Poems and rhizomes

Mark Krueger

Last month in this column I ended an exploration of the meaning of place with two poems and a brief explanation of why I like to reflect on Child and Youth Care, express myself, and find meaning in poems. The movement, juxtaposition of time, and sense of meaning between the lines of poems helps satisfy my curiosity about the work.

Recently, I read more about rhizomes in an article in the journal of Qualitative Inquiry (QI) June 2008, issue, The Narrative Construction of the Self: Selfhood as Rhizomatic Story. I had been reintroduced just a few weeks earlier to the rhizome by Hans Skott Myhre in his writing on youth as a creative force, and here it was again. In Skott-Myhre’s book, Youth and Subculture as Creative Force, I saw youth unfolding as unique developing beings in creative and multiple forms without restraints of stereotypes and development stages. The Belgium authors in QI (Sirmign, Devlieger and Loots) defined rhizome (a phenomenon found in the work of French philosophers Deleuze and Guattari) as: an underground root system, a dynamic open, decentralized system that branches out to all sides unpredictably and horizontally.

According to the QI authors rhizomatic self-stories have multiple entry points and constantly change. We define ourselves in the contexts of certain time or situation in conversations and interviews. This resonates for me with the way I juxtapose prose poems or sketches in writing my self story, a work in progress shown in reflexive time that moves forward and back. In my youth work classes, we do something similar when we share moments (short vignettes or prose poems) from our youth. We question and think about how these moments as metaphors for our stories at a particular point at time, and that the story might take a different shape if we entered it in a different moment. This helps us have empathy because it gives us a better understanding of how stories change.

Poetic/rhizomatic thinking also resonates with my notion of youth work as a modern dance that is improvised to the multiple rhythms and unpredictable directions and meanings of the work – an existential hum or jazz perhaps. Often as we move through a day with youth we find ourselves in unscripted moments that require our ability to improvise to the conditions and sounds we face and hear. Themes from the research, theory, and practice are undercurrents that take off in different directions during the dance. This is not to suggest that youth work doesn’t require planning (choreographing) and interactions, programs and interventions geared to youths' unique developmental needs and strengths, but rather that much of the time as a process of self(s) in action it is helpful to understand and think of the work this way.

The unpredictable nature of poetic, rhizomatic thinking also supports the notion that relational Child and Youth Care practice is a way of being in the world with youth that is best defined in prepositions and verbs, such as act, do, with, of, in, be etc. rather than absolutes, nouns, acronyms, and slogans that ultimately become stereotypes for relationships and development.

Once we name (label) something there is a tendency to fit youth into the name, or for it to be a fixed way of thinking, and this increases the danger of making youth subjectums rather than subjectus, as Skott-Myhre writes. Naming of course is unavoidable, but we have to be careful or we risk adopting a linear perspective fixed in time and space that inadvertently or perhaps intentionally leaves or assumes youth and relationships with no individual agency of their own. They become the objects of our political, social, economic, and emotional good/bad intentions.

In poetic and rhizomatic thinking together with youth, workers enter and change their stories in the present in spaces and places as they work in time that moves forward and back where events take on meaning in their occurrence and their reflection on them. They are not fixed on naming the work, but on being in it with youth without fearing its complexity and randomness.

Development can progress in predictable and unpredictable directions with their interactions fitting more with youth’s capacity and readiness in the lived experience.

In the following poem I reflect on youth, my own and others, in what might be called “reflexive rhizomatic” time. Some of the fragments have been presented in different versions before in this column:

Of Youth (4 Fragments)

George Oppen wrote in the beginning of Boy’s Room:

A friend saw the rooms
Of Keats and Shelly
At the Lake, and saw “they were just
Boys' rooms and was moved”

After reading Camus
with the sun
setting below the western trees
to Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man
and falling asleep
to Appalachian Springs

Their words return in
a crane’s haunting call
echoing across the
the still surface
of the waters “up north”

Back in the city
a father walks away from
his teenage daughter
who is sitting behind
him at a picnic table hand
slid up the side of her face

he does not turn back

resolute in the
spring dance of drift
his steps quicken

“Nobody wants it
on their garage door”

“but it’s art”

“that’s questionable”

I don’t care what you think

this is our court
the hip-hopster tells
the judges and neighbors
sitting in review of
the new impression (ists)

working in the new outdoor salons
on traffic signs
brick walls and park benches

still reaching like Cezanne
for a mountain
and leaving behind
patches of light and dark
on urban landscapes

“go to the zoo and look
at an animal for days weeks if
you have to until
you can see it,“
Sculptor Rodin told the poet Rilke

Before my appearance

What did the conductor
see from the roof ?

the seamstress
in the corner of her eye

the girl behind the wheel?

the boy over the handle bars?

the young woman who
smiled coquettishly?

the man with an eye
on the target?

“Travailler, travailler, travailler!”
Rodin shouted
and Rilke looked until
he heard the silence
of the panther’s eyelids closing

In this form of rhizomatic, poetic, fragmentation I see myself in youth work in reflexive thought. My quest to know self, the work, and the other is deepened in the process of writing and thinking. I move from a haunting reoccurring reflection on my youth, to youth in society and back again. I long for youth and wonder about what life was like before my youth existed while exploring youth’s existence in my community. Evoked between the lines are many questions, images, and ideas about being in youth work. My thirst and curiosity (empathy) is quenched for a moment before I move on to the next story or poem that is written when being and doing are once again together and apart in my practice. This too is Child and Youth Care work.