Dominic Fox wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 5:48 AM, Max Richards<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> ...It also brings back
>> certain misgivings about times when I tactlessly expected young students to be
>> ready for this sort of strenuous activity.
>>
>
> A few are, and that's the killer. What do you do with them? What,
> while you're doing it, do you do with the rest?
>
> Dominic
I don't know what anyone does with students in my particular setting; I
know only what I've done. It works or it does not. Sometimes it succeeds
wildly to the border of the miraculous.
Composition courses are not keyed to anything like reflective thought.
They are more like Auto Repair using a textbook and computer. It's
deadly for the instructors as well. We do not get to use different
books. This is reality: money and the ability to focus or concentrate
for long stretches. That said, most of the readings bore the hell out of
me and my students--or if they don't, sometimes I need to give them
exposure to something beyond the clever In The Box readings. So in one
class I handed out two poems: Mark Doty's "Broadway" and Ted Berrigan's
Sonnet 75. I told them to pick one and write a description of what they
saw happening. Basically, what story is the narrator telling, and by the
end, what do you see? I figured most of them would pick Doty's poem.
Less than half did. Something about Berrigan's headlong speed-rush
through the East Side got to them; and even if most of them got it
shallowly if at all, they were willing to try.
But I got a paper from a young lady, and it shocked me. She had
complained all semester that poetry is draggy and depressing and filled
with loss and death (you think I was going to argue with truth?). But
she took Berrigan's sonnet and it lit her up. She got to this:
The cooling
wind keeps blow-
ing and my poems are coming.
Except at night. Then
I walk out in the bleak village and look for you.
Something ignited this young lady. She developed an intensely personal
non-critical essay and at the end wrote down "I feel like he was looking
for me."
How could I reply? "Where is the discussion of prosody, the place of
this sonnet in the development of the sonnet?" Or could I say as I did
"He was looking for you and you found him." Ms. K was violating all the
rules of how to write a literary essay. I told her "If you write like
this when you get back to Virginia Commonwealth, they will crucify you."
But she learned something I could not teach her: to engage with a text
at a wholly personal level, how to avoid being stomped by The Rules, how
to make poetry matter to *her*. They don't teach that at VCU and they
probably don't teach it anywhere. Even I didn't teach it--I just let the
ones who were school to write mechanically do so, and I let the ones
like Ms. K dive into risk.
This young lady was my miracle. She more than compensated for the
"gentleman" back in 1976 who said "What the f--k do I need this for,
I've got my own sandblasting business." I don't expect another moment
like this, but that's okay. I have had my vision, haven't I?
Ken
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