Making "What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade" by Brad Aaron Modlin

 

What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade

Mrs. Nelson explained how to stand still and listen
to the wind, how to find meaning in pumping gas,

how peeling potatoes can be a form of prayer. She took
questions on how not to feel lost in the dark.

After lunch she distributed worksheets
that covered ways to remember your grandfather's

voice. Then the class discussed falling asleep
without feeling you had forgotten to do something else—

something important—and how to believe
the house you wake in is your home. This prompted

Mrs. Nelson to draw a chalkboard diagram detailing
how to chant the Psalms during cigarette breaks,

and how not to squirm for sound when your own thoughts
are all you hear; also, that you have enough.

The English lesson was that I am
is a complete sentence.

And just before the afternoon bell, she made the math equation
look easy. The one that proves that hundreds of questions,

and feeling cold, and all those nights spent looking
for whatever it was you lost, and one person

add up to something.

Brad Aaron Modlin

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What a poem. It makes me feel at once hopeful and sad, sweet and desolate, longing and content with not knowing. Many lines tug at me and make me cry—in a way that feels like the small child inside of me crying—because she's being seen.

I'm delighted to release this new broadside today of the poem “What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade” that's been many months in the making. Some that I expected, and some that I didn't fathom.

This poem arrived in my hands by unusual route. A customer emailed last fall asking whether I'd be interested in printing it, and if so how we could go about it. I was caught by surprise on my first read through—I didn't like the specificity of the naming of Mrs. Nelson from the outset but by the end of the poem I was in love with her and felt the soothe of all the many teachers I had in public school who cared to teach about big life things. Basic life things. Hard-to-know-unless-you've-lost-a-lot life things. My young self had plenty of experience with loss and no words for it.

At any rate, I liked the poem and it happened to show up in my inbox on a Tuesday so I read it for Poetry Lunch and got surprised again, choking up part way through and having to wipe away tears. I wrote back and said yes, let's print.

I settled into permissions work, connecting with the poet and the publisher who both gave lovely yeses themselves. Then I discovered the poem was in the Poetry Unbound anthology and further, that it was the first ever episode of that now-hallowed podcast. Fall turned into winter and I thought about type and format, selected Kennerly and Stymie and got to work setting.

Mid-winter I had a sudden scary health thing that turned into an even scarier thing over the course of a couple of months. My attention to this project sloughed off as I spent more and more time in medical waiting rooms and on hold trying to schedule appointments. After many tests, second and third opinions, and a major surgery I emerged with a cancer diagnosis and a pronouncement of being cured all in the same phone call.

Strange days to say the least. All the while this poem sat waiting for me patiently and I kept chipping away at the design, feeling more and more frustrated because I liked the 9x12 format but l also loved the type forms including the giant titling but could not get it to fit. Yet it looked so forlorn when I sized up the sheet. I kept walking away and back and away and then one day I moved one cut-out crap proof 90 degrees and suddenly it sung.

I designed this broadside to be portrait-oriented but I really like how it looks horizontally as well. Of course you can't read the poem easily that way but the lines hang off the title beautifully. Reaching all different lengths, like threads of searching, all ending up at the same point.

We never know what the days will hold or what each season will bring. Loss always leads to so much I couldn't see, I can't help but be grateful for it. Whichever way you count, I hope this poem helps you feel all you add up to.

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About Brad Aaron Modlin

Brad Aaron Modlin is the Reynolds Endowed Chair of Creative Writing & a professor at University of Nebraska, Kearney. His book, Everyone at This Party Has Two Names won the Cowles Poetry Prize. You can read more on his website here.

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Links

Get the print: What You Missed That Day You Were Absent from Fourth Grade.

Get the book: Everyone at This Party Has Two Names, which is where the poem came from originally. You can also find it in the anthology Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World.

Listen to me read the poem on Poetry Lunch here.