“The basic notion of writing is that the author creates this work that has enough life to start talking back to you. Its always saying the same thing: ‘Make me more real.’”

For students in Upper School English teacher Matt Laufer’s poetry elective, the source behind a number of the poems they read this year became more real on May 18, when prize-winning Chicago poet and short story writer Stuart Dybek, currently a teacher at Northwestern University, came to Parker. Dybek (pronounced DIH-bihk) spoke about his experiences as a writer, answered questions from the students, and read aloud two yet-to-be published poems, “Lesson” and “Iguana Song of The Children,” from his next collection, which currently has for a working title both “No Wake Zone” and “Vis,” for visibility

Describing how the island location affects the content, Dybek said, “The book that I’m writing gives me permission to write in a different way I did.” The poems are about his experiences years ago on the island of Saint Thomas in the Caribbean.

After graduating from Loyola University and getting his Master of Arts in Literature, Dybek spent two years in Saint Thomas teaching poetry at the Afro Caribbean School. “It was built on landfill, our overhead fans didn’t work, there was no air conditioning, and no books,” Dybek said. “The feeling of community in the classroom was incredible. We would create our own books and then study them.”  

Laufer began exchanging emails with Dybek after he attended a workshop led by Associate Professor of Instruction and Weinberg College of Arts and Science (WCAS) Advisor at Northwestern Bill Savage. Savage taught Dybek’s poetry at the workshop and mentioned that Dybek was generous about visiting schools. According to Laufer, Savage “suggested that if we just contact him, he would be likely to come to Parker.” After the first email, Dybek was quick to respond, and they began to set the event up.

“I want for the students to realize poets are real human beings,” Laufer said before Dybek’s visit.  “They are neither strange, gifted magicians, nor robots who just emotionlessly bang out poems.”

At the beginning of the year, the class read Dybek’s “Streets In Their Own Ink,” a 2004 collection of poems centered around the neighborhoods of Chicago. After reading this collection, the students came to class with poems they had written about the neighborhoods in which they live.

During the questions period, several students–all Parker seniors–asked questions about the writing process, which led Dybek to reference William Carlos Williams’s famous dictum “No ideas but in things.” “One of the things I am always trying to do is write a story smarter than I am,” Dybek said. When discussing his poem “Bath” he said, “When I wrote that poem, I wasn’t thinking that 15 years later after I wrote it, immigration was going to be a huge subject, but that’s what happens when you have all ideas in things. Those pieces are immediately going to have resonances that you never even imagined.”

Dybek’s visit resonated with students. “It was a great class period, and Dybek gave a lot of great advice to the seniors in the class,” senior Chris Flores said. “He changed my way of viewing literature and poetry when he said that he writes poetry that is smarter than he is, and he writes about topics that aren’t usually written about.”

Other themes resonated with different students. “He was really soft spoken,” senior Eliza Fischer said. “He talked about his polish family, and how that affected his poetry. He also said that he doesn’t like writing poems as much as he likes editing them.”

Throughout the class, Dybek kept up a common theme of life in literature. “The single thing I’m always looking for is life on the page,” Dybek said. “I’m not looking for great ideas or to sound like somebody else. That feeling of a piece having its own life is what I’m after.”