As a poet, I don’t like being told to abide by certain rules in poetry; whenever someone comes out with a list, say, of words that poets should never use, I immediately want to use them, every single of them. (Someone also told me that I couldn’t or shouldn’t write about horses because he felt “everything that needs to be said about horses has already been said,” and my immediate thought was, wow, this guy has never been around horses, or has never fallen for a horse in a bad way, and also I just had published a horse love poem to Drake’s “Hotline Bling,” that’s how magical and punishing it can get with a horse. But I digress.) I know such lists can come out of good intentions, and I have no doubt many do. It’s just poet me likes her freedom, and in the act of creation, she even likes making her mistakes. Because there’s a choice in doing so.
Likewise, I remember a professor in a writing workshop telling me that “good poems” only carried “one meaning,” and that any other poetry that tried otherwise was “lazy” and “untidy.” (I was then smitten, not with him, but with all poetic possibilities of “untidiness,” which was not his intention.)
As the semester ended, this same professor announced that all contemporary poetry was terrible, and that for now on, he was only going to read Shakespeare— and I kid you not—his own work, at least for the coming summer. This was the same professor who assigned— and had us buy— three of his collections in class, which we never actually covered. I don’t think this was solely because he didn’t want his work critiqued. Rather, I could see that he believed that when he made such pronouncements correlating his own work with Shakespeare, he believed it was like God talking to us. I mean, God had spoken. Always a tense in front of us. A happened in which we could only happen upon. Or some such things with mountains moving over majestic seas and a eagle flying above. Or something. I remember this moment because I remember thinking how I’d never seen Fraggle Rock, that I’d only heard the theme song, and wondered how I could find it. All because I was curious if Fraggles used their sense of self as verbs and nouns the way that Smurfs did.
I remember him saying to me: Earth to Rosebud. Are you listening?
I remember thinking, Thank Fraggle, yes.
Fraggle yes.
Because I learned quite a bit about what not to do from this man, so for that I’m grateful.
But I digress.
But you see, this is poet me.
This is how I sometimes create, making messes in tightly-wound, no it’s mine spaces.
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Down below is the last segment of this roundtable, and I am so grateful for the poets’ contributions to this series. As one who also teaches poetry, I want to understand the student’s process. It isn’t always easy. Sometimes my students bring in what actually went into writing the poem– that is, drafts and images and film/video clips of inspiration– and I wonder, how is this not the poem itself? Or at least its bones? How can the internet and new virtual realities create more spaces for poetry– as well as new poetry itself? This seems to me just as important as line edits or asking what is the poem’s intention or choosing one word over another. It also makes me excited to teach as I see the evolution of poetry happening right now. It’s impossible to keep up with, and that’s what makes it so great: these forces that escape definition and containment.
More than anything, the best advice I can give is advice that one professor never gave to me: read other poets. Start discussions on poems online in social media spaces. Share the work you love. I know I’ve written that before. But it remains truly the best way to grow as a poet.
That, and hanging with all the horses– whatever they might be to you– one never gets over, when she’s down in Fraggle Rock.
Surely, it can’t only mean one thing.
*
Rosebud Ben-Oni: Do you teach now?
Anthony Frame: No – I did teach as an adjunct for about five or six years, teaching Composition at a local community college.
Jarvis Slacks:: Yes. I’m an Associate Professor, teaching first year and advanced composition as well as intro and advanced fiction classes.
Sarah Fonseca Working on it…
Emma Bolden: I left academia in 2015. I am extremely grateful for the time I spent in the classroom. I adored my students and learned more from them than I can even begin to saya. But as university politics became increasingly more toxic, it became increasingly clear that academia just was not the place for me. I left for the sake of my mental and physical health. Making the decision to do so was a long and excruciating process. I knew that if I left the field, I would not be able to return. I also knew that I’d be leaving the only world I’d known as an adult. So many fears kept me from leaving: I thought I’d never publish again, that I’d be unemployable, that I’d lose the respect of my family, that I’d lose my friends entirely. When I left, I left with the full knowledge that all of those things could very well happen, but I also left with the full knowledge that it was the only way I’d survive.
Some of the things I feared did indeed happen, but a more important thing happened: I flowered into life in ways I never dreamed I could. My work, which had become stagnant, flowered as well: there were so many new centers from which poems could petal out. For so long, I thought that academia was the only viable path for a poet. Now, I see so many paths and possibilities, and I hope that by leaving academia, I can still teach by passing that idea of promise and possibility on in my work and in my words.
RB: If you teach, do you discuss mental health and well-being with students? Do you share your experiences and struggles with them as a poet and/or writer?
EB: With the clarity of hindsight, I can say that I did the best I could at the time. I can also say that I wish I’d done better. When I was a student, I was lucky to have teachers who shared their triumphs and set-backs with their classes. Those moments stick with me to this day, so I tried my best to talk about my own experiences with my students when it was called for.
I also recognized early on that there are certain moments in which the normal rules of a workshop are best suspended. I believe that the most important breakthroughs we make as writers don’t exist in the sphere of publication or recognition or anything related to Dickinson’s aptly-described “admiring bog.” Instead, the most important breakthroughs are moments when the self appears differently on the page, when a writer breaks down a barrier between themselves and the pen or the keyboard and reveals what it means, for them, to be human in a new way. Sometimes, this means finally reaching the point where one can write about something that terrifies them, breaking a silence they’ve held for so long it holds power over them. Sometimes, it’s just trying something new with the way words appear on the page — experiment can be every bit as soul- and self-baring as telling a secret, simply because every act of language is soul- and self-bearing. I believed — I still believe — that one should recognize the sanctity of those moments in which a person has the strength and courage to show themselves as human, to confess and confront and bare what they’ve been bearing for too long. When that kind of work came into the workshop, I suspended the usual rules so that we could relate to each other as human beings who recognize, admire, and appreciate the human in each other.
