“Their world’s a blur, their lives such rushes. Meditative concentration is, is—it’s almost impossible for them. We teach poetry because it forces them to slow down.”

I thank him and run back to class.

All I want is to feel that the class really gets a group of poems, just once. But this day, I feel as if I have no reserves to summon, that I am out of ammunition.

I mutter a question: “What does Dickinson mean by ‘Success is counted sweetest/By those who ne’er succeed’?” If a student says “opposites attract,” I’m going to weep.

Someone in the class volunteers, “If you always lose, winning is more, like, precious or whatever.”

“Yes, loss or hardship makes one appreciative,” I say, though I am irked by the students’ compulsion to disqualify their bold statements with such deadwood endings as “or whatever.” Once, a student condemned a poem about tattoos by asserting, “Your body is a temple of the Lord or whatever.” And everything. And stuff. Basically.

“But what does the poem say about always winning? About how one can become spoiled by constant victory? In sports, the victories of championship teams can become tedious. The souls of rich nations can stagnate. What does Dickinson mean by ‘To comprehend a nectar/Requires sorest need’?”

Silence.

“When is a cold drink best? When are grapes the best? When’s an orange the best?”

These kinds of open-ended questions either get aggressively individualized answers or some kind of fatalistic, apocalyptic overstatement. My students today choose the latter. Someone in the class says, “When you’re thirsting to death.” Someone else says, “When you’re thirsty as hell.” Everything’s to-death-as-hell.

“The line hinges on that word comprehend. What might that mean?” I ask.

“That you are understanding the food instead of just consuming it.” Score one for Cliff Lesley.

“What might that mean, to ‘understand’ it?”

“How it got here, why you have it, its role in existence,” Cliff continues in a grand stroke.

“Instead of the way we take in food at KFC, just snarfing it,” Jillian Jenkins says, triumphantly awake.

“Exactly,” I say. “With no sense of cosmic consequence. But Dickinson may mean much more than food; perhaps the ‘nectar’ stands for all reward, all pleasure. Okay, maybe she just meant all sustenance, but our twenty-first-century palates are so bored that ‘nectar’ connotes decadence. So perhaps, ‘comprehending a nectar’ is a kind of metaphor for the fullness of a more examined life.”

“Yeah, but that fullness ‘requires sorest need.’ Sore need don’t sound too good,” Tammy Wood says.

“So maybe Dickinson’s making an argument against indulgence and in favor of moderation, or perhaps a more extreme kind of self-discipline, rather than gratifying yourself every five minutes. All of these poems for today present doing without as a lifestyle choice,” I say.

“Then Dickinson’s against everything America stands for,” Cliff Lesley says.

I leave that one alone for the moment. “Look in this other poem, where she says that peace is ‘told’ by its battles, and that land is ‘taught, by the Oceans passed.’”

Lauren Hendricks says, “It’s more of that idea of comprehension and appreciation being directly proportionate to how much you had to endure or how much you were denied.” Maybe she does write her own papers.

“Do you guys ever go out drinking?” I ask.

Even the students who never speak say, “Yeah.”
“Have you ever been the designated driver?”

A second, general “yeah.”

“What’s that like? Don’t you see more scientifically and more keenly the nuances of the culture surrounding the consumption of large quantities of a central-nervous-system depressant?”

“Yeah.”
“So on that night that you hang back, that you don’t participate, it’s fair to say that you gain a more profound understanding of the people who are participating?”

“Yeah.” The class offers stories here of doomed couples, of groping, fight-hungry security staffers and apoplectic lighting.

“So here we have Dickinson, who hung back, who was, as a poet, a kind of lifetime designated driver, treating her life as an experiment in negation, pursuing—and enjoying—the clarity that accompanies observation.” I think but do not say anthropological distance.

