My flash fiction, "Evil Girlfriend" now up in the latest DETRITUS! It's a pdf Google doc, I'm on page 101.
Tuesday, December 31, 2019
Monday, December 23, 2019
Boricua en la Luna anthology now out!
I am honored to be in the Boricua en la Luna anthology:
"A collection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and art by Puerto Rican authors on history, family, and the effects of Hurricane Maria. Proceeds from the book benefit hurricane relief on the island."
Available in paperback and pdf. Order your copy here!
"A collection of poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and art by Puerto Rican authors on history, family, and the effects of Hurricane Maria. Proceeds from the book benefit hurricane relief on the island."
Available in paperback and pdf. Order your copy here!
Sunday, November 24, 2019
Café Schilling chapbook now out!
The cover for my new chapbook Café Schilling! Now out from Tower
Point Press. Email me to order a copy last name first name at the gmail. Suggested price $10, but send me what you think it's worth after you read it.
Featuring poems which appeared in:
ColdNoon
The Iconoclast
Topology
15 pages.
Featuring poems which appeared in:
ColdNoon
The Iconoclast
Topology
15 pages.
Tuesday, November 19, 2019
Stallions of Life by Reagan Sloman
Singer-songwriter Reagan Sloman has another song/video out. Check it out here.
Sunday, November 3, 2019
Friday, October 25, 2019
Café Schilling Chapbook now out!
The cover for my new chapbook Café Schilling! Now out from Tower Point Press. Email me to order a copy last name first name at the gmail.
Featuring poems that appeared in:
ColdNoon
The Iconoclast
Topology
15 pages.
Featuring poems that appeared in:
ColdNoon
The Iconoclast
Topology
15 pages.
Monday, October 21, 2019
Reagan Sloman—"That Was Me"
My friend Reagan Sloman has a new song and video up on YouTube. Check it out!
Thursday, October 10, 2019
Café Schilling chapbook now out!
My new chapbook, Café Schilling, is now out! Email me to order your copy!
yohejohn at the gmail!
15 pages. Poems about, and from, traveling in Europe.
Features poems which appeared in ColdNoon, Topology, and The Iconoclast!
www.johnyohe.com
yohejohn at the gmail!
15 pages. Poems about, and from, traveling in Europe.
Features poems which appeared in ColdNoon, Topology, and The Iconoclast!
www.johnyohe.com
Sunday, October 6, 2019
The Day of the Triffids by David Wyndham
This review-essay appeared in 2015 at Word Riot, which is now gone, alas.
I would be surprised
if anyone reading this remembers The Day of the Triffids, or
has even read it—it was out of print in American for many years.
The copy I found in the late 70s was an old paperback already, in my
parents' eclectic collection—probably my mother's, though maybe
actually my father's, from back when he still read books and hadn't
yet succumbed to the great god Television. The Day of the Triffids
was the first 'adult' novel I
ever read, which, I think, was what attracted me to
it—certainly wasn't the Hardy Boys or Old Yeller, though,
like a lot of science fiction, neither was it inaccessibly difficult
for a ten or twelve-year-old—not one of my mom's eastern religion
books, or The Brothers Karamazov.
Maybe it's because you always remember your first, but in the deluge
of sci-fi and fantasy books I read in the years after, I never quite
forgot Day of the Triffids,
and after reading a crop of recent dystopian novels, all now mostly
classed at YA, like The Hunger Games,
World War Z,
Divergent, Feed,
and others (there are a lot
of dystopian YA novels nowadays), and having discussions about
formative books with my friend Jen, I had to go back and see if 1)
Day of the Triffids
still held up, and 2) I could learn anything more about myself, and
my younger self, from what I was reading back then.
The
story begins with the main character and narrator, Bill,
waking up in a deserted hospital, after being unconscious for a
while, and learning that while he was out, most everyone in the world
has gone blind, and that not only that, what everybody took for
non-sentient genetically modified plants have pulled up their roots
and begun to hunt. I know, I know, in these days of zombies and
vampires, the idea of killer plants doesn't sound so killer, but if
one is willing to suspend their disbelief about zombies, a killer
plant dystopia is at least as plausible. I couldn't have told
you then why Triffids imprinted itself on me—the immediate
thrill was imagining what I would do if I were one of the lone
survivors of the destruction of human civilization—which is still
true with the current crop, but as anyone who has thought about
science fiction (meaning, I guess, trying to justify it to myself)
will tell you, those dystopian worlds are stand-ins (not quite
metaphors) (maybe fables) for our own world. In fact, those worlds
do not seem so different to us readers than our own world. I read
Triffids maybe at age eleven or twelve, not entering a new
world but no, feeling that the world had changed.
With puberty, I felt like I was waking after being unconscious for a
long time, into a mostly deserted world run by things I'd thought of
as weird and harmless (adults, and humans in general) but who were in
fact scary and dangerous. Also, the people like me, the left-over
puberty survivors, were mostly blind and helpless and, if I wanted to
survive, I very quickly needed to find others like me, who could see.
Also, once I realized that I liked what was called
'science-fiction,' I had a place to go, that I belonged somewhere: in
the science-fiction section of the bookstore. Once I started carrying
science-fiction books around at school, I began to find the other
survivors—kids, mostly boys (though girls, I sensed, weren't killer
plants)(or mostly not—cue Newt from Aliens: “Mostly....”)
who were reading similar books, and these texts gave us a 'secret
language' that the triffids couldn't understand.
The Day of the
Triffids was written by David Wyndham, real name John
Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (!), a British science
fiction writer who's other works I've never heard of. He was
apparently quite well-known in the 50s and 60s, and though he died in
1969, some of his posthumous writing has been published as recently
as 2009. Still popular and read in England, his books went out of
print here in the States, until recently, when Triffids and
his other most popular novel, The Chrysalids, were re-issued,
by The Modern Library, both under the label of a “20th
Century Rediscovery.”
What I didn't
remember, and maybe just didn't consider back then, was how much the
novel is less about the weird evil flesh-eating triffids, than about
humans, and Wyndham's thoughts on how exactly humans in a
post-disaster world would re-form and survive. Most dystopian books
present one form, one way, that the author thinks humans will govern
themselves, or, usually, be governed. Wyndham presents many, using
the structure of the book, with Bill traveling around England to
various groups of survivors, as a way to present different
philosophies about the best way to survive: Some as
anarachic/communal groups, some as smaller family-sized units, and
some (the really bad guys) going back to a form of medieval
feudalism, with sighted people ruling estates of blind serfs (who
will be fed on ground up triffid gruel). What I like about the novel
is that Wyndam's characters have some actual intelligent
conversations about the pluses and minuses of each form of
government, though, interestingly, the increasing number of triffids
force Bill and his fellow survivors to opt for larger groups, with
larger areas of protected land.
What the few sighted
people do, or don't do, with the now blind rest of the population
becomes the big question. Do they take the truly compassionate route,
and try and help everyone? Seemingly impossible, and endangering
everyone, especially, as if blindness and carnivore plants weren't
bad enough, with some kind of sickness, which may or may not be
typhoid, or the result of biological weapons, ravaging London and
other larger cities. Or, cut their losses and regroup in smaller
groups with other sighted people, knowing that the blind people left
behind will suffer and die? Not easy decisions, and no decision any
character makes in the novel is without some dialogue with another
character about its feasibility and morality. Even the 'best' guys
(there are no real good guys) that Bill and crew join up with are not
without some disturbing new rules, and in any case, in any variation
of post-disaster re-organization, the general lot of women seems to
always end up as baby-makers, which is the one conversation Wyndham
avoids, by having even the main female character, Josella, an
independent and intelligent woman before the disaster, and a writer
of a novel that seems to be the equivalent of Shades of Grey
(ultimate male science-fiction nerd fantasy: to be trapped in a scary
new world with a hot female porn writer), happy and willing, and even
looking forward to, having babies.
Re-reading Triffids
now, I'm just struck at how seminal it was: its influence shows in
all kinds of books and movies now, from Invasion of the Body
Snatchers, to Stephen King's The Stand, to José
Saramago's Blindness. One of my favorite zombie movies, 28
Days Later (screenplay by Alex Garland, another brit, who wrote
The Beach) begins with
the same premise of (and I take as an homage to) Triffids: a
man waking up in a hospital after an overnight disaster, to find
himself one of the few survivors). In fact, I think the whole zombie
genre premise (ie zombies spread over the world, small groups of
humans survive) comes from Wyndham's novel: just substitute killer
plants for zombies. Or apes, say, in Planet of the Apes. Apes
and especially zombies seem to make for a better metaphor (for
example, racism/slavery, capitalism, AIDS, the invasion of Iraq)
though who knows, with the now almost common, though still scary,
genetically modified foods, care of the Monsanto cabal, maybe the
triffids' time is close at hand! Maybe not even as metaphor!
And what did I learn
about my younger self? Well, obviously, the world was full of
metaphorically helpless blind people, and metaphorically evil
triffids, and I was on my own, surviving the disaster called 'growing
up.' And some of my fellow survivors might not be the nicest people
either. Nor did compassion for the blind seem to be enough. In fact,
it might have been too much: That, to have compassion and try to
relieve the suffering of all the metaphorically blind people in the
world would make me triffid food. No, best to withdraw, with a few
like-minded souls, if I could find them (and especially with a woman
who writes porn) and live on an island, where we could survive, and
(maybe) figure out how to rid the world of triffids, and repopulate
it with our metaphorically non-blind children.
Nothing has changed.
I still feel this way.
Saturday, October 5, 2019
The Palace of Illusions by Kim Addonizio
This review originally appeared in 2015 at Word Riot, which is now gone, alas.
The Palace of Illusions
by Kim Addonizio
Soft Skull Press 2014
ISBN: 978-1-59376-542-2
Kim Addonizio's writing goes for the guts—punches of raw
common american language, about raw common human relationships, that are also,
at times, funny and sexy, with touches of all her street-level poet heroes,
like Charles Bukowski, Frank O'Hara, Anne Waldman and (early Satan Says-era)
Sharon Olds. I have up to this point mostly thought of Addonizio as a poet,
though she has written some novels, and her first collection of short stories, in
the box called pleasure, is as unapologetically in-your-face as, say, Denis
Johnson's Jesus' Son, and I love it. It gives her room to work even more
in the lower-class blue collar divey world that other underground writers like
Bukowski and Hubert Selby Jr. make, if not beautiful, then interesting and
sympathetic, and Addonizio, like them, may be showing her (unconscious or not)
street Buddhism by showing how beauty can be found anywhere, that the lotus
grows in mud.
But now I've shifted how I think of her, as not just a poet,
but a writer in general, like Bukowski, because because of her new collection
of stories, The Palace of Illusions, out through Soft Skull Press. Some
of the stories, like “The Other Woman” and “Blown,” are similar to those in in
the box called pleasure—short, fast, and powerful, from the POVs of trashy
young women involved with trashy men (some not-so young) the results of which
we readers know are doomed, and that they're bad choices. Actually, even the
protagonists seem to know that they're making bad choices, and yet seem
powerless to choose otherwise, which is how you might determine whether you'll
like Addonizio or not: Is that how Real Life feels to you? Kinda out of
control, at least temporarily pleasurable, and full of suffering?
Importantly though: even as bad choices are made, none of
the young women protagonists refuses to accept responsibility for their
actions, which they could in some cases very easily do, like in “Intuition,”
when an older married man is breaking up with fifteen-year-old Faith, she
briefly thinks about what would happen if she just went public with their
affair, and how she could destroy him:
“I sit there, turned away from him on the swing, holding the
knife I my lap. I cold turn, before he gets up, and stab him in the heart, and
then he really would be dead. I could get away with it. I could say, He
touched me between my legs. He forced me. He took me to the Tip Top Motel, and
he said he would hurt me if I ever told. Everyone knows what men to to
girls; people would believe is was self-defense. No one would know the truth.”
