This rather long post is bouncing off a discussion a while ago on Kasey Mohammad’s blog regarding craft and poetic praxis, as well as some recent discussions at Mark Wallace’s forum. I’m sure there are many other fleshing-outs of these dilemmas: but this is primarily a personal reflection on some of these questions I am still asking myself. Allons-y . . .In the past year, I’ve had the opportunity once or twice to teach poetic writing, for short stints of a month or two. One was a summer job: very well-paid. (I mention this to give context to my perhaps bizarre reaction to these possibilities). It’s not that I explicitly refused the offers: I was told to send in a CV, and seeing as the university term was ended, was informed that there shouldn’t be much problem arranging a good number of hours in a given week.
Now I have always had an innate problem (prejudice) with treating writing in a direct way via pedagogy. This was why I made the choice to study comparative literature and poetics: the notion that criticism and theory was valuable not only in itself - I feel it is - but moreover that it could actively contribute to creative processes, if only in an oblique, and always necessarily abstract, way. It was thus the directness of the pedagogical creative-writing scenario which always disturbed me. I’ve often wondered if it’s not something I should attempt to overcome.
So, in both cases I seriously considered it. Once I even printed out my CV and left it on my desk. But I couldn’t send it! No. The barriers were still there. The apprehensions. A fundamental suspicion regarding the framing of this extremely private activity, which is important to me, in a public way. Such an intimate thing! "Please take off your inner metaphysical garments before the class . . ."
I’m not saying this is not an utterly absurd position! It’s simply how I’ve always felt regarding these situations. I’ve only attended one course in my life that could be called an instance of creative writing. It was in Paris some years ago, run by a very "prominent" French writer, and functioned as a fairly free workshop or atelier. That is, there was very little concrete criticism of produced texts (as it seems one may find in Iowa for instance, though please correct me Jordan or others if I’m speaking in utter ignorance), but rather a series of exercises proposed as an initial starting point: a potential diving-board for a poetic moment or expérience.
In many ways then it reminded me of the way rhetorical composition was taught for perhaps around 2 millenia : that is, by way of implicit imitation, not necessarily of a style or a discourse, but this time of a praxis or procedure. For example, we would take a text, usually by a French writer, and the exercise would be constructed around this, almost as if our produced texts would be subsequent “versions” (in the historically rhetorical sense of that word) which built and played upon (or corrupted) the received model.For instance, I remember one séance on Roubaud – I forget which collection – where, in true neo-oulipean fashion, Roubaud leaves his Parisian apartment and turns left at each street, describing the relevant environs. So we too would “repeat” (or corrupt or play with or whatever) this experience in our minds, producing hybrid documents.
Kenny Goldsmith, neo-oulipeans or the Flarf writers might be much more in tune and comfortable than I ever was with this type of “bouncing off”, this conception of writing as “play with others”. But perhaps I just don’t “play well” with the other children! I’d much prefer to be alone in a corner playing with my blocks, occasionally looking up at the window.
The other “children” bother me: they have their own ideas, their own ways of playing with their blocks, which bothers me. But I’m very happy to look at what they’ve created, after they’re finished: I could talk to them about it for hours, try to see what’s been done well and what’s been done less well. But I don’t want to watch them doing it, any more than I want them to watch me.
I don’t want to break their own world, which is necessarily so personal, during the process of its formation. I can only consider it as an intriguing or wonderful object, after the fact. Perhaps I just need to see the school counselor. But perhaps I don’t. I will now stop this ridiculous overly long metaphor.
In any case, the interesting thing about the approach of the French writer in our atelier was that it was, in a way, fundamentally anti-romantic : it treated writing really in the sense of a praxis which could be learned by precedents. Of course, writing is and is not this. Banality. But the notion is of course to give people the necessary practical tools, which may then later be used, even when one
has been divorced from the exercise in question, during those moments of writing, alone, which occur from some "deeper place", and thus no longer require the initial stimulus of the “canonical writer”’s diving-board.It’s an approach I was sceptically favorable to, at first: one reads to write, for instance, so is this not in some ways the same thing? No, it really isn’t. Reading in order to write is not the same as taking canonical models and learning one’s praxis from this basis. As in the first case, the choice of the models has been made for you, and so there is really no creative manipulation of various traditions, no initial choice involved. Secondly, reading in order to write is much more fundamentally personal than this other method: it digs down into the very roots of our relationship with literature, writing and the world, whereas this “imitation of models” seems to skip like a flat stone across various discursive and historical surfaces.
The problem then, I decided, is that I would be equally unhappy with an absurd “inspiration-based” pedagogy, as with a “praxis-based” pedagogy. And a golden-rule mixture of the two seems to me entirely disingenuous.
So the key thing to note is that this scenario was, in comparison to most workshops, very free-wheeling. That was why I attended it in the first place: it was apparently not prone to hegemonic directing on the part of the writer running the group. But . . .
