My Friend's Got This Problem, Mr. Candler by Mel Glenn
"My Friend's Got This Problem, Mr. Candler" by Mel Glenn is a poignant collection of interrelated poems that offers a window into the lives of high school students grappling with various personal dilemmas. The narrative unfolds through the lens of Mark Candler, a dedicated guidance counselor who, while managing his own life, prioritizes the urgent needs of his students. Each poem presents a unique voice, shedding light on the confusion, pain, and aspirations that characterize adolescence. The students candidly express their struggles with issues such as parental relationships, academic pressures, and the complexities of emerging identities.
A notable aspect of the work is its structure; it is divided into five chapters, corresponding to a single week, allowing readers to engage with the students' stories in a cohesive manner. The poems are characterized by their brevity and emotional depth, often concluding with a powerful insight that underscores the characters' unresolved challenges. Accompanied by black-and-white photographs, the collection enhances its impact by turning abstract voices into relatable individuals, creating a profound multimedia experience. Ultimately, Glenn's work serves as a testament to the importance of listening to young voices, portraying their experiences with empathy and authenticity.
My Friend's Got This Problem, Mr. Candler by Mel Glenn
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1991
Type of work: Poetry
The Work
“I’m here/Like always.” Thus closes Mel Glenn’s 1991 collection of interrelated poems. The lines are spoken by the overworked, if infinitely patient, high school guidance counselor, Mark Candler. It is Friday afternoon. Just as Mr. Candler is about to close the office for the week—and take his car in for a muffler repair and himself to the dentist—a student has appeared at his doorway, and the dedicated Mr. Candler quietly understands that his own errands, indeed his own life, must wait a bit. Here is another student whose crisis deserves airing, whose voice deserves to be heard.
Mr. Candler’s generous response defines Glenn’s own democratic vision, born of his long commitment to the classroom: the conviction that every adolescent voice deserves an audience. The name Glenn selected for his guidance counselor—Candler—provides some insight. It suggests a profession that provides illumination, here the counselor’s patient ear. No student problem presented in the collection is resolved; the therapy here is honest confrontation rather than treatment. Because each voice speaks in monologue, because the voices never directly speak to each other, Glenn creates an unnerving sense of distance, underscoring the unsettling isolation of adolescence with voices that never receive an answer. These are unsettling poems that raise dilemmas without quick-fix remedies. Indeed, the voices emerge, speak, and then dissolve back into the narrative text, never to be heard again. It is the impact of their collective voice that creates the work’s emotional impact—the steady accumulation of dilemma that reveals the angst, confusion, joys, and fears of adolescence.
For more than one hundred pages, Glenn’s reader listens to students who might otherwise pass unnoticed in the overcrowded halls of any urban high school, students coaxed into confession by an appointment with the guidance counselor. Each is rescued from anonymity, given a name that serves as the poem’s title. In five chapters, each given over to a single day’s appointments in a single work week, the poetry creates vignettes as each student, in turn, makes a complicated, often painful turn to the mirror. Although some adults speak (usually anxious or frustrated parents), the voices are largely students, struggling against their own reticence, against their own distrust of revelation. With slice-of-life honesty and a journalistic immediacy, the teenagers voice what bothers them and indirectly reveal the degree of their pain. They speak of their teachers’ indifference, of breakups and the confusion of new infatuations, the dread of exams, troubles with parents, struggles with poverty, and, most poignantly, of their dreams of success and the heartbreaking ease with which dreams become hard choices, the awful finality of the road never taken.
Structurally, Glenn’s poems, seldom more than twenty lines, favor a sonnetlike closing, a kicker that draws out the fullest—and more unsettling—implications of the character’s revelation. For instance, a character still terribly hung over from his first drinking experience closes by anticipating the weekend, the lesson of such dead-end excess apparently unlearned; in another, a girl is tormented by the sexual harassment she is receiving in the card store where she works and assumes “real work” cannot be like that; in another, a girl relishes shopping with her father’s new girlfriend but closes by confessing she could never call her “mother,” foretelling a complicated emotional showdown. Coherence comes from the device of the guidance counselor as audience, the listener who never interrupts, never lightens the anxiety with patronizing platitudes. We simply listen, reading itself becoming a gesture of compassion and a strategy of inevitable identification. Such realism is heightened by the accompanying black-and-white photographs of Michael J. Bernstein (a colleague of Glenn’s), each an unposed, unretouched headshot, a teen staring unnervingly into the camera lens. The text thus becomes a multimedia experience in which initially voices, abstract and intangible, are recovered into form (the poetry) and then revitalized into people (the photographs).
Bibliography
Children’s Literature Review, pp. 84-95. Detroit: Gale, 1999.
Copeland, Jeffrey S. Speaking of Poets: Interviews with Poets Who Write for Children and Young Adults. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.
Lesesne, Teri S. “Mel Glenn.” In Writers for Young Adults, edited by Ted Hipple. Supplement 1. New York: Scribner, 2000.
“Mel Glenn.” In Contemporary Authors: New Revised Series. Vol. 127. Detroit: Gale, 1989.
“Mel Glenn.” In Twentieth-Century Young Adult Writers. Detroit: St. James Press, 1994.
Mel Glenn Web site. www.melglenn.com.
Thomas, Joseph T., Jr. “Mel Glenn and Arnold Adoff: The Poetics of Power in the Adolescent Voice-Lyric.” Style 35, no. 3 (Fall, 2001): 486-497.