(183-4)
But, she doesn't, which is why I like her—or, well, at least
sympathize with her—and other Addonizio characters. It's not so much about
ethics—Faith, obviously, doesn't like the man anymore, and has lost respect—but
'owning' your actions, realizing the inevitability of effect, from a cause that
she, less than he, put in action. Which might horrify some readers, or make
them go tsk tsk, but whatever Addonizio's characters are, they're not victims,
or they don't think of themselves that way, and her stories are not about being
politically correct.
“Intuition” is my favorite story in the collection. It's got
the gutsy darkness of earlier Addonizio stories, but it's longer, and more in
depth. If earlier stories (and, again, some in this collection) are more
similar to her poems—capturing a short moment in time—this story has time to
build, and has great passages like this:
“The thing is, you keep hoping. With each boy, you think maybe
it will happen: he'll look at you a certain way, he'll get you, and your
search will be over. I've been searching since I was thirteen, with one boy
after another.” (163).
Hard to remember maybe (though funny too) that that's a
fifteen-year-old-girl speaking, and yet Addonizio's talent (and this goes for
her poetry too) is that she can write something in plain american speech that
sounds easy to articulate/write/say, but isn't, and yet captures how anyone,
fifteen to fifty, really feels, even when they're fucked-up messes: they still
capture very human situations and feelings.
Other stories in The Palace of Illusions are more
along this tone and strategy. Some would say they're more mature, but that
would imply Addonizio's shorter pieces aren't as good. They're just different.
Still, she is experimenting with a more formal, controlled, style. What
these stories remind me of is City of Boys, a collection of short
stories by Beth Nugent, which I thought was one of the best books of the 90s,
though Nugent dropped away after that, and it's out of print, so I'm not sure
many readers will get that comparison. But Nugent was coming from Hemingway's
darker short works, and Marguerite Duras, and Joyce Carol Oats, as is
Addonizio.
She's also experimenting with different ages, both
younger—with the poor girl from “Beautiful Lady Of The Snow,” who you just want
to hug and take far away from her mother and life—and the nameless woman in “In
The Time of the Byzantine Empire,” the middle-aged academic that proves making
bad choices is not just the domain of young people. And there's an older
character, Ruth, in “Cancer Poems,”dying of cancer and taking a community
college poetry class in order to maybe write a book she can leave behind for
her granddaughter.
Addonizio is also, in a few stories, experimenting with
fairy tales, and one vampire. These interest me less, though I acknowledge that
other readers might find them preferable to the punch-in-the-guts stories. And
even whe Addonizio writes about seven dwarves, say, her narrator still
talks/sounds 'street smart'. The vampire is a teenager in college. Or, she's
half-vampire, her dad is full vampire. The details are less important than the
effect, of an insecure young woman with low self esteem, who can still, with (dark)
comedic effect talk about stalking people to drink their blood.
Addonizio apparently being Addonizio, none of the characters
in The Palace of Illusions (with the exception of Ruth, the cancer
non-survivor) is what we'd call likeable. Relatable, yes: we've all done things
in our lives that we regret or are not proud of (ie, we're fuck-ups just like
everyone else)(or we feel that way)(or I do—if you don't maybe this collection
isn't for you and you can just renew your subscription to The New Yorker).
So, sympathy, yes. Pity, definitely. Interesting, for sure. And these
types of characters can be harder to stay involved with beyond a short story.
The one Addonizio novel I've read, My Dreams Out In The Street, I found
difficult, not because of the style but because of the two main characters, and
the awful choices they make in their lower-class lives. They're interesting,
yes, but following them for two hundred pages and continuing to feel any kind
of sympathy is a hard ask, though it apparently has a cult following.
Addonizio also written two fairly popular and well-received
'how-to' books on the craft of poetry, Ordinary Genius, and A Poet's
Companion, co-authored with poet Dorianne Laux (another street-ish poet,
though more interested in the erotic than the rough) both of which include
short essay-chapters on writing as a process and way of life, as well as
exercise-prompts that could be used on one's own, or in poetry workshops. What
I would love is to read some critical essays from her, in maybe the style of
Tony Hoagland, just to see how she thinks about other poets and poetry, though
the truth is I'd just love to read anything by her.
Actually what I'd really love to do is jam with her
sometime, since she also plays blues harp (harmonica) in a band and at open
mics, and this seems perfectly fitting—she's not pop (too shocking and
rough-edged for the prudish mainstream) and she's not jazz (though she has an improvisatory fun feels at
times, her subject matter is too dark) and neither is she heady classical (no
'too many notes' texts here—stark versus ornamental). No, her writing is from
the bars, from the blues that come from real human working class
relationships—the sadness and sexiness and fucked-up-ed-ness of things never
quite working out, as all relationships never really ever quite work out, even
when they do (and they don't).
After reading the last installment Best American Short
Stories, I feared that I was losing interest in short fiction, period. But
Addonizio restores my faith and interest. Good edgy fiction is out there, with
publishers like Soft Skull Press, we just may have to search a little harder.
That said, I don't know why The Palace of Illusions wasn't picked up by
a bigger publisher. For all that I love Addonizio's underground feel, that's me
being like those music listeners who like their underground bands to stay
underground, when really it feels like she's about to explode.
—John Yohe
Thursday, October 3, 2019
Coming soon: Café Schilling chapbook
Coming soon! My new poetry chapbook, Café Schilling: Poems from Europe.
Experiment: email or DM me with an address, I will send you a copy, and you pay what you think it's worth. yohejohn at gmail.com
Experiment: email or DM me with an address, I will send you a copy, and you pay what you think it's worth. yohejohn at gmail.com
Sunday, September 29, 2019
Deep Wild Journal submissions open Oct 1st!
Wednesday, September 18, 2019
Open All The Boxes: The Barcelona Poetry Festival
Originally appeared at COLDNOON: International Journal of Travel Writing and Travelling Cultures, March 2017. It is now defunct, alas. Enjoy!
[update: it's back up! Here's the original link]
[update: it's back up! Here's the original link]
When you open yourself up to the Universe, the
Universe provides! With a free summer ahead of me, I have decided to return to
Spain after many years, Barcelona in particular, which I've always wanted to
explore. No plan, no activities, just to stay awhile and see what the city has
to offer. Sunny May, and although Barcelona has a super convenient metro, and
an amazing bike path system, I am content to walk, especially down in the old
section of town, where what would be back alleys in the US are a main streets,
a whole maze of them, filled with people and small shops: Food, music, clothes.
All the signs in Catalàn, a Romance language similar to Spanish, and French, so
that I can understand most of them, but have no idea to how to pronounce the
words. In fact, and I didn't know this before I came, Catalonia (or Catalunya
as the natives call it) used to be its own country for a while, like Texas,
and, also like Texas, they're fiercely proud of themselves their language and
culture. I envy their bilingualness, like having a secret language only cool
people know.
It's my second day here, rambling along La
Rambla, main avenue in the touristy centro section, when I see a green poster
outside of the Palau Virreina advertising the 2011 Barcelona Poetry Festival. A
week of daily free readings and performances at the Palau and other nearby
locations. And it started yesterday! I check the schedule of events, and,
though I'm fine with just seeing what the poets in Spain are up to, some
American poets are reading, including Jerome Rothenberg and...Gary Snyder!
The next night I return to the Palau Virreina,
early, and though I didn't think a poetry reading would attract much people,
I'm wrong. The place fills up, all chairs taken, people standing in back and
even weaseling down the aisles. The building is old old, stone walls
probably older than the United States, but it's been converted into an arts
center, currently displaying some contemporary photography. Two huge wooden
doors open into a high arched hall in the layout of a cross, though the 'top'
of it is closed/walled off and the stage arranged right at the center, so
chairs in the wings are viewing that performance sideways. I suppose this isn't
even a 'hall', since parts of it are open to the sky. A courtyard I guess.
The opening act for Jerome Rothenberg is a South
African “poet/musician” named Kgafela Oa Magogodi. During his
reading/performance he sits with a guitar in his lap, tapping out the rhythm
with his right foot on a tambourine, and occasionally picking up small
percussion instruments like a drum stick or rattle, singing in English and what
I take to be a tribal language from South Africa, but between 'songs' (which at
times are him just talking over a simple vamp) reciting poems in the style of
what some would call 'spoken word', meaning fast and passionate and
occasionally rhyming and on the political side, criticizing both his government
and the United States. I'm all for that, though he seems to be preaching to the
choir, which is, in my humble opinion, the problem with that type of poetry:
it's passionate, but not subtle, nor surprising, nor does it tell me anything
new, or make me think differently about politics, or anything.
I have to say that I'm not that familiar with
Rothenberg, never read his stuff except maybe in anthologies. Magogodi
introduces him as “The Shaman” and he has that air, though all poets have that
air, a little. He looks like an old Jewish Torah scholar, except with short
white hair and beard, his head and neck curving over in the beginning of a
question mark, from a life bent over books, and which is probably what I'll end
up looking like. He's dressed all in black: black slacks, black t-shirt, black
shoes, with a Native American-looking necklace of wood and turquoise. An
assortment of props are already on the podium: a feather, a baton, and what
looks like a long plastic tube.
He addresses us in english, and I wonder how
much the audience understands, and even how much of the audience is
spanish/catalan versus maybe american, and starts by saying he's going to sing
a traditional native Seneca song, in the original language, then in English,
then “for the first time ever, en Catalàn!”
That gets a huge roar, though when he actually
starts singing, the song just consists of the line, “The animals are coming”
repeated a few times while he shakes a rattle and waves a feather. Still, I
think the Senecas would have been proud that one of their songs has been sung
across the ocean in a language just a little bit less in danger of disappearing
than theirs.
Impressing the crowd even more, Rothenberg reads
one of his poems in English, then a Spanish translation of it. Unfortunately he
can't keep that up, and after that reads just in English, and though
interesting to me perhaps, he's losing some folks, they're getting restless,
especially when us English-speakers (and there seem to be more than I would
have thought) chuckle, or go 'huh' after an interesting line. Since Rothenberg
does such a good job of reading his one poem in Spanish, I'd think he could
have, or even should have, talked between poems en español, at least un
poquito, to keep the crowd with him, since they loved how he started out. But,
he also reads a 'tone poem' (as in, just made up of sounds) by a German
dadaist, Hugo Ball, while whirling that plastic tube over his head the whole
time, making a high pitched whine. Which seems to have the same effect on
everyone, as in, Um, what the fuck was that?
He ends with a Navaho song, about how horses
came to their land, which is interesting since the Spanish were the ones who
actually introduced them, but I like the idea of the 'losers' re-writing
history with poetry and song, taking the oppressors out of the story
completely. I'm not sure people get it though. Maybe I'm thinking too much. It's
happened before.
The description in the program says that
Magogodi and Rothenberg will “show a way to listen to poetry that incorporates
ritual and combat in every verse and every gesture” (my translation)(from
Catalàn!) which only goes to show that the Spanish like their descriptions to
be melodramatic, because there is no ritual or combat, nor have the two
performers ever met before the show. What they do have in common is an interest
in mixing/melding languages and cultures together.
The huge wooden doors of the 'palace' have been
kept open for the poetry reading, which I think is meant as an invitation to
any passers-by (and there are many) though throughout there has been a constant
Rambla rumble of people out on a Friday night, and at one point a large group
gathers in the back of the hall and have to be shushed, though they don't
really. I'm not sure if they're people who have just wandered in, or who are
waiting for the Sufis, because in fact they are the headliners tonight:
three people performing Sufi poetry and music. A beautiful red-haired woman
dressed all in white reads the poetry, translated into Catalàn, while the two
men, one of whom also sings beautifully, accompany her, and/or play musical
interludes between poems, with both stringed instruments (guitar, violin, and
some kind of traditional lute or oud) and sometimes on handheld
tambourine-looking drums. Since the poetry is in Catalàn, I tune it out
sometimes and just enjoy the music, but other times I can understand some of
the words. It's all about love. All you need is amor.
Halfway across the world and all I do with my
free time is what I'd do back home: Hang out in a bookstore. The best one, LA
Central, a block off La Rambla, has a huge collection. I seek out the poetry
section, curious about which American poets are the most popular, and (this may
make some people angry, but I love it)(meaning both that I love that it makes
people angry, and love that it's true) it's Charles Bukowski, hands down. There
are eight of his books of poetry, in translation, compared to Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton, each with one book. John Ashbury nowhere to be found.
