Tag Archives: students

Interviews

This past weekend I was most fortunate to have been interviewed, via Zoom, by four Chilean university students of English and creative writing. They are taking Hernán Pereira’s course at Arturo Prat University, Iquique, Chile. In 2014, Hernán collaborated with Dr. Karen Jogan of Albright College in Reading, Pennsylvania on a poetry and place project that resulted in the book So Far..So Close/Portada y Contraportada: Contemporary Writers of Tarapacá & Pennsylvania. Pamela Daza took the photos for the book; I posted a bit about it here. Thanks to social media, which I don’t often thank, I’ve kept in touch with Hernán, who is full of interesting ideas for teaching young people to enjoy poetry and to learn English.

Now, I’m retired, and I was pleased to hear from Hernán that he’s assigned his students books by English-speaking poets to read and research, and then interview, said writers (with whom he is acquainted). Would I be willing to be interviewed? Why, of course!

The result of most interviews is that I learn a great deal about my work by having other people ask me questions about it. I usually learn a bit about the interviewer(s) in the process. In this case, I was happy that the students had come up with some good and unexpected questions that really made me pause and ponder. I was also impressed with what excellent English skills they have, and how polite and earnest they are. One of the questions was what makes me motivated to write a poem. Not inspired (the usual question), but motivated–a slightly different verb and a telling one.

I answered along the lines of how seeing an image, experiencing an event, learning new information (ie observation), or reading a text with which I might disagree or wonder about leads me to a line of questioning/reflection, and that whole process motivates me to write. I have to say my answer was, in real time, rather vague, and that I was speaking with people for whom English is a second language. But a student named Maximillio said, “So, would you say then your motivation is responsive?” Wow, yes! Which clarifies a lot for me. I’m not a forward-momentum sort of writer who bulls into powerful expression, much as I admire such writers and sometimes wish I were more like them. I’m the ponderer, the one who imagines being an other and tries to figure out that perspective, the somewhat distant observer who nevertheless wants to bring the feelings and experiences home to whoever my reader may be.

That was a splendid experience for me. So nice to speak with people under 25 years old again. I miss that. Meanwhile, reading a 1998 edition of Lorca’s Poet in New York (in translation of course, though I am getting slightly better at reading the Spanish). And drafting new work in my head while watering the garden.

art by Federico Garcia Lorca.

Automatic writing*

A few posts back, I mentioned I would weigh in on artificial intelligence prose generators–“bots”–specifically the much-reported-upon ChatGPT. The media coverage has included everything: hand-wringing, speculations on the extinction of critical thought, predictions about the death of the high school essay or the re-institutions of oral and handwritten exams, not to mention worries about spurious content and job loss among educated citizens, as well as wild enthusiasm for automating tedious writing tasks and excitement about where tech is taking us.

It’s not as new as most people think. AI has been providing customer-service responses and generating basic summary content for news-related websites for awhile; but OpenAI’s open-source platform, which is currently free and for use by anyone (not to mention educating itself as each user inputs prompts and questions) has so rapidly gained “tech adopters” that those of us who teach writing cannot ignore it completely. And we shouldn’t ignore it, but neither should we throw our hands up in surrender and predict the end of the art of writing as we know it.

A recent New York Times article reflects the kind of discourse taking place at the institution where I work. It’s fascinating to me to see how quickly the conversations have evolved in the usually slow-moving environment of academia. I find that at my college, my years of laboring with students who lack strong backgrounds in written expression or confidence in their writing have suddenly attracted the attention of full-time faculty members–they want to know how they can tell if students are using AI assistance to write essays (when said profs have no pedagogical experience in writing) and how to change the wording of their assignments to “fool” the programmed generators, among other pressing questions. These inquiries tend to come tinged with a sense of slippery-slope fallacy: does this mean academia will go to hell in a handbasket?

I refuse to send out a firm forecast, though my intuition says no; instead, academia, and society, will change.

And despite the daily-proven, scientifically-accurate, anecdotally-obvious FACT that change is normal and indeed necessary, most people (and their societies and institutions) fear change. Hence, the media and institutional brou-ha-ha.

Let’s face it, writing can be hard. There will always be people who do not want to do the work of writing from the soul, brain, heart, emotion, experience, dread, you-name-it. Painting is hard, too. But people who don’t want to practice and experiment with visual art can use paint by numbers, clip art, or AI. There will always be a few folks who learn to play an instrument for the joy of it and for the challenge of continually learning new approaches to the process of music making; the rest of us can be audiences, if we like. People who write because they can’t not write? They won’t use bots unless they want to experiment with them: make perverse use of the programs, play with them to see what the human’s skills can do in concert with algorithms, bits, bytes, and data. I know artists who are already collaging with AI-generated art to create new, human-mediated visuals.

