“Summer in Gambier” is too jolly a sentence for the starlings to sing stonefaced. I’m here on Day (night) 12 of Kenyon College’s paradisiacal Young Writers Program, where I’m running off photocopies, writing letters, teaching, riding a borrowed touring bike as I belt Roy Orbison’s “In Dreams,” and setting These Tables Reserved For signs on tables for the kids in Kenyon’s Hogwartsy dining hall.
My hands are full. But I’m surrounded by the high school-age students’ thrilled daily gabble of new authorial fondness, trading favorite books like headphones proferred and tinning out a new favorite-ever song. Around such appetitive and novel love of literature– watching two someones from Cleveland and Alabama who are too young to vote discover they both love Matthea Harvey, say, or Carson McCullers– I feel a wattage.
Strange, though, as a writer, to feel so personally removed from the pedagogy of writing education. I think about how long it’s been since I’ve written from a prompt, like any (story in 5 postcards; abecedary; poem enumerating all you left out of your last poem) of the wonderful dozens I’ve heard here. I find I don’t play the scales (as G.C. Waldrep [click this link, I mean it] referred to exercise-writing in rhyme and meter, the night he read here and astounded the kids) anymore; nor do I prompt myself when I’m dry. The best I can manage is an assiduous off-the-cuff, trying to write the only way I can only when I need to.
What’s the value of the exercise to your poetry, or fiction? In their lack am I going to petrify?
I’m still surrounded, meantime, by murmurs and lights. In the mornings there’s a silence deer here walk up in. In the afternoons Amish contractors next door with crowbars and nailguns tear a building’s roof off. At night people sing, squirrel up with a book, talent-show each other. My girlfriend showed me a site of nothing but extremely-high-shutter-speed images of bubbles bursting. Katie, my friend here who co-manages a sonic boom of a backyard, has been baking zucchini bread (zucchini past a certain size, she says, is only good for bread).
And today one of this town’s fat starlings flew up and told me that James “Pineapple Express” Franco is playing Allen Ginsberg in Howl, directed by Gun Van Sant. As awesome as Milk? As horrible as Tom & Viv? Here Franco is, Ginsberged against his onscreen Orlovsky (Aaron Tveit) at Ste. Germain-des-Pres:
So some sort of strain of fannish, eager love for poetry circulates other places than Gambier, though Young Writer’s heat and goodheartedness I still insist is unique. Until next time, then, listen well, and please stay tuned for a post about the meanest poet in the world!