2022 Post #6 -- The Possibilities Inhering in "If"

by Xochitl Bentley

Sometimes, the human imagination can seem landlocked: accustomed to thinking of experiences in terms of peaks and valleys and slippery slopes. What happens, if instead of grounding ourselves in language entrenched in terrestrial terms, we submerge ourselves in metaphors related to the sea?

Aimee Nezhukumatathil, in her poem titled “Invitation” from her poetry book, Oceanic, repositions the vantage point from which we tend to direct our gaze. Instead of looking up, we are invited to glance seaward, where “lessons bubble up if you know / where to look.” As Nezhukumatathil brings alive descriptions of elusive squid and spinning narwhals, the poem unfolds in a series of beckoning hand waves, moving us closer to rarely seen sea creatures and ocean encounters, moving us beyond our comfortably familiar routines.

Once students have read the poem, we might ask them to consider how the poem is structured by sentences containing “if”—how Nezhukumatathil stretches our sense of possibility through conditional sentences that imagine delightful outcomes if we dare take a risk.

We can zoom in on one example from the poem to help students consider the effect of this type of sentence construction:



The sea imagery found in this conditional sentence contains a promise—if we dare to push ourselves beyond our comfort zones, whatever they may be in life, we might discover something previously unimagined, maybe even about ourselves.

Your students can explore what it means for them to dive beyond the familiar by creating a simple T-chart. To get started, ask them to list what the poem’s imagery invites them to do on the left side. Then ask them to list what behavior or mindsets accepting that invitation would discourage on the right side.




Then model combining the two in a conditional sentence using “if” as my student does below:

If I slow down,
I will glimpse a jellyfish umbrella light up its sky,
who can teach me how to float and pulse at an easy speed.

Through paying attention to the poem’s conditional clauses, we can better appreciate the generative quality of the poem’s invitation: new mental terrain opens up, not grounded in the familiar and the routine. It might be fun to ask students to share their sentences in a wraparound (or invite the risk-takers in the room!).

Further Reading:



Xochitl Bentley is a high school English teacher and NBCT in Los Angeles, CA. She is a Co-director of the Cal State Northridge Writing Project and a contributing writer at Moving Writers. You can find her on Twitter @dispatches_b222.