Tuesday, June 30, 2020

Teaching Writer/Writing Teacher: Benefits and Losses


Professionalism is the enemy of creativity and invention ~ Leonard Cohen

            Bob Dylan slept on floors, couches, benches—other people’s floors, couches, benches.  His hair was a weedy meadow he pomaded with ouzo. Showers were what fell on him during rainy, un-umbrella-ed walks.  He peed out windows. He betrayed. He forgot. He stole. He presumed. He played. He sang. He created.  He is the first songwriter to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature.  He didn’t pick up the award and he didn’t deliver the scheduled acceptance speech.  We have his songs and his legacy.  He is a reminder.

            Toward the other end of the spectrum (cf. diagnostic term), I have spent over thirty years behaving as teacher.  But, as my lapel button sports, “Well behaved women rarely make history.”  And yes, the benefits and joys of teaching include choosing literature I want to read—we do learn by teaching, freeing up students from school abuses they had sustained—and life-long friendships with students and colleagues.  Although an immigrant child raised in poverty, I acquired a three-acre property with a thirteen-room house; a pension and long-term care package; bucks for massages, yoga camps, jaunts through Budapest and London. 

One of the main curses of teaching in an institution is the bureaucratization of the creative process, orchestrated by those-who-ca(wo)n’t-teach-or-write administrators.  I exploited my writing talents to produce textbooks; taught too many courses under increasingly tyrannical strictures; wrote grant applications for time to write (although no one issues contracts for poetry books); tailored my writing projects to be granted time to write; committed (cf. incarceration) myself to draconian disciplines to “get some writing done,” despite; submitted (hm) my work to faceless, distant editors judging contests (the university would “get” awards). But The Muse doesn’t come in little uniform drawers, like ancient library card catalogs—ideas dutifully ranked alphabetically and secured by unforgiving rods running through them.  No self-respecting right brain will court a slapdown-happy opportunistic left-braining. I would be amazed at the risks and innovations of the Writing Poetry students I coached, secretly wondering when will I get to mine?

The body doesn’t lie.  Mine was trying to head me off with multiple embodiments of my self-abuse: multiple hand injuries from years of banging away at the keyboard to get get-it-over-with tasks over with so I could write poetry, music, whatever comes from authenticity instead of ambition, the internal instead of the external—whatever else dedicated writers have for their sacrifices of all of the above.  Back injuries, fibromyalgia, epic insomnia from the commutes and stress.  Yoyoing weight.  Premature gray.

            Juggling writing and teaching is like juggling work and child-care.  Someone has to suffer. And juggling, while focusing, is also limiting.  I decided to leave teaching, which I inordinately love, while there’s still time to discover who I am and can be as a writer. The final blow was when my university foisted course conversions on us which required lesson plans for every fifteen minutes to be planned months ahead of classes; and grading students on every peep they said or wrote.  As often happens, our tools became our masters. The faculty were enslaved to their digital tools.  Assessment instead of education. Micromanagement instead of music and magic. I refused to do that to my “Writing Poetry” and “Emily Dickinson” and “Shakespeare Survey” courses, among others.  I was not willing, in Dickinson’s words, to “Split the Lark” to find the music—either in my students or myself.  (That metaphor became moot at my university, as they abolished the music department.)

            Yes, my students benefitted from my being a writer—in both my writing and literature courses.  I know that who and how I am is more compelling to them than anything I say.  If I wasn’t taking care of myself, I did bring my passion for literature and the creative process to the classroom, as well as iconoclastic practices.  I forbade students to summarize and paraphrase, in favor of original and quirky interpretations.  I had them read as writers, questioning Shakespeare’s choices, challenging the gushings of bardolators. I eschewed the almighty writing prompt to unrelieve student writers of one of the most important aspects of writing—cultivating inspiration. I lied and finagled around assessment rubrics to protect us all. I submitted my syllabi, as I would throw a bloody bone to a cur, and then blithely closed the classroom door to create a space station for discovery and invention.

