Have all your classes included student writing?
Not immediately. I waited on that until I taught the Art of Poetry in 2019. All the courses until then had been literature courses. But then it seemed to me it might be interesting to engage a little bit more fully and directly.
What did you hope students would get out of the writing?
Well, you learn by doing, so if you’re going to take a course about the art of poetry, then you really want to try your hand at it to understand what the dynamics of it are, what it means to work with different forms and with the aspects of even meter and rhyme and traditional elements[.]
I think it really enhanced the learning experience and it seemed as if it was satisfying, so I’ve kept that component in part because students seem to like it.
Do most of your YACOL students do the writing assignments?
I would say pretty much everybody. If they haven’t done it before, they’re probably going to feel self-conscious, but because of the age group, people have come to a point in their lives when it’s like: Why not? I can try this. It’s in the spirit of playing and learning.
How do you come up with your course ideas?
Sometimes they’re based on courses I’ve taught before, but I’m restless to learn new things. In Reorienting Tradition, the idea for it was partly from former students. I said to them, I’m going to teach a class this year and here are some possibilities; let me know what you would like me to teach. A few came back saying that having studied the Western poetic tradition, they’d like to learn about non-western traditions. I thought Bingo! It forced me to write in forms I’ve never used before, to study them, to take a deep dive into traditions that I was mostly ignorant about. It was fun to see what students wanted to learn and then to work with them because I really see these classes as collaborative; I’m in there working with a peer group.
Thinking back to your youth, can you remember the poem that made you think, I want to do this or that had an impact on you?
I think I was in eight grade and we had an assignment to find a poem and read it to the class. It was in public school in upstate New York, a very small rural town, and I had discovered Alfred Noyes’s poem “The Highwayman,” a very popular early twentieth-century poem, in a book on British and American poetry. I thought it was fantastic. I still to this day remember that I was the last to read my poem. I stood up and I read it, and I was so transported by the poem in the activity of reading it that it was almost like a trance. When I finished the poem and sort of came out of the trance, I looked around and I realized the same thing had happened to the class, and also to the next class because the bell had rung and the next class had come in and they were lined up along the walls watching this weird performance by this entranced kid. And I thought: Wow, poetry is something else.
I’m curious about your process, how does a poem come to you?
It does vary a bit, but usually it begins with some kind of impression that I have from different sources, sometimes it’s just something that happens to me, something that’s otherwise quite trivial, but it penetrates in a certain way, it lodges itself in me. It can come from another poem, or work of art, or even driving along and seeing something, the way the light falls in a particular way. This impression sort of sits around and often has attached to it some sense that it wants to get out. And so that becomes the kernel of a poem. It isn’t necessarily that the poem ends up being about those things, those little events, but they trigger the poem. Something of the experience, the feeling, is captured by the poem, and the attempt is to convey it so that somebody else can have that experience.
When you think about poetry today in the United States, is it a good moment?
I think poetry is thriving in the United States; there’s a lot of interest. It’s much more dispersed than it used to be. There used to be centers of power, as it were, and there was much more gatekeeping about who’s to be considered an important figure. Though elements of that still exist, it’s really much more de-regulated if you will. There’s lots of poetic communities. and when you start looking around, there’s an almost bewildering array of styles and attitudes and work, and it’s very lively. It’s almost impossible to have a real sense of what’s going on in its entirety, to get the whole picture. There are over ten thousand books of poetry published each year.
