The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing (7 page)

I started teaching at the age of forty. In the fourteen years I’ve been at it I’ve talked to many students and faculty, and I’ve reluctantly come to a few conclusions. It hurts to state why I believe students are turning away from literature courses because even at fifty-four maturity is not my strong point, and polemic tends to make me either nervous or bored and withdrawn. I do not like a fight, and I hope what I say doesn’t start one.

A young recent Ph.D. asked me to attend his class to discuss some of my poems with his students. I like the young man and was pleased he wanted to teach my work. It was a good class. The teacher had done his work well. That was obvious from the enthusiastic attention the students brought to the work being discussed and the intelligent way they made points.

One student asked how I’d come to write “The Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir,” one of the poems they were studying. My answer was straightforward. I’d had a love affair. The woman dumped me for someone else. I was brokenhearted and vengeful, but cowardly. So in real life I suffered but in the poem I had my revenge—at least early in the poem.

A few days after the class, the teacher told me he had been very surprised at my answer, that he didn’t know poets used life that way. I was surprised at his surprise and asked him where he’d assumed poems came from. He replied that he’d believed a writer sits alone in a room and makes things up.

Understand this is a bright young man. A good teacher. He has a Ph.D. in literature from one of our very best universities. Where did he get such ideas about writers? The answer is obvious. He got them from the same place he got his education.

One of my reluctant conclusions is that the Ph.D. system tends to train people to teach literature as if it is some grand, mysterious system that has little or nothing to do with human existence. Obviously enough good teachers come out of the system to justify it. But I fear such a system attracts its fair share of people who are eager to put knowledge between themselves and their lives. To put it bluntly, dull people. As the punch line of the old joke goes, “I’ve been going through my notes and it turns out I
have
read
Hamlet
.”

I’ve even heard academics refer to popular teachers as “entertainers.” To have interest in literature and to communicate that interest is of secondary value at best. True integrity is often willfully equated with dullness. That’s not a recent development, either. If anything, it was worse when I was a student.

Another reason for declining student interest in literature courses is a tendency of academic professors to establish and maintain emotional advantages over the students. They seem to have acquired knowledge in order to feel superior to those without it. A strange attitude for a teacher—not wanting to give and share. They’re not as good at this as business executives are. Maybe that’s why they must limit their victims to the young. One rule for all who want the advantage over others: never show your feelings. The capacity to hide feelings is the one trait I found common to all high-level corporation executives during my thirteen years in industry. Of course, it helps if you don’t have any feelings to hide.

This tendency to hold the advantage over the student is not a new development, either. It too was worse when I was in school. But then it was considered normal, and it did not turn students away from the literature courses. Students were less sophisticated and assumed that superior knowledge gave license for behaving as if one had superior social status. A lot of students today would rather not learn Milton than be made to feel inferior because they didn’t already know his work.

That makes academics sound petty. But damn it, some of them are petty. In one large university the senior faculty voted against publishing the graduate catalogue because they objected to their names’ appearing with names of junior faculty members. It’s a wonder what so-called educated people will do to look important. It’s no wonder that a lot of young people don’t want to study under them.

If I had to limit myself to one criticism of academics it would be this: they distrust their responses. They feel that if a response can’t be defended intellectually, it lacks validity. One literature professor I know was asked as he left a movie theater if he had liked the movie, and he replied, “I’m going to have to go home and think about it.” What he was going to think about is not whether he liked the movie, but whether he could defend his response to it. If he decided he couldn’t, presumably he’d hide his feelings or lie about them.

Academics like these, and fortunately they are far from all the academics, give students the impression that there’s nothing in literature that could be of meaningful personal interest. If I seem to be sniping, forgive me. There are great academics and I’m proud to know some of them, glad that I can work in the same profession with them. If my criticism seems harsh, please know I still consider academic professors indispensable to an English department. Whatever the curses of creative writing, it is still a luxury. If there’s a choice between dropping Shakespeare studies or advanced poetry writing, I would not defend retention of the writing course. It is not as important to the education of the students.

Whatever my criticisms of some academics, I’m old enough to know that education as a way of improving the self remains a fluffy ideal. Academics have no corner on human failure. We creative-writing teachers have at least our fair share, and speaking personally, I’m in no position to be critical of the weaknesses of others. We must live with some things. There may not be enough good people to go around, and most people aren’t very good at what they do. The excellent teacher may be as rare as the excellent automobile mechanic. The Ph.D. system may not attract enough good people, but the M.F.A. system in creative writing has some shortcomings too.

One glaring weakness of the system is that it places in teaching positions people who have not demonstrated that their impulse to write is real and lasting. It is simply too easy to pass oneself off as a writer in a university. I’m in favor of all M.F.A. graduates remaining out of school for at least ten years before they are considered for a teaching position. This is a cruel proposal, given the economic pressure to build a a career. For it to work humanely, schools should be willing to count that ten years as time on the job and to hire the writer at the associate professor level, but without tenure until the writer demonstrated his ability to teach creative writing. This way, one will have already published and presumably would continue. The writing is there to be judged, published or not, and the writer has demonstrated a durable impulse to write. One would hold or lose the job on the basis of one’s ability to teach. Creative-writing instructors often write and publish because that is their role and they must do it to hold their job. Once they receive tenure, they stop writing. We are perpetuating ourselves and the system.

