Immigrant muses: teaching poetry as a second language.

Last Christmas on my way to visit my parents in Indiana, driving through Gary past the steel mills and empty lands surrounding them, an image floated up from one of the first papers I ever read as teacher of English as a Second Language.

The image came from a Mexican woman who described how as a little girl she'd followed her grandmother to the top of the sand dunes and listened to her crying out the name of her husband who'd been killed in an explosion in the mills.

As I drove on I realized the image of my student's g mother shaking her fists spewing smokestacks had now become a part of my memory and an insight into a place and a people that I'd passed by all these years and never really noticed.

Many other images live in my memory from what I've read in handwritten journals and painstakingly typed papers--images of a father standing on a dock at By Michael McColly, who teaches English as a Second Language at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and who's working on a Peace Corps memoir. dawn waving, as a student described the last time he saw his father alive the night his father put him on board a boat to escape from Vietnam; or the image of tens of thousands of people kneeling in prayer as a Pakistani man described his family's first pilgrimage to Mecca.

As a teacher at Northeastern Illinois University for the past three years, these images have been handed to me by my students from nearly 50 countries, as if I were somehow chosen to hear the messages and stories within them.

Essay after essay, week after week, semester after semester, I have been called into these worlds introduced to me by broken sentences and translated memories. At first I wanted to believe that the worlds and lives that I'd been asked into were ones far different from my own.

But if I've learned anything from teaching, it has been not to give in to the differences that separate you from your students--no matter where they come from or what language they first learned.

When I first began teaching writing to students whose first language is not English, I'd hoped that it would be only a temporary step that would lead me to the work I really wanted to do, and that was to teach creative writing on my way to a. successful career as a writer.

How disappointed I was at first, knowing that instead of teaching the poetic works of [Franz] Kafka and Wallace Stevens I'd have to explain why the past tense of teach is not teached if the past tense of reach is reached.

I had prepared myself not to be stimulated by these students with few writing skills, coming at night from their jobs at cardboard box factories and nursing homes and the kitchens of restaurants.

All those fantasies I had of how creative I'd be teaching poetry and short stories now had to be replaced with the reality of how I was going to teach about semicolons, relative clauses, and the possessive.

In my first weeks I was so confused and nervous having to look at their straining faces as I explained what a thesis sentence was that I decided to teach the class as if it were a creative writing class. Why not? I thought.

I started with having them describe a place from their past. We went over how the senses of smell and sight and sound can help bring back memories and make a place visible and alive for a reader.

Two weeks later, I got detailed descriptions of villages in Guatemala, refugee camps in Thailand, romantic visits to the Taj Mahal, grandparents' houses in Baghdad, and Soviet army stations in Siberia.

We moved to people in our next assignment and out came portraits of a father who left for work one morning in Cambodia and was never heard of again; or a Polish grandmother who'd walked through the night in winter carrying her children to escape from the Nazis; or a Zairian boy with a shriveled arm who swims out into the middle of a swiftly moving African river and saves his friend--my student now 37 years old, who sits in the back row of my class.

Then I asked them to write about what it was like when they first arrived in America. I read descriptions of [Chicago's] O'Hare and the lake [Lake Michigan] and skyscrapers and tiny apartments in Uptown and miserable jobs and roaming the streets all night lost and unable to find their way back home because they didn't know how to pronounce the name of the street where they lived.

I also heard words and phrases out of dictionaries that were so wrong they were right. Rules were broken, yes, but sometimes the result was a phrase or figure of speech that was so apt and descriptive that I didn't dare try to correct them but would want to write their words down in my own journal instead.

Then last spring with the encouragement of my colleagues and writer friends, who'd heard me recount story after story from my students, we came up with the idea to see if we could sponsor a reading of our students [works]. A few months later, 15 students from nine countries sat hunched over their essays at a venue for poets at a weekly literary series at a place called the Hot House on Milwaukee Avenue, which was filled with poets and would-be poets, teachers, and the family members and friends of our Northeastern students.

