“A List of Praises”

I’ve been battling an unusually stubborn bout of kidney stones as of late, and thus have spent a lot of time not blogging, or writing, or doing much, really.  It’s at times like these that I come at least a bit closer to understanding Dickinson’s famous line: “After great pain a formal feeling comes –”.  There’s a kind of focus that comes with the kind of stillness that comes with pain.  Lately, I’ve turned that focus to the small beauties of the world, the tiny pleasures, the things that may seem commonplace but when viewed through another lens can take your breath away.  A picture post, then, seemed necessary.

I start with a photo from a trip I took to Mammoth Cave around this time last year.  I start with this photo now not only because of its general awesomeosity, but also because, apparently, this is why I’m having such a time with kidney stones — the karst geology which makes giant caves possible also gives the water here an extremely high concentration of calcium and phosphorous — and thus, my kidneys stones.  I’m infinitely fascinated by this and will probably blather on about it way too much at some point soon.

The entrance to Mammoth Cave

The top of the purple people bridge -- or, rather, the Newport Southbank Bridge, which connects Newport, Kentucky, and Cincinnati, Ohio.

This is proof that I walked all the way across the bridge. And back. With no cane. At normal speed. Hooray!

Aw, shucks. Golly.

"I wish I could bake a cake filled with rainbows and smiles and everyone would eat and be happy... "

This pile of books will eventually, hopefully, be assembled into a course packet by magical elves with magical elven shoes.

An illustration from the back of a student's mid-term. Awesome.

Another mid-term illustration. Another awesome.

Ah, the jelly bean. Specifically, the Jelly Belly. How delicious are you?

The back of the Carnegie Center, which is probably my favorite place in Lexington (well, that doesn't sell shoes or wind-up toys).

There are these gorgeous trees on campus that leave gorgeous red leaves all over.

Alice B. Toklas slows her wrathful destruction of the world long enough to make this impossibly cute face.

 

 

“I have been her kind.”

Anne Sexton was born on this day in 1928, and I had to write a post, however brief it may be, to celebrate her birthday.  I’ve been drawn to her work for a very long time — to her courage, her power, her ability to shred through any shred of shame and speak, and speak, and speak, no matter the subject, the taboo, the person telling her not to speak, the prevailing sense of propriety, or the fear she must have often felt (though, perhaps, I comfort myself by telling myself that she must have often felt fear).  Though there are certainly parts of Sexton’s biography which bother and disturb me, so much so that, months after purchasing Middlebrook’s biography, I still haven’t brought myself to read it, there is still her work — and her voice.  It’s through Sexton’s work that I first gained an understanding of the concept of “voice,” and also the pure power of the poetic voice to enrapture, bewitch, and draw in an audience, to make them hear even if what was being said wasn’t pleasant — and even if the far-less-than-pleasant thing being said was, at the same time, essential to hear — and therefore difficult to hear.  It’s only now that I’ve also begun to appreciate her craft, how skillfully she measures her words and how beautifully she beads them together even when taking on the most disturbing subject matter.

The Poetry Foundation’s page on Sexton is excellent.  I’m posting one of Sexton’s poems here (check out a recording of her reading it here – hearing Sexton’s voice is not to be missed), one which is one of my favorites if only because of its power, and of its power to empower women who otherwise may not be able to find a voice.

Her Kind

I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.

 

“The Soul unto itself — / is an imperial friend — / Or the most agonizing Spy — / An Enemy — could send –”

