As I Begin to Think About Teaching in the Fall

I again realize I don’t know that much really about how other people do this thing called writing poems.

I do think that the not knowing what we’re doing isn’t written about enough. How poets go into mystery and keep going back, bringing back bits and pieces sometimes, sometimes rescuing or producing or guiding a whole body/song/character out of silence or pain or a few vowel sounds, even out of boredom.

Some teachers teach it as simply practice, some as a kind of calling, some as a need, some even as a kind of delight. It’s all of those things of course, or the great stuff is, balancing meaning and delight and need and ambition on razors’ edges of language and breath

and any false move can make it collapse like a house made of teaspoons.

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I used to, in my early days as a teacher, simply say Bring in a poem for next week, and the students did. The first ones would be usually dependent on cliches and language students had been told poets use—e’er, thine, wouldst, do run—and in the workshop I’d quietly just replace them with the students’ “real” voice, more contemporary diction and syntax. Slowly I’d lessen their dependence on rhyme or metaphor or symbol so they could see and learn to use all the other kinds of language that go into poems. I’d quote famous poets as challenges. We’d look at books that both changed and confounded me.

Then as I grew more used to those cliches/moves, I’d try to head them off with prompts that forced students into creative states by making them work with certain words or sounds or constraints first, things that made it harder for them to rely on cliches or the ways they’d been taught to use language to make poems. I learned to talk less and read out loud from example poems. I had students write more imitation poems. Try to write a poem like that but using the material of your life, I’d say.

Some students blossomed under one kind of teaching, some resisted. No way of teaching always reached everyone. I got used to that. Sometimes the resistors argued with me and lost. Sometimes the resistors disappeared and I asked myself why and tried to change, to be clearer or softer in my tone or remember that there are circumstances I cannot control that arise between teacher and student. Sometimes they found better teachers in my colleagues.

So, now, in a time in which so many things have changed, “changed utterly” as Yeats says in his poem “Easter, 1916,” for the rebels of the Easter Uprising, I wonder which approach to teaching will be the best for the students whose lives have had to undergo radical shifting. Should I still start by having them read Sharon Olds’ “The Takers,” and shock them with what a poem can talk about? Should I start with Terrance Hayes’ poem The Blue Terrance and ask them to, in the next twenty minutes, write their own poem about where they come from, using the same language Hayes uses (I come from, I come from, I believe, I will not)?

Where do they come from? What do they believe? What will they not do/say/put up with? The first few weeks will let me know all those things. And I may have to reconfigure everything then, change my approach. I’ve done it before. My guess this time is they’re exhausted by screens and lectures and listening. They miss being in rooms full of other humans who are trying to learn something new. It can be awfully lonely to be trying something new all by yourself.

So we need to talk about that. Probably a lot. Make some spaces where they can experiment and maybe test out some lines, ask some questions, spend some time (specific, dedicated, bounded time, not this uneasy open-ended time we have now) listening to a poem being read, listening to someone (me at first probably but soon them) talk their way through a poem, then talk their way through changing a poem without destroying it, which is very hard to do for some of them, indeed for many of us.

What is the structure I’ll use to do this? I don’t yet know. But I know there are structures already. I know I might have to invent one that works with my own way of teaching and can reach out to them wherever they are. I told some friends I might just set up a set of correspondences and write letters, but I’ll have to have some way of appearing too—on Zoom or Teams or something else—so they can talk to me in person, as a person, instead of only getting me through words. But how will it be? Would the Witch of the West get destroyed if Dorothy had seen that the Wizard was just a person, like her, who is a lucky imposter?