The following appears in a forthcoming anthology on teaching poetry, edited by Joshua Marie Wilkinson.

some thinking

500-1000 words, more or less, to say something about teaching poetry, feels like an appropriate restriction—not unlike the restriction of semester and quarter units, class meeting times, the space of a classroom, institutions. Which is to say something about the context I’m speaking from: I teach one undergraduate poetry workshop a semester (“beginning” and “advanced”, in rotation) at an institution where I also work full-time as an administrator for a large (100 student) graduate creative writing program. And so I think a lot about the workshop model across various and fairly specific contexts; about the problems and possibilities of the workshop as a space for thinking in groups. What is a workshop for? And what can it do?

I’ve become increasingly interested in the ways a workshop may function as a provisional, immediate community, where some relationships dissolve when the container of the class dissolves, and others persist. This feels both like and unlike the poetry communities I’m a member of. I tend to work with other people, and often come into brief but intense relationships within the frame of collaboration around a performance or event. Some of those projects grow into long-term creative partnerships. But there’s also a myriad of less easily categorized ways wherein almost everything I write is in some way responding or thinking through the conversations and relationships of local, national, online and international poetry communities as I experience them.

I don’t have room here to sufficiently problematize some of the terms I’m using, “community” in particular, which in the bay area, a location central to my thinking and experience, is decidedly plural, overlapping, contestatory. And while there exist all kinds of bridges and pipes and paths between poetry classrooms and poetry communities (a permeability that comes with its own set of problems and possibilities), finally the space of the classroom isn’t equivalent to that of the writing community, the latter of which so often plays out at public and private readings, in galleries, bars, homes. The compare and contrast possibilities here are many: the writing scene with its deeply messy, engaged friendships and sex (I’m thinking of a lyric from Penelope Houston: “where everyone in the room must be once or future lovers”), but also the poetry scene’s confusing, uninvestigated social relations and power differentials, administered by a multitude of institutions and yet often claiming non-institutional status. In contrast, the classroom comes equipped with an entire exoskeleton of visible hierarchies (teacher/student, beginning/advanced, etc.) and calcified taxonomies, policing and further producing everything from genre to market to canon.

Still, the writing workshop can do some things a writing community can’t, namely, it can require things of its members: that they show up regularly, read, write, and commit to speaking together about one another’s writing for a pre-determined set of time. Sometimes these requirements, a certain model for community, do actually generate networks of response and engagement in the class. Sometimes they don’t. Classes don’t always “work”.

Other things the workshop can do: actively think about things like genre and markets, make some arguments around these things visible, maybe even de-naturalize the trajectory of undergraduate creative writing major to MFA to contest submissions. Thus, part of what I try to do in the workshop is make many kinds of contemporary writing visible, especially conversations between contemporary writers (whether framed as such or those which unfold in the space of poetry) but also the means of production that generate and make that work available, the gift economies and often relational milieu which contemporary work emerges out of, and into.

And I also try to construct a set of conditions that foster thinking through a field of questions or concerns together as a class. In constructing a class (the texts we’ll read together, the order in which we’ll read them, and some usually formal prompts that might be paired with reading,) I try to maintain tension between a field of inquiry constrained enough to focus the group’s conversation, and wide enough that individuals can continue whatever it is they came into class working on. (I should say that I’m talking here about the “advanced” workshop I teach, which I have so far taken apart and re-constructed every time I teach it.)

I put a lot of work into constructing the container, and in the best cases it’s something I hand off to the group at the beginning of the semester. And then I’m a member of the group and we mess around with this container together, and in this way I learn a lot about the structure I’ve made, the questions or concerns I was trying to surface.

some practice

Last summer Amber di Pietra, a bay area poet and Kelsey St. Press editor/member, posted a proposal/project on the Kelsey St. Blog: “Send Us Your Vertical Answers.”[i]

The premise: “In the years since Vertical Interrogation for Strangers was published, Bhanu Kapil has received dozens of letters and emails from readers who have taken the questions that foreground the book’s structure and answered them in their own way… Kelsey Street press invites you to send us your answers to the Vertical questions.”