I'm renting a room from a woman while staying
here. Much cheaper than staying in a hostel, and much quieter. I'm going 'old
school' traveler style, enjoying having no phone, no car, no computer, no iPod.
Still, with not even a radio in my room, I do miss music, so that every little
snippet I hear seems like a gift, like when I stop into a smoothie place down
on Calle Ferrán for a slice of pizza, as a halfway cheap lunch (because
Barcelona is expensive) and the Rolling Stones' “Beast of Burden,” is playing.
One of my favorites, haven't heard it in a while. Tired from walking all day,
gazing at all the beautiful Spanish women, the perfect words for what I'm
feeling:
I've
walked for miles, my feet are hurting
All
I want is for you to make love to me
Poetry vs. Music. Two points on a continuum?
Heidegger says all artists help in the creation of the world, but he reserves
top place for the poets, because they create with language, but here on La
Rambla, Saturday afternoon, a percussion troupe appears. Modern day punk rock
Catalàn Kodo drummers, blocking traffic, yelling and pounding and dancing and
lifting their drums in the air. A hundred people surrounding them, dancing with
them down the street.
On Saturday night, when I arrive back at the
hall of the Palau de Virreina. A group of people, volunteers, dressed in
funny-looking, what I take to be traditional Catalunyan, red hats, wait at the
front of the courtyard. One woman, guapa, approaches me and says hola. I try
not to act nervous as she asks me if I'd like to hear a poem. Me encantaría, I
say. I would love to.
She spreads out a set of ten (or so) cards, face
down, and asks me to pick one. On the other side is the name of a poem, and who
it is by, which, alas, I don't really catch, but at least it's in Spanish and
not Catalàn—I may have a chance of understanding it.
She smiles, seemingly pleased by my choice, and
recites it by memory. I understand most of it, I think—it seems to be in a
simple accessible style, a poem about a woman's face. I try to be brave and
look the beautiful woman in the eye, and she stares right back, and when she's
done I want to tell her that she has a face like that, but what if I've
misunderstood? What if the woman's face in the poem is old and wrinkly?
Instead, I play it safe, as I always seem to do with women, and say simply,
Gracias. That's all I can say to beautiful women who recite poetry to me.
Gracias.
The problem with having events in the courtyard
of the Palau de Veillreina becomes evident: Rain. I arrived early, just to get
out of it, but with the open courtyard, half the seats are wet. Hardly above a
drizzle, not unpleasant to walk through, but not to sit in. I grab a metal
folding chair down front, under a second-floor walkway, in the second row. The
first row is just a little out in the open, so the seats are half wet. All the
video recording cables, and half the stage, are out in the rain. Steam rising
from the stage lights. I start to worry about be electrocuted.
A trio of older people sit down next to me, and
the woman right next to me smiles and nods. The hall is filling up, or at least
the dry parts, with a small section of us under the crosswalk, then twenty feet
of empty wet chairs, then a larger group standing in back. The whole time we're
sitting there, through a glass wall to the left there is a room, a classroom
maybe, with chairs and a couple desks up front. I finally ask one of the guys
in charge why we can't all move in there. He claims we wouldn't all fit, though
I'm not so sure. More likely, moving all the recording equipment, sound and
video, would be impossible, so the recording/video of the poetry has become
more important than the poetry itself.
My new neighbor spreads out her umbrella and
puts it over the chair in front of us, because by now the rain has gotten
stronger and raindrops are splattering off the seats and back onto us. I thank
her and mention that things don't seem planned out very well. She nods and says
that it's a matter of organization, and that if a corporation had organized
this, everything would run smoothly. Anarchist that I am, I have to agree with
her. “Sabes,” she says, “Los poetas son idealistas, pero no muy organizados.”
Indeed.
Lining the back of the stage are four
super-comfy-looking chairs about the size of love seats. All black, of course.
And dry. The poets arrive, and man are they young. Two young men, two young
women. I guess I'd expected people like Jerome Rothenberg, wise men, or wise
people, but nope, these look like college kids. I tell this to my neighbor and
she laughs. “We don't have many poets here in Catalunya!”
The four youths ascend and stand in a row at the
front, in the drizzle. Like, for a while. Silent. I think this is a statement
of some sort. My neighbor chuckles. Then, through some unspoken signal, three
of them retreat to their chairs, of which I'm seriously jealous right now.
Two of them, María Cabrera and Jaume C. Pons,
are from Catalunya. The other two, Pablo Fidalgo and María Salgado, from
Madrid. So, half the poems will be in español, and half in catalàn. The guy
from Madrid, and the seeming organizer, Fidalgo, reads first. He's cultivating
his inner Pablo Neruda, both in body weight and poem content, where 'amor'
appears every other line.
I understand most of the Spanish poems, though I
actually prefer the Catalàn poets, they have better stage presence, speak more
intensely. The young catalàn woman is serious, and intense, and I want to marry
her and her sexy rolling r's. Pons, the catalàn guy is the best, even the other
poets seems to acknowledge this. He's the only one who uses humor, which I
like, as well as a couple 'shout outs' to both Keats and Jim Morrison. He even
sings a verse from The Doors' “The End.”
All lusting after beautiful women who write
poetry aside, I feel like I'm in a good tribe that night. A room full of people
who like poetry, and surprisingly a lot of younger folks. I'm not sure what
would happen in the States, though there are plenty of artsy-looking older
folks, including a few other men with long hair, so I don't feel too much like
a freak.
I wonder what writing in Catalàn is like. That
is, everyone here seems to be basically fluent in both Catalàn and Spanish,
therefore these poets seem to be choosing the language they want to write in. I
wonder if they would say that? That it's a choice for them? Because Spanish is
a world language, they could write in it and have people from Santiago to Los
Angeles understand them. But to choose to write in a language spoken by maybe a
million people? Two million? And yet, I would do that too, write in my own
language versus the language of the oppressor. Except I have no choice, the
language of the oppressor is the only one I know.
On Sunday I do get to see a couple of older
Spanish wise men poets: Luis García Montero and Joan Margarit. I arrive at the
Ateneu Barcelonès, where the reading is being held, a little late. In contrast
to the Palau Virreina, this building is new, fancy, a little sterile feeling
even. I walk in and a security guard points me through some doors, where I can
already hear the sound of poetry being recited. I check my watch. Really? It's
not that late. Who ever heard of a poetry reading starting on time?!
I enter the room, a small theatre with rows of
seats, and with a large movie/tv screen, on which the two poets are seated on a
stage somewhere. Not here though. Shit. I almost decide fuck it, that I didn't
come to see a video of poets reading, but on the other hand I have nothing else
planned, so I awkwardly crawl over some people's laps to a lone chair off to
one side. I'm lucky to get that, the salon fills up with people coming in after
me who have to stand in back.
At first I think the poets are reading somewhere
else, Madrid maybe, and we are watching a simulcast of some sorts, but then on
hearing them talk between poems I realize they're actually in the building, in
a larger theatre, and that we're in an overflow room. Wow. How's that for a
poetry crowd? Still, grrr, I want to be in the main hall.
The two poets have a weird dynamic. The younger
one, Garcia, reads one poem seated in his chair. The second, older, poet,
Margarit, stands up and walks to the front of the stage and reads while
gesticulating like an Italian. Montero's poems have humor, and joy, like
Charles Bukowski or Frank O'Hara, while Margarit's poems are harder for me to
understand. I can't tell if it's because he's speaking in Catalàn, or if he
just has a super-thick accent, or both, but they are, or seem, serious, though
he also seems to impress the audience a bit more. Towards the end, Margarit
tells Garcia that he happily sees him as the heir to his throne. Which sounds
horribly arrogant. I know, right? Who would have thought a poet could be arrogant?
But maybe Margarit has earned it.
And now for something completely different. Lee
Ranaldo, guitarist for the band Sonic Youth, is giving a performance back at
the Palau Virreina. I'm not sure what to expect, but since it involves the
guitarist from Sonic Youth, I'm expecting noise. In fact, his performance, or
show, is called “Noise Recitation: Against Refusing.”
This time there's a huge screen at the back of
the courtyard, with a large square stage. A wire has been suspended down in the
middle, with a small noose about head height. Two Fender amps flank the stage,
one in each back corner tilted slightly up, with a small podium stage-right,
where I sit a couple rows back. I show up early and still barely get a chair.
Huge turnout, with a slightly different crowd. All the alternative music crowd,
generally younger, and with more tattoos, has turned out, expecting perhaps
more music than poetry, or a concert instead of a poetry reading. They're
certainly rowdier, especially the women, who all seem wonderfully foul-mouthed,
making me think of these lines:
In
the streets the women come and go
laughing
and yelling, “Coño!”
About ten minutes before the show, Ranaldo comes
up on stage. No one in the audience seems to know if it's really him, or maybe
just a roadie, since he's now like, an older guy. Maybe a little older than me,
meaning late forties, with grey hair, though cut in kind of an old Beatles
British invasion style. He hangs a Fender Jazzmaster electric guitar from the
wire noose, wrapping it around the head and through some of the tuning pegs.
With a wireless unit duct-taped to the body, he turns up the volume knob,
leaving the guitar just hanging there, moving in the wind a little, and since
it's on, and the amps are on, the strings vibrate slightly, creating a low moan
and a really high-pitched, though faint, feedback sound.
The lights lower, and a weird collage movie
projects on the screen: shots of some very skinny young people crawling around
coastal rocks, très 70s. I'm not sure if they are the Sonic Youth folks from
way back or not.
Ranaldo comes up on stage. Again, nobody knows
it's him until he grabs the mic and begins to talk, so there hasn't been any
applause. Or maybe everyone else knows what to expect? And I'm the dummy? It's
happened before. Anyways, he gives a brief explanation of what he's about to
do, in English. He'll be reciting some of his poetry (later I learn that it's
from a new book of his, Against Refusing), but that “half of it won't
make sense.” He doesn't even know what the words mean, so we shouldn't
worry if there's no translation.
He grabs a drumstick, walks over to the guitar,
and starts banging on it. He has some effects pedals on the floor by the podium
that I can't see, but which must include distortion, and some kind of repeater,
and some other weird stuff, because the hall fills with sound. Low notes and
some high notes. Feedback. Clicks of the wood stick on the wood body. He even
hits the strings, getting huge vibrating thick chords.
Holding the mic in one hand, he recites his
first poem, something about traveling by car through California and the desert.
I'm not sure the words would stand on their own. Seems like he could just be
reading from a dictionary with just as much effect. But what an effect! The
movie continues, with more bizarre scenes strung together, of mostly naked
people wearing masks and spitting rubber spiders out of their mouths. Ranaldo
takes a violin bow and strokes the guitar strings, sometimes one, sometimes all
six, stepping on his various effects pedals. In fact, I'd argue he's 'playing'
his pedals as much as his guitar.
Even more bizarrely, Ranaldo pushes the guitar
away, sending it swinging in huge circles around the stage. The noose/wire
stretches, it's black and mostly invisible with the stage lights and movie
playing, creating the effect of the guitar as an animate being, floating around
in space singing/screaming/moaning. A ghost.
Ranaldo recites more poetry, going from more
narrative-ish stories to listing off weird sound-words, reminding me of the
Dada poem Rothenberg read the other night. At one point Ranaldo even takes the
guitar off it's noose and carries it to one of the amplifiers, creating a weird
feedback loop that, combined with the repeat effect, sounds like, and is as
loud as, a helicopter hovering overhead.
I'm actually surprised Ranaldo has a guitar
strap, not sure why, but he does, which he puts on the guitar. Slinging it over
his shoulder, he fingers some chords and single notes. Not a lot, never many
notes at once. Instead, he just seems interested in 'layering' notes and sounds
over each other, in different rhythms (or indifferent rhythms).