When I signed up for my first self-designed conference course at Sarah Lawrence, my proposal was at first rejected — I’d titled the class something like “Poetry Conference Class,” and the rejection form stated that the title wasn’t descriptive enough.  Too boring.  I then began to plow the fields of my brain for a more exciting title, thinking all the while that such a process was ridiculous.  It became a bit of a joke, as I took more conference classes and began to challenge myself to think of the most ridiculous title possible — something which, to this day, makes me a little squeamish when I order my transcripts.  I think that the title I finally chose that first semester was something like “Unconscious Associations: Poetry and the Mind.”  Though the title may have been a joke, the study I undertook that semester, with the amazing and brilliant Kate Knapp Johnson, was far from a joke, and what I read of poetry, philosophy, and psychology (Jung especially) was, in fact, the basis of what I do and believe as a writer to this day.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how living as a writer has as much to do with what one does know as it does with what one doesn’t know.  It seems to me that in order to be a good writer, one has to be comfortable working in the dark, with ideas that are not yet clear, with the faith that there will be light, there will be clarity.  These thoughts relate to Keats‘ idea of negative capability, something which I admit not understanding for years — I probably still don’t totally understand the concept, but it does shed some light on the dark field which we as writers wander.  In a letter to his brothers written on the 21rst of December, 1817, Keats describes a conversation he had with a friend after he saw Richard III; in the letter, Keats describes an idea which occurred to him:

…at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. . . .

In one of those grand moments of synchronicity, I happened to pick up Alice Fulton’s Feeling as a Foreign Language yesterday, and began re-reading “Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook” (ah!  And there is my good man Jung again — a coincidence?).  In this essay, Fulton describes the moment of writing in a way that seems to dovetail Keats’ idea: “When I’m lost in the Thou-art-That of composition, the membranes dividing each from each dissolve; the separate self vanishes into an undifferentiated state.”  What all of this means, for me, at least, is that in the moment of writing, of creation, the self in some sense dissolves, or must dissolve, so that the creature can become the creator, so that we can put our “irritable reaching[s] after fact and reason” to the side and dwell, for a moment, in what Dickinson spoke of as “possibility” — unknowing, unseeing, uncertainty.

What this means in the real world is this: I worked for nearly a year and a half on my manuscript about the witch trials, drafting and doodling and furiously reading and researching, without knowing that I was working on a manuscript about the witch trials.  I’ve been writing essays for nearly a year and a half now, but it was only a few weeks ago, in conversation with a dear friend, that I realized what the essays are really about: the undefinable moments of human experience which are beyond our control, experiences which, I must now say, seem quite like the very process of writing itself.  We do, but we do not know what we are doing; we move, but we do not know where we are heading.  It’s at these times that I think back to that first conference course at Sarah Lawrence, and how, upon reading in Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections his idea that the subconscious itself is a process, that I was greatly moved, though I didn’t know why.

I’ve been part of a number of conversations about how poetry classes don’t impart skills that can pass on to classes in other areas, and I’ve fought passionately against this idea, using language as my weapon and claiming that poetry teaches concision, rhythm, composition, attention to detail — that poetry is an argument unto itself.  I’ve never argued what I feel most deeply, which is that it is exactly the mystery that makes poetry seem devoid of skill that is most instructive.  The dark field in which the poet wanders is really the field in which we all wander: the world, the body, the self — all are, in the end, unknowable.  The heart goes on with its work, and then one day quits.  The mind churns like a happy machine, and then suddenly breaks down.  We marry or don’t marry.  We are hired or laid off.  We find ourselves in station and locations, and don’t understand the process that lead us there.  We love the person who can’t love us back, or we can’t love the person we should love, and we don’t know why.  We wake and say to ourselves, without knowing how we’ve come to the conclusion, that this is not what we want.  The soul and the self and the world move, and we do not put these things into movement, nor do we understand how or why they move.  It seems that the greatest skill one could ever learn is to navigate this darkness — or, rather, to learn that the darkness is not navigable, not understandable, and to learn how to live in it nonetheless — and, moreover, to learn how to love it.

“Sir Humphrey Davy / Was not fond of gravy.”

This is a post promising another post.  I have one simmering in my mind — negative capability!  Jung!  Poetry! — but I also have an avalanche of papers to grade.  In the meantime, I thought I’d give a peak into my poetry workshop.  We’re discussing meter at the moment, which always seems to be the most intimidating and frustrating subject to cover in a poetry class.  As such, I always try to introduce two important forms: the clerihew and the limerick.  Somehow, meter isn’t as frustrating when it’s used to make fun of people.   Observe this clerihew, by Stephanie Boxx, a student in my poetry class, which made me laugh when I greatly needed to laugh:

Emma Bolden
to her cats was beholden.
She thought they perfect could be-
until on her best green boots they did pee.