Amber’s post sent me back to the book. I wanted to respond to the call but wasn’t sure how or when I’d have time. At the same time I was trying to figure out the structure for a workshop in the fall. In past workshops, I’d paired two texts and asked writers to respond in some way to the combined pressures of the combinations (i.e. Gaston Bachelard and Mei-mei Bersenbrugge, Brenda Coultas and Mark Nowak, David Antin and Tracie Morris) and it struck me that it might be interesting to shift modes and answer the 12 questions from the Vertical Interrogation for Strangers in workshop. I was also thinking through some problems of earlier classes where I’d assigned more outside reading than people were willing to read for a workshop, which negatively impacted our conversations and limited the emergence of a field of concern or inquiry.

In constructing the class, I paired each question with a single reading. From the syllabus:

Our basic procedure will be to read and discuss, in conjunction with each question, a poem or other piece of writing that in some way addresses, upends, interrogates or comes alongside the question…

At the next class session, you will each bring in a poem that in some way answers, rejects, upends, interrogates or otherwise addresses the question, and/or the reading we’ve discussed, if the reading takes you in a useful direction.

The questions and paired readings are as follows:

Who are you and whom do you love?

No reading; for the first poem, please answer from whatever place your poetry is currently engaged.

What do you remember about the earth?

reading: Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache, Juliana Spahr

How will you begin?

reading: “VIA (48 Dante Variations)”, Dante & Caroline Bergvall

Describe a morning you woke without fear.

reading: “G-9”, Tim Dlugos

Tell me what you know about dismemberment.

reading: “The Cherry Pickers”, Yedda Morrison

Where did you come from / how did you arrive?

reading: selections from Dictee, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?

reading: poems from She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks, M. Nourbese Philip

What is the shape of your body?

reading: poems from The Cow, Ariana Reines

How will you live now?

reading: “To be in a time of war”, Etel Adnan

What are the consequences of silence?

reading: “Lecture on Nothing”, John Cage

How will you / have you prepare(d) for your death?

reading: “punk half panther”, Juan Felipe Herrera

And what would you say if you could?

No reading. The final project, a chapbook, will serve as your answer to the last question.

Writing now, I’m thinking about everything that shows up in the negative space of this syllabus, particularly how the inclusion of certain readings was thanks to various conversations: Dana Ward pointed me towards Tim Dlugos’ devastating long poem “G-9” in the online journal EOAGH, Tyrone Williams played some sound recordings of M. Nourbese Philip at a talk he gave last May in the bay area, and then the work of Ariana Reines was being feverishly discussed at various blogs when I was putting this syllabus together. I could go on.

What emerged over the fall semester were a number of things I hadn’t seen, particularly the way that many of these poems work with framing devices and upset various reader expectations, how many of these poems ask questions about language acquisition and use, all the complicated ways speech and writing intersect with history, economics, location, migration, war. Some of those concerns are embedded in the questions themselves (and certainly in Bhanu’s book, which we read and looked at about halfway through the semester), and I’m unclear now which preceded which. Something else that emerged over the semester was the way that several readings and questions could easily have been switched; some readings could have been paired with four or five of the questions. I’m curious about how another person would have constructed a syllabus from these questions.

I’m still thinking about and am not sure how successful this construction was. So many questions/readings made for a breakneck speed, leaving no time to turn in revisions on a regular basis. I’m also thinking about how difficult some of those questions are to answer, finally. In terms of community building, something about the difficulty of the questions seemed most operative—being together in the questions, the surprise of how one writer might find a way to reject the terms another writer in the class might build an entire project from.

–Stephanie Young, KSP guest blogger (Visit her at the Well Nourished Moon blog in our sidebar).