When I was in high school, my history teachers always ran out of time. At the end of the school year, American History concluded at Appomattox or with a rough outline of Reconstruction. World History ceased abruptly with the Napoleonic Wars or the dynamic dislocations of the Industrial Revolution. And so, without any instruction in more recent history, I was left with no bridge between the past and my own time. The contemporary world lacked context — the soil of cause and effect — and seemed to have sprouted almost by magic like a blade of grass from a cracked paving stone.
Similarly, the literary education of high school students is often so truncated that freshmen and sophomores come to a college creative writing classroom with few modern and contemporary models to guide their work. In some cases, students may be familiar with Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allen Poe, but there is a good chance they have never heard of T. S. Eliot or Flannery O’Connor, much less any present-day practitioners of poetry and fiction. With the recent emphasis on diversity at all levels and disciplines of public education, some students are aware of at least one or two significant writers of color. Though this effort to update and diversify the literary education of elementary and high school students is laudable, it is incumbent upon college-level creative writing instructors to fill at least some of the remaining gaps.
Still, despite our best efforts as educators, many creative writing students resist reading literature. But what sculptor, for example, could aspire to success in his field without an appreciation for the work of Rodin and Michelangelo? What classical musician could pretend to any commitment whatsoever to music without a familiarity with Bach, Beethoven, Mozart? So, why do so many students believe they can produce writing of real value without studying the work of their established predecessors and peers? These are questions I put to all of my students, including those who participated in my English 280: Poetry Writing class in the spring of 2005.
Though these students had already taken English 205, the basic multi-genre creative writing course at Community College of Philadelphia, their notions of poetry were still heavily influenced by oral forms delivered in public venues, such as popular music and poetry slams. While oral presentations do have value, at their worst they provide opportunities for bravado, for swagger, rather than artistry. As song lyrics or performance pieces, poetry lends itself to entertainment rather than rigorous scrutiny. In the classroom, however, the written word is paramount, especially the words of established poets.
In what I will call the “Apprenticeship Model,” students serve as apprentices to the writers whose work we study and critique. Exposure to the work of modern and contemporary poetry helps students move beyond simplistic or antiquated notions of prosody and content, teaching them lessons that they are in no position to teach one another in a standard workshop. Our predecessors provide models in terms of both art and craft. What, for example, can we learn from Jane Kenyon about variety in rhythm and meter? What can Allen Ginsberg teach us about the illusion of spontaneity? When we compare two poems of the same title — “Lot’s Wife” — by Anna Akhmatova and Anthony Hecht, what can we discern about differences in esthetic sensibility, modes of expression, use of language? Each week, a new element of craft and/or content — such as concrete imagery, narrative arc, subtle aspects of prosody, emotional credibility, manipulation of time, or sense of place — is introduced through the poetry of others. These elements in particular poems are evaluated by students and instructor. So, in a sense, the work of established poets is subjected to workshop analysis, thus allowing students to become accustomed to this process before their own work — and their egos — are exposed. Students are then required to apply the studied elements to their own poems and encouraged to measure their accomplishments against the assigned readings. In this way, a written dialogue is initiated between poets in the classroom and poets of the recent past. It is a classroom, then, containing a few students and many, albeit virtual, teachers.
By the end of the course, students have come to realize that the richest form of artistic inspiration comes not from the narrow concerns of the self, nor from a classroom occupied by a small group of individuals united by limited knowledge and experience, but from the wide variety of external sources that comprise the modern literary tradition — a tradition to which the apprentice poet is now better prepared to contribute.
Course Reading List & Writing Assignments: ENGL 280 (Spring 2005)
Love Poetry: Abstraction vs. Specificity
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Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2007