See?  Poetry’s not so stuffy after all.  Though I do wish those green boots were spotless …

Not the offending feline in question, but still perhaps the best photo of one of my cats.

“Powder exists in Charcoal — / Before it exists in Fire.”

There’s a beautiful story about Emily Dickinson — and forgive me, as I’m telling this from memory (nearly every page of

My favorite Emily Dickinson poster -- Penelope Dullagan got her hair color down!

my copy of Richard B. Sewell’s The Life of Emily Dickinson is dog-earred, and, testimony to my love of Dickinson that may be, it’s not good for locating stories — though I think this one also appears in Adrienne Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home,” now that I think of it –).  When her niece visited, Dickinson took her upstairs and pretended to lock her bedroom door, saying something to the effect of “Martha (or Matty — perhaps Matty), this is freedom.”  And so in one simple phrase the cultural mythos surrounding Dickinson dissolves: it was Dickinson’s choice to stay in the attic, and it was a choice that she had to make for her own freedom.  Had she not, and had she taken on her expected role as a woman in the Dickinson household, she wouldn’t have time to write — by locking herself away, she gave herself the gift of freedom.

It’s a refrain that’s been sung time and time again, from Dickinson to Virginia Woolf (whose A Room of One’s Own has been sadly languishing on my bedside table, abandoned for Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, which was so terrifying I had to speed-read to the finish): in order to create art, one must have money and time.  Money and time.  Though there are, admittedly, many downsides to the academization of poetry, there is also one significant upside: the poet’s place in the academy ensures them time — or, rather, the promise of time.  Though the swirling Dyson-vacuum-esque chaos of the semester may send the poet scrambling for time to scribble down even just a line or two, there is always winter break, and summer break, and the promise of sabbatical, if one is lucky enough to make one’s way up the academic ladder.  Sometimes the promise of time is enough.  But the other thing — money.  How to solve that?

The usual argument reads as such, nearly a neat little syllogism: art is an activity of leisure.  One must have money to have leisure.  Therefore, one must have money to make art.  When I hear this argument, I can’t help but make the same response: Okay.  That might be true.  But, why? It seems that in our culture, the act of making art and the state of being moneyed are inextricably linked.  A simple glance through the AWP Chronicle or Poets and Writers or, really, any writing-related magazine or Website shows this to be true.  There are workshops which will help you to strengthen your work, often in exotic locations, near beaches and tiki bars: but there’s a very high cost for admission.  There are conferences where you can hear about aesthetics, meet others who’ve taken the same route in life as you, make necessary connections for furthering your career and your craft: but there’s a prohibitive cost for admission.  And on it goes — even the colleges known for their creative writing programs, from Bennington to Middlebury to Sarah Lawrence, have prohibitive tuition.  Even the thing artists most need to climb that academic ladder and achieve that grand promise of time — a book published with an academically-accepted press — is prohibitively expensive: many poets spend upwards of $250 a month in admissions fees.  To make art, this all seems to say, one must make money — or have money — and a great deal of it.  Okay.  That might be true.  But why?

It seems, to say the very least, unfair.  It seems like an incredibly unfair assumption that only the moneyed can make good art — and that good art must be done in leisure.  And it seems, most of all, that this is an incredibly dangerous assumption, treating art as something extra and unnecessary, an extravagance, like foie gras or Beluga caviar or some delicate and decadent desert.  If art is an extravagance, then it can be eliminated, and without a repurcussion — again, an incredibly dangerous idea.

