Elements of Stale, with Luke Mazur: Sister, You're A Poet

by Luke Mazur

So last Sunday I read an op-ed in the Times, where some dude argues in favor of Catholic priests saying Mass, while facing the direction opposite of the congregation. Now, this op-ed was most wacky to me not because of anything inherently awkward about facing away from the people you’re talking to. (But, yes.) Or because Kenneth J. Wolfe assumes that there is very much of a congregation these days not to face. (Ha, I think.) But because I remember learning back in high school that the Catholic Church had already reversed this practice once before.

We once learned that the Second Vatican Council reformed some of the institution’s more antiquated practices; opened its windows and let some fresh air in. We learned that Vatican II was the Church growing its hair out, the Church’s version of modernizing. More accurately, it seems, it was the Church catching up to Galileo. And, this time, not condemning him. But for a Church that recently elevated a former member of the Hitler Youth to its highest post, change does have a funny definition.

Some people hated these reforms. Some people, like the current Pope, or the villains from The Da Vinci Code, or Maureen Dowd’s mom, devoted their lives to reversing them. Others more quietly protested. Sister Edith, the librarian at my grade school, for example, chose to wear her habit, even as most of the other nuns in the building had by that point updated to something more akin to Pat Nixon’s modestly stylish wardrobe. Those Republican cloth coats-well, Richard Nixon would happily tell the sisters that they looked good in whatever the hell they wore, especially if that meant they’d vote for him. It’s probably safe to say that many of them did, in fact, vote for this man three times. Still, no habit for these Rockefeller Republicans.

For whatever reason, at Kolbe Catholic, “library” was not only a room with bookshelves full of copies and copies of Dear Mr. Henshaw, but also a class that met once a week. We called Library, along with with Art, and Music and Gym and Computers, “specials.” Special, as in, a break from our regular classes and regular teachers. In Library, Sister Edith taught us how to find books using the Dewey Decimal system and how to look up answers in an encyclopedia. And because she was old and wore a cape on her head, and we were 8 and this was a “special,” these skills would be forgotten even before technology made them obsolete.

But Sister also, bizarrely enough, taught us about poetry. We wrote haiku on snowball cut-outs during winter and limericks on shamrock cut-outs during Lent. And around the calendar, we wrote cinquains. That five line poem seemed to be appropriate no matter the season. The variant we were taught was a twenty-two syllable, constructed from a third grader’s vocabulary that could adorn the hallways no matter the month. The first line was just a noun, a naming word. The second line, just two adjectives, or descriptive words. For the third, three words that express action (verbs, if you will); and on the fourth, four words that express feeling (perhaps more verbs, a phrase even). The last line was just another word that re-states the first one. A tag. Here are some examples.

According to a website that appears to be designed for parents who home-school their children, a good cinquain “commands attention to word choice, word meaning, syllabication, and parts of speech, while at the same time expressing a meaningful message.”

Good cinquains, it seems, are tweets.

It is clear now that in 2009, the year that Twitter finally replaced newspapers, writing cinquains was probably the most pertinent of our Library lessons. Sister, despite the books and the film strips, so old that she was edentulate, helped to cut our new media incisors. And Ken Wolfe who, according to his byline, “writes frequently for traditionalist Roman Catholic publications” and who wants priests facing the wall? Well, I can only make assumptions regarding his politics, but even for Kenneth, 2009 might’ve been the year when the pound sign evolved from terrorist fist jab to hashtag. #imsorry

Previously: The Text

Luke Mazur is getting really comfy at his parents’ place up in Buffalo.