            You’re right, I wasn’t behaving.  But I was playing at it. I developed habits that are corrosive to a writer.  I studied, instead of read auto-didactically, in anticipation of engaging students. A nature walk was all about how I can arrange for them to have the experience. What I fed my mind as I attempted sleep were elaborate scripts with how to respond to administrative evils.  What awakened me in the morning was solutions to ephemeral, trivial problems instead of a new image for a poem. As I encouraged my students to discover inspiration in the daily and personal, I became a machine for identifying “that’s a poem” in our talks.  That carried over into my obsessively hoarding poem ideas—for when I got the time.  All it did was overwhelm and suffocate me.  Because I’m easily inspired and feared the tidal wave of ideas I had trained myself to identify for students, I developed my own addictions to stop the flow: stupid television, food, shopping—luckily, no drugs or alcohol.

Then there are the numbers—the numb-ers.  I love mathematics, so it’s not fear of numbers—but the misuse of them.  Institutional quantifications are all about control and dominance—and the numbing of the messy experience of being creative human beings.  During the COVID crisis, I’m taking my temperature and oxygen levels for peace of mind—that I don’t have it, or if I do to get immediate help and protect loved ones.  But human signs are more reliable—the cough, the loss of taste and smell, body aches, dizziness and other clinical symptoms. 

Numbers—how long, how much, how many did I write/publish—the only thing that administrators acknowledge—is counter to what Csikszentmihalyi terms “The Flow.”  Numbers are like putting multiple walls into a river—at some point, if we’re lucky, the river will break them down.  But the flood might be devastating and it will fling walls wildly.

Then there’s the issue of input.  A Columbia University study documented that the longer a writing teacher teaches—the more unconventional spellings she sees—the more her own spelling skills will deteriorate.  This applies, as well, to the myriads (that’s tens of thousands) of student drafts I read.  Yes, some were brilliant and thrilling, but how much better it would have been for me as a writer to read polished, accomplished writing.  Responding (I hate the words “marking” and “grading”) to student papers is for most teachers stultifying and onerous—one of main reasons teachers retire early.  Through the years, I have devised creative ways to maximize students’ learning and minimize my crumbling paper glaciers.  But what we practice is what we are.  I practiced feeding myself unpredictable food of varying temperatures on Styrofoam take-out trays.  Not always.  But mostly.  Practice cringing at incoming work, cringe you will at reading, in general.

The bureaucratization of the creative process, hoarding ideas, delaying projects, martineting myself to produce, studying instead of reading, numbing myself with numbers, denying myself nourishment and freedom—I betrayed my Muse.  I did develop a 60-page vita of publications and performances, but I abetted a culture of I can’t have for or take care of myself—and students learn by example.

I am delighted and gratified with my experience with students, but the greatest strengths of my work were in how I rebelled against the status quo, and writing my way into and through my iconoclastic ways.  That I loved to do.  And that’s what my students remember the most.

Who will I be?  How will I recover?  Write, of course.

           
Works Cited:


Sunday, May 24, 2020

Popcorn: Coming Back to Our Senses


What is mushroom popcorn? - Quora 
            Isn’t she beautiful? A kernel of corn subjected to high heat, bursting forth—even more unique among other popped kernels than a snow flake is to another snowflake, for snowflakes are hexagonal.  One popcorn is not even so related to another.

            Onto a serving plate, I measured out one popcorn for each of twenty students (plus a few).  Come and choose your special piece, I said, And don’t eat it. Each student filed past, intent on finding the piece that sang out to her or him, and picked it up with a pair of tongs I had provided. (Sanitation, and all that.)

Study your popcorn in detail.  Name it.  I will gather all of them back, and you will have to retrieve them.  One student asked, But what if someone takes mine before I get to it? Already, students were bonding with their new treasures. The stakes were high. Back at their desks, students began their study of these small beings.

Focus. Eyes widening. Turning to see 360 degrees of each pop—this way, that. The room silent.  Were we all holding our breaths? Fingertips becoming as finely tuned as a safecracker’s. Noticing color gradations, textures, patterns, shine versus matte surfaces—individual markings.  Were we using all our senses?  How about sound? I invited them to listen to their pops, rub them by their ears (person’s—we were in corn mode, corn comes on ears). Like Styrofoam, they said.  And remember, I said, name your popcorn.

