Life During Lockdown: John Waldman
When our son was entering kindergarten we went around looking at elementary schools. At one of them, we were taken to a sixth grade classroom where a dynamic teacher had the kids writing poetry. His passion and energy, along with the attention of a room full of 12-year-olds, sold us on the merits of that school. Both of our kids attended PS One, and John became a good friend. We both have a son and daughter who are about the same age, we share passions for music and sports and he was an important teacher to our kids Gavin and Sadie. When our sons were both 11 years old we co-coached their soccer team and nearly won the championship. I still remember almost every game, and it was all John: he’d played college soccer and also understood how to communicate concepts to kids. I was more or less the team cheerleader, but it was an amazing three months for us and the players.
John is also a highly accomplished and published poet. His work is thought-provoking, relevant and full of life. Throughout the years since we met I’ve often read his poetry, attended his readings and encouraged him to get his words in front of more people. More recently, John has been collaborating with his lifelong friend, songwriter and musician Ben Harper. Ben composes and plays music that fits beautifully with John’s language. I’m including below their new collaboration, called Cresting the Hill, which John describes as “…the descent into the Inland Empire and the entry point to the desert vastness of the imagination beyond.” Afterward is my discussion with John about how he’s getting by during the pandemic.
Give me some highlights and lowlights from your first two months in lockdown mode.
Some of the highlights and low lights seem to be linked arm in arm. Clearly the devastation of the pandemic as it plays out moment to moment and day to day is a lowlight like none I have seen in almost sixty-two years and then the counter balance is the stories of those who are our neighbors lifting up and treating the sick and the dying which reignites your faith. Similarly, the murders of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery and Breonna Taylor, crushing displays of our capacity for bigotry and hatred, have resulted in a staggering outpouring of activism. It feels like maybe some of the bad wallpaper of our history is being ripped down to be replaced by something sustaining. On a personal level my wife, Elizabeth and I have not seen my son, Louis and daughter, Melina since January. We decided as a family that having them stay in Oregon and Washington where they are in college respectively and not return to Los Angeles was the best idea. Louis may be back here in August but it may not be until December that we are reunited with Melina. On the highlight side of the coin they have grown up exponentially- they are wise and independent and Liz and I are in a bit of awe each time we speak to them.
My mother is 95 and lives in a retirement community. In what was a social and intellectual environment she now lives in almost isolation and naturally I have been worried about her becoming discouraged. But last week she called and asked me if I could get The Atlantic to send her a copy of the latest edition since there was an essay by Anne Applebaum. She’s still reading like her life depends on it.
I have a group of friends, (John Albert, Eric Allaway, Peter Andrus, Bill Baldwin, Chip Diggins and Ben Harper), who have gotten together several times a year for a long, long time. We have been through births, deaths, divorces, and now a plague and our continuous text thread has been a truly essential-business since March. They are some of the smartest, funniest most creative people I know. At any given time, you can jump on board and someone is posting articles, music, diatribes, pontifications, ruminations and various forms of absurdity. It is both de-evolved and elevated. At some point I started writing poems as texts and sending them to the thread. For someone who always swore by the friction of pencil to paper and not writing faster than my heart can beat and all sorts of other beyond antiquated standards, this was the perfect way for me to tap into my locked down world. I decided to write 19 Covid poems in 19 days. I pretended my friends were waiting in great anticipation for each to post.
On two occasions, Ben has invited me to recite my poems before he took the stage to perform. We have long talked about putting some of my words to music and with the cancellation of his spring and summer tours, this moment in time gave us the opportunity. I recite the Covid poems I previously posted on my phone’s voice memo, send them off, and Ben illuminates and orchestrates them in his studio.
And then there are the cats but most of us now truly know how our pets help tether us to sanity and joy.
How have you grown personally and professionally during this disruption?
Spending so much time inside my head better reap something worthwhile to carry forward. I can say that having both Elizabeth and me working from home has been for the most part a gift. I mean who knows how something like this might play out after twenty-three years of marriage? But I love working, talking, arguing, cooking and walking with her day after day after day. She is never lazy with her point of view, and lockdown demands interaction. To be able to really think and talk about our life together, particularly, but not exclusively through our conversations about Louis and Melina is a command to take stock of who I am, of who we are. It’s ragged but it’s beautiful.
