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Rumpus Book ClubAll We Read Is Freaks
I am named after an uncle who lived only days, my father’s only brother. He is buried next to where they are lowering my grandmother’s casket. So as this is being done, I am forced to behold a grave marker bearing my own name. Perhaps the only thing more Dickinsonian than this confrontation is my father’s comment regarding how far away I live: “No one stays home long enough to die anymore.”
***
Still brittle after the ceremony, I return to Florida for the last day of my class’ Dickinson Unit. Plus, all of the letter reading in The Civil War is blending with the volumes of Dickinson’s letters I’ve been skimming before bed. In my sleep, I am haunted by the bayonet-wielding female who represents America in Dickinson’s sole jingoistic poem (“My country need not change her gown.”) As cannons fired near a Charleston graveyard, Dickinson herself appeared in my dream, lip-synching to Patsy Cline’s “Crazy.” Clearly, I need to switch mental train tracks fast.
The class seems unhinged as well. Chuck Barnes is disheveled and without his CALCIUM NITRATE hat, which strikes me as ominous. I overhear the usually game Michelle Shivers announcing to her neighbor that she is just about tired of talking about a rich white woman. Jillian Jenkins looks zombified, staring past me, past the blackboard, perhaps past the school walls into the abyss she believes her Gainesville life to be. Lauren Hendricks presents to me a request for yet another recommendation letter, one of a series she’s been having me do for organizations whose credentials can’t be found in any nook of the Internet. I am beginning to suspect that her approval-based confidence is getting the best of her and that she is fortifying herself with these vouchers. She specifies that I praise something new each time. She asked me to include a positive assessment of her leadership skills in the last letter; for this one she’d like me to endorse her aura.
“Folks, let’s look at our last chunk of your favorite writer,” I manage to say as I hand back some old quizzes. “These poems are thematically linked, so—”
“My favorite writer is Associated Press,” Chuck Barnes interrupts. Chuck didn’t do so well on the quizzes I’m returning. “I don’t think I’m learning anything in this class.”
“Chuck, I know that I run an informal classroom, but in your academic future”—and here my inner asshole interjects, If you have an academic future—“be respectful, and don’t talk over people.”
“I just feel like I paid for this class and I’m not going to get a good grade in it.”
It’s the instructor-as-service-provider ethos. Teaching-guide prologues flash to memory:
Gone are the days when professors stood in front of a room
passing knowledge on to students; now more power lies with
the students, whose enrollment plays an active role in the
shaping of curricula and….
“Well, Chuck,” I say, “that reduces all the dynamics of a college course to the level of a fast-food transaction and reduces your professors to the level of cashiers. If you need to view your college experience as a long trip to McDonald’s, at least acknowledge that the rules are different. Here, you don’t just pay and therefore bind me to give you your burger, your good grade. Here, you pay, and then you have to earn your burger.”
A frost descends over the students. Many of them are fast-food cashiers by default. I’ve got to say something to thaw their glares. “Excuse me just one moment,” I say.
I walk next door to my department chair’s office. He’s a great guy. Knows his jazz. I am pretty sure he already thinks I’m delirious.
“Hi. Why do we teach poetry?”
“Don’t you have a class now?”
“Why do we teach poetry? Why do I make Michelle Shivers write papers about a rich white woman from the 1800s? Why do we literature instructors spend our lives prepping lectures on an art form that is, next to, say, sitcoms, dead in the gutter? Just remind me quickly. A sound bite, anything.”
This guy could have easily drawn a macho line in the sand and accused me of lacking fundamental belly-fire. Instead, he looks, as if for inspiration, at his poster of Miles Davis, one from Davis’s overtly whitey-resenting days. Then he performs a little drum hit with his fingertips atop a stack of forms requiring his authorization.
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April 6th, 2010 at 7:50 pm
In a time when standardized tests include testing the ability to read an inter-office memo, when such “literacy” is substituted for the honest attempt to engage with a text which does not aim to eradicate ambiguity, I’m glad to see someone take an ice pick to the permafrost which characterizes not only the intellectual but also the “real” lives of their students. It seems fitting that Emily Dickinson, someone who so emphatically grinds against the apathetic “Youniverse,” is your vehicle for this effort. Extremely moving essay: the comma splice line tore my heart out-halting, haunting. I found the idea that the AP could be someone’s favorite writer a tragic and profound observation of a culture where original, distinctively stylistic writing (not just journalistic writing) must be sought out. I’m thankful for places like the Rumpus where pieces like this can be showcased. Homogenization is not limited to fast food and strip malls. It has been exported to our collective rhetorical and stylistic range. Thank you for the freshness, and the open expression of love for a New England freak who used as many dashes as the vacuous words which riddles most writing today.
April 6th, 2010 at 10:42 pm
Surprised there haven’t been more appreciative comments posted here. I don’t have anything clever to add — just wanted to say know how much I enjoyed the essay.
April 7th, 2010 at 1:53 am
Yes I loved this as well. Beautifully written.
April 7th, 2010 at 2:20 am
Why doesn’t the world have more of this kind of text? Many thanks to the author, of course, but also to Kyle for the finger-waggling endurance it took to give us this.
Thanks.
April 7th, 2010 at 11:52 am
Thank you for unearthing this – and for pointing towards more William Bowers at Pitchfork. I am now a rabid fan after having read the following two sentences in his “Puritan Blister” column (#44) about the band Xiu Xiu: “We, the abused, are parent-haunted to the point of never becoming parents. We stay trauma-bonded to folks who mistreat us while dismissing the well-adjusted and kind.”
It takes a long, long time for some stories to get themselves written.