Hearing their words echo out of the microphone and land into the hearts and minds of the audience, the students stepped off the stage as if they'd finally felt that they belonged here. A Peruvian man told a story about having only $10 when he came to America and how he worked literally every day for two years to bring his wife and children here. And then when he finished reading, he proudly pointed to them sitting there in the front row.

A woman from Romania recalled reading the Bible by candlelight to her dying grandmother on the night she died. Another young man from Eritrea described walking through the desert at night crossing into The Sudan as he escaped with his family from the tyranny of Ethiopian soldiers.

That night [at the Hot Housel changed some of these students and changed me, too.

Taking one of the students back to the school to get her car, we talked about her reading--a story about her struggles as a single mother coming here from Puerto Rico.

She was shaken, never having read in front of a crowd of strangers, and she turned to me and asked: "Did this really happen tonight? Did we all just read in front of all those people? Do you know that somebody, somebody I didn't even know, came up to me and thanked me? Can you believe it?"

I couldn't. I mean, having read in front of people before as a writer, I knew that you could feel changed when your words became mingled into the memories and i an audience.

But in another way, I couldn't, because after I'd dropped her off, I felt that I, too, needed to verify not only what had happened that night at the reading but what had been happening since the beginning of my work as a teacher with these students. As I listened to them read on stage, I couldn't believe that they were my students. How could it be, I wondered, driving home through the neighborhoods of Albany Park where many of my students lived, that I'd been hearing and reading their stories for three years and not realized that I had been teaching poets all along, for who else but poets can make words sound as if they were being spoken for the very first time?

My grandfather's cottage

My memorable and most interesting place is not in the United States or in the big cities like Chicago or New York. It is a simple and quiet place with peace and freedom that no one knew. Because it is close to me, my grandfather's cottage in my village in Cambodia is my kind of place. Maybe it isn't interesting for many people, but for me it is the place for my inspiration and my love of nature and its environment

When I was young, I used to live with my parents and also with my grandfather, that is to say, I had two places for shelter. But most of the time I liked to keep my grandfather company by staying with him. Because my grandfather preferred to live alone after the death of my grandmother, he had built one beautiful cottage near the like at the end of the village. This shelter was a small hut with a large backyard and one deep well with a long bamboo counterbalanced sweep pointed high to the blue sky like a giant fishing pole. And this place was really a perfect resort for both of us.

When one walks by, the first thing he or she will see is a tiny single home facing the lake built under an old mango tree with large branches and big shade like a giant umbrella in the day time. At the left of this hut, one old-styled bed made of bamboo served for taking a siesta. Two big jars under the rain spout were used for containers of rainwater. The backyard was a garden of vegetables and a large orchard of many kinds of trees-orange, guava, coconut and the sugar cane field.

Although we didn't have any valuable property, our subject of interest or concern was peace and freedom. It was my favorite spot where I needed to relax and be alone, so I could think without having anybody to disturb me or to interrupt my imagination. There I could admire the beauty of nature, listen to the murmur of the ebb and flow of the water, which was sometimes wild and some other times melodious like a lullaby. I could feel the fluttering of the Trayang (a kind of gray-black-bird with a curved beak resembling a crane) which flew back and forth over the lake. I could feel the warmth of the golden sun and the freshness of the Monsoon's southwest wind. Far away I could see the fishing boats moving slowly and going on more farther and then disappearing in the horizon. In the evening, the twilight sky had changed its coloring and reflected on the lake. Then as the sun began to gently set and transform the golden summer sky into a deep luscious blue, the mountain's soaring summits at the other side of the lake, emerged, twinkling against this spectacular star-filled backdrop.

This scenery made me feel free and relaxed with serenity. In my mind there was no boredom or loneliness. I was alone with my freedom to think, to write, to draw or to learn about the real beauty of the nature around me. It was a time and a source of my inspiration , towards peace and freedom and the real essence of life.

