I recently discovered this teaching philosophy that I wrote a long time ago now. As with much that we've created in the past, this piece reminds me that my concerns and hopes for my students come from deeply held convictions that are constant, and serve as the foundation for the way I grow and develop as a teacher, artist, and person.
Now that I am on my first sabbatical leave, I have an opportunity to contemplate my role as teacher from a new perspective. It is gratifying to me that the sabbatical has thus far accomplished what it is intended to do: to give me a rest, to retool, and to come back to teaching refreshed. Sometimes I spend my morning working at my desk or reading history. Sometimes I take my notebook and simply wander Athens. Sometimes I have to attend to business, contend with the bureaucracy of getting a visa. I take metro, looking out the window, eavesdropping on conversations. I walk about, observing city-life. When I’m on the Cycladic Island, Serifos, I hike the steep steps of the village, sit in coffee shops by the sea, chat with friends, always taking notes. I have a project to complete, which involves discipline, direction, and research, both in books and in daily life, but sometimes it’s what comes unexpectedly that leads me to write a poem. For the first time in years I can go where I go without any ostensible purpose, except to experience, observe, open up, and develop my writing process. I discover and rediscover that everything and every moment is an occasion for a poet, whether I am going for an idle walk on which perhaps I’ll pick up a loaf of bread at the bakery or an International Herald Tribune at a kiosk or whether I must meet a visa deadline and head over to the government translation office, crowded with people from all over the world, who are having their official documents translated into Greek legalese.
Though I have no official duty to my students, they are not far from my thoughts. I ask the same questions I ask when I have classes to prepare: how can I convey to my students the transformative possibilities in their own daily lives? And conversely, how can I encourage them (give them the courage) to imagine life outside their own experience, to empathize with the other?
So often I hear professors complain: “Teaching takes up so much time that I have no time for my own work.” I made the same complaint myself in the past, until I came to two crucial realizations. The first is that teaching is my own work. The second is the more ways I find to let my students into my writing process—a process that includes reading and research, of course—the more effective I am as a teacher and the more symbiotic my teaching and my writing are. I calculated that approximately half of the poems in my newly completed manuscript had their genesis in the classroom, playing writing games (I don’t call them exercises) with my students. I have found that for me as a professor to say This is how I write is less effective than demonstrating the process. I often begin or end a class by playing a poetry game with my students. Then when they read what they’ve written out loud, I may read what I’ve written, too—just to show them that the initial writing might be a mess, complete with bad lines. But maybe in that rough draft are some good lines and ideas, which I may turn into a poem later.
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Fan K'uan, "Travelers Among Mountains and
Streams, "1254–1322 A.D. Hanging scroll
ink and colors on silk.Source |
The formula I put at the top of my syllabi (both for workshops and literature courses) is play + practice = work. I tell about the Song landscape painters, who practiced their brushstrokes meticulously until the moment the spirit moved them. Then they painted those marvelous intricate landscapes in twenty minutes. Practicing one’s brushstrokes as a poet can take many forms: reading, doing research, wandering around with a keen eye, keeping a journal, translating, or playing the poetry game and writing something that has one salvageable line. Practice stands for discipline and craft in the formula. Practice also helps us to stop being so precious about “inspiration,” as if somehow if one is in a transported state when one writes, the words on the page are sacrosanct, or as if that feeling were a moment of truth that cannot be reentered or re-visioned. Play makes practice a joy and encourages experimentation. If I’m playing a game, then I might take a risk I otherwise would fret about. For example, one of the games I give my students is intended to teach them about the different effects of words whose roots are Anglo-Saxon versus those derived from the Latin or Greek. I give them a sheet of paper on which I copied the nouns, verbs, and modifiers from Elizabeth Bishop’s “At the Fishhouses.” Then I alphabetized and categorized the words according to their roots. The game is to use at least two of the Anglo-Saxon words per line and not to use a Latinate or Greek word more than once every three lines. The goal is to help students understand in a hands-on way that Anglo-Saxon words tend to be thingy, as they are the foundation of the language. Latinate and Greek words tend toward abstraction. So I give the students a palette of words and invite them experiment with their effects.
