Why school leaders need poets: you can find a context for your daily work by reflecting on a truly meaningful personal vision

Leadership, March-April, 2004 by Walt Buster

Several years ago at a California School Boards Association Conference, Jimmy Santiago Baca was a keynote speaker. He brought most of the audience to tears. Baca learned to read in prison and went on to receive the American Book Award. His poetry is about relationships and incredible vision, but it is also about the power of information.

Our schools didn't see his talent or give him the information he needed to learn to read, so now he shows us how we can reach students in our schools that have been, like Jimmy Santiago Baca, abandoned, are on the streets or are incarcerated.

It was the book, the word, the poetry that gave Baca the courage to change his life. In describing the power of the word, he says, "Oh, it caught me up in the fiercest typhoon I have ever been in and from which I have never escaped. I have continually swirled like a leaf."

There are also powerful thoughts about leadership and information in Baca's Black Mesa Poems and his moving autobiography, "A Place to Stand." This poem is especially meaningful for thoughtful leaders:

Work We Hate and Dreams We Love

By Jimmy Santiago Baca

   Every morning
   Meiyo revs his truck up
   and lets it idle, Inside the small adobe house,
   he sips coffee
   while his Isleta girlfriend
   Cristi
   Brownbags his lunch.
   Life is filled with work
   Meiyo hates,
   and while he saws, 2 x 4's,
   trims lengths of 2 x 10's on a table saw,
   inside his veins another world
   in full color etches
   a blue sky on his bones,
   a man following a bison herd,
   and suddenly his hammer becomes a spear
   he tosses to the ground
   altering a sound we do not understand.

What powerful words about the world of work and dreams for leaders of schools to contemplate! If we give students the information they need to learn to read and write, perhaps they won't, like Baca, have to find that information and power in the penal system.

Baca was able to transcend our limitations; his poems can teach us the power of giving ideas, words and time for reflection to the schools and districts we are paid to lead.

Every child getting better every day

It is the vision, the sharing of information and the cultivation of relationships that will allow us to leave no child behind. Certainly, we will do our work and teach the curricula, try to raise test scores and teach to the standards. But those tasks will not be accomplished by leaders with verbal directives and insensitive hearts.

It is the leader with a vision of every child getting better every day, the skills to inform and be informed, and the likeability to build morale both within the school and the community who will meet the challenges in today's complex educational environments.

If it seems that as we age as leaders it all gets too hard and the tasks seem to pile higher as we forget which problem to address next, we can take heart from Poet Laureate Billy Collins, who writes in his new collection, "Sailing Alone Around the Room," the following:

Forgetfulness

By Billy Collins

   The name of the author is the first to go
   followed obediently by the title, the plot,
   the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
   which suddenly becomes one you have never read, never even
   heard of.

   It is as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
   decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
   to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

   Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses good bye,
   and you watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
   and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,
   something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
   the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

   Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
   it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
   not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

   It has floated away down a dark mythological river
   whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
   well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
   who have forgotten even how to swim and how to ride a
   bicycle.

   No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
   to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
   No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
   out of a love poem you used to know by heart.