            Then the letting go—final looks, tiny noddings as each person sealed in last(ing) impressions.  I swirled the popcorn around on the plate.  Now come retrieve yours. If you’re not certain, wait.  All but two knew instantly—and those two had no trouble choosing when others were readopted.

            What was your experience? I asked, and wrote these responses on the board:

            How quickly I can focus.
            Full of anticipation
            Kinda like happy
            Nostalgic—what if I lost my popcorn
            Imaginative
            A feeling of ownership
            Something that seemed unimportant became really important
            I actually felt nervous
            Creative
            I was able to connect to something real.
            An appreciation for the identity of every thing—big or little—in the world
            It was an experience of creating meaning.

            We then had a lively discussion of how much communing with a single popcorn was like communing with a poem, in all the ways cited just above this paragraph.  Ultimately, as Shanique Christian eloquently put it, Poetry is a full-body experience.  It brings us back to our senses as that single piece of popcorn does—we focus, anticipate an experience, we take ownership of our experience of the words, we connect to something real, we create meaning—we get kinda like happy.

            A piece of popcorn is a full-body experience, for, as William Butler Yeats put it, Art is the fountain jetting from all the hopes, memories, and sensations of the body. Some poems provide that experience more than others.  And this is where coming back to our senses, and noticing which poems uniquely identify body experiences—and to what extent.

 Kate Nightingale on Twitter: "Senses are the only way into your ...
           

            Here’s the beginning of Rudy Francisco’s popular poem “Love Poem Medley” for us to consider. The highlighted passages appeal to the body.  Except for the image of the air-brushed super model, a visual reference, Francisco favors bodily sensations and kinesthetic (motion) imagery.  The rest of this excerpt appeals only to the mind, sometimes relying on clichéd ideas, and does not invite us into the whole-body experience of poetry.  In a writing poetry workshop, we would invite Francisco to use his considerable talents to focus his writing more on imagery rather than thoughts.

            I want you to bite my lip until I can no longer speak
            And then suck my ex-girlfriend’s name out of my mouth just to make sure she never
comes up in our conversations
            I’m going to be honest, I’m not really a love poet
            In fact, every time I try to write about love my hands cramp…just to show me how painful love can be
            And sometimes my pencils break, just to prove to me that every now and then love
takes a little more work than you planned.
            See I hear that love is blind so, I write all my poems in Braille
And my poems are never actually finished because true love is endless

I always believed that real love is kind of like a super model before she’s air
brushed.
It’s pure and imperfect, just the way that God intended
See I’m going to be honest, I’m not a love poet.
But if I was to wake up tomorrow morning and decide that I really wanted to write about love I swear that my first poem…
It would be about you…

             Francisco’s poem pops with meaning where the images are.  It wouldn’t be long before we forgot his thoughts which aren’t unique and don’t get lodged in our bodies, as readers. And, truly, since there is no imagery about the woman he is addressing in the poem, it’s more about what’s left of the old girlfriend. So, his claim that he would be writing a first love poem about the new love, is just not happening so far in this poem.

But we would certainly remember the searing image of his first two lines.  Because they are of the body, because they focus us and make us kinda happy, because they give our bodies something with which to connect, we would readily identify those lines of poetry on a serving plate—and own them.

Take a look at a favorite poem and identify where it brings you back to your senses—where it pops—and where it retreats into thoughts. 

            Reply here as to how this perspective might change your experience of reading poetry.

Works Cited




Wednesday, May 6, 2020

Virtual Teaching During Coronavirus Lockdown: A Poem



Virtual Teaching During Coronavirus Lockdown

1.

Google Meet mini poetry workshop—
Olivia, Patricia, and me in our separate
Hollywood Squares, Brady Bunch tiles.
I join, leave my HP on, leave for the boiling kettle.

Ping—Olivia, I know her voice, calls out
“I have my mask on.” 
I imagine one with a painted wolf snout.
But where is she if PPE-ed?

Ah, not an N-95 or repurposed diaper
or winged sanitary pad
but a green bio-Clarify Clarifying Masque
for purifying her pores.

2.

