When Larry helped us define the tern "underprepared," it raised a question. When I began to write, was I "prepared"? Granted, I wasn't in the same position as most of my students. Language was the sea I swam in. I loved to read, though not in a disciplined way, and on a certain level, I had models. Yet, back then, if someone had asked me my favorite author, I would have replied the same way as the correspondence student in the J.D. Salinger story who said in his questionnaire, "with wordy, Honest John integrity, that he was his own favorite artist" (157).
Preparing for this panel led me back to the story, "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period," narrated by a sullenly precocious 19-year old who fakes his way into teaching at a fly-by-night art correspondence school, and opens envelopes full of drawings by "underprepared" students. Granted, some are familiar with technique. One of the more memorable is Bambi Kramer, who lists her favorite artists as Rembrandt and Walt Disney. She draws a young boy fishing. One leg looks as though it has rickets and the other elephantiasis- "an effect, it was clear, that Miss Kramer had deliberately used to show that the boy was standing with his feet slightly apart" (Salinger 146)
The method of the school is to correct these drawings through penciled overlays, and our hero knows that through this method they were able to show "a reasonably talented student how to draw a recognizable pig in a recognizable sty, or even a picturesque pig in a picturesque sty." But it could not give the students the information they most wanted-how to draw "a beautiful pig in a beautiful sty" (Salinger 143).
Here's the truth of the matter. Of course, writers need to read the established writers Alan mentioned. Perhaps the most critical reason is that then language of these writers can begin to displace the language the students unconsciously absorb from reality television, action movies, and instant text messages. In particular, the students we work with at Community College of Philadelphia swim in a sea less of language than of ideology, where just about everything they hear - and what little they read – confirms what they already believe about themselves.
A course I often teach, English 205, immediately precedes Alan's poetry courses, and ten sections a year fill. There may be many reasons for its popularity. Our college is in a city where Spoken Word poetry is increasingly popular. Many of our students are rappers, and more than a few have performed their work. They may assume that the course will confirm their own belief in their abilities. Still, experience has taught me that most of our students enter these classes for the same reason that poor Bambi Kramer entered the art correspondence school. They don't want to learn how to draw a realistic pig in a realistic sty, or even a picturesque pig in a picturesque sty. They want access to beauty and originality that they know is out there, and that their world is not providing.
This begs the question: how can we teach what cannot, in fact, be taught? Alan suggests that reading masters will lead to mastery. I am less sure. I am now going to tell you something Alan did not tell you about our particular set of students. They are not polite. By that, I don't mean that they are rude to each other. In fact, their respect for their classmates is obvious and moving. I mean that the students don't assume, just because a story or poem is written by a so-called master, like O'Connor or T.S. Eliot, or is part of some anthology called Best American Writing, that they have to think it's any good. If they're bored, they say so. They are intolerant of ambiguity. In short, most of them have short attention spans, and are resentful when a writer takes them out of their own worlds and neighborhoods and safe assumptions. Of course, this is exactly where they long to go--to somewhere new. That's why they're here, not only in my course, but in the college. Still, they hold onto a basic distrust of anything "official." They also hold onto their honesty. It is that honesty that makes working with our students both a pleasure and a challenge. It is also what ultimately prepares them for the rigors of a Creative Writing classroom.
And it is also why, in spite of many lively arguments I've had with Alan over the years, I continue to make a writing workshop the center of my classroom. My students' heads may be full of what is on their cell phones, but the most immediate way to make room for other voices is if those voices are there in the classroom. The workshop is a way to use the respect they have for one another as a way to make them take all writing seriously.
Everyone here has had the experience of the poem or the story with "one true line." I think of a poem I read years ago. It was about trees. It had-or at least attempted-regular end-rhymes, something I did not encourage, and they went high into the sky, and their leaves so green were lovely to be seen, and so on. Then, it ended with the statement-a comma-splice actually. "Sometimes they are wood, then they're dead." There was something about that line that got under my skin, to the point where I still remember it twenty years later. Even the incorrect punctuation worked, a kind of awkwardness that merged form and content. When I told the student that it was the best line in the poem, she was bewildered.
Can beauty be accidental? I believe it can, and that my job is to give students the tools to recognize it and the words to describe it, and ultimately, serve as a kind of scout into the thicket, machete in hand. I guess that's why I'm "scissors." I lead my students in a search for the one true line, or one true scene, or one true character in an artificial construction, what the poet Marianne Moore called a "real toad" in the "imaginary garden." I'm pretty ruthless with that machete, but I keep a vigilant eye out for that toad. In the course of that search, we develop a common language, a critical vocabulary. Of course, I use established writers from the start, but initially, that is not the center of our work as readers, because it is only after students recognize true moments in the work of their peers that they are willing, sometimes grudgingly, to admit that these masters can do it too.
What keeps these workshops from dissolving into sloppy love-fests? When students respond to the work of their peers, they aren't critics, who give a thumbs up or thumbs down. They are observers, and they write down everything they notice. I make sure of it, because I grade them on the responses they write on those poems and stories. I grade on quantity. Sheer density of comments on the page lets writers know their readers are taking them seriously. In fact, insistence on long, detailed comments serves a few purposes. The more they're pushed to comment, the more they tend to notice, and the more they notice, the more they bring to their own reading and writing. When they read a classmate's story, where does the point of view shift? What is the dramatic question? Can they identify the climax and the denouement? Consider the rhythm of dialogue. Consider where the author breaks a scene. Consider the piece as a whole, its shape and structure. Assume the writer makes these choices deliberately.
At times, this process is a struggle. In a workshop full of people who may well lack basic skills in use of Standard English, should we go forward on the assumption that troubles with sentence fragments and subject verb agreement are artistic choices? And then, because the classroom often contains people with wildly different levels of literacy, ranging from people who have never finished a book, to some ringers who have read Proust, some of the written comments may initially be something along the lines of "Stop wasting our time." But like any teacher with an ounce of sense, I enlist these ringers as allies, and they soon learn that taking the work of classmates seriously is a way to take their own work seriously, and that the true moments in the piece may initially be accidents, but they are accidents worth deconstructing.
Ultimately, it is the workshop that helps them to make the transition-to read like writers. There have been times when a student has read a story by, say, Z.Z. Packer, and said the characters reminded them of one we'd read in workshop the week before, or noticed that Ginsberg used repetition or enjambment in a way that reminded them of the girl who'd written a poem about standing in line at the Philadelphia Gas Works. And there have been times when they refer to a technique-say a way of jumping from one scene to another, or shifting point of view from line to line, by a classmate's name, say the "Laisha Thompson point of view shift." It may not exist in any index of literary terms, but maybe it will one day.
Unlike poor, gloomy De Daumier-Smith, I am not teaching in a correspondence school. Thus, I have far more tools at my disposal-not only my pencil, but two-dozen pencils, and they are not really correcting errors. They are searching for that real toad in the imaginary garden. They may not find it, but in the process, they will begin to recognize it. Can we ever "prepare" a student to write not just realistically, or even picturesquely, but beautifully? We can, at least, teach them to recognize what is beautiful and true. We can do it by introducing them to the great writers Alan has mentioned, but I hold that we can also do it through introducing them to each other.
Reference
Salinger, J.D. Nine Stories. New York: Bantam, 1964
©Copyright 2007. Contact author for permission
Maintained by Jay Howard,Jan 2007