experience and its shaper.

Improving the teaching of writing

Providing leadership to improve the teaching of writing requires inspiration and a vision that reaches beyond pedagogical prescriptions. As it turns out, the central obstacle to improving the teaching of writing in the United States is the fact that most teachers do not write. Some of them once enjoyed writing, but that distant memory has all but faded, and their jobs are too busy and overwhelming to allow for much change. Many carry the baggage of humiliation that poor writing instruction imposed on them.

However, in schools where principals or teacher leaders share their own writing or start faculty meetings with a few minutes of writing, something quite amazing happens. Schools become homes for writing if leaders are adept at inviting others to write and generous about sharing their own unfinished efforts.

Consider the power of Bertolt Brecht's poem, "Praise of Learning," which adorns the wall in my office in both English and Spanish versions.

Praise of Learning

By Bertolt Brecht 

Praise of Learning

   Learn the elementary things!
   For those whose time has come
   It is never too late!
   Learn the ABC. It won't be enough,
   But learn it! Don't be dismayed by it?
   Begin! You must know everything.
   You must lake over the leadership.

   Learn, man in the asylum!
   Learn, man in the prison!
   Learn, woman in the kitchen!
   Learn sixty year olds!
   You must take over the leadership.
   Seek out the school, you who are home
   less!
   Acquire knowledge, you who shiver!
   You who are hungry, reach for the book:
   it is a weapon.
   You must take over the leadership.

   Don't be afraid to ask, comrade!
   Don't be talked into anything.
   Check for yourself!
   What you do not know yourself
   you don't know.
   Scrutinize the bill,
   it is you who must pay it.
   Put your finger on each item,
   ask: how did this get there ?
   You must take over the leadership.

Would it be an act of educational leadership to suggest that this poem be read aloud from time to time in faculty meetings? Would students benefit from composing their own versions of Brecht's poem, inserting people from their own lives where Brecht mentions prisoners, cooks and the homeless? Because the poem is straightforward and accessible, it invites us to talk about how poetry can be about persuasion.

Surely, this poem proposes a sort of leadership that inquiry is both built on and makes possible. It asks us to imagine how leadership can be distributed across a community. Brecht's poem, by taking leadership as its subject, is a sort of mnemonic for how poetry, and leadership collaborate.

The poetry of hope

We all rush around so much these days that we must seek ways to slow life down. Poetry that grabs our attention, calls for our response, and makes us grateful to have other people to talk to, can save our lives.

Perhaps it is an act of leadership to share the poetry of hope when colleagues need it; to hand out a poem to restore faith in our efficacy.

I recall the mailman in "Il Postino," a film about Pablo Neruda's brief exile in a remote Italian seaside town. When Neruda discovers that his admiring friend has used one of his love poems to woo a local beauty, he blows up as though the poor mailman has stolen something precious. Neruda is silenced, however, when the young lover, driven to wisdom by necessity, replies, "Poetry is not for those who write it; it's for those who need it!"

It occurs to me that in sharing the Brecht poems with my colleagues and students, I am sharing something of myself and, at the same time, stepping out of the way. As director of the Central California Writing Project and instructor in my university classes, of course, I am identified as the leader, in part because I choose the texts that others read. But in both situations this gesture of leadership is an invitation to others to share the poems they find or that find them. It works. Inevitably, after I share my treasure, students and CCWP teachers share poems that have claimed their attention to initiate dialogue and direct our conversation.

I am not, certainly, reducing poetry to a verbal magic wand, endowed with infallible authority. But I am saying that in addition to urging us to see, even momentarily, the ordinary as extraordinary, and the extraordinary coexisting with the ordinary, poetry is useful. It both elevates and grounds; excites and subdues.

As W.H. Auden so beautifully observes in his "Musee des Beaux Arts," a poem about Breughel's painting "The Fall of Icarus," at the very moment when someone as ambitious as Icarus plummets into the ocean, a horse is scratching its behind on a tree, and a farmer is plowing his field. Poetry is useful because it reminds us to honor what is deeply significant and to remember the profoundly ordinary. With this in mind, William Carlos Williams wrote, "It is difficult/to get the news from poems/yet men die miserably every day for lack/of what is found there." (Asphodel, That Greenly Flower, 1962).

A leader who turns to poetry aligns herself with those who change the world by seeing anew what is right in front of them. The leader who reads a timely poem or simply one that will not go away, honors her colleagues' capacity for wonder and their desire for precision. The leader who writes, and who invites others to join her, sustaining both courage and humility in the process, celebrates the value of creativity and honors her colleagues' humanity.

To conclude, I turn to one other way that leadership intersects with poetry. Leaders are often able to name what would otherwise remain obscure, and this act of naming has its own aesthetic. We all know really perceptive people who are not listened to because of how they present their insights. Poetry can provide remarkably succinct and memorable ways to name complex experience.

Take, for example, Macbeth's "Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow/ Creeps in this petty pace from day to day," where the words beat out the unceasing ticking of a clock. Or Hamlet's "To be, or not to be--that is the question," or Prufrock's "Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?" which have become emblems for uncertainty. Or Frost's "Something there is that doesn't love a wall," which lures us in with an 'I can't quite put my finger on it' precision.

At moments when lines like these come to mind, we are reaching for poetry to name our experience. To the extent that leadership involves helping colleagues name the world more accurately and more memorably, we would expect poetry to serve us.

It doesn't diminish poetry, or art in general, to describe it as useful, especially if we remember that its value transcends any single use. In the presence of beauty, we are impelled, as Elaine Scarry suggests in "On Beauty and Being Just," to remove ourselves from the center and consider the claim that all of us, equally, should have access to it. I'd go even further and say that we have a powerful impulse to share beauty, even with strangers.

More than a metaphor

Leadership should be dedicated to expanding people's desire and ability to be useful, and the poetics of leadership, by which I mean its resonance with the evocative aspects of language, its imagery, tone and rhythm, is more than a metaphor. We use words to inspire, encourage, guide, correct and provoke each other. Poetry's maieutic power draws out our creativity and intelligence. Leaders who value these gifts should find a place for poems.

Don Rothman is a senior lecturer in writing and director of the Central California Writing Project at University of California, Santa Cruz. He leads workshops and seminars for school administrators and teachers, and is co-author of "Academic Literacy: A Statement of Competencies Expected of Students Entering California's Public Colleges and Universities" (2002), available at www.academicsenate.cc.ca.us. He can be reached at [e-mail].