Reading, too, is a way of both practicing and playing. The pleasure of the text and the act of recreation in reading constitute play. The discipline involved in making oneself an apprentice to other writers constitutes practice. In both my workshops and literature classes, the reading list is extensive. I’m very keen that my students see the full spectrum of poetry and poetics in the tradition, history, and the contemporary scene. And reading is the way. I require a reading journal, in which I direct students to address several questions. They must have an entry for each assignment. Those are the requirements for practice. I also encourage them to play in their reading journals, to paste pictures inside, or draw, make diagrams, to do whatever gives them pleasure, makes the journal their own, and makes it a record of their development over the course of the semester. The students are compelled to be active readers. At the same time, they all (or almost all) choose to lavish playfulness and care on their journals. At the end of the semester, it is such a joy to collect a box full of beautiful notebooks, to see the record of the students’ progress, made by hand.
I want to show my students that they are smarter than they think they are, to tear down the walls that limit their thoughts, and to show them how they might find pleasure in difficulty, as did Baudelaire, who wrote the dictum, “There is great pleasure in difficulty.” I believe that the more poets and the more readers of poetry, the better. If many are amateur readers and writers, remember the root of “amateur” is love. But love is difficult; love requires practice and play in order to work. Love requires a full embrace of the other. I am not interested in teaching what I call mere self-expression. To practice an art means creating for an audience, even if it is an audience of one. And writing for an audience entails participating in a community, with all the responsibilities, messiness, unpredictability, attention to nuance, and pleasure involved in human interaction. I want my students to get to know each other, read each other, and be active facilitators, along with me. I say the classroom is a sanctuary, where we can be idealists. That doesn’t mean we are not skeptics, that we don’t see evil, that we don’t suffer and we don’t feel for others who suffer. It means, to me, that we are astonishingly lucky: we have the freedom to imagine other lives, other worlds.
I don’t mean to suggest at all that making art is merely a game and to rob it of its power to witness and to make social commentary. My goal is precisely the opposite. I hope to help students shed ego attachment and fear, so that they may enter the most difficult territories. One of the games that my students are required to play is to do some historical research and to write a poem out of that inquiry. I also have a game based on the front page of The New York Times. My reading list is replete with poets of witness. My hope is that with practice and play in the classroom, we can take the work outside.
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Marc Chagall, White Crucifixion. Oil, 1938
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The book I’m writing now, involves a good deal of soul-searching, angst, and horror, because I’m writing in the voice of a Holocaust survivor. I have to find ways to be brave, so I can hear the words when Eva Victoria Perera, my imaginary poet, speaks to me. So I read history, then I wander about, trying to see what’s before me through her eyes. The streets of Athens are lined with orange trees and olive trees. In the fall they are loaded with fruit. Grapes and figs litter the sidewalks strewn with dried bougainvillea flowers. I can’t help but think of the famine during the occupation, when the German troops took all the food from the Greeks. People were dropping dead in the streets. Somewhere between 250,000 and 500,000 died of starvation. So during World War II, there two genocides in Greece, the 69,000 Jews who died in the camps and all those who died in the famine, regardless of their religion. And here’s a garden city, abundant as Eden, where on a busy boulevard, you can reach up, pick an orange, and eat it, right there on the sidewalk, where you can fill your pockets with black olives. How do I transform this into poetry? I want to find a new language, a new voice, and it’s daunting. So I make lists of words by closing my eyes, opening to a page of a book, then pointing to a word. Then I group the words, two, three or four, to group, according to a preset pattern. Then I play a game: write a line for each group of words. I can cheat, violate the rules, and revise later. Yet I only lose if I don’t write. Yes, I’m playing a silly game to write about a serious subject, but it’s one designed to catch myself off-guard, to shed my protective armor, to throw a wrench in my defense mechanisms. I think it’s worth asking, why do we use militaristic metaphors for these psychological states? And I think it’s worth trying to defuse them with games and play in order to hear the notes of poetry, which, to me, can be sung in anyone’s voice, because they are the chords of empathy.
I’m sitting at my desk, looking out the window. Mark Mazower’s Inside Hitler’s Greece and Rebecca Camhi Fromer’s The House by the Sea: A Portrait of the Holocaust in Greece are on my shelf, along with other histories, some books I’ve loved for years, and the new loves, the books I’m reading right now —Yannis Ritsos’s The Fourth Dimension, Lynn Freed’s House of Women, Adam Zagajewsky’s Mysticism for Beginners. As soon as I finish this paragraph, I’ll go out, take care of some business, wander around, talk to friends and family. I’ll practice and play, hope for a poem. And I look toward the future, when I’ll return to my students, bring the work home.
October 28, 2005
Serifos, Kyklades
(Greece)