First time in 34 years teaching, I’m in control
of how I look—fluffing my bangs
to shade my incoming skunk stripe.
The five cowlicks tonsuring the back of my head

won’t show when I message in the chat bar.
And how could I have assumed
such a Harpo Marx grin all these years,
making a wide flat funnel of my chin?

Now I smile with The Joker teeth—
have been brushing with peroxide.
I lean into the camera to get cozy.
I cup my jowls in my palms.

3.

Patricia (my estranged sister’s name),
is sitting in her car. Her aunt and uncle have the virus,
were arguing—“So, I know they’re better,” she says.
Still, she mutes and unmutes herself.


Her phone is low, her face towering above us—
this time, without the Blue Buddha tapestry
forming a halo behind her head.
Dusty, her guinea pig, is sitting in her lap—pees.

Patricia strokes her back. We ask to see her.
Olivia’s mask is forming a map of rivulets.
I winch my teabag out of my Dickinson cup.
I present a poem. We caress commas.



Thursday, April 23, 2020

"Sweet smoke of rhetoric": Sussing Shakespeare

Chapter 3 Shakespeare the Writer. Above all, Shakespeare ...

“Rhetoric” is most often defined as strategies of persuasion—strategies that range from simple requests and statement of facts, to seduction, flattery, force.  Rhetoric can be used to promote worthy causes: it says, “Let’s do some good.” Sermons practice the rhetoric of “believe what I believe”—sometimes with the proviso “or else” as subtext. Commercial ads are quintessentially messages of “buy me.”  Artists are rhetoricians: “see the world as I see it.” The rhetoric of seduction and flattery broadcast, like a bird of paradise, “I’m the one and only for you.” Rhetoric is too often used by tyrants to dominate, confuse, delude; to inflate their own images; to vanquish others, greedily amass and hoard resources, and to subjugate and enslave others.

To read Shakespeare from the critical perspective of rhetoric is to discover and appreciate the devices he uses to (1) capture and maintain our attention from scene to scene, (2) develop dramatic tension between characters, (3) seduce us through stagecraft to, in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s phrase, “suspend our disbelief” and participate in the illusion that is theatre.  Theatergoers buy into plays and films to enjoy that illusion.

Aristotle identified three rhetorical appeals—Pathos, Ethos, Logos:

Pathos stirs, amplifies, and takes advantage of emotions. 
Ethos says “believe me because of who I am.”  Since we only vote for ourselves,
an ethical appeal also says “I’m like you.”
Logos offers reasons for belief and action.

Let’s consider how these strategies are managed in the opening of a pivotal soliloquy, St. Crispin’s Day speech in The Life of King Henry the Fifth, as King Henry rallies his small coterie of soldiers to fight the vast French army at Agincourt:


           WESTMORLAND.
                                                                   O that we now had here
                         But one ten thousand of those men in England
                         That do no work to-day!


Westmorland bemoans his fear, O, a word/sound—appealing to the Pathos/emotion of woe—that being outnumbered, the English army will be vanquished.  He uses the rhetorical device of hyperbole, inflating the numbers to ten thousand, a number named “myriad,” which has classically considered astronomical.  Comparing himself to the indigent in England “That do no work to-day!” uses the device of inflating his own ethos/moral standing.  He reverts, through this, to both appealing to the King’s ethos—oh, great leader, protect me—and appealing to the King’s Pathos—please pity us.  The rhetoric here is we’re doomed. Let’s not go into battle.  Westmorland only indirectly uses a Logical appeal—we are outnumbered; therefore, we shouldn’t fight. 
By setting up this dramatic tension, appealing to our own fears, Shakespeare invites the audience/readers to identify with Westmorland, thus rousing our interest in how the King will respond:
KING.
                                                                  What's he that wishes so?
                          My cousin, Westmorland? No, my fair cousin;
                          If we are mark'd to die, we are enough
                          To do our country loss; and if to live,
                          The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
                          God's will! I pray thee, wish not one man more.

