The Good Stuff

“It is mistake to want to be a poet more than want to write poems.  There is a difference if you can feel it.”  Lucille Clifton

A few weeks back I posted the poem “Southbound Trains.”  After this year’s NWP/NCTE annual meeting, I left with that adrenalin high that comes from hanging with amazing teachers, folks comfortable with ideas and theory, people who love and understand language.  Writers, all of them.  There was an ache, though, at this year’s meeting, an anxiety churning in everyone’s belly, an uncertainty about the future.  I think the poem was born of that curious subtext, a juxtaposition of potential and risk, of fear and hope.

I wrote the poem in that post-conference, train-travel euphoria -  a stream of consciousness and word association effort which I thought had some clever moments.  I posted the draft under the tag “practice what we preach” in what turned out to be a weak effort at making the point that teachers of writing must be writers themselves.

Nancy Ellingson, my former high school writing teacher and now facebook friend and cyber-colleague, didn’t let me get away with that pretense.  She commented on the post offering some editorial guidance.  What followed offers a remarkable glimpse, I think, at what writing is and what writing can do.  Writing isn’t about the poem – it’s about connecting, about creating something together, and about the learning that happens when we are guided by someone like Nancy through the wreckage of our attempts.  Our correspondence over the poem has me rethinking what I “knew” about teaching writing and about responding to my students’ work.

Nancy’s reading of the poem was line, even word, specific, without losing sense of the whole.  She celebrated the successes, questioned the wobbly parts, and called me out where she saw me taking short cuts – my use of the word “shit,” for example.  Readers, she taught me, attend to a writer’s words with intelligence and sincerity.  Readers deserve the same quality of attention from writers.  Her comments had me back pushing words around the page with the same zeal I’d had on the train that morning.

Further, our correspondence over this poem had us exploring pedagogy and thinking about how we become the teachers we become.  Consider this bit from one of Nancy’s emails: “I’ll say it again: I am happy to read what you have to say about learning/teaching. It makes me a bit sad, though, to recall all the days/weeks/years I sat everyone in rows (later in groups a lot) with the lecture-questioning method. My “method” came partly out of seeing what was around me in the schools, partly out of ignorance, and maybe mostly out of fear of loss of control…All I know is that I loved the kids.”

Stories, like the following, from the same email ease the sting of regret far too easy to see in hindsight:  I just received a note from an old student who had endured an awful life and then landed in my freshman class. She went on to have a very hard life, but is now graduating as a nurse! She said she wrote a poem in my class and that I thought it showed great promise. She has held dear that small encouragement for lo these many years as one of the only good memories from school – just a small and rare bit of encouragement. It is scary and wonderful to be a teacher.”

Besides our discussions of the poem and of teaching and writing, Nancy and I began filling in the details of the 25 years of life that have played out since I left her classroom as a high school senior.  We shared some stories of the triumphs and challenges and how eager we are to spend the holidays with our families.  “Southbound Trains” is in its third iteration, but I know the poem itself is really beside the point.  The sediment suspended in the currents swirling around the poem – that is the good stuff.