He hangs the guitar back up and sends it
swinging around in more huge loops. I, and the guy next to me, keep expecting,
maybe in some way hoping, it will hit the podium, but it never does. Would make
a cool noise though if it did. I love though that at one point the guitar tags
Ranaldo on the back, but I seem to be the only one who laughs out loud. At
another point, he pulls it to the back of the stage, then sends it swooping out
over the heads of the people in the first few rows, again like a live creature.
I started the show (? Or, what do I call this?)
thinking it was either the most pretentious thing I was ever going to see, or
the coolest, and by now I'm thinking it's the coolest. His weirder poetry seems
to fit the mood more, and he uses repetition effectively, especially at one
point when he chants the last line of a poem over and over, “Open all the
boxes! Open all the boxes!” While bringing the noise to it's loudest peak of
the night.
I expect Ranaldo to just leave the guitar
screaming and walk off the stage as his ending, but as the movie ends, he gets
the guitar under control and plays it some more with a violin bow, calming things
down, leaving it hanging with just a low hum. He walks over to the microphone,
smiling, and quietly says, “Thanks.”
Huge applause. The house lights comes on, and
though I can't necessarily hear or understand the exact worlds people around me
are saying to each other, the expressions on their faces say what I'm feeling:
Holy shit. That was the craziest fucking shit I've ever seen or heard.
Gary Snyder has been one of my favorite poets
for years, though I had despaired of ever getting to hear him read, since I've
moved back to Michigan and, well, he's getting old now and I figured he'd want
to retire quietly to his house up in the Northern California mountains. But,
apparently, he has come all the way to Spain for this reading, which takes
place in a small auditorium in the Caja Madrid (a big Spanish bank) building on
the Plaça de Catalunya, a large plaza and park, with a huge fountain and trees
and benches and metro stop, and where the Rambla starts, heading south to the
port. And the spot where, a week later, protesters will set up camp, as part of
a nationwide manifestations against government austerity measures, due to the
crumbling economy, caused, in part, in my opinion, to government deregulation
of banking practices, including those of Caja Madrid.
The arts wing of the building, the Espai
Cultural, houses some contemporary photography exhibits on the ground and
basement floors. In fact, since I arrive super early, I wander downstairs to
look and stumble on Snyder getting interviewed in front of a camera crew. I
can't help it: I smile when I see him. One of my heroes, in person. Someone
whose writing changed my life, really. I try not to gawk though, not wanting to
seem like a dork-stalker-groupie.
The auditorium is on the second floor. I slip in
early, while the techies are still checking the mics. The room is set up weird,
in a large 'V', with the stage at the base, so that the two 'wings' of seats
are separated and not visible to each other, though both can see the stage. I'm
glad I got a good seat right up front, because ten minutes before the reading
is supposed to start, a flood of people come pouring in, scrambling for seats
like jackals.
The first hour of the 'reading' is actually a
showing of the short documentary The Practice of the Wild in which the
writer Jim Harrison, a friend of Snyder's, interviews him in different
settings, including while walking in the woods, interspersed with Snyder
reading some of his poems. I've actually seen this before and, though I'm a fan
of Harrison, he's not the most photogenic person (Snyder later describes him as
looking “like Genghis Khan”) and talks in kind of a mumble-growl. In fact,
since many people in the audience don't seem to know who he is, or maybe they
do, they kind of end up laughing at him. I'm also left feeling that Harrison
doesn't 'dig' as deep as he can with his questions. But I think the audience is
won over by Snyder, the wise man of the woods, talking about Buddhism, and
writing, and his past.
After the movie, the host and interpreter for
the night, Nacho Fernández (love that name!), a writer and translator from
Madrid, gets up and introduces Snyder, though I get the impression that he
needs no introduction to anyone there, Spanish or otherwise. In contrast to
Jerome Rothenberg (they must be around the same age) Snyder is straight-backed,
thin, and wiry, dressed in blue jeans and boots and a shirt right out of an
L.L. Bean catalogue, looking twenty years younger than he actually is, and like
he's about to go for a hike in the mountains. When he first walks up on stage,
he seems tired after his trip of three or so days, but as soon as he starts
reading, he gets more energy.
He and Fernández sit at a long table. Snyder
reads from a small collection of poems, mostly earlier work, that Fernández has
assembled and translated, and which has been handed out for free to all the
attendees, with the English and Spanish versions on facing pages. Since I know
Snyder knows Chinese and Japanese and probably Sanskrit and some Native
American, and has lived in California most of his life, I half expect him to
read some of his poems in Spanish, but he doesn't. Fernández translates
everything Snyder says in between poems, which is a lot, since Snyder likes to
basically tell a story for every poem, and I see some of the Spanish people
next to me kind of following along with the Spanish versions of the poems. I
like following along too, to see how the poems 'work' in Spanish. And they seem
to work well. Though Bukowski would have a heart attack for me saying this, he and
Snyder both have a plain, simple language, no big words or complex phrases.
Snyder tends to let the things he's describing stand for themselves, just
listing objects, letting us readers visualize them. Not a lot of adjectives or
adverbs like I tend to see in Spanish poetry. I wonder if Spanish readers tend
to think of poets like Snyder and Bukowski as too stripped down, too
minimalist. But no, here's Snyder in a packed auditorium. Though, based on the
crowd reaction to some of the funny lines in the movie, and in certain of the
poems, I start to think that maybe 2/3s are American, which makes the size of
the crowd even more surprising. Of the Americans actually in Barcelona right
now, how many would actually come to a poetry reading?
I'm familiar with all the poems, and like I
said, I've seen (and heard) videos of him reading, but hearing the poems in
person has a certain magic. Plus seeing his expression, his wrinkly smile, or
even the moments when some sadness appears, like in poems about his sister, and
Lew Welch.
Interesting note: He reads one of my favorites,
“As for Poets,” but with a revision. Instead of all the described poets being
male, he's changed at least the Water Poet to a female, so that the stanza now
goes:
The
first
Water
Poet
Stayed
down six years.
She
was covered with seaweed.
The
life of her poem
left
millions of tiny
Different
tracks
Criss-crossing
through the mud.
I'm not sure about anybody else in the room, but
his words bring back memories of California and the southwest United States,
making me miss the woods and desert. What am I doing in this big city? But
where else but in a big city could I see a performance like Ranaldo's? Or even
attend a poetry reading by Gary Snyder?
There's a funny poem by Bukowski describing
doing a reading with Snyder, where the Snyder groupies (hey, I'm one, I can say
this) keep asking for an encore, one more poem, and it happens tonight too.
“Otra! Otra! One more!” And I'm like, yeah, ok, let's hear one more. So first
he reads a letter a twelve year old girl wrote to him after going with her mom
to see him read in California, a rhyming poem thanking him. To thank her, he
wrote a rhyming letter back. Cute. Clever. Very unlike what I associate with
Snyder and his poetry, ie humor, but it's a nice light way to end the evening.
After the reading, I consider going up to the
stage to just shake Snyder's hand and tell him thank you, but the jackals are
already descending, and Snyder looks tired again, though still smiling. I just
mentally bow and head out the door.
One lone man sitting in a café, scribbling in a
notebook. A young woman waiting on the corner across from the café. Evening.
She's waiting for poetry. Or for a boyfriend to pick her up on his motorcycle.
Or, no, for another young woman. They wait together for poetry. They type
poetry into their phones. The man would write poetry on their bodies. They
would whisper poetry to him, one in each ear. And then rain. And then two more
young women, all of them now huddling under an umbrella reciting poetry to each
other, and he looks away and they are gone.
Rambla on.
Tuesday, September 17, 2019
Fucking Barcelona
With COLDNOON now defunct, I'm moving my published work there, here. This appeared February 2018. Enjoy!
[update: it's back up! Here is the link]
[update: it's back up! Here is the link]
Fucking Barcelona
Cool southern breeze off the ocean
bringing grey clouds
meaning time to heal our burnt skin
and put on jackets and go drink green
tea
in Café Schilling reading La
Vanguardia and El País
about the protests against government
austerity measures
which are really the government's way
of paying
for the mistakes it made with the
taxpayers' dinero
or not even mistakes really—the
deregulation
it handed the rich and the corporations
and the banks
and yet no one seems to care but this
handful
of people camping out in the Plaça de
Catalunya
while everyone else prefers to watch
Barcelona
beat Manchester United on the tele
and celebrate the victory at a Shakira
concert
since she's dating one of the players
now
and still hasn't committed to marrying
me
but even I am bored with protestors and
manifesting
because it just doesn't seem to matter
the government doesn't care and the
bankers certainly don't
and I fear our lack of fear and anger
but still want to enjoy my life
and you
right now
and
what was the word you
used to describe your confession
that day months ago when it also rained
and we ducked
into Café Schilling and the camarera
was sexy
with her tattoos and black tights and
attitude
and we had decided that we liked Joan
Miró more than Picasso
even though in reality it was not
either/or but and/both
and both of us were tired from staying
up the night before
listening to jazz and walking home
through the medieval streets
because the metro had shut down for the
evening
which was fine and everything was quiet
the streets
the seagulls
you
and I was quiet too thinking of that
song in 5/4
with the latin bass line and the Sex
Shoppe in Madrid
where the girl with the knife scar
straight up her chest
danced an extra ten minutes for us
because
you told her to go back to college and
get the philology degree
and even though you encouraged me to
jerk off
I wanted to save it for you for later
and now it's much later in our travels
and I can say I love you en español
and you can tease and deny en catalàn
and I wish we didn't have to go back
to our old lives where we're
comfortably normal
and does the
Universe take care of us I asked
because that's
what a woman tells Javier Bardem in the movie Biutiful
and you said yes
but I'm not sure
maybe the Universe
only takes care of middle-class rich people
and doesn't give a
fuck about the poor
especially but not
limited to those in Africa who
just want to
survive in the postcolonial system
unless the
Universe is in fact doing the best it can
given the
circumstances
and that things
could be even worse
which seems hard
to believe sometimes
but when I think
about quitting my job and moving to Barcelona I think ok
at least I
wouldn't be selling cheap chinese-made purses on the street
trying to support
my family
and in fact I
could even envision a spanish woman maybe liking me
and me even
talking to her somehow
and us touching
our naked bodies to each other
though I'm not
sure I'm not sure
maybe the Universe
is a little busy right now with more important things
maybe I would just
end up in a cheap noisy apartment by myself
with my money
running out
and I'd have to
return to the states
even more poor
than now but dude—you said—
fucking
Barcelona!
[image: Javier Bardem from Biutiful]
Wednesday, September 11, 2019
let's go
Originally appeared at COLDNOON in February 2018. That site is now defunct, alas.
[Update: it's back up! Here is the original link]
[Update: it's back up! Here is the original link]
let's go
let's go to Café Schilling and read a
newspaper
like our parents used to do
where you can get a café con leche and
I'll get a green tea
and we'll listen to the bloopy music
watching the tourists
and becoming annoyed by loud arrogant
spanish men
but we'll both want to make out with
the camarera
with her tattoos and converse high-tops
and black tights and attitude
and we'll discuss whether the people
camping out in la Plaça de Catalunya
are effectively protesting government
austerity measures
and the IMF
and Spain's membership in the European
Union
which itself seems set up to benefit
France and Germany
though at the same time offering an
economic challenge
to the Evil Empire of our own United
States
or we could discuss whether the
narcotraficantes basically
own Guatamala and Mexico like it
appears
and what would happen if Americans
stopped doing cocaine
or if Egypt will indeed become a
democracy
or will the new boss be the same as the
old boss
with the help of the American
government or not
and basically we can discuss how guilty
we feel
for being from America
and how helpless we feel
about affecting any change in US
foreign policy
because with the deregulation of banks
and corporate donations
more and more of our politicians do
what Big Money says
but fuck it
finish your croissant
let's go to la playa
Tuesday, September 3, 2019
Wednesday, August 28, 2019
Them That Follow (movie review)
My review of the movie Them That Follow, about a young woman in a fundamentalist snake-handling community in Appalachia. Now up at PSYCHO DRIVE-IN:
Tuesday, August 27, 2019
I Hate English But I Love Writing
My project for the MA in Written Communication: The Teaching of Writing at Eastern Michigan University.
