Cassandra Cleghorn’s Four Weathercocks was published in 2016 by Marick Press. Her poems and reviews have appeared in journals including Paris Review, Yale Review, Poetry International, Colorado Review, Boston Review, Field and Tin House. She lives in Vermont, teaches at Williams College, regularly reviews poetry for Publishers Weekly and serves as poetry editor of Tupelo Press. For more info see www.cassandracleghorn.com.
Kristina Marie Darling: You currently teach at Williams College, and it’s been a pleasure to hear about some of your innovative teaching practices. What pedagogical discoveries are you most proud of and why?
Cassandra Cleghorn: One of the great things about teaching at Williams is the freedom I have to teach to my interests as they change. Last year I used our winter term to test a theory — that freeing students from their laptops might open up new writing habits. I had a small budget to purchase ten manual typewriters from eBay, taught myself the basics of typewriter repair and maintenance, and set out on a month of old-school writing with ten students. They loved the physicality of the keys, how the page waits and slows down the thinking process, how strike-throughs let them see earlier word choices, etc. Mostly, they were blown away by how the typewriter let them access their own thoughts — as if for the first time, many of them felt! — removing that compulsion to cross-check an idea on the internet or to do that fidgety backspace/delete/cut&paste technique that passes for writing. You can watch a lovely film about the experience made by my friend and filmmaker, Diana Walczak.
My other “innovation” this year involved memorization: hardly a new technology, but no less inspiring. In the multi-genre intro to creative writing for first-year students, I included two recent volumes of poetry: Vanessa Villarreal’s Beast/Meridian (Noemi, 2018) and Aaron Coleman, Threat Come Close (Four Way, 2018). In both cases, our discussions of the books culminated in a meeting with the poet via video.
I knew these books would be challenging for the students, so I framed them carefully (e.g. “How does writing draw upon and depart from lived experience?” and “How do poets use formal constraints?”). I gave students multiple ways to make sense of and internalize the poems: writing short responses to individual poems, small group discussions, etc. But the most important component was memorization. Every student had to memorize at least ten lines of a poem of their choosing — one by Coleman, one by Villarreal. We talked about what goes into and follows from memorization — how repetition slows down and deepens the understanding, how mere reading becomes incorporation. Most ended up memorizing an entire poem by each poet.
But the truly wonderful moments were still ahead. In the video sessions with the poets, I would call on a student to recite their poem at a relevant moment in the conversation. The student stood and recited, sometimes haltingly, but always with genuine investment. The effect on Vanessa and Aaron was was electric. Vanessa was moved to tears, little trails of mascara. Aaron was “shook.” Neither of them had heard anyone read their own poems aloud, let alone memorize and recite them. And then — for me, the most rewarding turn — each poet spontaneously recited poems later in the conversation, in illustration of a point we were building toward together: Vanessa, Kim Addonizio, “To the Woman Crying Uncontrollably in the Next Stall”; and Aaron, Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.” So the kids witnessed that this is what poets actually do — we take poems into us, and breathe them out again. Memorable, all around. I’m going to work more memorization into all my teaching.
KMD: What has surprised you the most in your time as a teacher and mentor?
CC: I am continually surprised by how identification works, often crossing lines of expected affiliation. In academia many of us are thinking hard about representation in every sense of the word — how to make the classroom a safe and equitable space for all thinkers, how to decolonize genre and challenge the historically straight/white/male literary canon. This work is valuable and necessary. I follow my colleague, critic Dorothy Wang (author of Thinking its Presence, 2017), who charges critics and writers to acknowledge and challenge the white privilege inherent in our literary institutions. That said, I can never predict which student will be drawn to which work and on what basis. Identification doesn’t always align with professed identities. As teacher and mentor, I try to listen for rather than predict or prescribe.
KMD: How does your work as an educator feed your own creative practice?
CC: First, there’s the schedule of full-time teaching. As the mother of four, I learned to write on the fly. There is always at least one poem percolating. The nature of my appointment at Williams (nontenured, though relatively secure) is such that I get only occasional leaves. And I teach every July. So, no extended residencies and retreats for me. But that suits me. I’m somewhat perverse. I have the strongest urge to write when it seems I have the least time to do so. I tend to answer that urge, “making time” for writing constantly during the semester. There is no stronger motivator to write a new draft than a stack of papers waiting to be graded.
But then there are the ways the teaching catalyzes new work — both through the writing I discover (e.g. Nuar Alsadir, Fourth Person Singular) and rediscover (most recently, Richard Hugo and Lisel Mueller), and through my interactions with gifted and open students. I do a lot of teaching and advising of creative nonfiction, which really feeds the poems and my intellectual life more generally. Next year, one of my students is writing a linked set of essays about their experience growing up in the Pacific Northwest. They have turned me on to the work being done in “poor queer studies.”