            The first thing we notice is that, given that this portion of the play is written in blank verse, the King literally finishes Westmorland’s line.  In this context, using this device (let’s call it cutting him off, or having the last word) King’s asserts his Ethos—he’s in charge. It is an act of dominance. The king confronts Westmorland’s exclamation point with a question—thus further undermining Westmorland.  A question that is a true request for an answer puts the questioner in a dependent position to the one to whom the question is posed—a position of anticipation and waiting.  “What’s he that wishes so?” is a rhetorical question that expects no response.  The King, having established his position, is actually forbidding an answer to the question.  Also, the King very well knows who asked the question.  By asking “What’s he” and not “Who’s he,” he is diminishing his cousin to a thing—What thing is he could ask?  It is a question that shames Westmorland.  Once having made this combined appeal of Pathos and Ethos so that Westmorland is vulnerable, the King has him in his power. The men are all present for this interchange, so the King’s image is at stake.  He quickly shows himself to be compassionate with “my fair cousin.”  He can afford to condescend to Westmorland as “fair” and as kin.  That’s a classic move of passive/aggression.  To object to this treatment—which seems flattering—Westmorland would seem disingenuous.  It silences him.  After three short lines, he is cut off by the King, who proceeds to speechify for 49 lines.  That’s dominance.  The King wins.
            Choose your favorite passage in Shakespeare, and savor the words slowly for appeals to Pathos, Ethos, and Logos.

Works Cited:

Useful Link:
Brinks, Melissa. “The 20 Most Useful Rhetorical Devices”  

Thursday, April 16, 2020

Much To Do To Do Shakespeare: Strategies for Exploration and Interpretation

Free Png Freeuse Shakespeareillustration Png Image - Transparent Shakespeare Clip Art

           Without readers and theatergoers, there is no Shakespeare.  His work is like a musical score, and we are the musicians who embody and bring it life.  Throughout this blog, there are many strategies are offered for joining Shakespeare’s orchestra. This post offers a list of this range, referencing the Index number (46) for posts for how to bring Shakespeare’s works to life.  You can access the Index @ https://www.blogger.com/u/2/blogger.g?blogID=4711406005322167702#allposts

I.                Poetry (36)

a.      Imagery (six senses) (66)
b.     Vowel Sound Frequencies (94)
c.      Rhyme
d.     Alliteration
e.      Consonances
f.      Speech mouth and face metaphors (94)
g.     Rhythm
h.     Diction
i.       Etymologies
j.       Puns
k.     Contrast to prose
l.       Numbers (69, 70, 71, 95)
m.   Sonnets (103)

II.              Theme (43)

a.      Titles
b.     Binary Oppositions (20)
c.      Content Analysis
d.     Critical Approaches (90)
e.      Paper Clip (29)
f.      Story not Plod (55)
g.     First words (19)
h.     Last words
i.       Genres (99)
j.       Parallels to current events


III.            Character:

a.      Typecasting (92)
b.     First words (19)
c.      Names (93)
d.     Role reversals (96)
e.      Deconstruction (96)
f.      Shadow selves
g.     Shifting alliances
h.     Practices
i.       Projection
j.       Development (97)
k.     Seven deadly sins
l.       Speech Acts

IV.            Staging (23)

a.      Rhetorical devices
b.     Dramatic Irony
c.      Setting
d.     Props (42)
e.      Stage directions
f.      Lighting
g.     Sound
h.     Metatheatre
i.       Where’s Iago?

V.              Plot (55)

a.      Why summaries don’t work (6)
b.     Character as plot
c.      Setting as plot
d.     Staging as plot
e.      Subplots

VI.            Writing strategies:

a.      Land the Helicopter (5)
b.     Banish summary and paraphrase (6)
c.      Paginate (25, 61)
d.     Punctuate (26, 27)
e.      Be honest (28)
f.      Paper Clip (29)
g.     Caress the Literature (33)
h.     Digest quotes (39)
i.       Start where it starts (40)
j.       Be original (43)
k.     Avoid the intentional fallacy (48)
l.       Story not Plod (55)
m.   Avoid clichés (59)
n.     Titles (79, 81)
o.     Use/mention (91)
p.     Genealogies (100)
q.     Enjoy (50, 71)

Works Cited:

Cover Art:


Text:

Because I Can Teach: becauseicanteach.blogspot.com