When I was stuck inside on rainy days while visiting the family farm as a kid, my grandmother read stories and poems to my siblings, cousins, and me and sang songs and hymns with us while she played the electric Wurlitzer organ in the upstairs hallway. One of the books she read from was called Peacock Lane, which had been one of her classroom textbooks when she was an elementary school teacher. Granny had begun teaching in a one-room schoolhouse in very rural Smith County, Tennessee, with kids of all ages, and she finished that career in a typical 4th grade classroom in less-rural but still resolutely agricultural Wilson County. It is safe to say that, after so many years teaching school, Granny knew better than most how to mesmerize a group of bored kids with a dramatic reading. One of the standouts from Peacock Lane that I recall, possibly because she loved reading it so much, was a poem called “Tillie.” Written by British short story writer and poet Walter de la Mare (1873-1956), who is still known for his writing for children that channels the spirit of William Blake, “Tillie” is both simple and complex. The straightforward narrative arc of the poem provides an evocation of beauty, offers a sobering encounter with death, and whispers inexplicable mysteries that last beyond change and apparent endings.
Even though it’s been about fifty years since Granny’s readings, I can still recite the first few lines of the poem, hearing her voice whisper in my head:
Old Tillie Turveycombe
Sat to sew,
Just where a patch of fern did grow;
There, as she yawned,
And yawn wide did she,
Floated some seed
Down her gull-e-t
Accompanying the words on the page was a color drawing of grey-haired Tillie, sewing in her green garden amongst the ferns. But even if I had not seen the picture, I would have been able to envision Tillie because of the ethereal voice through which Granny conveyed de la Mare’s poem. Tillie and her garden became alive to me in the reading.
My grandmother’s sharing of poetry lingers with me because it was a formative part of my education as a human being. It is one of the practices that truly brought me alive. Not only did it spark my imagination, bequeath a love of language, and encourage the pure enjoyment of creating with words – but poetry also brought me together with others around a metaphorical (and sometimes literal) campfire amidst the rains, cold, and challenges of this world. Writing and sharing poetry creates a living, breathing community, a vibrant web of poets and the readers and reciters of poetry. As I’ve aged, poetry has also given me access to the voices of those long gone – in this instance, my grandmother and Walter de la Mare, William Blake’s poetic voice, and even Tillie herself, who dies, in the poem, as a result of the seed going down her gull-e-t. Somehow, despite (or perhaps because of) our losses, poems can carry love and beauty and truth across time and space, floating us deeper into the heart of who we are.
Reciting poems and telling stories creates an experience that some academic thinkers call “joint attention.” Coined by American psychologist Jerome Bruner (1915-2016), the term refers to the shared practice of focusing on something together. This practice can result in an individual developing cognitive and other skills and clarifying values, so it is particularly useful to educators thinking about matters of pedagogy. But joint attention does more than that: in a group of people, whether in a school or at a conference or in a field of flowers, it can assist us in creating a common ground, a shared sense of meaning and collective knowledge. Joint attention helps build and stoke that campfire of warmth, belonging, and imagination. The intentional creation of common ground through shared activity is inextricably tied to the development of intellectual and other human qualities – social, emotional, linguistic, artistic, spiritual – in the individual, who is never learning or living alone, even when she feels alone. Language, images, stories, rhymes, rhythms – these are our shared heritage as humans.
In addition to poetry, many objects of attention can become an occasion for focused sharing – birds and cicadas, food on the table, seashells and short stories, knitting and films, maps, music, and magic, religious liturgies, rolling in clover, snowballs, tomatoes, and salamanders. For me, poetry became an important experience of joint attention with my grandmother and the other kids in my extended family, and it expanded across time and space, eventually, to include wider and wider circles of community in real life and online. I encounter all sorts of writers, gardeners, singers, filmmakers, visual artists, naturalists, and preachers who are interested in spending time in each other’s company while focused on a shared creative object.
I was reminded of this back in April when I attended a weekend extravaganza put on by The Porch Writer’s Collective (the OTHER Porch, the one here in Nashville). Their celebration of creative writing featured poet and essayist Ross Gay, who is devoted to encouraging the kind of community-building fostered by joint attention. Not usually one to ask a question in a large public forum, I decided to inquire during the Q & A at the end of Gay’s reading at the Nashville Public Library because I wondered what he noticed about Americans during his book tour around the country. According to the news, I said, we are very divided. But are you hearing people talk about anything that sheds light on what we have in common? Gay responded enthusiastically. He emphasized people’s innate desire to “make stuff together” – to share their ideas and questions as well as the truths and insights that emerge through their writing. He was echoing something he’d written about in an October 2022 piece for the online daily news source for creative writing, Lit Hub. In “Back to School for Everyone: Lyric Research with Ross Gay – In Praise of Thinking with Other Thinkers,” he relates a proposed curriculum and his pedagogy of sharing:
I’m just excited to be in a smallish, well-lit room with differently shaped comfortable chairs and a couch, with folks reading and thinking and making and trying stuff out and sharing work and food. I’m excited to see how what we read, what we think about, can not only make us more able to write what we need to write, or learn what we need to write, but can also maybe make us love one another better.
This is, perhaps, the magic that my grandmother tapped into back in the 1970s in the white clapboard farmhouse outside of Nashville while the rains lashed against the windowpanes. Through our engagement with her through stories and poems and songs, the inspirational droplets of creativity and joy joined together to form rivulets, which swirled together to create a river that coursed through our own created stories, poems, and songs. We later performed extensive revues for our elders in the wide downstairs hallway in the house, and they patiently endured our efforts. Like my grandmother’s own love for us and the love of poets Blake and de la Mare and Gay for their subject matter and audiences, these imaginative impulses overflowed into and beyond us. This abundance still streams through each person who was present in that farmhouse, expressing itself through our own areas of interest. My overflow just happens to be writing and sharing prose and poetry and encouraging other people to do the same.
When creativity, truth, and beauty in poems and stories meet a human being sitting around the proverbial campfire with other human beings, when we look at, listen to, and/or make something in community, a profusion of loving energy is released. Instead of cultivating loneliness and miserliness and bitter irony in this often-discordant world, we find that we are able to produce generosity and humor and a deeper sense of community. We notice generative creativity in ourselves and others and the world. What we make may not be perfect, may never make us famous or rich, but that work channels a deeply human, ancient river of aliveness that gives back more than it takes away. In it, we can hear the voices of those long gone from our communities, share our current joys and sorrows, and dream up possible futures with and for each other. Most of all, in the overflow of this river of words and ideas and feelings and images, we can learn to float in the varying currents of life together and, along the way, come to love each other better as we listen to what we – each of us, all of us-- have made.
Shan Overton lives and writes in Nashville. She currently serves as Associate Dean of Academics and Associate Professor of Practical Theology at American Baptist College, a liberal arts HBCU dedicated to social justice, equity, advocacy, and leadership.