The thing is that this worldview doesn’t include or accept the idea that art can — or should — be an integral part of life, that art should be accessible to the masses, not just the moneyed few.  The mere history of poetry supports this idea.  Yes, there were patrons and payers, and people who paid for poems, and paid artists to work for them.  Yes.  But these were not the only people who made poetry.  Some of the most beautiful and complicated forms of poetry originated as work songs.  The villanelle originated with farmhands — the word itself meant something like “country song” for a very long time.  Most cultures developed work songs for different types of work, from weaving to harvesting to bee-tending.  The mere fact of this proves that art shouldn’t be limited to the rich — and that art has a use, an importance, and a very great one at that, outside of the upper classes.

The question — and one I’ve been thinking a great deal about as of late — is how to break our assumptions and our cultural mode, how to bring art back into the world, where it belongs.  The steps I’ve thought up so far are small.  Very small.  But I have hope in small steps, and hope that others will take similar steps.  Dickinson herself, of course, said it best:

A Man may make a Remark—
In itself—a quiet thing
That may furnish the Fuse unto a Spark
In dormant nature—lain—

Let us deport—with skill—
Let us discourse—with care—
Powder exists in Charcoal—
Before it exists in Fire.

Public Like A Frog: Part One

If my somewhat hazy memory serves me right, back in the day when I was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence

Smells Like Teen Spirit

College, we had cheerleaders for one event and one event only: the poetry slam.  Granted, these weren’t your ordinary cheerleaders, looking more like the anarchist cheerleaders in the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” than those at your average college football game, but I still think that this shows the raucous enthusiasm the student body showed for, of all things, poetry.  I know that there is a great deal of debate about the place of slam poetry in the literary world, and a great deal of denigration of its worth.  I also know that the atmosphere during SLC’s poetry slams, especially invitationals including our rivals from NYU and Bard College, was electric, and that the feeling of being in an auditorium packed with people cheering and whistling for poets was nothing less than amazing.  (I also know how many people, myself included, harbored huge crushes for the NYU student who would be crowned champion, based upon his shy, self-effacing, and flat-out hilarious poems which ranged from losing a fire truck in a sandbox to how his problems with women began on the playground when a girl kicked sand in his face.)

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how to re-create that atmosphere, or, at least, how one gets a group of people as excited about poetry as they might be about a basketball game (or, at Sarah Lawrence, about a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show).  It seems to me that if not everyone, then nearly everyone writes poetry.  It also seems to me that most people, though they write it, or have, at least, written it, are also completely and totally terrified of poetry.  I often feel as though somehow we’ve ended up with this tremdendous split, a schism between what poetry means to people in their private lives and what it means in their public lives.  Poetry so often seems to be relegated to two diametrically opposed realms: the private journal or notebook whose pages are bursting with poetry the author feels somehow ashamed to show anyone, and the public classroom, in which poetry is, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s words, “formulated, sprawling on a pin.”  Perhaps the classroom is the cause of the schism; perhaps, after years of formulating and pinning poems, those who spend time writing privately don’t feel that their poems will hold up, or see the act of creating a poem as somehow drastically and dramatically other than the act of reading a poem, or having a poem read.  Perhaps they see themselves as set up not for a celebration of honest and intense personal expression, but to be “pinned and wriggling on a wall.”  In the classroom, we so often look at a piece as an artifact rather than art, ignoring the sheer fact of process, the hundreds of crossed-out and crumpled papers which preceded the poem now preserved in an anthology or textbook, and the thousands of poems that preceded that one — the sometimes-brutal fact that poetry is process, poetry is work, and very hard work.  Perhaps these private writers fear that their work will, before it is ready, before they have worked to the point of a Prufrock, be examined microscopically for errors and psychologically for slips; perhaps these writers choose to hide before they must see the moment of their greatness — the beautiful moment, the upwelling of emotion and the wrenching need for expression which called the poem into being — flicker, and, in short, be afraid.

