18 pages • 36 minutes read
Aimee NezhukumatathilOn Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2018A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Literary Context
While no critic has defined it as a movement, several American poets between 2000-2020 turned to closer examinations of the natural world in their work, to comment on and correlate them to the human experience. While natural metaphor has had a place in poetry since its inception, there are times when the environmental world takes center stage to recall a memory in wonder and awe. This can be seen in poems from this decade by Nezhukumatathil as well as Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Maggie Smith, and Ilya Kaminsky. In their work, the poets use nature as a touchstone to bring the speakers to a sense of inclusion within the wider world. These poets consistently acknowledge the brutality of life and nature but encourage their speakers to find hope in it as well, whether in the ocean, the garden, or the field populated by hawks and horses. Nezhukumatathil in particular undertakes the making of such correlations with the fervor of a naturalist. While she’ll alter personal facts for the good of the narrative, she won’t change scientific ones: “[All] the science and nature elements I include in my poems have been triple checked and/or extensively researched to be as accurate as possible. I’m not at all interested in fudging something just for the sake of music or sound, for example. I want very much for people to learn about plants and animals they might normally not have expected to learn about from a book of poems.” (Smith, August. “Interview with Aimee Nezhukumatathil: The nature of poetry.” BookPage, 2018). The facts that Nezhukumatathil researches are arranged to add to the poem’s message, enlivening the reader’s sensory experience.
Scientific Context
Nezhukumatathil’s use of well-researched scientific fact in her poetry is well-documented, and her most recent book is the best-selling A World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments (2020), a collection of essays on the natural world. In “On Listening to Your Teacher Take Attendance,” specific scientific details regarding the sea scallop enhance the reader’s understanding. In the poem, the speaker tells herself to “picture all the eyes as if your classroom / is one big scallop” (Lines 12-13), and later, one can liken the pencil case to the parts of a scallop. Marine bivalve mollusks, commonly called scallops, are located in most oceans but never in fresh water. Scallops have a rough exterior consisting of two pieces (valves) shaped like fans—the classic seashell shape—that are connected by a muscular hinge. In this poem, Nezhukumatathil concentrates on some key aspects of the scallops: their eyes, their tentacles, the way they open, and their capacity to make pearls. A scallop has a ring of small blue eyes, up to 200 in number, embedded around the edge of their mantles, on the inside of the outer ridge. The scallops’ “icy blues” (Line 13) are echoed in the classmates’ eyes as they turn to stare at the speaker.
Scallops feed on plankton that come in through their tentacles, so they appear to hold their mouths like an open purse. This same open-mouthed image is captured later in the poem via the pencil cases, which can be seen as unzipped pouches, the pencils standing in for the scallop’s noticeable tentacles. Inside the pencil cases is “a pink pearl eraser” (Line 22), which alludes to the scallop’s ability to produce pearls out of microscopic objects trapped within its folds. The primary predator to the scallop is a sea star, which in her memory, the speaker notices is the same size as her “outstretched hand” (Line 17). The specific scientific information regarding scallops deeply informs the poem, enhancing its messages.