But time passed and everything changed. Cambodia was mutilated by the genocidal war of 1975. The whole country became the land of blood and tears including my beloved place. Every house was burned down and destroyed by the bombing and heavy artillery. Terrified by the continuing violence of the new regime, and after their family members were exterminated, the survivors left this village for the big cities hoping to save their lives. They left behind their home, their belongings-all that remained were orphaned children and the elderly who had no family. What a cruel fate for those who were left!

Those who remained wept, cursing their fate and begging the lake's spirits to protect them and not leave them abandoned. Who was responsible for all this?

The more deeply I go in to that place, the more interesting it becomes. If I have time to think again and discover my favorite and most important spot, I think I already have found one, and that is my grandfathers cottage.

My independence

I was born in a small town in Mexico where we used horses for transport When I came to America seven years ago, I was impressed to see a lot of cars around me. At that time I promised myself to get one some day. I am an ambitious person; I look for comfort and try to enjoy the way I realize my ambitions. If I have a goal, I persist. I am conscientious about my obstacles. I persist until I reach my goal; time and money don't matter for me.

When I married my husband he promised to teach me to drive, but he never did. He is a "macho man." He says women don't drive well, and when they do, they make a lot of mistakes on the street We always argued about it, because I said that women can drive as well or better than men. Women are not perfect. Most accidents involve men because they are drunk, on drugs, or because they feel they know everything about driving. Moreover, they feel they are better drivers, so they zoom around in their cars.

A car in Chicago is a big necessity. They are very indispensable because of the weather, especially during the winter time. For me, a car was a dream, a goal, a wish, but first of all a necessity. In 1988 I began to go to college, and with two small children at home. My husband was working a twelve hour shift, 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. I was studying from 6 to 10 p.m. It was impossible for my husband to help me with the babies and take or pick me up from school. I was living near the school, so I could take a bus. But if I walked I would arrive before the bus, so I preferred to walk. During the winter at 10 p.m., it was hard to walk with two children and two bags in my hands, even though home was near to school. Sometimes my two children were sleeping when I picked them up after my classes.

My mother is a good organizer. When she was visiting me, she planned out how I could get my drivers license. She pushed me to study for the written test We went on the bus to the Department of Motor Vehicles and Transportation. I passed. Then I went out to look for an instructor who could let me use his car to do the road test I had to pay thirty-eight dollars. My husband found out months later when I said I wanted a car. Of course I explained to him my reasons. One reason was I was tired of being dependent on others. My family and friends were either too tired, had to get up early the next day, or just had something else to do than drive me places.

I saved money for four years because I had a goal: to have a car. My husband never knew anything about my savings. I remember an angry day. I left home to buy a car by myself The bad thing for me was when I went to see cars. The people who attended me were men. One of them told me when I asked him about one car, "This is a good car for men because its a standard." Another asked me, "Can you afford it?" Then, another asked, "Are you married? Where is your husband? I prefer to do deals with men." I came home crying and more angry than before. I went one week without saying a sentence to my husband. Then he asked me, "What is happening to you?" I told him: "I need a man who can understand me and help me." He didn't say anything bad, but he called me ambitious. He asked me, "You want a car, but you don't have a drivers license?" I told him what I did when my mother was visiting. Then we went to a dealer.

When my husband saw a car he liked, he said, "This is a good car, if you have one thousand dollars you could buy it." He was surprised when I said, "I have two thousand in cash, right now. Do you want to get it?" He opened his eyes more than usual and stood up, asking, "You have two thousand dollars, cash, here! From where?" Then we bought my car.

Now that I have my own car I feel very independent, with the freedom to go out, to school, to church, and to visit my friends in other places. I can not explain or define what independence is, but for me it means a lot.

This article is adapted from "To teach that the past tense of `teach' is `taught,'" an essay read on the WBEZ radio series, "Immigration: Unsettled Questions."