Lately, my thoughts have swirled around this dilemma, and the idea of bridging this gap by finding ways to celebrate not just poetry but also the work of poetry, to make the process less intimidating and create an atmosphere in which writers of every level can feel a kind of solidarity, a happiness in the fact that they’re all working together, and working together to do something which is, after all, pretty darn important: creating art, which can help unify us by helping us to understand not just each others’ experiences but our own.  I’ve been looking at public poetry events, and been thrilled with what I’ve seen.  Here in Lexington, the Alltech Fortnight Festival, which runs during the two weeks which will next year be the time of the World Equestion Games (only 356 days to go, as the count-down in downtown Lexington reminds me), features not only such amazing acts as The Decembrists (why, why must you play on a Tuesday night, sweet Decembrists?!), but also Marc Smith, founder of the International Poetry Slam movement.  I’ve also been fascinated by the Gumball Poetry project, beautifully described by Mike Chasar on his Poetry & Popular Culture blog — Rachel Dacus‘ contribution is also particularly stunning.  The day I can get my hands on a gumball machine for Georgetown College will be a happy, happy day — if you have any suggestions for places to find cheap gumball machines, please let me know!

Until I can find a gumball machine to fill with poetry, I’ve started another project on Georgetown College’s campus in the hopes of getting students interested in both reading and writing poetry: the Pawling Poetry Project, or P Cubed.  I have a class of eight wonderful writers in poetry workshop this semester, and the Poetry Project started as a way to celebrate their very strong work outside of the classroom.  I also wanted to celebrate the fact that poetry is work, and work which needs a supportive community to improve and to thrive.  And so, with the help of my amazing department chair, who gave us space in the hallways and a brand spanking new bulletin board (which is the fanciest bulletin board I’ve seen in a while), the Poetry Project began.  It’s an interactive poetry exhibit of sorts, and each week I post not only my students’ (and my) responses to an exercise, but also the exercises themselves; students are encouraged to stop and read, and take an exercise, and post their own response, anonymously or otherwise.

P Cubed, an interactive poetry exhibit

It’s a small start, I realize, but it’s a start, nonetheless — and even if one student passes by and reads the poems, and takes an exercise, and starts thinking that maybe, just maybe, they can free their poems from their journals, it’s worth it.

Telling one’s name the livelong June

This is a story I’ve told several times, but, as it’s one of the few stories I have that are worth telling that don’t include my falling or saying Absolutely The Wrong Thing at Absolutely The Wrong Time, it’s worth telling again.  When I was in second grade, I was deep in the midst of one of those childhood moments of feeling as if the world has stopped and you’ve gone on, or, rather, that the world has gone on and you have stopped.  I’d just moved back to Alabama after a year’s sojourn in Arizona, and found myself a complete stranger at the school I’d attended before moving — this was especially disturbing for the child who once, after having the flu, returned to her kindergarten classroom and cried for a very long time after realizing that someone else was sitting in her seat.  At the same time as time seemed to be rebelling against me, my body began its now-long rebellion: in the span of a year, I got a snaggletooth, glasses, and braces to put the snaggletooth back into place.

I felt misplaced — or, rather, displaced — in my own home and in my own skin.  Instead of talking to the other students (which, of course, probably would’ve solved quite a few problems), I spent my free time flipping through textbooks, skipping ahead to look at the prairie dogs in my science book (why were we always studying prairie dogs in the late 1980s?) and giving myself a delicious sense of fright by looking at what was to come in my math book.  Most of the time, though, I turned to my reading book, and one day managed to flip to the back, where I found Emily Dickinson’s “[I'm Nobody!  Who are you?].”  I remember the moment as one might remember a lightning strike.  I felt, as one of my professors in graduate school would later eloquently describe it, “seen.”  I felt as though, finally, there was someone speaking to me who I could speak back to, plainly and openly.  I felt understood.  And all of those things combined to a feeling that made me understand perfectly when, years later, I came across a definition of poetry by Dickinson herself: “”If I read a book [and] it makes my whole body so cold no fire ever can warm me I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. These are the only way I know it.  Is there any other way.”