JS: I talk about mental health a lot in my class. I share my experiences as I writer and I discuss the dynamics of the work/life balance with my students. I don’t want my students to have idealistic conceptions about writing. They need to know the struggles that come from being isolated and alone for hours and days on end. I want my students to understand that writing is often romanticized. Yes, there are writers that drink and use drugs and they glorify that. Those same writers tend to push their loved ones away, become depressed or ill, or die early in life. For an 18 or 19 year old, dying at 43 sounds fine. That is terrifying to me. Writing is important and the creation of artistic works is a lofty goal. However, is it right for a person to sacrifice their lives so that others find joy? That might seem like a good use of a life, the giving of beauty to the masses. The very instinct to see ourselves as some kind of martyr is the very aspect of ourselves that brings about our destruction. I’m fine with a student giving themselves fully to the craft, but they need to know exactly what they are doing. I try to help them understand that.
SF: I don’t teach. That’s the one consequence of dropping out that eats at me the most. I believe, thanks to my own hurdles, I have a good eye for what is and isn’t working in a classroom. Who is distracted? Who is bored? Who is too overwhelmed with their life circumstances to digest material beyond the bare minimum? Because there’s no way around this, I’m exploring returning scholar options that range from MFA waivers to nontraditional student programs.
I do, however, frequently rub elbows with undergraduate and high school educators–many of whom are strapped for time and funding–and it’s been interesting to see how they deal with these same battles, both with themselves and their students. General accessibility seems to be more important than the syllabus week monologue about office hours and verified safe spaces on campus, as the critical conversations seem to transpire via email or during one-on-one conferences with students about their work. My impression is that many of my friends and writer colleagues grapple with crossing professional boundaries by actively introducing conversations about mental health issues.
RB: Whose teaching style or mentorship do you admire & why?
SF: I admire teachers and mentors who are fans of second chances and approach everyone with an even-handed enthusiasm for the work and its development. Lambda Literary Foundation’s Tony Valenzuela and William Johnson are coming to mind…
AF: I definitely admire Rane Arroyo’s teaching/mentorship style. Rane was very clear from the beginning: “I don’t care about the poem. I care about the poet.” And that meant he could be really harsh, if he knew the poet could handle it (he once spent an entire class discussing all the things I did wrong in a poem) but it meant he was also always on your side no matter what you did on a single page (the same day he spent that class picking apart my poem, he immediately sent me an email reminding me that he loved me and that my strength in class helped others and he included a poem he impromptu wrote for me). He tried to help us understand ourselves as writers. His classes were broken in half – the first half of the semester, we wrote. A lot. And we read what we wrote to each other. But we didn’t critique. Here we were just writing, learning about ourselves and our fellow classmates. In the second half, we brought in more polished work and we used what we’d learned about each other in the first half of the semester to help guide each other through these more polished pieces. And, he never asked us to do anything that he wasn’t willing to do. If he wanted us to spend a day writing about our childhood, he did the same thing right with us. If he wanted us to bring in a draft of a poem that terrified or embarrassed us, he brought in one of his own. And all along, his concern was focused solely on us as writers and as people. Not on us as producers of poems.
JS: A professor from graduate school, Robert Siegel, had an impressive workshop style that I mimic in my own teaching. He would allow everyone in the workshop to speak first and then he would say a few words and wrap the workshop up. That might seem thin on his part, but his letters to the writer were always so powerful. These letters would be long and detailed, helping the writer understand the work better. It felt like you received a private audience with him, one that you could only earn by enduring the workshop. I don’t have the same level of patience as he has. I tend to talk more in a workshop than I should. I think that Robert’s calmness in the face of my young anxieties is the only reason why I was able to get through my graduate work and my teaching assistantship.
EB: Kate Knapp Johnson, my don and poetry professor at Sarah Lawrence, taught me everything I know about being a teacher and a mentor and a human being. She taught me that those things are not mutually exclusive, which is a far more important lesson than that phrase admits. I’m awed by her beautiful, restless curiosity and her willingness to follow that curiosity wherever it goes. She widened the world of writing for me by showing how a careful attention to and study of anything in the world – astronomy, Jung’s theories, charcoal drawings – is part and parcel of poetry.
Robert Creeley’s class completely changed the way I thought about workshopping, creation, and writing. He didn’t focus on workshopping writing but on the writing itself. We wrote three to five poems a week and read our poems in class. There’d be time for a few short comments, and then the next person went. He encouraged us to just keep going, to create, to let the poems free. He led the class to know writing as a weird, wonderful, wild and living thing: a rare gift for which I’m grateful every day.
I took a phenomenal workshop with Sarah Messer in which we turned in poems in groups, rather than as individual pieces. That opened up a whole new way of thinking about poetry for me: it wasn’t just about the individual but about the whole, about the nexus of meaning netting together a body of work. It’s like I was focused on these small separate dots and then, with Sarah’s help, zoomed out to see a whole picture, like a Seurat painting. At the same time, I learned from Sarah how to focus on those dots, meditating and working and reworking until the phrase became something new and luminous. When I can’t get a line to work, I still say to myself, “What would Sarah say?” And then the new thing comes to me.
This is Part 3 of a 3-part series on writing, the workshop experience and mental health. Read Part 1 & Part 2.