Poet Makes Connections at Lawrenceville School

For Naomi Shihab Nye, poetry is all about connections. "All writers are interested in connections," she said.

Shihab Nye may be especially interested in connections, however.

Born in St. Louis, she has also lived in Ramallah in Jordan, the Old City in Jerusalem, and San Antonio. The daughter of a Palestinian father and American mother, Shihab Nye learned from a young age what it means to bridge divides and truly connect.

On Monday, Jan. 10, she tried to connect with the students of Lawrenceville School during a poetry reading to kick off the week she would spend at the school interacting with the kids.

The reading included several poems about the Middle East and other regions outside of the United States. She said she thinks it is "a sadness of our time" that there is such a disconnection right now between America and places like the Middle East.

In "During a War," Shihab Nye described how children in Abu Dhabi are eager to meet children from the U.S. "How easily they would have welcomed us in for coffee," she read.

Perhaps her most popular reading of the night was based on advice columns found in newspapers. "Dear board of education, no one will ever remember a test," she said to rounds of laughter. "Dear dog behind the fence, you need to calm down now."

Shihab Nye even included a short prose piece about an interesting taxi drive she once took. After discovering that neither she nor the taxi driver knew how to get to her destination, Shihab Nye discovered a connection she had with the driver – he had come from Bangladesh, a place she has visited twice.

At the end of the story, upon finally making it to the school Shihab Nye was trying to reach, the driver exclaimed, "We made it. Yes, we did. And I do not even know how to ride a bicycle."

"If you're not a writer, what do you do with that?" Shihab Nye said. "He really said that about the bicycle." 

After the reading, students were given a chance to talk with Shihab Nye. Many took advantage of the opportunity and asked questions about her unusual taxi ride and other queries they had on their minds. In fact, the packed auditorium hardly emptied at all after the reading was over.

“This is what usually happens,” said Champ Atlee, director of Lawrenceville School’s annual James Merrill Poetry Seminar.

Atlee helped bring Shihab Nye to school. He said part of his motivation for doing so was that she had come to Lawrenceville before, and impressed the staff and students in the process.

“There’s a way in which she speaks to students that really connects and makes them want to listen,” he said.

For her part, Shihab Nye said she was thrilled to be back in Lawrence Township. “This is such a gracious student body. That’s why I wanted to come back here,” she said. “[The students are] lively, alert, just beautiful in every way and very creative.”

She said she was looking forward to interacting with the students for the rest of the week and getting to read their poetry.

The award-winning poet – who has four Pushcart prizes among her many honors – said after her first visit to the school, she’d hoped for an opportunity to come back and spend a few more days with the students.

“I feel your energy again. There’s just something special here,” she said, adding that she was impressed that the entire school eats lunch together at the same time. “It’s quite an antidote to what you get if you just spend a lot of time with the news these days.”

“In the end,” Atlee said, “we need to decide which vision of the world we want to absorb.”

This past week, Shihab Nye helped the students of Lawrenceville School see through some of the headlines and do just that.