A Review of Caroline M. Mar’s Special Education — July 31, 2021 by Arden Levine
Caroline Mei-Lin Mar didn’t (as the kids say) come here to play; she came (per her job) to teach. And appropriately, the first stanzas of Special Education’s second poem, “Chinese Girl” land like a pay-attention hand slapped on a classroom desk, an assertion: this lesson plan moves fast (economic inequity, complex racial prejudices, gentrification, Lesbian identity politics) so keep up…
Bing bing. In the mouths of my Black students my ethnicity is the sound of an elevator rising past the floors of some anonymous downtown building they will never set foot in…
My kids want to know what kinds of women I have loved, if I’ve ever dated a Black woman. They don’t know the word butch but they know stud.
In this debut collection, Mar speaks with harsh eloquence from in front of the blackboard and from the back of the midnight club-bound cab, from the dim sum shop counter, the city bus, the hospital. She speaks from everywhere that social policy issues assert themselves in her demographically-shifting hometown of San Francisco (which is to say, everywhere in San Francisco).
The book contains three chapters with semester-syllabus titles. Starting with Language Lessons, Mar introduces a poet’s mouth inherited from Chinese and white families; to accommodate both, she splits her tongue and, when necessary, her allegiance. Of the nine poems in this chapter, three contain the word “Language” (another, “Tongue”; another, “Body”), revealing the verbal and corporeal socialization that compel her toward a career providing history, social studies, and vocab lessons to youngsters. In “Ghost Language,” time and trauma take away the inherited and acquired words of her beloveds:
My grandmother, the white one, my mother’s mother, she has Alzheimer’s. It isn’t an easy thing for Grammie, or my mother, or me. My grandfather, the Chinese one, my father’s father, it was the same: he lost his English, then his mind; the ghosts all came to pace his hallways.
Later, in “Death of the Immigrant Language,” she elegantly stretches the vocal cord strand of her near-literal metaphor to full tension: At a Chinese takeout spot, following a funeral, she confides in herself (and us) “I will not use these words again except to ohdah food. / The counters are kept clean of grease and rust. / I wish my mouth could do the same.”
The second chapter, Primer, gives voice to a different marginalized group: Mar’s students, neuro-divergent and despondent, held in obvious contempt by supposedly right-thinking adults. Here, Mar upends the image of the municipal public school teacher as endlessly patient in impossible conditions. The book’s title poem sees her clashing with a student’s auditory processing disorder: “I say now is not the time for this conversation. / You hear shut the fuck up dumbass.” In “Secondary Trauma,” with desperately dark humor and a set of tidy, restrained line breaks, she reels back from destructive student behavior by sharing revenge fantasies that would cross any number of professional boundaries.
Yet Mar holds deep affection for her vocation and her young charges. And her exhausted exasperation, expressed as it is in poems, reverbs as sorrowful empathy and insight, such as when she makes a self-reflective study of a student who “will draw / massive looming sad faces over and over / on any paper you give me because // I am the only girl.” She does likewise in “Look at Pictures, Illustrations, Charts, and Graphs,” a story-in-verse of the visual aids, presented by tongue-clucking administrators, that reduce her life’s work and students’ identities to micro-data:
Projected on the wall, a map, each school a dot. Colored in codes of the standardized test: there’s basic, taxi-yellowed
proficient, advanced, the colors of wealth. But not my school nor each nearby. In our neighbor- hoods, fire burns, blood pools:
below basic, far below basic.
Mar deepens her analysis, with full-throated frustration, in the third chapter, Examination. First comes the sharp, sarcastic send-up “The Key to Saving American Education,” which begins…
Fire the lazy, the sloppy, the weak, Fire the meek, those without classroom management, without class, without room for lesson planning in their busy social lives. The angry, the time-biding almost-retirees, the bitter. Fire the (we know they will be) quitter.
…and ends, as one might expect…
Go first for the unionists, But not all at once, someone might notice. Fire the criers, the needy, any who fuss. Fire the ones the kids really trust. Fire those who hate the testing. And those who teach to the test. When you’re done, fire the rest.
She then expands her critique of the treatment of school personnel into a near-encyclopedic cataloging (presciently) of 2020–21’s anxiety and rage: violent, misperception-driven confrontations between Asian, Black, and white communities (see: “When Someone screams the N-word from the Next Campsite”); anguished reflections on the murder of LGBTQIA individuals (see: “After the Pulse Orlando Shooting, My Wife Asks If We Can Eat at Chick-fil-A”); urban housing disparities (see: “Views” and “San Francisco: Boomtown”); and the persistent and pernicious American custom of taking wage workers for granted (see: “Blazer”). Each of these themes has presented itself throughout the book, but Examination is what it claims: a final test of the readers’ comprehension of what they have learned and what is at stake. For terrible and necessary reasons, Mar’s poems arrived right on time in this frayed year-plus.
Mar has many literary influences, among them Gwendolyn Brooks (a crop of new neighborhood toughs show up at a modern Golden Shovel in “Ask for Help”) and Elizabeth Bishop (“Ask Questions” is a latter-day “Geography III” in more ways than two). But equal in influence are the lingual modes of researchers and policy-makers, as well as her students’ themselves; her poems code-switch and cross-pollinate urban sociology, classical lyricism, and world-wise smack with a deft, inquisitive approach to each.
For this reason, I didn’t absorb Mar’s words exclusively as poetry, but as poetic descendants of Jonathan Kozol’s Death at an Early Age, an immersive treatise from 1964 that described Boston’s failure to offer its most vulnerable public school students a humane experience of growing up. Similarly, Special Education is a collection of poem-tales and autobiographic truths delivered by a writer who has heard every expert opinion on her profession and identity and determined for herself, shrewdly and with practitioner’s clout, which ones hold merit. Her great power is how she convinces us of the same.