Some may hop on this idea and say: yes, and then the writer would be forced to subject himself or herself to outside experience. Experience outside the university is just what the writer needs. But I am doubtful. I believe the writer creates experience as needed to satisfy impulses to write. The odd and not so odd are everywhere, and landscapes never stop. For a writer it is a matter of receiving, responding, converting, and appropriating. A writer will do that anywhere.

The graduate writing program has some serious problems. One is how we judge students for acceptance to the program. I think Yeats was right when he observed that what comes easy for the bad poet comes with great difficulty for the good. We accept those who, in our opinion, seem to be the best writers. But we may be accepting those who have absorbed technique rapidly because no obsessions normal to the good writer were there to get in the way. In forty years a celebrated poet may turn out to be someone who was rejected by graduate writing programs. I see no way around this. We have to go on the samples of writing submitted. The strength of the impulse behind a piece of writing is a hard thing to judge, and we are wise not to try. Most young writers haven’t learned to submit to their obsessions.

We can’t ignore the overwhelming evidence in favor of creative-writing classes. Names like Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Kurt Vonnegut, Flannery O’Connor, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, on and on, testify in one way or another to the validity of writing classes. But let’s load the dice and say all the good writers would have done it anyway. Maybe they would have. If I am that fatalistic about writing, how can I justify creative-writing classes? A dozen years or so back I was asked that in front of a huge audience, and my answer is still the same: I don’t. I just take the money. This time let me dignify the question with some other equally serious answers.

A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time. Writing is tough, and many wrong paths can be taken. If we are doing our job, creative-writing teachers are performing a necessary negative function. And if we are good teachers, we should be teaching the writer ways of doing that for himself all his writing life. We teach how not to write and we teach writers to teach themselves how not to write. When we teach how to write, the student had best be on guard.

What about the student who is not good? Who will never write much? It is possible for a good teacher to get from that student one poem or one story that far exceeds whatever hopes the student had. It may be of no importance to the world of high culture, but it may be very important to the student. It is a small thing, but it is also small and wrong to forget or ignore lives that can use a single microscopic moment of personal triumph. Just once the kid with bad eyes hit a home run in an obscure sandlot game. You may ridicule the affectionate way he takes that day through a life drab enough to need it, but please stay the hell away from me.

The best argument for a creative-writing class is one I learned long ago, in 1940 in high school. I didn’t know I’d learned it until years later, but I’m slow picking up the important lessons. West Seattle High School was fairly middleclass. A few children of Japanese truck farmers and some of us from Youngstown and White Center helped preserve what I snobbishly prefer to think of as peasant vitality. Belle McKensie, the creative-writing teacher, had fiery red hair and shapely legs the boys remarked on outside of class, and she had loud concepts of democracy and equality that she practiced when her temper didn’t interfere. One student, named Hughes (I think), had moved to West Seattle from Oklahoma. One had to be unusually ingratiating and aggressive to find friends among the little snobs who banded together at West Seattle High. I suppose that’s standard for a high school. Hughes was shy, a stranger, just one of many of the 2,000 students passing through, unnoticed, lonely, and probably miserable.

One day he read aloud a theme he had written—we had to read our work aloud to get credit. It was a true story about an evening some older boys had taken him to a whorehouse. He had been fourteen at the time, and he was candid about his fears, his attempts to appear courageous and confident to the older boys, his eventual panic and running away. We were a bit apprehensive when he finished. That story could have gotten him thrown out of most classes in the school. McKensie broke the silence with applause. She raved approval, and we realized we had just heard a special moment in a person’s life, offered in honesty and generosity, and we better damn well appreciate it. It may have been the most important lesson I ever learned, maybe the most important lesson one can teach. You are someone and you have a right to your life. Too simple? Already covered by the Constitution? Try to find someone who teaches it. Try to find a student who knows it so well he or she doesn’t need it confirmed.

In the thirty-eight years since that day in McKensie’s class, I’ve seen the world tell us with wars and real estate developments and bad politics and odd court decisions that our lives don’t matter. That may be because we are too many. Architecture and application form, modern life says that with so many of us we can best survive by ignoring identity and acting as if individual differences do not exist. Maybe the narcissism academics condemn in creative writers is but a last reaching for a kind of personal survival. Anyway, as a sound psychoanalyst once remarked to me dryly, narcissism is difficult to avoid. When we are told in dozens of insidious ways that our lives don’t matter, we may be forced to insist, often far too loudly, that they do. A creative-writing class may be one of the last places you can go where your life still matters. Your life matters, all right. It is all you’ve got for sure, and without it you are dead. These days, the joke is even less funny.

If a lot of people were not already willing to run from their lives, the demand for creative-writing classes would be greater. Disappearing into the hugeness of system is not unattractive. I know. I’ve attended large universities and worked in giant corporations, and I’ve found anonymity to be wondrously seductive. Something pulls some of us back from that tempting disappearance. Call it the obsessive and irresistible love of being alive, if you can stand the rhetoric. It is born of the certainty we will disappear fast enough. Oblivion needs no help from us. Long ago, in the first poem in his first book, James Wright told himself and us

It is paradise
because
it is vacant, like a blank sheet of paper. It is paradise because the vacancy is there for us to fill momentarily, and we are here to fill it. No matter how justified our despair, we still live in a world where circumstances that make death preferable to life are limited by our revulsion. When moments that support our awareness of ourselves and each other, fond or sad, immediate or mnemonic, insist, some of us would not deny them any more than we would deny our lives. That anyone or anything says they are not important is vivid proof that they are. Creative-writing classes give us a chance to be glad of the green wall.