“So perhaps Cliff is right to suggest that with poems such as ‘Water, is taught by thirst,’ Dickinson has much to tell our McWorld. Perhaps that’s why so many people claim to be so dissatisfied here in the richest, freest country on the planet, where every good thing is available by pressing a button. Dickinson seems to be saying that if our culture of saturation leads to a superficial comprehension of the world—”

You know, teaching is isolated work. You spend a lot of time alone, grading papers or preparing lectures. Most of the people you do encounter don’t want to see you, and certainly don’t want to read your beloved assignments. That isolation becomes unbearable if you freeze while teaching. That’s what happens to me here. I lock up. A total blank in front of thirty scrutinizing, or at least expectant, people.

“If saturation leads to a superficial comprehension of the world—”

Sometimes repeating what I’ve just said helps. Not here. I understand that this happens to all teachers who take risks, who allow spontaneity in their classrooms. I’ve heard it referred to as academentia, a point at which an individual whose job it is to communicate concepts becomes incommunicative. I have simply run out of ways to put things. One wishes for an autopilot.

“If saturation leads to a superficial comprehension of your world—”

One may choose from several forms of pedagogical suicide at this point. Some instructors, in order to fill the silence, have, well, babbled (making it apparent that their professionalism masks a kind of madness). When I was in college, one of my instructors attempted to staple the curtains sun-tight during a severe attack of academentia. One said, “I give up,” and stomped off campus. Some confess things about their parents, children, spouses, or former spouses. How to fill the silence? Do I deliver a soliloquy on fatherlessness? On personal religious unease? Do I confess that the woman I was living with, who had wooed me with bodily confidence and material humility, has gone violently bonkers, bless her heart, with bodily insecurity and material covetousness, symptoms of the image-and-acquisition culture I was discussing with such calm reserve? Do I confess that because I failed her, I’m temporarily boarding in a house behind a funeral home with some rich stoners? That I drink on the porch at night and read Emily Dickinson and bemoan my kerplunked love and watch the undertakers unload folks’ remains from somber SUVs? (The opening lines of Dickinson’s Poem 241 flash to mind: “I like a look of Agony,/Because I know it’s true—”)

“Saturation,” I try once again, “contributes to a superficial comprehension of your world, so, conversely, it could be argued—”

“—that deprivation leads to depth,” Jillian Jenkins perfectly finishes the thought. The line even scans: that deprivation leads to depth. I smile. Jillian smiles. The class smiles. The moment is so satisfying that I wish I weren’t single, young, and energetic; I wish I were married, old, and frumpy. Because I would like to retire.

***

Many of the class’ final Dickinson papers are actually pretty good. I know there’s a greater chance of my dreaming of Chuck Barnes’s hat than of his dreaming of Dickinson, but I still feel like I’ve expanded the students’ entertainment and shopping Youniverse and broadened their Mytopia. After just five years of teaching, I know that every semester will initially seem fraught with limitations, only to erupt with rewards later. Semester after semester, students still say “literally” to modify “raining cats and dogs,” they still think a dark night of the soul involves having a cable outage or a dead modem, and they still want to reduce Dickinson to an obsessive-compulsive Northerner. And some fall through the cracks. I try to talk Cliff Lesley into finishing his studies whenever I spot him bagging groceries, and on a late-night jog, I see a plastered Tammy Wood being carried by her friends out of a rodeo-themed bar. But many students engage the poems and remember what we covered, if only as a fascinating detour from the quotidian, shop-till-you-drop path of Wal-Mart’s (this phrase comes from their panty-hose packaging) Transparent Control. Poetry helps folks cope with their lives’ fat task, which, Dickinson wrote, is “To make Routine a Stimulus.”

***

Dickinson’s portrait is posted on my office door, flanked by some “fun facts” about her life. I cut tiny eyeholes into the picture, which covers a small window. If I hear a student loitering, and peer through to see one squinting to read about the “morbid” poet who lived in awe of death’s absoluteness, I can’t resist exclaiming, “Boo!” from behind the door. Students usually scream or jump back. The good sports even laugh.

It cracks me up every time. Who says that here, in the land of fluorescent signs, football mania, booming bass, and a Mouse with a compulsion to celebrate itself every few hours, a poet can’t still strike a nerve?

***

“All We Read Is Freaks” originally appeared in the Jan/Feb 2003 issue of The Oxford-American.

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