What I Learned This Summer
September 9, 2010
I spent a chunk of my summer transcribing interviews between poets. It’s not for my own work, though there is some transcribing I need to do for the third chapter of my dissertation, and probably also for the fourth. I signed a confidentiality agreement for this job, so I’m not going to get into the details of the project, but working on it this summer (I began in April, and I think it will likely run through the end of the year) taught me a few things.
First of all, having a job like this can sometimes be a godsend. It’s a blessed relief to shut off the analytical part of your brain and just let the words on the screen accurately reflect what you’re hearing on the recording. Like data entry, except really cool–after all, these are living, breathing poets in conversation, and I study and write and think about contemporary poetry, so it was like getting to do deeply relevant data entry. And frankly, I’m good at this. I tried to sign on with a temp agency a couple of summers ago–I never got any work–but when I went in for the interview, the results of my timed typing test were welcomed as proof positive that I was an oasis in the desert. Nevertheless, I don’t go for this kind of thing often, these days; I type a lot for my own projects and personal life, and don’t really want to mentally associate my emerging-scholar feminist self with a Mad Men-type secretary figure (even if I do admire the clothes. The hats, OMG, the hats). But, you know, I couldn’t get teaching this summer–I’ve been out of the loop for so long that no one at CUNY wants me!–so I decided I would apply for this gig. And it’s really allowed my brain to recharge. In working at this, I’m not necessarily thinking about the particulars of my dissertation, but I am thinking about poetry, and the poetry community.
Many of you know that I have a real problem with “The Poetry Community.” Here’s my beef: why is it that contemporary novels or drama are widely recognized as appropriate for scholarly study, but the study and analysis of contemporary poetry only ever seems to “count” if it comes from people who self-identify as poets? The problem works from both ends, as it were–the poetry community is insular, resistant to newcomers, and many of its members claim a purposefully anti-intellectual persuasion. At the same time, the growth of the modern MFA program has institutionalized contemporary poetry and poetics within the academy as a practice, but not so much as a subject. I understand why that happened–it’s pretty hard to make a living as a poet. But one of the results is that there’s little room for people like me–people who want to write and think about poetry, but don’t actually feel the need to live life as a poet–in the academy. Both poets and other academics see me as a poseur.
You know, I didn’t become a scholar because I’m an unimaginative person. I became a scholar of poetry for a number of reasons, not only personal but also pedagogical. The way that poetry has become a practice within the academy itself means that many, many, many people don’t teach it in composition or Intro to Lit, or even all that much in survey courses. Poetry very easily becomes an afterthought, even in courses designed for English majors. Many undergraduates don’t ever learn the basics of prosody, or how to recite a poem with affect and awareness. I study poetry because it’s my first love (Seriously. Me and Ezra Pound? We’re tight). But I am aiming for a career in the teaching of poetry because I fear it’s becoming a lost art in English departments around the country. Doctoral students don’t even know how to study poetry–the standing joke in my doctoral program is that on the poetry explication section of the first-year comprehensive exam, everyone chooses to write about the sonnet. Undergraduates (especially those who have been underserved by their K-12 schooling) are so afraid of poetry that when I tried to teach a Mike Ford sonnet (Do y’all not know Mike Ford’s work? Read The Dragon Waiting right now) in a developmental writing class last fall, I literally had to spend three hours quelling a class-wide panic, gradually easing them into the idea that the world would not fall down around them if they tried to write about something as unfamiliar and frightening as… poetry.
When I was in the third grade, every single member of the class had to memorize Robert Frost’s “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening,” and then get up and recite it, in front of everyone. (This wasn’t all that long ago, for the record–I once shocked a member of the doctoral faculty by mentioning in passing that I’d been born in the ’80s.) And as an undergraduate at Barnard I had to memorize passages from poetry with some regularity, whether it was the opening of The Canterbury Tales or a good solid chunk of Milton. Poetry has always been a part of who I am as a person (even that crazy twenty-below February evening in my national service year, when I got some other AmeriCorps volunteers to go with me to hear Robert Hass give a reading, and we were all more than a little inebriated). And it’s made me a better person. No one should be afraid of poetry. It frustrates me to my core, to see otherwise-promising students break down in front of something that’s given me so much joy.
So that’s my long-term goal. To build a life of teaching people to try new things. Like, you know, reading a poem. Even the ones that don’t rhyme.
But what this transcription gig has also taught me is that I do, in fact, have a number of ways of contributing to “The Poetry Community”–whether they want me knocking at their gates or not. I can transcribe these interviews, doing my small part to help get them out into the world. I can submit well-written, jargon-free book reviews. (I have a forthcoming review in Cross-Cultural Poetics, and I’m in the process of writing another for the next Galatea Resurrects.) I’ll also publish longer essays of a similar bent, and in all sorts of publications. (For the record, Samuel Delany’s piece on Hart Crane, “Atlantis Rose…,” is the essay I see as my critical inspiration.) I can also, importantly, continue to do and own my own personal creative work. I put a lot of effort into my photography this summer, and the results are only getting better and better. I’m trusting my own eye more and more each time I go out and shoot, and I’ve learned more about how to work with my camera. Although I think of it as an outlet and a means of relaxation, rather than part of my career, it’s true that I’ve already had my photography show up in print publications. But even if that had never happened, my own creative work in this arena infuses my literary scholarship with an important set of secondary sensibilities.
You can write good criticism and still be kind. You can be sharp and incisive and thoughtful without relying solely on the specialized language of the field, too. It’s helpful to know what the phrases mean, but that doesn’t mean you have to use them yourself, all the time. Better to make your words as clear as they can be, and let it be simple, if it needs to be simple.
Now, having blasphemed in this way, I may never become Assistant Professor So-And-So! 😉 But I shall try.
The final thing I learned from this job, this summer, was a new approach to time management. It’s largely practical. There are only so many hours of the day that I can personally do a job like this. At first I tried to transcribe for eight hours a day. Yeeeah. Not so much, as my sibs would say. Not so much. My wrists and my brain were both fried by such an effort. So I eventually, through much trial and error, managed to develop a system in which each day included a couple of hours of transcribing, a couple of hours of dissertation, and then time for exercise, photos, cooking experiments, sleeping late, watching DVDs, bumming around the Internets… whatever. And even though the school year has begun, and I’ve been hard at work as an ITF an awful lot the last few weeks, this method of divvying up my time, of making some small amount of progress on a variety of tasks each day, begins to feel more and more like a way of making a good life for myself at the present moment. It helps stave off the sense of DOOM! which otherwise accompanies the dissertation-writing process.
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