Every semester, in
my first-day introduction letters from my composition students, many of them
tell me how they “hate” English, some even say that they learned to hate English in high school, by being made to write
standard, formal five-paragraph papers. Yet in these same letters, some of
these students go on to say that they still write poetry, short stories,
comics, and lyrics (to name a few genres), but they consider this ‘creative’
writing completely separate from English. After I started teaching composition
at Jackson Community College, I also had the opportunity to teach a creative
writing class, in which many of my best composition students enrolled. I
suspected that they were some of my best composition students because they had
already been interested in creative writing, and had a confidence in themselves
as writers, and even as thinkers, that some of their composition classmates
didn’t have. Not that they didn’t work hard in the composition classes, but
they had had at least a ‘head start,’ building skills which they could apply in
any other genre, including editing (or correcting surface convention errors),
genre and model recognition, and revision.
My experience
writing both in creative genres and in the academic world seem to confirm this
idea. That is, my own explorations in creative writing have given me the
survival skills for writing in an academic setting because those skills
transfer: The strategies and knowledge students develop in one genre of writing
can be applied to any other genre, regardless of context or situation. Not
necessarily at the same level, but this knowledge gives them that ‘head start’
in the unfamiliar genre. For example, someone who is familiar with writing in
the genre of poetry will be able to ‘adapt’ to the genre of a biology lab
report more easily than someone with little writing experience at all. Note
that this works both ways: A person skilled in writing biology lab reports has
a certain knowledge of writing that would give her a ‘head start’ in writing
poetry. In either case, she will be using strategies such as revision, model
recognition, editing, experimentation, invention, and metacognition.
In a sense, this
idea is summed up in the phrase, “all writing is creative writing,” which gets
passed down from comp teacher to comp teacher as some kind of mantra. I have
explored this idea by having my composition students write in creative genres
in order to improve their skills in writing considered more ‘academic,’ with
some success, but I also wanted to determine why this ‘transfer’ wasn’t
absolute, and what other factors there are in learning how to write in a(ny)
genre.
Using creative
writing in the composition classroom seems to have other advantages too, like
building classroom community, and building students’ confidences in themselves
(and each other) as writers and thinkers, which in turn empowers them in
college and out the real world. Last but not least, giving them the opportunity
to experiment in creative genres may help alter their attitudes towards writing
in general, and may give them a love for writing for the rest of their lives.
Or, at least not make them hate it. In exploring these ideas and questions, my
(potentially subversive) goal is to argue for making creative writing genres an
integral part of composition class assignments.
The Split
When I started teaching at Jackson
Community College, I became aware of not just a mental split between creative
writing and academic writing among my students, but also a split among the
faculty: Only about three of us, including me and another adjunct, had any
interest in even teaching creative writing, and when us two adjuncts moved on,
the two creative writing classes were cut down to one: not for lack of student
interest, just no one else wanted to teach it. At Eastern Michigan University,
where I was a full-time GA earning a degree in Written Communication: The
Teaching of Writing, this ‘split’ is even more obvious: Although technically
part of the English department, creative writing classes come under their own
letter designation, and are even listed on a separate section of the catalogue.
Teachers in the two disciplines, though sharing the same halls, rarely even
talk to each other, and the only graduate students who see both worlds are a
few graduate creative writing majors who teach intro composition courses (and
not the other way around!).
This Split (which
I’m starting to think of with a capital ‘S’) between creative writing and
academic writing has always existed, starting at least back with Plato, especially
in the Dialogues Phaedrus, Gorgias and The Republic. Plato took as a given that there was a difference
between rhetoric and poetry (in which in he includes storytelling and drama
(Republic Books II and III)), and while he never discusses whether there’s a
different process between rhetoric
and poetry, he obviously considers them different ways of thinking. Rhetoric,
the form of communication used by philosophers, is used for something, to argue, in a logical manner, for how a person
should act, or “pointing to what is just” (Gorgias 138). In other words, to
prove something. In Phaedrus, Plato
ranks the philosophers/rhetoricians as those people who have been closest to
God, and therefore closer to truth, followed by kings as second closest, with
the poets way down at seventh, just two places up from tyrants. A little later
he claims that poetry doesn’t do anything more than “educate” people, by
chronicling something that has happened in history (150), meaning, I guess,
that The Iliad is nothing more than a
history lesson!
But even Plato
admits, implicitly, that this is not true, because he spends half The Republic going after the poets. What
he doesn’t like about poetry is that it can portray gods and heroes as less
than ideal—for example, afraid, or acting unjustly. That is, human. In short,
poetry doesn’t necessarily act logically; it doesn’t argue for acting justly; it just represents gods and heroes doing
ambiguously human things. Very dangerous, especially for his
guardian-philosophers, for whom bravery and acting justly seem to involve
ignorance more than logical thinking.
The Split Today
In modern times, even though most
people would now view at least the reading
of creative texts as valuable, the Split between creative and academic writing
still exists, and is still based on the idea that certain types of writing are
‘useful’ and other, creative types, not so. The most famous example of this in
composition studies is the (in)famous exchange between David Bartholomae and
Peter Elbow that appeared in College
Communication and Communication in 1995. Though they both agree that the
preparation they hope to give their students is a way to empowerment, a way to
learn how to survive in the academic world, their debate is over the best way. Should students “be suspicious
of writing” (Bartholomae “Responses” 85) or learn to “trust language” (Elbow 78)? Elbow claims that students need to
write from personal experience first, in order to feel like they, and not the
teacher, are the expert on the subject. Any kind of formal writing, in the form
of arguments, or research papers, holds the problem that the teacher may
automatically know more than the student, thus the student feels like he or she
is trying to write to some ‘standard’ determined by the teacher.
Bartholomae argues
that learning to write to a standard is just the reality of college life. In
his debate with Elbow, and even more so in his essay “Inventing the
University,” Bartholomae argues that unless students get some exposure, or
practice, at the types of writing they’ll be expected to do in later classes,
they’ll be at a loss in how to begin when they get there, and end up excluded
from the “specialized discourse,” or discourses, of the university (60-61). To
him, power is the key, and the university is the representation of power. When
and/or if students learn the way people, we instructors, talk and write, they
begin to have access to, and control of, that power. Without being able to
navigate in the academic world, students are outsiders, powerless:
Our goal is to make a writer aware
of the forces at play in the
production of
knowledge...[and]...there is no better way to
investigate the transmission of
power, traditions and authority
than by asking student to do what
academics do: work with
the past, with key texts...working
with other’s terms...struggling
with the problems of quotation,
citation and paraphrase....
[to] argue. (Writing 66)
And while I do think the ability to critique a text, any text, is useful,
perhaps even a survival skill, and empowering,
I don’t think students, or anyone, can get to that point without first feeling
confident as a writer, and I lean toward agreeing with Elbow in his “Response”
to Bartholomae that critical-type academic writing “isn’t feasible or desirable
in one semester first year introduction to writing courses” (87).
This is the
problem: Time. For most schools, there’s only one semester in on composition
class to do anything. If Elbow had more time, I think he’d be willing to agree
with Bartholomae about working towards giving his students more experience with
academic type writing. But, there seems to be room to wiggle between the
Elbow/Bartholomae poles, even in one semester, and have students have some fun
and gain some confidence in themselves as writers, then on the last paper of the semester, move them a little further
down the continuum with an introduction to critical writing and/or working with
an outside text. Any more ‘academic’ writing than that, Elbow argues, though
probably an intense writing experience, and a good preparation for future
academic assignments, sounds discouraging, for my students and me, and I just
can’t have my students associating writing (and thinking and using language)
with the word “discouraging.” I firmly stay in agreement with Elbow when he
says that his
goal is that students should keep
writing by choice after the course is over—because...the process itself of
engaging in writing, of trying to find words for one’s thinking and experience
and trying them on others—will ultimately lead to the kind of questing...that
[he and Bartholomae] both seek...by a path where the student is steering.” (92)
Is this ideal
thinking? Yes of course. But it resonates with me because I’m pretty sure that
that’s how I learned to write in the
Star Wars Cantina of Bartholomae’s Academic Discourse.
Long Ago: K-12
It took me a long time to
disassociate academic writing from the “school writing” I grew up on, which was
nothing ever more than regurgitation of facts. I don’t think my school system
was the best nor the worst, but any writing assignment I ever had, a so-called
“report” was no more than what was expected on a history test: just a listing
back, supposedly in my own words, of information. Nothing more than summary. I
don’t blame my teachers, they had five classes of 30+ students, and were
probably just grateful that I could construct a sentence and have a paragraph
every now and then. It’s at this point where I do think my own creative writing
(done, of course, outside of school) helped me ‘get by,’ because I was very
content to ‘get by’ with a B with minimal effort than be one of those nerds who
worked hard to get an A (my nerdiness and cravings for A’s came much later in
grad school). At the very least, the idea of putting words on a page was not
new, or foreign. I had some
confidence in just writing.
The Discourse Strikes Back: College
I realize now that, back in 1990,
the instructors I had at Jackson Community College, and the department itself,
were under the influence of Elbow. In neither of the composition classes that I
took there did I do any research or citation. In fact, because I wanted to be a
writer, I decided to take one writing class every semester, and, when I ran out
of composition and creative writing classes, enrolled in an independent study
class called Research Writing. There I got my first experience with research,
and citation, both of which I explored more or less on my own. The instructor
never ‘taught’ me how to do either of these things, because, after I showed
that I was willing and able to learn by myself, he didn’t have to. I only
worked on one paper the whole semester, on cockroaches, for a grand total of
seven pages, which was huge for me back then. I have always remembered that he
left the decision of what to write about up to me, which made the ‘assignment’
actually interesting: I’d lived in a roach-infested apartment building out in
Los Angeles for a year, and just wanted to know more about the damn things,
especially after seeing one of the guys across the hall put one in a microwave
for two minutes and it survived!
I don’t have the
paper anymore, but I know it was still in the regurgitation style: just copying
interesting things I’d found out about cockroaches (like that there are flying
cockroaches in Florida! I remember that!) But, I learned how to cite: I just
found a book that used citations, I don’t even remember what it was, and copied
how that writer had done it. I didn’t know at the time, but I was actually
learning Chicago Style. I didn’t even know then that there were different types
of citation, I just assumed that since this way of citing was in a book, that
must be how everyone did it.
At Michigan State
University, as an academic writer, I was almost a complete failure. I look at
my transcripts from that time and it’s glaringly obvious there was a problem: I
was an English major, yet in all my literature classes I was getting 2.5’s. I
was reading the books, coming to every class, listening (passively) to the
professors lecture me on what the books meant, but writing anything meaningful,
to me or my professors, seemed impossible. I didn’t know what “writing anything
meaningful” meant. Only my creative writing classes, in which I was receiving
4.0’s, saved my GPA (plus, curiously, Spanish and physical education). I now
remember how disillusioned I was with college, wanting to keep learning, but
feeling I would never fit in as a grad student because I knew I’d have to do
more of that writing that I didn’t like, and wasn’t good at, which sounds
exactly like what some of my students say to me, and which I see might actually
be related in the opposite way: I wasn’t good at it, so I didn’t like it.
I just didn’t get what was required. I was doing what
I’d been taught to do, regurgitate info, when I could remember it. Not that I liked doing that, but my other, natural,
response to reading a text, emulating it, trying to write something similar,
didn’t count at all in that world (Notable exception: This TA teaching a
British Lit class who actually accepted a poem I wrote in response to Keat’s
poem “To Autumn” in lieu of an essay, and gave me a 4.0 on it. A thousand
blessings on you Tony, wherever you are now).