Of course — and this is the point of this entry, finally, and also the point of most of my thinking over the past few months — there are other ways.  Or, rather, there are other ways that are taught – other ways that we teach students to recognize poetry, through scansion and theory and history and analysis.  More and more, however, I’ve come to think of poetry in Dickinson’s terms, as Experience, and not as some being to be wrestled and pinned down to the page, dissected into bits.  It isn’t that I think the pinning and dissecting isn’t important — it is, of course, and essentially so — but lately I find myself thinking more and more about the wrestling, or moreso about the moment before the wrestling, the moment of strange recognition, the lightning strike in which one realizes, yes, this is a poem, because it has the kind of power that a poem does, because it has that pulling-your-head-off effect that makes you experience it as not just words but as experience.

Poetry is dying — or, at least, people say that it is.  And I can’t help to wonder if that might have something to do with the way we (myself included, here) tend to teach it — to put formaldehyde over its mouth so that it’s not so frightening and strange to deal with, especially in front of a room of people who could challenge you at any second.  But I think that the fright and the strangeness is an essential part of poetry.  I’ve been thinking more and more about how to let that into the classroom, and how to be comfortable with that.  This, of course, would also mean learning how to deal with not-knowing, and with letting my students know that I’m in a state of not-knowing.  I think, however, more and more, that that’s important, and tend towards the idea that the art and craft of poetry is best taught in an atmosphere where you are all together and working at something, even if at different levels — you are all together and engaged in working and wrestling with an experiencing this very glorious and strange and difficult thing that, indeed, can’t really be defined or clearly explained, besides the dissected bits of it (the iambs, the juxtaposition, the emphatic line breaks) — and that that, the mystery, the inexplicable and bizarre and mind-blowingly majestic mystery of it — is what makes poetry an Experience, and an essential one, at that.

Variations on the Theme of Shame

The first is a kind of shame I’ve often heard celebrated, at least in the academic world: the shame of becoming a professor or getting a degree without reading Some Very Important Thing.  There were, at grad school gatherings, often tales of the Yale professor who got his PhD without reading Hamlet, or the poet who never read Walt Whitman.  My Hamlet Whitman, shamefully, has always been Virginia Woolf: though I’m not particularly proud of it, I’ve never read more than a few words of hers.  As Georgetown College will soon be the host of the 2010 International Annual Virginia Woolf Conference, I’ve realized that there is no time like the present to make up for this terrible empty slot in my bookshelf.  I’m starting with A Room of Her Own as, I admit, it was the only Woolf book I could find at Barnes and Nobles (this is surely a sad state of affairs), but I’d love to hear any suggestions.

And now for another form of shame: shameless self-promotion.  The first bit of news is that I’ve two poems up at the Country Dog Review — check them out for more pieces of the witch’s puzzling story!

The second bit of news was a major surprise: I’m this year’s winner of the Betty Gabehart Prize — in nonfiction!  This came at a monumentally important moment, as I’d spent three days wondering just what the heck I thought I was doing writing essays, and trying to decide if perhaps I needed to give it all up and reunite with poetry, leaving the experiment with prose behind as an essential but, in the end, perhaps unpublishable lesson — and then this, which I’ve decided to take as a sign to at least keep going.  I’ll be giving a reading at the Lexington Central Library on Friday, September 11th as part of the Kentucky Women Writers Conference, which I’m terribly excited about as well.

“A long brown bar at the dip of the sky / Puts an arm of sand in the span of salt.”

(A NOTE: the title of this post comes from Carl Sandburg’s “Sketch,” and I love those two lines to the point of obsession.)

Fair readers, the semester has begun, and thus the tide of Emma’s blog posts has withdrawn.  Hopefully, things will stabilize into some sort of routine soon; in the meantime, I offer a picture post.  It’s always been A Very Big Deal for me to finish a notebook, as it seems to signify — well, that I’ve finished something.  I’ve just moved on to a new notebook, and admit that I’m having a hard time letting go of the old one (even though, I admit, the new one is identical) because of its significance — the notebook was a gift from my dearest friend Brigitte, and it was a gift that taught me a new way to write.  I started writing essays in this notebook, without even really deciding to do so, though I did decide to stick with it.  The notebook’s a Moleskine, the kind of thing I’d never buy for myself, usually, but the kind of luxury that now seems necessary, as it meant a new way of writing.  I think I’ve mentioned that my most difficult and rewarding class at Sarah Lawrence was a studio art class.  One of my favorite things about Sarah Lawrence is that you’re encouraged to find different ways to make your brain think, and this studio art class taught my brain a radically different way of thinking.  The Moleskine allowed me to pick that up again, six years later, and I found myself looking at the world in an entirely different way.

