At St. Albans Lunch, the Best Poet Clears the Table

The best poets clear the table. That is the only school assignment I know where talent is punished with dishes.

It is also very hard. Write too well and you are carrying plates. Write so badly that it becomes funny, and you may have written something good, and you are carrying plates.

St. Albans takes real poetry seriously too. In 2024 its literary-arts magazine, Gyre, with 26 pieces of student writing, won a first-place award from the American Scholastic Press Association.

The table assignments do other work. A student who arrived in the fall of 2016 wrote, years later, about how nervous he had been: about fitting in, and about being a young Black boy joining a predominantly white school. On his first day, a classmate walked up, introduced himself and asked his name. He had seen it on the lunch table sheet. They would be sitting together. The classmate showed him the table-assignment board, walked him to his first class and became his first friend there.

A lunch table sheet on a bulletin board. Nobody designs that as a kindness. It turns into one anyway, when a twelve-year-old reads it and goes looking for the name.

We tried the worst-poem game at dinner. The rule was that the best poet does the dishes. The middle one wrote two lines about a sock. The eldest wrote a haiku about the dog that was, unfortunately, beautiful. My wife wrote a limerick that did not rhyme, on purpose, and won.

I wrote four lines about a parking space. I was trying to be terrible. The table voted, three to one, that it was the best of the night. I have no idea how. I did the dishes. The youngest dried, because, she said, her poem had been second best.