Yes, it’s gourd season—but for those of us who teach, it’s also syllabus season and course-packet season. I’ve joked before that I expect to be buried with my course packets; they’ve claimed inordinate amounts of my attention and my shelf space. I’ve clipped New Yorker cartoons in hopes of finding just the right spot for, say, a Charlie Hankin or an Edward Steed gem in a future packet, and I’ve held on to one “Dilbert” panel for over a decade, reusing it again and again as an addendum to my “Final Portfolio Instructions.”
In introducing a course, we set a tone. We may want to emphasize playfulness, or risk-taking, or rigor. (The best courses may emphasize all three, in equal measure.) Last night my poetry workshop met for the second time, and I found myself leaning on Kenneth Koch to help explain what I find most exciting about writing poems. In Making Your Own Days, Koch offers the idea of poetry being “a language within a language” (he’s borrowing a bit from Valéry), a language that allows for statements such as “Two and two / Are rather blue”—but not, perhaps, “Two and two / Are rather green.” Poetry lasts, says Koch, “because it gives the ambiguous and ever-changing pleasure of being both a statement and a song.” If I were inclined to get a tattoo, that’s what I’d want it to say.
So I was demonstrating to the class who I am: as a poet, as a reader, as a teacher. And later I started to think about all the other ways I’ve leaned on Koch, and Frost, and Dickinson, and Marianne Moore, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and Mary Ruefle in the early days of a semester. One of the many great things about writing poetry is that, unlike, say, making movies or playing ice hockey, it requires very little equipment. Dickinson puts it this way (in poem #1755 and near the bottom of my syllabus):
To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.
But I can’t just enthuse about rhyme and revery; I have to (eventually) give the students grades. I’ve borrowed my grading policy—in workshops, anyway—from Chris Bachelder’s U.S.!, a novel that imagines, among other things, Visiting Professor Upton Sinclair issuing the following guidelines:
GRADING!
Grades are the filthy lucre of the American education system. They are a part of a system of rewards (for a job well done, for good work) that pits students against one another in a ruthless battle for limited resources, that helps sort the winners from the losers, and that ultimately prepares students to take their slots as interchangeable cogs in the capitalist machine. You will not receive a grade for this course unless the dean makes me give you one, in which case a B+ is satisfactory, an A- is good, and an A is exceptional.
(Professor Sinclair’s other policies include “No firearms allowed in class” and “No rhythmic evocations.” He writes: “If I am assassinated at some point during the semester, carry on with the assigned work. I will rejoin you, if at all possible.”)
But what if folks just want to jump to the end? In the final pages of my poetry packet, students will discover this cartoon:
and this poem:
THE BLACK BOX
As well as these poor poems
I am writing some wonderful ones.
They are all being filed separately,
nobody sees them.
When I die they will be buried
in a big black tin box.
In fifty years’ time
they must be dug up,
for so my will provides.
This is to confound the critics
and teach everybody
a valuable lesson.
– Gavin Ewart
There’s also this (comforting?) farewell from Robert Graves: “A perfect poem is impossible. Once it had been written, the world would end.”
But most students probably stop at the end of the syllabus. Just below Dickinson’s ode to the imagination, I’ve included this passage from Nicholson Baker’s The Anthologist:
They all looked at me, and I looked at them. I was the teacher. I was the authority. And then I said, “Of course, it hasn’t worked all that well for me. My first book was okay. But you know what Amy Lowell said. She said, ‘Poetry is a young man’s job.’” And then I burst into tears.