Scenes from a Notebook

(A Tribute)

“I, too, dislike it.”

When I first began teaching, eons ago, my least favorite part of pre-semester prep was crafting class policies.  In particular, the part of pre-semester prep I dreaded, avoided like all manner of plagues, and generally kvetched about to no end was writing the all-important “course objectives” part of the syllabus.  It seemed so painful, so impossible: how to describe your goals for the class, what you think is important for your students to learn, and what you want them to think is important?

Now, entering my eighth year in the classroom, I’m really not sure that the process of creating a syllabus has gotten any easier — in fact, I think it’s probably more difficult now that my brain has to churn through so much.  However, the process has become more enjoyable — and even — in fact, particularly — the previously-dreaded “course objectives” section.  I’ve found myself turning these sections into manifestoes of sorts, which helps me to get a grasp on what I’m thinking about for the class — and for the art.  I’m not sure that they’re the most successful manifestoes, but they are from the gut, and, if there’s one thing I believe about poetry, it’s that it needs a little gut in it.

Here’s the current manifesto, from my poetry syllabus, which probably resulted from my thinking a great deal about Marianne Moore’s masterpiece, “Poetry,” after it was mentioned on the Wom-Po discussion (I’m offering a link to the poem, as WordPress and I tend to disagree about formatting):

Course Objectives:
Let us remember … that in the end we go to poetry for

one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives

and the world in which we live them, and that if we

more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt

to destroy both.

– Christian Wiman, editor, Poetry magazine

Poetry.  Some are polite and call it difficult: others, impossible, or, at worst, irrelevant.  Many claim with sincere conviction that poetry is dead.

In our time, poetry is often relegated to the madwoman in the attic, furiously scribbling away at verses incomprehensible to anyone but herself, or else to dusty books pounded by fusty professors who claim they’ve found the key.  But poetry is as far from dead as it could be.  Historically, poetry has told us who we are – the Greek poet Callimachus’ Aetia, or Causes, explained Greek culture, customs, and festivals; Hesiod’s work explained everything from agriculture to astronomy; and most of what we know of Greek theology comes from Homer’s Iliad – as well as how we are to relate to each other and our world.  From Milton, we derive what we know about Christianity; from the Brownings, we learn how to love; from Dickinson, we learn how the mind works in solitude; from Coleridge and Wordsworth, we learn what we can learn from nature; from Eliot, we learn how to navigate the treacherous reaches of the psyche and the modern world.  Poetry may be a foreign language, but it is a language that explains the landscape of the human heart and of a human’s relationship and responsibilities to the world; to say that poetry is dead is to kill much of what we know about ourselves, and the way to express what we know.  In our times, in this battlefield where we are bombarded by promises of instant gratification and entertainment solely for the sake of entertainment, in a world of YouTube clips and reality television and a whole host of what T.S. Eliot would call “broken images,” in a world where mindless entertainment threatens to wash away our minds, we as human beings must fight to keep what is most human about us: and poetry can be the key to preserving and expressing this.

In this class, we will keep poetry alive by reading and examining the works of poets both ancient and modern.  We’ll learn a number of different techniques and forms from various cultures and language systems, from the 1^rst century Japanese renga to the 13^th century Italian sonnet to the 20^th century French transliteration.  We’ll strengthen our skills at analysis and scansion through the study of sample poems, and we’ll strengthen our craft by writing a wide variety of poems, both in formal and free verse (and some forms in between!).

Which, of course, translates as this.