How to Stay Sane in the Classroom (Poets’ Division)

Is academe a healthy place for poets to spend their hours? Many people have doubts. Thomas Macaulay reportedly once wrote that Milton required “years to undo what his college and classical training had done for him before he could become a great poet.”

Anxieties like that will probably never vanish. But a new volume from the University of Iowa Press offers several thousand thoughts about how poets and college classrooms can make peace with each other. In Poets on Teaching: A Sourcebook, edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson of Loyola University Chicago, 102 writers reflect on their dual roles as poets and college instructors. All but four of the pieces are original to the collection.

The writers ponder such matters as how to teach 18-year-olds not to use boring verbs, how to resist “the medieval titles and trappings of the university,” and how to teach John Ashbery’s poems to students who don’t like them and probably never will.

A few highlights:

Arielle Greenberg argues that poetry workshops should be based on Mary Karr’s notion of a “three-way contract” between the writer, the reader, and the poem. “The process of writing the poem is that of making good on the contract, while the process of reading a poem is that of meeting the poem on its own ‘contractual’ terms,” Greenberg writes. The advantage of the model is that it requires students to think carefully about what a particular poem is trying to do, rather than tediously imposing their own aesthetic preferences on everything they encounter. In Greenberg’s workshops, it’s fine to criticize a poem—but the criticisms should be framed as arguments about how the poem breaks its implicit contract with the reader.

Catherine Wagner explains how to teach students to read poetic line breaks by leading them through “6 S’s”: speed, sound, syntax, surprise, sense, and space.

Finally, Linh Dinh lists 11 excellent pieces of advice that he gives his poetry students. We’ll steal two of them here.

“Have faith that you will get better at thinking and writing, and that people will notice it, even if stingily and reluctantly, since you’re not entitled to any attention.”

and

“Even if you’ll end up a mediocre writer, there’s an outside chance you will become an excellent reader, so this pursuit will still be worthwhile, sort of, even as you lie there, unheated, loveless, and clutching your last packet of Ramen Pride.”—David Glenn