Return of the Poet: Grad School #1: The New School for Social Research
After my horrible experience with
lit classes in college, I knew there was no way I wanted to go on to a Master’s
in English and be what I now call a “lit critter.” I had no idea about
composition studies at the time, all my comp teachers had been lit majors,
which is probably significant, but I still had a desire to study writing, so I
eventually decided to try a MFA. The New School for Social Research (now New
School University) accepted me in their Poetry Writing Program and off I went
to New York. And, despite the reputation MFAs have with some folks as just
money makers, which I even sort of agree with now, at the time it was the right
thing for me: I was writing and reading, and although we discussed what we were
reading, I was with people, including the instructors, who also felt that
natural way to respond to a creative text was to write a creative text of one’s
own.
Did I have
problems there? Yes. Language Poetry was in vogue, so the young Language poet
wanna-bes wasted a lot of time telling the rest of us we shouldn’t write
personal poetry. I digress, but I had my revenge when our Master’s projects
came around and everyone had to write a critical essay in addition to a
portfolio of creative work. The Language poets didn’t have such an easy time, I
think (now) because they had no experience in narrative, or even revision, or
even making a coherent sentence. Not that what I wrote felt easy, and it took
time and effort, but it was ‘do-able’ and I had confidence in myself. My
critical essay compared Gary Snyder and James Dickey, who, I realized were both
considered “nature poets” but who had very different views of nature. And to my
surprise, I did a pretty decent job of it while actually learning more about
both writers. By that time I’d been reading more non-fiction critical writings about
writers and writing, both in school and out, and I felt more comfortable using
the discourse language, and emulating how others discussed texts. And, my
experience back at JCC with the research paper on cockroaches had at least
prepared me for citation: It was not a new concept to me by then, even if I
probably wasn’t proficient.
Each of us
students worked with one of the faculty. My advisor was David Trinidad, a funny
intelligent guy who had really helped me fit in, and I remember talking to him
on the phone the first time after I’d sent him my first rough draft: There was
actual relief in his voice when he told me I was doing a good job, letting slip
that other folks he was working with, college graduates like myself, were doing
things like calling poets by their first names in their papers, and had no clue
how to cite.
Grad School #2: St. John’s College
Even after my Snyder/Dickey paper
for the New School, I now know that I still did not understand academic writing
until I entered the Eastern Classics MA Program at St. John’s College in Santa
Fe, New Mexico. The actual revelation actually came from the admissions
counselor when I called him for advice on what to do for the sample essay
required with the application. The main idea of the essay was to write about a
favorite book, and I wasn’t quite sure what to do, except that I knew it should
be nothing like I used to write back in college. He broke down the three basic
ways a person can write about a text: Regurgitate, Compare, or Ask a Question.
The first,
regurgitate, is what I had done, and all that was required of me, all the way
up into college. Even my “research paper” on cockroaches at JCC was just a
listing of info I’d found on them. My essays at MSU were just summarizing of
the text (literary or critical), or what the professor said in class. The
second, comparing one text to another, is what I’d figured out how to do at the
New School, though it was really just a step up from regurgitation because
still none of my own thinking was required: I just came up with a list of
common ideas and summarized what each poets had to say on them.
What the counselor
at St. John’s told me to try was find something in a text I really didn’t “get”
and make it into a question. Then, go back into the text and try to answer it.
This may seem obvious to some folks, but it was a revelation to me: To actually
admit to myself and others that there might be something I didn’t understand
about a text, when my whole academic career (such as it was) I felt I was
expected to understand a text completely, or at least act like I did when I
wrote a paper on it. The result of trying to answer the question, whether I can
or not, is that I come away with a deeper understanding of the text. I also
loved the St. John’s approach (sometimes called the Great Books approach) of
engaging in just (and only) a text, by myself, without consulting the so-called
experts. This forced me to defend myself, and quote and cite a text well.
I don’t know why
it took me so long to learn how to have a question about a text, except that in
my literature classes I learned that I shouldn’t do that. I had always felt
that everyone was just expected to know
what a text was about, and that there was only one thing that a text was about:
what the professor thought. Do I think now that’s how the really good lit
critters think and work? No, but nobody taught me that that was part of the
academic process, perhaps because for a professor to admit that they had
questions about a text would be some kind of weakness, to their students, but
maybe also to their colleagues and employers. If the university is based on
‘publish or perish,’ then to survive professors may have to be ‘experts,’
meaning seeming like they know everything. And this attitude gets passed on to
their students.
Teaching Academic Writing? Me?
Another big plateau in learning
academic writing was teaching it. When I returned back to JCC, this time as a
supposed authority figure, I was given English 131 classes, which every
student, in every department, had to take. The Bedford/St. Martin’s book we
were using had chapters basically laid out so that I could’ve had my students
writing different forms of personal essays the whole semester, and I was
strongly tempted to do that. Personal writing seemed more creative, more human,
and something I felt I might be able
to help my students with. I also felt that they
would like those types of writing better, i.e. it would be fun writing instead
of “work.” Then my friend Dave, who had been teaching there a couple years
already, pointed out that many of my students would not go on to English 132,
the class needed for those transferring to a four year college, in which the
main emphasis was research and citation. English 131 didn’t have that
requirement, yet many of my students were going into JCC’s nursing program, in
which they would have to know how to cite and research sources. I realized I
couldn’t in good conscience send my students off having only written personal
narratives. So, I decided, anticipating Bartholomae, that I had to have at
least one paper in my classes which needed to be a research paper, so that my
student would be (a little) prepared for potential assignments in future
classes. Note that I didn’t think any
kind of writing would prepare them: To be prepared for citation, one needs to
actually cite. Or that seemed true at the time.
Personally, I
wasn’t happy with that because the thought of reading dry sterile research
paper horrified me (still does), and I wasn’t sure I would be able to ‘help’ my
students write them, because I knew I was no expert and, unlike my MSU
professors, I didn’t feel right to pretending. I was saved again by Dave who
showed me Ken Macrorie’s I-Search paper, which I loved (and still do) because
it ‘scaffolded’ off of the personal essays my students had already done, gave
them experience in working with sources and researching and citing, and still
gave them the opportunity to be human. One humorous note: Although I didn’t
want to pretend to be an expert, I surely didn’t want to come off as an idiot
either, so I had to give myself a crash course in research and citation, since
it had been years since I’d used a citation system, and that had been Chicago
Style. I also finally learned about databases and how they worked. Embarrassing
to say, but in a sense I was returning to my St. John’s roots, where the
instructor comes to a subject not as an expert, but as someone with questions
too.
By my second year
I was given the opportunity to teach English132, which I knew would be a
challenge, since the corresponding chapters from the Bedford/St. Martin’s book
were writing assignments like literary analysis, arguments and “proposing a
solution” to something. I kept the I-Search assignment, for the same reason I
used it in English 131, to still give me a personal connection, a human element
to my students. The Argument Paper seemed practical to me, applicable to both
academic assignment and also to real life: for some reason I had visions of my
students standing at one of the bars in Jackson, The Hunt Club, arguing about
politics, or at least tv shows, and doing so formally and logically while their
less fortunate friends resorted to yelling and name-calling.
And, since these
were students transferring to a four-year school, I figured they would get some
kind of literature class, so I wanted to prepare them better than I had been.
Maybe too I dreamed of helping my students become more critical readers of any
text and they would all give up watching television. And I failed miserably:
the literary analysis was the hardest essay we did, for both them and me. I was
trying to teach them something it had taken me until my thirties to learn. Were
they better prepared? Maybe. Did we have fun? No. Did they walk away with a new
found love of reading or writing? Hell no.
I learned more from the argument paper
than my students. I’d never had to formally argue anything, so again I was
frantically reading everything about arguments before class. But, those papers
went better. Once my students got that an argument is made up of claims,
everything clicked. Not a very creative way to write, but 132 wasn’t about
creativity I realized. They had total choice on the topics they were writing
about, but the structures of the writing genres felt stifling. Again, at the end
of class, were they more ‘prepared’ for possible future writing assignments?
Yes. Did they have fun? Well....
Which was my
reaction to the class as whole, even though my students were great. They seemed
to accept better than I did that the class wasn’t supposed to be fun, but
though some teachers at JCC prefer to teach 132 exclusively, I knew I couldn’t,
at least not how it was set up. Even though I wanted (and still want) to
prepare my students for future writing assignments, if that meant reducing writing
to impersonal arguments then I kind of felt like I was preparing my students to
hate writing, and preparing myself to hate student writing. Nor did I like the
set up of JCC classes and the Bedford/St. Martin’s book, which implied that
literary analysis and arguments are somehow at a higher level than personal
essays. Meaning, I guess, that they are both more difficult and more important.
That’s just not true.
Grad School #3: Eastern Michigan University
My most recent academic plateau
(and at this point I know it’s plateaus all the way up) was going to grad
school, yet again, this time at Eastern. The big difference between St. John’s
and Eastern is that at St. John’s I learned to come to a text with questions,
while at Eastern I learned, and was expected, to come to texts with opinions.
The two ideas are interrelated, of course, and probably most people would learn
that faster than I have. I was even trying to get my students to have an
opinion about a text at JCC (which is very very difficult, because, like me,
that had learned that what is expected of them is regurgitation) but the point
is, I felt prepared going in. Finally, only after years of academic writing,
did I feel prepared for academic writing. And, feeling prepared has made it
fun, or at least highly interesting. I find I worry less about format or
audience, and can concentrate on thinking. I’d rather be writing poetry, but
yes, I find myself turning into an academic nerd. Note to self: Writing is fun
when you feel prepared.
Like I said, if it
took me this long to feel comfortable in academic writing, is there any way I
think I can teach my students in one semester how to survive in Bartholomae’s
Academic Discourse? Well, no. But, like with my JCC nursing students, if I
could give them a couple of clues to help them on their way, that might be more
than I got and might provide them with a beginning. In valuing that, I feel
like I’m starting to argue for the teaching of academic writing over
everything. And, if learning the Academic Discourse were only about the writing
and thinking that goes on at the university, if it were only something that
existed in a vacuum, then I’d be less inclined really give it importance. But
it doesn’t, and I don’t think Bartholomae emphasizes that enough, that the skills
we learn in the Academic Discourse are directly applicable to the ‘Public
Discourse’ outside of the university. Engaging with texts is something people
do every day. The most obvious example of this, which goes back to Plato, is in
politics, and with politicians, and how important it is to be able to engage
with politicians on what they say and do (which are not always the same thing),
rather than sitting back and passively watching. Being able to ask questions,
disagree, argue with/for, have opinions, are survival skills for life. Without
those skills, our students will end up feeling helpless about life just like
they may have been in the university.
But my question
still remains: are some basic
principles, like revising, editing, appropriate use of mechanics, setting aside
a regular writing time, using models, and getting peer response, transferable
between creative writing genres and academic genres? Because if they are, I and
my students will have a lot more fun. So, in order to help myself understand
the transfer of skills, and perhaps strategies also, between creative writing
and academic writing, I went back and analyzed my own, creative, writing
process.
My Own, Creative, Writing Process
I looked at three different genres
of creative writing that I’ve done, a poem, a short story, and a novel, first
comparing those processes with each other, then examining my writing process
with an academic paper I wrote, to see if I was actually doing the same
‘things,’ and if not, why not. What I found, which may or may not be a
revelation to anybody, is that my writing process is basically the same for all
the creative genres I work in. All of my writing begins with reading, and is a
reaction to, or reply to, or an emulation of, something, or some things, I’ve read.
For example, I use models. I might read one of Allen Ginsberg’s long-lined
poems, and then want to try something similar, like the long line format, or a
similar subject. Not that either would be an exact copy of any of his poems,
since I also have many other literary heroes and their influence goes into my writing also: Our styles are always a
mix of everything we read. I do find though, that is there is usually a
‘trigger’ that makes me want to write something at that time. The poet, and
teacher, Richard Hugo, most famously, describes this phenomenon in his book The Triggering Town, where that one
thing, that one trigger, be it a town, or a poem, or a conversation with
someone, “excites the imagination” (Introduction). I also like poet Denise
Levertov’s description of the elements (and I feel there are always many) that
lead up to this trigger. She’s talking about writing poetry, but she could be
talking about any type of writing:
first there must be an experience,
a sequence or constellation of perceptions of sufficient interest, felt by the
poet intensely enough to demand of him their equivalence in words: he is brought to speech. (629)
Another common,
and key, part of my processes is time, i.e. making it. When I set aside writing
time every day, I’m much more likely to be open to triggers, to feel ‘inspired’
to write something. I also write ‘on the fly’ sometimes, especially poetry,
since it’s short, usually, but knowing I have a space every day where I’ll do
nothing but write keeps my mind open to thinking about writing too, and keeps
me more ready to go. Time also is important in the revision/editing process.
