Over the thirty-eight years of my career I must have spoken in well over five hundred universities, colleges, and community colleges, to say nothing of the hundreds of high schools I’ve performed in. It might be interesting for you to know that the invitations to speak on campus rarely came from the English Department. "Ric your work is too thin, too accessible, not layered with enough metaphor and simile!" I remember one English Department head coming up to me after I got a standing ovation from the students saying, "Well, that was really something Ric, but I hope you know it isn't poetry, it's Vaudeville!"
No, the departments that found the honorariums to bring me on campus were Interpersonal Communication, Psychology, Education, Counseling, Public Speaking and Drama. Those were the departments eager to have me come and show off my wares. Once in Florida I was even invited to speak to the Department of Electrical Engineering. The teacher ordered every student to be present telling me that in that one hour and fifteen minutes his egg-head students would learn more about poetry than in the required English classes they had been forced to take. However, I must admit my feelings were always a bit hurt when the English department snubbed me.
Sadly I believe that America's general distaste for poetry started in grade school. The students were never allowed to be creative. The problem was that subjects like poetry, art and dance must be judged subjectively, which is impossible to do. "I like this one. I don't like that one.” So we tell the students what Shakespeare meant by that sonnet and then we test and grade the students’ retention. I could always tell you what the Bard’s lines meant to me that morning but there was no real way to judge my response. I either remembered what I learned about that sonnet or I failed. It didn't matter how creative my answer was; it wasn't what we know Shakespeare meant. But I have to tell you that in all those ivied halls I performed in for thirty-eight plus years, of the ten best teachers I came across probably seven of them would have been English teachers. Teachers FIRST and good at English second.
When you read or listened to my lyric “I, the Caterpillar,” did you get confused, wondering what in hell is this poet is trying to say? Or did you go into your own life's experience when you decided who the caterpillar was and who the butterfly was? I often use these lyrics to I address the mess I believe education makes when it comes to poetry. I was guilty of it for years myself. I carefully explained what the poem was all about before I read it because I wanted you to march in lock step to where I wanted the words to take you. What a total rip off I obviously didn't respect your creativity.
Recently I have changed my ways so that you always get two interpretations for the price of one. The poem you heard and made sense of for yourself and then in the AFTERWORD you'll find out what I was writing about. This in no way negates your creative interpretation of my lyric.
Just think of what you would have lost if you knew ahead of time that “I, The Caterpillar” was written to Joan Baez (Saint Butterfly) trying to explain that I (the Caterpillar) was a working stiff in a print shop eight hours a day five days a week eking out a living to keep my family afloat. And I wanted to join her at the sit-in at the Laurence Livermore Labs (and be arrested and put in jail for six weeks) making a powerful statement for peace. But the yellow bus keeps coming at four o'clock each day and I had to pick up my four kids and drive them the three miles from Highway 1 to our house up in the Palo Colorado Road.
All of the above is offered to encourage you to decide what poetry means to you. I believe that you are all poets but somehow along the way were taught that you weren't. The coffers of education are running low on funds and there really isn't any money to bring poets, artists, dancers and philosophers on to a campus. So when ever possible I give my time for free. I refuse to sit idly by and let our institutions of learning become nothing more than a trade school!.... (My Ph.D. History professor daughter April, is my proof reader and she remarked "As if poetry isn’t a trade. And what’s wrong with learning a trade anyway?")
Beat it kid you bother me!
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