Professionally, I teach at PS1 school in Santa Monica and have for about twenty-five of my thirty-five years as an educator. The school is predicated on community building, conversation, experience and engagement. Although I can craft essential questions and learning goals for my students, I most love the improvisational unexpected journey down sometimes uncharted tributaries with them. I half-jokingly offer them money for the unbelievable lines of poetry they often craft. But suddenly in early to mid- March we were told we were closing shop for the remainder of the year and would become a distant learning community. Is that possible? Most of my colleagues are more technologically inclined than I am but I had to put on my zoom identity in a matter of moments. I did it. We did it. It worked. I grew. Yes, I thrive on being in the presence of my students but I feel like the school pulled off a minor miracle.
Has your relationship with your work changed as a result of being homebound?
Well as far as my teaching, yes, my relationship to my work changed in much of the way I just described. A plague resulting in computer learning probably wouldn’t have made my list of things I would experience in my career although I’m not sure if I would have conjured up ducking and covering during an intense aftershock of the San Francisco quake or coming to school to face my students on the morning of 9/11 either. What I understand more clearly is adaptability and, although I know this but now it is reconfirmed, children are ready to rise to almost any occasion, just be there to meet them. Most importantly I hope that at some point I will be back in a living and breathing classroom.
My work also includes my writing, my love of physical labor, and my need to exercise. In all of these I participate more fully being homebound than I did when my day was divided up by different locations. More poems are getting written. I had been heeding the work of the poet August Kleinzahler because he can chisel diamonds from dog walks. This meant polishing my poems for days on end. In this Covid time I am not inclined to craft my work with such intensity but rather spill my poems unencumbered and move on.
The original owner of our house was a mason who seemed to take whatever was left of a job and turn it into a project. We have bricks printed with the name of their kilns, flagstone, tile work, black stone, pebble paths and cobblestone paths. I now work tirelessly to make sure the plants are accentuating this madness. I also cut up some old termite eaten railroad ties that separated plant beds and replaced them with bricks and stone of the past owner’s aesthetic. I have my basketball court on the alley and a cinderblock wall to return my passes with the soccer ball. And Liz and I play ping pong and log thousands of steps each day. We act like sharks who need perpetual motion. No doubt psychologically we are keeping something at bay.
Can poets like yourself create positive change in the world during the pandemic?
I know there were times and places where poems and poets could directly affect change in troubled times. Clearly Neruda’s power intimidated Pinochet and some wonder if the dictator was responsible for the poet’s death. Now I think the poems, the songs and the stories can nourish us and give us some of the sustenance we need to both make sense of our circumstance and to actuate change, during a pandemic and beyond.
My father beat the odds and lived to be 80, but faced the specter of an “early” death for much of his life. He told me about when he felt scared and even haunted, he would turn to the writers and philosophers for solace and strength in his darkest times. Lean on Michael Palmer, Yusef Komunyakaa or Emily Dickinson for support. Read Patricia Smith’s collection Incendiary Art from 2018 and the death of George Floyd resonates clearly in the whole context of who we are as we fall prey to both a cell virus and a social virus. Or read David Wojahn’s Late Empire as you traverse the minefield of a sociopathic president capable of only cleaving us apart. Poets force you to be ready to dust yourself off when it’s your turn to walk strongly back into the mire.
In this time of instant information, the role of the teacher is evolving but is no less vital. We are here to ignite, inspire, facilitate, and guide. We hope we can lead our students to drink deeply from the well. To conceptualize, imagine and reimagine. To experiment and to dream. We are obligated to show how to build and maintain sturdy bridges of compassion and respect.
In the small world of twenty-seven students, even if only projected in zoom windows, I could see how being in the company of art and ideas was a tonic during troubled times for them. The teachers I know are invested in allaying fear and keeping students engaged, creating, thinking, and, importantly, laughing. Additionally, teachers exact positive change by allowing students to understand they aren’t viewing the human experience as outsiders, they are the human experience.