April 7th, 2010 at 3:48 pm
Hey, that was a tremendous essay; I enjoyed it. It is indeed remarkable when someone writes about an extremely traumatic event and a teacher’s response in the margin is: comma splice.
Hilarious. Mr. Bowers has a tough row to hoe, and I wish him well.
April 9th, 2010 at 9:23 am
“…some students are either so compartmentalized in their religion that they cannot fathom having a spiritual crisis, or they are so secular that salvation and redemption are concepts limited to the realm of coupon-clipping.”
This is the exact reason why I usually feel like an alien on this planet, and also the exact reason why Emily has helped me cope with life’s “fat task.”
Brilliant essay.
April 9th, 2010 at 11:22 am
As a colleague in the community-college realm, I laughed out loud (and a couple times with tears of joyful despair).
As a person who thrashes against finding that mental middle way between my gleaming egomaniac and my weepy dowager (even though I know it’s good for me), I sighed with the momentary peace of recognition.
As a reader who values words, ideas, words, and too much thinking about words, I wanted to pet the writer’s face in gratitude before slapping his butt and telling him to get back out there.
April 11th, 2010 at 11:43 am
Thanks for re-typing this. Well-worth it. I’ll pass it around to a select few (of my fellow CC instructors). It’s long, that’s why there aren’t as many comments as…, and why it took me a week to read… and what can you say but : it’s great, just great!
April 12th, 2010 at 9:03 am
Thank you, Daily Rumpus. I love the work this publication brings to my attention.
April 21st, 2010 at 11:24 am
Thanks so much for this. Humor is a great antidote for existential despair. Well, a good antidote. Mr. Bowers, you are a brave man. I am lucky enough to teach literature in a high school where students have to audition to get in – it is an arts school, a public school. There are always some students who really love reading, and the others are smart enough to get it, and do a reasonably good job of pretending to like it. They are also honest about disliking pretty much everything written before 1900. Especially the Scarlet Letter. Some of them like Crime and Punishment. Some of them are addicted to cell phones and popular culture, but many of them appreciate the grand sweep of human history and culture. They write better than William Bowers’ students, but only a few of them risk exposing their thoughts out loud. I’m not sure why.
And thanks, wood s lot, for introducing me to Rumpus!!! (That’s how I got here.) (Here. Hmmm.)
April 22nd, 2010 at 9:44 am
Excellent essay, thank you! Where else can I find your writing?
February 27th, 2012 at 10:44 am
For a long time I thought William Bowers was kind of a self righteous, cocky English nerd who managed to get published for cleverly shit talking his students, however after reading his actual work I am taken aback. This is a beautiful essay, and also very true to life as far as his students go. I would know, he’s my professor.
April 3rd, 2012 at 1:26 pm
At first I was skeptical (a professor writing about his students’ grammatical errors and inadequacies seemed rather cruel and unfair), but this essay took my breath away more than once. I crave a pat, happy epilogue- but doesn’t that just prove your point?
April 4th, 2012 at 8:11 am
I also came to your writing via your Xiu Xiu odes. As a high school teacher, I thoroughly enjoyed this piece. Keep ‘em coming.
April 4th, 2012 at 10:27 am
Terrific article! -That sounds like marginalia, not my intention. You captured your experience very well and made it glow. -Having trouble getting away from that voice. Well, your writing made me wonder about linguists who reconstruct the sound of Shakespeare’s speech from the phoenetic spelling in his age’s written word, and what those of the future will deduce from ours, in other words you made me think. -Better.
April 4th, 2012 at 10:27 am
as a long time fan of Emily and a former community college student, who went on to the big time, thank you for writing this. sometimes i think we need an organization called “save the poets”. thanks for doing your part.
April 5th, 2012 at 1:38 am
Students could use more clever shit-talking and less micro marketing, making them the lowest common demoninator (one) of their own lives. What gifted narration. We all have it; just got to get that rhythm. Bowers has it, and now maybe some of his kids do.
April 6th, 2012 at 3:22 pm
I thoroughly enjoyed this piece. I taught high school and middle school English in Central Florida until I retired two years ago, so I recognize these students and remember both the despair and joy of teaching. Well done.
April 7th, 2012 at 9:37 am
Greetings. I am a former Remedial English student who was ordered by my tenth-grade English teacher, Barry Buschy, to promise to write every day for the rest of my life. I had a very difficult time understanding what was going on in his Poetry class and did not participate unless under duress, for a fear of sounding like an idiot. But I hung in there. I did not at the time imagine that one could be saved by language and yet I took his advice, which indeed saved me. I went on to a lower-tier state school, transferred to a better one, then on to grad school. I became, you guessed it: a teacher, first at a community college, then at a very rural public school. I am currently in a well-regarded MFA program for Fiction, something for which no one who knew me back then, including myself, could have hoped.
The point of all this is that I suspect Poetry is out there for the overlooked. As a (metaphorical) needle in a haystack, I thank you for your work and for this excellent essay.
April 26th, 2012 at 5:56 am
As someone who teaches Emily Dickinson in a small college in Ireland, this had surprising resonance. An excoriating and wonderfully wry snapshot of third level poetry teaching. I can’t help but leave this poem by an Irish Poet, Louis MacNeice, to offer some justification for the reading and teaching of poetry:
To Posterity
When books have all seized up like books in graveyards
And reading and even speaking have been replaced
By other, less difficult, media, we wonder if you
Will find in flowers and fruit the same colour and taste
They held for us for whom they were framed in words,
And will your grass be green, your sky be blue,
Or will your birds be always wingless birds?