I was saddened yesterday to learn of the death of Diane Wood Middlebrook, poet, critic, literary biographer, and emeritus professor of English at Stanford University. I took a graduate seminar with Middlebrook back in the mid-80s on the poetry of Stevens, Ashbery, and Rich, and what I remember most clearly about her teaching is her combination of academic brilliance, lively imagination, and personal warmth, all expressed in her contagious love for those challenging poets. “The imaginative teacher is thought itself,” Roger Rosenblatt writes in the latest issue of The Kenyon Review. “And to come upon such a person in a lifetime is to find, well, gold.” I’ve been lucky enough to find several such teachers over the years, and having now spent over two decades as a teacher, my admiration for those brilliant men and women has only deepened.
Teaching, I’ve decided, is much like writing: both are careers that, at their best, can give full range to the aspirations of the mind and soul, or, at their worst, can feel like shouting down a well and then listening for the faint, hollow echo. But more importantly, both are reminders that we’re only the medium, not the message. What’s great in us, as teachers or writers, comes from those writers or teachers from whom we’ve learned, passing through us to others as a gift is handed on. That word, “gift,” as Lewis Hyde observes in his wonderful book The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, for which he has written a new afterword that appears in the current issue of KR, can mean both a talent and an inspiration: what those ideas have in common is that they refer not to things that we can own, but debts that we owe. We learn from those who came before us, and we pass on that gift to those who come after. Hyde, as the contributors’ notes to the current KR tells us, is currently working on “a book in defense of our ???cultural commons,’ that vast store of ideas, inventions, and works of art that we have inherited from the past.” In effect, every act of writing or teaching is an attempt to share that common inheritance.
My teaching mantra, which I whisper to myself before every class, and which I learned by watching great teachers like Diane Middlebrook, is, “It’s not about you.” What a teacher says in the classroom is far less important than what takes place in each student’s mind. The same could be said about writing: what we make, when we’re at our best, exceeds us, just as every teacher lives for the moment when a student becomes the teacher, showing us something new about a book we thought we knew well. While our literary culture values originality and self-expression (a word that suggests displaying some essential and private part of the self, as one squeezes the juice out of a fruit), one might argue that all the celebrations of literary ego that we see in book parties, public readings, and literary prizes, or in the celebratory rituals of academic life, obscure a hard fact: all we can hope to achieve by our writing or teaching is to add our own small contribution to that shared gift, a payment of interest, if you like, on the loan given to us as students or readers. What we know, we owe, but in this economy, our debts are more valuable than any object we can possess.