KMD: You also write book reviews for such venues as The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, & many others. What can poets gain from reviewing, spotlighting, & celebrating the work of other members of their artistic community?
CC: For over a decade I worked largely behind the scenes as an editor. A few years ago, thanks in part to your inspiration, I decided to raise my profile as a literary citizen. I requested review copies from presses, and pitched journals with review ideas. The response was 100% gratitude.
I quickly formed relationships with book review editors and managing editors (most of whom are also poets). I got to know Ryo Yamaguchi from Wave, for example — with whom I discovered not only a common love of Joanne Kyger’s work (which I reviewed for Boston Review), but also hiking. We traded our own books. Ditto Bill Carty at Poetry Northwest, after reviewing Stephen Collis’s newest book. And when I reviewed Matthew Cooperman and Aby Kaupang, NOS for The Rumpus, book reviews editor Molly Spencer and I made a plan to exchange new “problem” poems for mutual critique. And so on.
For reviewing, I seek out books that aren’t receiving the exposure they deserve — experimental work, work by writers of color, mostly works by women, from small presses (e.g. Noemi, YesYes, FuturePoem). Of course, I decline to review books I dislike — where’s the value in that? But I do love to write about work that takes risks I myself have resisted. Digging into those choices — understanding and savoring their effects — has given me a much broader and deeper repertoire of ideas for my own work.
I review writers I do not know personally, of course — but after a review comes out, it’s not uncommon to build a professional friendship with that book’s author. My friendship with Vanessa Villarreal, for example, grew out of the process of reviewing her book for LARB. Nothing means more to a writer than knowing that someone has sought out and lived with their words, intentionally, interestedly, sustainedly. I also love the challenge: to give a new book my maximum attention, and to do so under deadline. The feedback loop is quick compared to getting poems published.
Now that I have made reviewing part of my regular practice, there’s no turning back. I’m tired of hearing poets who have never written a single review complain about how hard it is to get their books reviewed. Get out there, pay it forward, lose yourself in someone else’s hard-won work for a few hours, and say something interesting on their behalf. Then you can return to your own poems with new ideas.
KMD: You currently serve as Poetry Editor and Associate Nonfiction Editor of Tupelo Press. Editors, like book critics, serve a gatekeeping function in the literary community. How is the work of publishing poetry different from the work of reviewing poetry?
CC: When reviewing I start from a place of extreme openness. How can I honor the years of work the poet has spent making this book? How can I appreciate and articulate some of the book’s accreted layers — what the poet has read and lived, the teaching and mentoring the poet has received? If I resist an aspect of the book, how can I work with that resistance to learn something about myself as reader and writer, and fully inhabit that dialectical zone? I aim to write a review that is true to my own experience of the book, while also bridging a range of other readers’ interests and needs.
In many respects these questions also reflect how I read as editor and publisher. But the numbers do change the dynamic. At Tupelo Press, we get an enormous number of submissions relative to the number of works we publish. This ratio puts lots of pressure on the reading experience. I am always reading a manuscript comparatively: Is this work unambiguously and fully realized? If so, what sets it apart from and above other work like it? Does it convey a sense of necessity or even urgency to find its readership?
In contrast to reviewing, which is rather solitary, there is also a distinctively collaborative aspect to editing and publishing. Being an editor and a publisher means saying “no” far more often than “yes,” but I never make these decisions alone. I love my conversations with other editors at Tupelo Press and Tupelo Quarterly about what each of us sees as the relative strengths and deficiencies of a work. These conversations are always subtle and often surprising.
“Gatekeeping” is one way of naming the function resulting from these processes. I am mindful of how I carry my power and privilege as a white woman, as an academic educated at, licensed by and employed by elite institutions, and as a poet published by high-visibility journals. But I’m also committed to doing my part to change the model, making the literary scene not about the keeping of gates (the etymology of which goes back to 16th-century borderland security), but about the multiplying of voices — increasing access to the microphone, as it were. I prefer this metaphor.
KMD: What are you currently working on? What can readers look forward to?
CC: As gratifying as are teaching, reviewing and editing, these activities also take me away from my own poetry. So this summer I’ve returned to revising and making new poems, which form the core of my second book. The working title is “Crash Course.” I’ve always learned best under pressure. My mom passed away unexpectedly a few years ago, my youngest kid is about to fledge. I remember Creeley saying that aging is like adolescence, “the body becomes phenomenal again.” I’m writing into unfamiliar sensations of loss and surge.