I need to speak with
you about a class
in the next day or
two.
Stanley Fish (in an essay "Is there a Text in this Class?") once described a reading list he'd left up on the board from a previous class that looked like this:
Jacobs-Rosenbaum
Levin
Thorne
Hayes
Ohman (?)
He told his following class of seventeenth-century poetry students that this was a religious poem, and asked them to explicate it as such. They did. I like the idea of getting students to play with language, though something about Fish's excercise (something I can't quite put my finger on) bugs the hell out of me and reminds me too much of fellow graduate students who waved around names like Derrida as if they were magical keys that could unlock the meaning (or non-meaning) of everything. Maybe it's the names themselves (with maybe the exception perhaps of "Ohman (?)" that I find distinctly unpoetic.
The mystery student's note is much more to my taste. The hesitancy of those first and third line breaks, as if the student isn't quite sure of who he needs to speak with or when or how urgent his need is. The student is no poet, but those lines make me think of the doctor William Carlos Williams' scribbling poems onto his prescription pads. [I love the idea of a poem as a prescription. It's lovely how just the few I read in your blogs the other day uplifted my spirits. I don't know if this has ever happened, but I love imagining a physician handing a poem to a weary patient. "You'll be fine. Read this and come back in a week."]
I didn't understand or even like WCW until I took a creative writing (poetry) class in college. I couldn't figure out what that red wheel barrow poem was doing in every poetry anthology around. I couldn't appreciate the elegance. And then there was this one (which I like much better):
This is Just to Say
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
A note dashed off by a husband to a wife, perhaps. But what's the tone here? It sounds so playful to me, so mischievous. In class, the poem inspired more conversation than I ever thought possible. I started to see just how deliberate those breaks were, how much the breaks themselves could communicate. We practiced using them in poems of our own, experimenting with how else those breaks can convey meaning or tone:
We appreciate
your interest
We are unable to
include you
We were forced
to be extremely
selective
Thank you
for allowing us
to pursue your
credentials
Please accept our
best wishes
for the future
This "poem" seems to be sneering. The words are conventional, but there's still some fun being had. And unlike Williams' poem in which perhaps a joke is being shared between lovers, here it's at the addressee's expense. Putting the word "credentials" on a line by itself seems to convey exactly what the hiring committee might think of the rejected applicant. It's the tone I heard in my head when reading the numerous rejection letters (for grad schools, for jobs) I've received up to this point. Oh, sure, most of them seem nice enough, and some are even apologetic, but the perceived meaning "you're not good enough for us" was still there. I know better, now, how random the search process is, how much regret our committee really does seem to have that we can't hire or even interview more... but I digress.
I guess what I'm trying to say is... it's national poetrymonth. That's all.
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