Since my creative writing is for myself primarily, and I don’t have a deadline,
I can have the luxury to go back, again and again, to revise and edit various
pieces. Revision I think of as any kind of changing of the text, from moving,
to cutting, to changing words. Editing is surface convention stuff, like
correction spelling and punctuation (though even sometimes the change of a
comma can be an important revision). In any case, both functions generally
happen together, recursively, though at some point editing is that last thing,
one last spell check.
Peer response is
also a key part of my writing process, though unfortunately not always available.
Being out of school and not having many, or any, writer friends can be tough.
In addition to just ‘having another set of eyes’ on my writing, a perhaps even
more valuable part of peer review is just acceptance. As a writer I always
doubt whether what I’ve written is even worth anything, is even any good at
all, so just having someone read something and talk about it as if there’s
something there to talk about can be a relief, even if they’re also pointing
out parts that might need work. I would think that after years of writing now
that I might have a little more confidence in whether my writing is worthy, and
I do sometimes, with some of my texts, but I also sometimes just tell myself
that what I’ve written is ‘good enough,’ when it’s not. I also have to stress
that I don’t just include anybody as a peer, because, curiously, I’ve had a
couple writer friends who haven’t been as useful as I’d like. Also curiously:
One of my best ‘responders’ is a non-writer, non-English major.
Audience
consideration tends to not be important to me with my creative writing. I do start out with a sense of some kind of audience, just in what I
read and like. For example, I know if I like Beth Nugent’s short stories, my
stories are probably going to be in the same ‘audience type’ (if they’re good
enough). That is, “if you like that, you might like this.” Most writers do that
though. Not consciously, not like, “I like Nugent’s style, therefore I’m going
to attempt to write exactly the way she writes.” No, it’s that I already like
that stripped-down “iceberg” style (i.e. what we see/read is only the tip of
the iceberg, with a whole lot going on under the surface) in general, because
she was influenced by Hemingway and Marguerite Duras, also iceberg writers.
Audience
consideration only comes in after I
feel a text is ‘done’ and ready to be considered for publication. Then,
ideally, I try and find a market into which it fits. I do my share of sending
out stories and poems to random literary journals too, but I’ll always try the
publications in which I think I ‘fit.’ For example, if I have a story about man
in his twenties or thirties involved with a woman in some romantic way, I would
probably consider sending the story to Esquire
or Playboy (if they still even
publish short stories, but that’s another problem), since the people who buy
those publications might be
thirty-something men interested in women. Similarly, I know the New York Quarterly tends to print poems
in the Charles Bukowski ‘dirty realism’ style, and since Bukowski is a huge
influence on me, my poems have a better chance of getting in there than in,
say, The Paris Review. Point is, I
don’t ever modify my writing to fit an audience, I find the audience for my
writing.
This is one of the
big differences in academic writing, at least as I’ve learned it up to this
point: I have always felt that audience awareness is constantly part of my
process in academic writing, meaning that it ‘feels’ like it has a lot more of
what I call constraints: The language is different, more formal, less me, and
the organization and appearance of my ‘paper’ are going to have to be a certain
way. Yes, there is wiggle room, but for example, I know I’ll have to end an
academic paper with a conclusion-y sounding paragraph, whereas with a short
story I have no idea how it will end, except that it probably won’t sound conclusive. The opposite: it
will be ambiguous. Do I wish that I felt I had more freedom to experiment in my
academic writing? Of course, and now that I’m a more mature writer, I do. My point
is that I can afford to feel that way in graduate school, and now as an
instructor, but back as an undergraduate? Never. Even though I did have some
confidence on how to approach certain types of writing, the general expectation
for any kind of academic writing back then, for me and for friends and
colleagues, was to write within a given format, decided on by our professors,
and/or by ‘convention’ (I like to picture a Council of Twelve English
Professors dressed in dark robes in some secret chamber somewhere when I hear
this word). The most evil example of this being the five-paragraph essay, still
in use in high school, according to my students. Not much room for
experimentation there. How fun it that? And how much learning is going on?
The other big difference
between my academic and creative writing, and again this might not be a big
revelation to most people, is working with texts. With creative writing, other
texts are there in the background when I write, as the inspiration, and the
things I’m emulating. In the ‘big picture’ way of looking at it, I see creative
writing as a dialogue, or what jazz musicians call “riffing”: taking someone’s
idea and using it as the basis to create something of one’s one. Brief example:
Victor Hugo’s Les Miseràbles inspired
Tolstoy’s War & Peace which
inspired Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell
Tolls. With academic writing, all the background reading is still there,
for inspiration and emulation, but there is also a text the writer is thinking
about, responding do, arguing with. The key difference seems to be the writer
is engaging with a text, or texts, in the present tense, working with an
outside source, with ideas coming from the outside world, instead of the
inside.
So, aside from
citation and responding to a text, the process and principles—using models,
making time, revising, editing, getting peer response, and audience
consideration—seem the same between creative writing and academic writing.
Therefore, they would seem to be transferable. And there are folks out there who
agree. What I’m finding is that these people are writing instructors who also
write in both creative and academic genres, and are working in the worlds of both composition and creative writing. The
biggest name in this hybrid field was of course Wendy Bishop. Almost all of her
writings, and all the ones I talk about in this essay, are based on the idea
that there is no Split between creative and academic writing. Originally, I
heard the mantra I mentioned earlier, “All writing is creative writing,” attributed
to her, though I haven’t been able to confirm it, but if she didn’t say it, she
should have. For example, in her essay, “Crossing The Lines: On Creative Composition and Composing
Creative Writing,” she takes the
“commonalities” between the creative writing process and the academic process
as a given and feels that the reason certain composition instructors favor
academic writing is because that’s the only writing they’ve ever done
(184-190). Whereas, people like Bishop, and me, who have done both, tend to
naturally see the similarities, and the value of each. And, in another essay
written ten years later, she goes even farther, by coming out in favor of using
creative writing genres in the composition classroom, saying that they allow
for just as much growth, in fact, maybe more, as more traditional essays
(Contracts 109). When I read Bishop, I start to lean more and more toward the
complete banishment of academic
writing from my classrooms!
Defining what
these commonalities are is the first step to showing they transfer between
genres of writing. Bishop doesn’t, but only because there are already other
people in the same crossover community doing so, like Evie Yoder Miller, who in
her essay, “Reinventing Writing Classrooms: The Combination of Creating and
Composing,” also takes as a given the idea that creative writing and
composition classes share “common goals and strategies” such as the
“development of ideas and appropriate use of mechanics” and that they share the
idea of “writing as a process” (39). She also agrees that students consider
creative writing “fun” and composition “drudgery” (41), and, more
interestingly, that they think writing creatively is something that they have
to build up to, after they’ve done their time ‘learning’ basic “skills” (42).
But Yoder Miller, like me, feels that fun writing, creative writing, is an
important way to learn those basic skills, and that it should be incorporated
at all levels.
Hans Ostram
co-edited two books on writing with Bishop. In his essay “Undergraduate
Creative Writing: The Unexamined Subject,” he argues that creative writing is
one of the most important types of writing students can experience in college,
and, like Bishop and Yoder Miller, that creative writing and composition
classes have much in common, and much to learn from each other, and that the
two fields should be doing what some of my students might call ‘conversating’
with each other more. He even demonstrates how, with creative writing classes
being so popular with students of so many different majors, that they are at
the center of Writing Across the Curriculum. It’s Ostram who goes into depth on
the commonalities, and how those commonalities imply transfer between genres of
writing:
much of what [students] learn may
be transferred to other
writing situations at the
university or in a career. For they
learn about the expectations of an
audience; they learn how
absolutely crucial revision is;
they learn the subtle matters
of structure, pacing, and
organization; and, by confronting
the clichés and stereotypes that
flourish in first drafts of
poems and stores, they learn to
become more independent
thinkers and writers. They learn
that they are responsible
for the values and assumptions
their poems and stories
project, and so, even though they
do not write argumentative
non-fiction, they learn a great
deal about persuasive writing.
Because of these transferable
elements...we should regard
these courses as...improving
students’ writing in general. (57-8)
He’s talking about creative writing
classes, but if I substitute the phrase “stories and poems” for “essays,” he
could be describing any instructor’s ideal composition class. His list of
everything he feels students learn is exactly what I want/expect/hope my
composition students to learn. The only difference seems to be the creative
writing students seem to be having a lot more fun.
The problem is
that I can find many people who agree with me, but we still can’t prove this transfer between creative
writing to academic writing exists. It isn’t quantifiable, and will never work
the same way for all people in all cases. It’s always going to ‘depend’ on the
‘context.’ The person who came closest to doing anything like this is Lucille
Parkinson McCarthy, in her essay/study “A Stranger in Strange Lands: A College
Student Writing Across the Curriculum” which originally appeared in the journal
Research in the Teaching of English
way back in 1987, but which was also selected for the anthology Landmark Essays on Writing Across the
Curriculum edited by Charles Bazerman and David R. Russell. In it,
Parkinson McCarthy follows one student from his first year composition class to
two later courses, comparing his writing process in assignments for all three.
She does as thorough a job as anyone could in collecting data, interviewing,
and making careful observations, to the point of pointing out, to the surprise
of the student, that he is in fact using the same strategies and skills in all
of his writing assignments, even though
he doesn’t think so.
Unfortunately, all
this student’s assignments are of the academic type, i.e. critical response to
texts, even (and maybe especially) in his composition class. The scope, time
put in, and thoroughness of the data collection are beyond me, but I would’ve
loved if he had taken a creative writing course also, in order to see if he
would have used the same approach in those types of genres as well. My guess is
that yes, he would have. But of course, the weakness of using one student as an
example is that his situation, his context, might not apply to others, and that
some other student in his composition class might have given Parkinson McCarthy
a completely different response. Still, after reading her study, I think most
people, and I would put Bartholomae in here, would agree that what happens to
this boy, Dave Garrison, is typical,
and that skills and strategies learned in academic genres in academic genres
are applicable, and used, in other academic genres.
Which sounds like
an argument for giving some exposure in academic writing to students in first
year composition classes. And yet, I’m left wondering about this student Dave,
who says at the beginning of the study, “he did not really like to write and
that he was not very good” (130). Notice how those two ideas always seem to go
together. If he had had more exposure to creative genres, in which had had the
freedom to experiment with writing, especially with writing he had chosen to
experiment in himself, but also even the more traditional Elbow-esque personal essay,
might he have changed his thinking? As in, “I like to write, and I’m ok at it,”
the opposite of the above ‘equation.’ This confidence would be useful in his
later (academic) writing assignments. It seems
like this would have been the case, and the result would be the same: either
way he would be more confident and successful (read: empowered) in future
assignments, but in the latter case he would walk away with a ‘liking’ (or at
the very least a tolerance) of writing, which would be much more “useful” in
the long run, meaning in all the writing and thinking he would do beyond
college.
And yet....
I still have
doubts about whether that confidence will be adequate, will prepare my students
for future classes, and/or the real world. Georges T. Kanezis, in his essay
“Reclaiming ‘Creativity’ For Composition,” shares my doubts, wondering if, by
emphasizing creative writing, and the personal exploration and fulfillment for
our students that we all hope comes from it,
whether I will ultimately
see...children in my classroom,
quite adept at narration and
description, but relatively
crippled and hostile when it comes
to writing of a different
and, probably to them, uncreative
sort. (31)
My initial,
subversive, wishful-thinking reaction to ‘boring’ composition essays was (and
still sometimes is) to replace them, get rid of them, and have my students
reading and writing in creative writing genres all the time. But Karnezis
reminds me that this “privileging of the ‘creative’” is actually what caused
FYW essays to be seen as a kind of “industrial art” in the first place (32),
perpetuating the Split. His response is to share with his students, and have
them write, examples of writing that blurs the lines: creative non-fiction that
informs and analyzes but which still seems creative (39), which I would like to
explore more in my classes, but his point sounds true: I have to make sure I’m
not ultimately reinforcing the split between creative writing and academic
writing.