I lasted about 6 weeks.I couldn’t do it.
It disgusted me! Still, this atmosphere perturbed me. I believe I was one of the only people who felt uncomfortable with this. I think the others thought I was unusual. Perhaps arrogant! It’s probably all true. Anyway . . . There were things running through my head which are usually only associated with supercilious dicks who believe their own writing-practice to be of such significance to them that no other individual may intervene in its conception. I don’t rationally believe this of course, but this was the emotional state I was in during such exercises.
I’m trying to be honest here. During the exercises I remember tripping clumsily through my mind such thoughts as: “Why am I wasting my time imitating the praxis of Jacques Roubaud, when I could be at home writing what I want?” But what disgusted me the most was that I remember, during the 6th week, that I had begun writing texts which I thought would please not only the "head-writer", but the other people in the group. As soon as I had this thought, I quit. Same day.
It’s a too well-known paradigm, of course. “Group-think”. A clichéd rebuttal of poetic pedagogy. But I’m not saying it’s inevitable: I just felt, in my particular case, its imminent presence, creeping up on me, taking me from behind and whispering “ah, they’ll like this!” And they did.
How revolting.
So I believe I learned nothing concrete from this experience: in spite of the presence of a dynamic and open teacher and intelligent and sensitive classmates. It was nobody’s fault but my own. I was the typical “bad student”! I would go home afterwards and think: “Why do I need this?"
But perhaps it wasn’t entirely my fault: imitation (or corruption) of styles or situations or registers, in a rhetorical sense, is flawed for many reasons. It is not taking the writing of a particular person, in its absolute particularity, and dealing with it on its own level, on the level of its particularity. It is shoving it into known canonical or discursive registers - inevitably - reducing writing thus to a flow-diagram of procedurality.
But with all this said, I still maintain the thought that I may want to teach poetry one day. That I may like to reconcile myself with some elements of a pedagogical scenario. But what could this pedagogy possibly resemble? It would neither be that incongruous cultivation of “inspiration” or wordsworthian “strong feeling” or schellingien and coleridgien “esemplasie” ; but nor could it be the taking of canonical forms or procedures as a pure basis of poetic evolution.
But this question of “arrogance” is actually a rather stimulating and important one I think. For instance, I’ve really never corrected any “mistake” in a poem of mine on the advice of others. On the occasions this advice has been forthcoming, I’ve committed the absolute cardinal sin of replying: “I’ve looked it over several times, you may be right, but I think I’ll leave it that way. Please feel free not to publish, if you think that would be best.”
The responses were usually around half and half: of the 4 or so times it’s occurred, perhaps twice the editor in question responded that, if I wasn’t willing to make changes, I couldn’t be in their magazine. Okay. Usually though there is a more general understanding. (The most noteworthy example for me was one of the first times I sent out my “star” poems, and received a response from an editor that he would publish them only if he could remove the “stars”. That was a no-brainer: “no, I’m sorry, those are very important to me.” The poems were published in their original state).
Regarding this notion of identifying “faults”: there is a whole argument, for instance, for thinking that one’s “errors” can be the richest part of a poetic! (Think of the rather finicky observation in some Zukofsky, or the pompous grandiosity of Olson or Pound). This is of course a very complex question: some faults are just that – which is why I still think it’s useful to have a vibrant, often negative critical writing in contemporary poetics – but perhaps others are sources of inquiry: the sign of deeper questionings, of unresolved tensions and dilemmas. (I think I remember reading this in Lyn Hejinian’s The Language of Inquiry, or perhaps somewhere in Ron Silliman: it sounds rather Hejinianesque . . .) In any case, “faults” are extremely personal things, which must perhaps be meditated within the confines of a very specific poetic. And never identified or imposed absolutely from outside the barriers of that specific poetic’s functioning.
So my strange conclusion, I suppose, is that: any situation in which one has the goal of teaching poetry must be entirely inclined into going deeply into the absolute particularity of different individuals’ poetics. In this way, it may strangely even resemble a sort of collective “thinking-through” of the world: of perception, epistemology, identity, creation and reception, where each of these things are entirely geared to the parameters of individual poetic functioning.
Does that sound right? But how to "teach" this in the context of a collective group? Is it possible to understand, or at least be open to, such absolute particularity in another person’s production?For poetry to be taught, for me, it must be. Otherwise it must perhaps fall into the strictures of parameters and procedures. Otherwise, perhaps, it should not be done.
Please do give your thoughts on all this. I know almost everybody knows more about these questions, and crucially has more direct experience of them, than I do. Please talk about these specific experiences. I suppose I am still trying to decide on the position and nature of poetry’s institutionality in the west. That’s a big question. There are thus some things to work through . . .
And to conclude on a more sublime note, please taste of the greatest known teacher of poetry, presented vicariously via a now famous Tim Peterson performance.
"Does poem feel earned?"
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