And it’s not that
I think academic writing isn’t necessary,
but in my own academic writing I felt like something sinister was happening by
having to ‘play the game’ and learn other people’s rules and lexicons. I didn’t
want to lose who I was: I didn’t want to change into something I wasn’t sure I
wanted to be. Entering the Academic Discourse (cue sinister music) felt like
the ultimate ‘conformation’ at a time when I was building my identity around
trying to be unique. Meaning, learning academic writing felt like having to
conform to rules in order to be accepted into a group, a group that I wasn’t
sure I want to belong to in the first place. So, I also agree with William
Lyne, though surely he’s not the first one to say so, who in his essay “White
Purposes”, says that learning academic writing is a form of “cultural
assimilation” (73).
And yet....
Bartholomae’s
response, and, strangely, mine, is that our students can’t afford not to assimilate: Doing so is the key
to the power of access. Bartholomae is right: If they don’t, they will be,
excluded from the Academic Discourse, therefore from the public discourse when they get out of college. If they get out of college. The Academic Discourse doesn’t exist in
a vacuum. It feeds into the public discourse, or discourses, in real world
(paying) jobs including, but not limited to politics, law, the media, and even
medicine. The principles students learn in academic writing, such as the
ability to do research, to think critically and logically, and respond to
texts, and audience consideration, are used every day by the people influencing
what happens in the world. And if our students can’t communicate in that world,
they can’t participate in that world. They can’t even enter it. They will
remain outsiders. This is hard for me to write because I have always been proud
of my outsider status, and many of my students are, and I want to nurture that
too, but I only feel comfortable in my outsider status knowing I can slip in
like a spy sometimes and function in the real world, if I have to.
I want so badly to
say that creative writing assignments would be enough, and I think people can
go through life just writing and thinking creatively, but the reality is they
may be put in situations in which writing and thinking creatively won’t be
enough. It pains me to say this. And, even though there is some of Ostram’s “transfer,” some ‘bleed over,’ in the two types
of writing, and creative writing does give students a head start on handling
formal writing, they’re still outside, still excluded from the academic
discourse, and therefore from certain
form of power.
Is there an
alternative? I like Wendy Bishop’s response, building on an idea from Peter
Elbow, which is to get out of the dichotomy trap and not think of entering the
Academic Discourse as an either/or situation, but rather “both/and”
(Bartholomae and Elbow 90, Bishop and Ostram, “Understanding” 17). That is,
surely assimilating into the Academic Discourse, playing the game, must be
possible, while also keeping oneself true to one’s cultural background. To
borrow a term from the lexicon of Black English Vernacular studies, our
students (and we!) need to learn how to “code-switch” between different
discourses. Learning how to do so, they will feel empowered in both (or all?).
Creative writing
and academic writing do have differences, so there will always be the trap of
wanting to know which is best, so that we can concentrate on, or even teach,
that one ‘best’ way, when the answer is (always): it depends. Meaning, ‘best’
depends on context. The person/people, the text, the culture, the time, the
location. Creative Writing and academic writing are both ‘best.’ In addition,
“empowerment” is a vague term that people seem to think of as a singular goal
that, once achieved, remains constant for the rest of a student’s life. There
is some truth in that: students build a certain ‘base’ confidence, more so than
someone who has never written anything. But empowerment is really an on-going
process, and can come and go depending (there’s that word again) on the
situation/context (and those words
again too!). It comes from (at least) both types of writing, creative and
academic. Again, the problem is thinking of this problem as either/or. The
question is not which type of writing best empowers students. It shouldn’t even
be a question: they both do. Which means, our students need to do both.
So should we then
make both creative and academic assignments mandatory?
I have. As I said earlier, when I started teaching, my first assignments of the
semester were always personal narratives, and lately I’ve experimented with
poetry and experimental writing, like “crots” of 400 word essays, which I
discovered from the website 400words.com.
My students seem to enjoy these assignments, and I’m open to any kind of
experimentation they want to do, so even those that don’t feel comfortable
writing about themselves can write 400 words of anything. But I have become
more intrigued with the idea of students having even more freedom to choose
what they want to write. Given the choice, I’m fairly sure most, if not all,
students, would experiment and explore both (or all) types of writing, and
experimentation seems to be where people learn the most.
Of course, Wendy
Bishop weighs in on this question too. In “Preaching What We Practice as
Professional in Writing,” the first chapter in the book she (along with Hans
Ostram) edited, Genre and Writing,
Bishop argues that while compositionist study is becoming more open to
different styles of writing, composition teachers are still assigning the same
old “student papers” (4-5). She quotes another writing instructor,
Bradwell-Bowles, who says that many teachers are (still) not giving students
“permission to experiment” (13). In the same quote, Bradwell-Bowles goes on to
say that while some students still need, and want, to write in “familiar
forms,” other students, given the choice, will experiment, and she agrees with
the idea that students “learn ways of critically analyzing theoretical
conventions at the same time that they are being introduced to traditional
academic discourse communities” (13). Bishop qualifies this by saying that
including a traditional essay is important in order to contrast the
“traditional and experimental in dialogue...[to]...learn about convention
making and breaking” (13). But about a decade later, she seems to drop the
idea. Instead, she too emphasizes, in her essay “Contracts, Radical Revision,
Portfolios, and the Risks of Writing,” on giving control of what kind of text
to write, and how to write it, to the students. Given freedom to choose whatever
genre of writing they want, students begin to see “that writing can be
pleasurable” (115). Every writer/instructor I discuss in this paper emphasizes
that writing being pleasurable, or fun, is the best, and in my opinion the
only, way students will learn. I might have doubts if, given the freedom, a
student chose purely academic writing or purely creative writing, yet what that
student is interested in, at this time, in this class, might be vital to their
development, and I’d feel very weird assuming that I knew any better than they
what they needed.
So why don’t more
teachers and departments encourage creative writing as an option in composition
classrooms? In addition to the creative/academic split in English departments
already mentioned, there’s again the fact that composition teachers might not
have much experience in writing in genres other than the academic writing they
did in college. Which should not be underrated, but many of them might not feel
comfortable evaluating anything they would classify as on the creative side.
The trick is to change the way we evaluate: Kate Ronald, in her essay included
as the first chapter in Starkey’s Teaching
Writing Creatively, seems to have already walked a path similar to mine.
She describes her shift in thinking about composition classrooms. Originally
she excluded any genre beside traditional essays, but then decided, like
Bishop, to give students the choice to decide both what they want to write and
how they want to write it. What she discovered was “that genre doesn’t matter
so much” (4) because the focus of her teaching became the students’ writing
processes. When she realized that many of her students chose creative writing
genres to write in, she wasn’t sure how to respond to texts, like fiction and
poetry, outside of her comfort zone. As she proceeds to describe some sample
students, their chosen genres, and how she responded to each, she realizes that
she’s responding in the same way that she might have responded to essays, with
questions and enthusiasm.
Conclusion
There doesn’t seem to be any firm
conclusion I can come to on this
subject, and I’ll probably wrestle for the rest of my career with how much, and
what kind, of certain genres of writing to offer in my composition classrooms,
but what seems even more important than which
genres students should write in is that they
have a choice about it, since being invested in both the topic and the genre
seems to provide the best learning environment. Of course, I have one more ‘and
yet’ moment: There does still seem to be value in nudging our students towards
certain kinds of what is considered academic writing/thinking, to give them
some experience with, to better prepare them for, any writing challenge, in
school or after. If they’re more prepared, hopefully they’ll have, if not fun,
then at least a better chance to learn from these future experiences.
What I am
interested in, then, are hybrid type assignments, in which all of the above is
possible. Ken Macrorie’s I-Search paper is a good start, but an even less
formal way I’ve found to combine student choice in topic/genre while still
preparing them for research and citation (and to combine both creative and
academic writing) is the Multi-Genre Research Paper, also called the
Multi-Genre Researched Writing Project, that I learned about, and started
incorporating in my classes, at Eastern Michigan University: Students choose
the topic, and the different genres (the one time I actually give my students a
page minimum in order to ensure they’re probably try more than one genre),
while still exploring, in class, how to do research, and cite the information
they use. Building on the ‘code-switching’ idea mentioned earlier, students
start with a personal connection/interest, which provides them with a way to
explore, or ‘switch’ into, and between, different genres of writing that are
relevant to them.
The genres of
writing can, and do, range from the more ‘creative,’ like poems and stories, to
the more ‘practical,’ like resumes or magazine articles, though, for example, a
student researching the blues and writing a fictional resume for a blues
musician is writing (and thinking!) creatively, while still giving herself
practical experience in writing a genre that she’ll be needing soon. So far
I’ve had great success with this assignment. My students get experience in
using library resources for research, citation (including in-text citation and
constructing a Works Cited page for their sources), as well as experience in
the writing principles I’ve listed previously. Best of all, they have fun
learning (or are learning because they’re having fun? or are having fun because
they’re learning?) and I have fun, and learn from, reading their projects. I
also feel more comfortable evaluating their writing, not on any set research paper
‘standard,’ but from the time and effort they put in.
Works Cited
Bartholome, David. “Inventing the University.” Writing on the Margins: Essays on
Composition and Teaching. Bedford/St. Martin’s. Boston/New York: 2005.
60-85.
Bartholomae, David. “Writing With Teachers: A Conversation
with Peter Elbow.” College Composition
and Communication. February 1995 Vol. 46, No. 1. 62-71. JSTOR Eastern
Michigan University. Halle Library. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/358872>.
Bartholomae, David and Elbow, Peter. “Responses to
Bartholomae and Elbow.” College
Composition and Communication. February 1995 Vol. 46, No. 1. 84-92. JSTOR
Eastern Michigan University. Halle Library.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/358872>.
Bishop, Wendy. “Crossing The
Lines: On Creative Composition and Composing Creative Writing.” Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking
Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy, edited by Bishop, Wendy and Ostram,
Hans. National Council of Teachers of English. Urbana, Illinois: 1994. 181-197.
Bishop, Wendy. “Contracts,
Radical Revision, Portfolios, and the Risks of Writing.” Power and Identity in the Creative Writing Classroom. ed. Anna Leahy. Multilingual
Matters LTD: Buffalo, 2005. 109-120.
Bishop,
Wendy and Ostram, Hans. Genre and
Writing: Issues, Arguments, Alternatives. Boynton/Cook. Portsmouth, NH:
1997.
Bishop,
Wendy and Ostram, Hans. “Understanding and (Re)Defining Genre.” In Genre and Writing. 17-18.
Bishop,
Wendy. “Preaching What We Practice as Professionals in Writing.” In Genres and Writing, Bishop and Ostram,
3-16.
Elbow, Peter. “Being a
Writer vs. Being an Academic: A Conflict in Goals.” College Composition and Communication. February 1995 Vol. 46, No. 1. 72-83. JSTOR Eastern
Michigan University. Halle Library. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/358872>.
Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town. W. W. Norton &
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“Reclaiming ‘Creativity’ for Composition.” Teaching Writing Creatively. ed. David Starkey. Boyne/Cook,
Portsmouth, NH: 1998,
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Levertov,
Denise. “Some Notes On Organic Form.” Postmodern
American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. ed. Paul Hoover. W.W. Norton &
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Miller, Evie Yoder.
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ed. Anna Leahy. Multilingual
Matters LTD: Buffalo, 2005. 39-48.
Ostram, Hans. “Undergraduate
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Landmark Essays. ed. Charles Bazerman
and David R. Russell. Hermagoras Press. Davis, CA: 1994. 125-155.
Peckham, Irvin. “The Yin and
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“Gorgias.” The Rhetorical Tradition:
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“Phaedrus.” The Rhetorical Tradition:
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