I recognize the fear factor here, but I don’t buy into it because I am so curious about what will happen next. I’m interested to see how changes will occur, which changes will make a difference and which ones will just vanish, and whether pedagogy will develop toward, away from, or parallel to AI developments in numerous spheres–to name just three of numerous possibilities. Change is exciting, but it’s also hard. I can’t say I am as excited about adapting my fall semester syllabus to reflect whatever the university decides to do in light of ChatGPT, but since I’ll have to adapt to a new “learning management system” anyway, I may as well accept that “a change is gonna come.”

~

*For the definition of automatic writing, Wikipedia has a fairly complete page.

Photo by Startup Stock Photos on Pexels.com

Practice

When students struggle, I nod as kindly as I can. Do they need to know they’re not alone? Seven billion of us, each with struggles of our own. It takes practice, I tell them, and practice takes time. But persistent patience isn’t common among young folk, who seek strategies, shortcuts, miracles.

They yearn to know what I know so easily, are astonished that words and thoughts can spool smoothly–they think so, bless them–as though there were dictionaries and references in my mind. If they would believe me when I say: it’s possible to learn–

They never realize I haven’t always been old or knowledgeable, that practice continues and, dear students, so does struggle.

We can practice that, too.

~

You noisy jays!
scattering
       the mourning doves

Just speak

Much has been going on in the blogger’s back-of-the-blog life, compounded with news of the nation. And frankly, I have been mulling for well over a week on how to say what I want to say; or how to say anything, for that matter. There are times in the life of a writer when said writer recognizes the limitations of words.

Also: words can be dangerous–inflammatory, distracting, powerful, persuasive, false, painful, hurtful. People get defensive at words they feel are “aimed” at them. Aimed, a weaponized word. I have had people (okay, white people) tell me they are tired of hearing about their privilege, because they and their families worked hard for their place in the world and because many, many white people are underprivileged and suffering, just as people of color are suffering.

While this is true, it is also fails to address the argument. Defensiveness is a diversion tactic used when people are too uncomfortable to address hard discussions. A student at my university recently exhorted us–“us” being mostly the uncomfortable white people who teach or take classes here–to speak up. “Even if you’re afraid you’ll say something the wrong way,” she said, “if you let me know you are uncertain but that you really want to have a discussion, speak up anyway. Because then at least I know that you’re reaching out to me, and I’ll dial it back a bit.”

It’s easy to understand why people would want to avoid the topics of privilege and of systemic racism. We are taught to be polite; one of the social contracts I was urged to respect was to keep conversation friendly, to avoid religion, politics, and other hot topics in order to get along with my neighbors and coworkers–to maintain friendships with people whose perspectives are different from my own. This approach does work, to a degree. Politeness, though, is not the same as compassionate interest and doesn’t always encourage listening and reflecting.

So it stops the conversation just when the conversation might be getting interesting. Or difficult. I have seen this play out in the course I teach time and again. Some students try to mediate as soon as a disagreement starts. Some tune out; some get embarrassed; some shut it down. Some talk to me after class, individually. Only a few times are my freshmen confident and mature enough to speak up assertively but in a way that admits of, and permits, other points of view.

That behavior is what I try to teach and to encourage. We need to admit of other perspectives rather than keep comparing this with that or bring up side arguments or shut people down with ad hominem attacks. That means ideologically “liberal” people also have to listen and to allow opposition, by the way. I teach in a fairly conservative university; and as a rather unconventional thinker in that environment, it can be a challenge for me to let students express views with which I disagree. But that’s the point: to listen and try to understand, and then to show where the argument goes awry–if it does–and acknowledge the validity of the stance, as there often is some.

I am not defensive about my privilege because I can admit to it. I acknowledge that things I have little control over–the society into which I was born, the family that raised me, the historical structures of the social contract norms, the assumption that I would be educated–have randomly assigned me to accepted norms of privilege. In simplest terms, I’m lucky, randomly fortunate.

Which had little to do with how hard my ancestors worked. They scraped and toiled and suffered, they may have been run out of Europe for their beliefs, or out of poverty or risk of prison, they may have arrived with nothing and been poorly treated by the elite in the early USA. All true. They worked their butts off for generations and never became wealthy or politically powerful.

They were permitted to attend school, however. They were permitted to own land. They were permitted to vote.

These foundational opportunities for equity were denied–often by the laws of this democratic nation–to black slaves, who were brought here completely unwillingly and indeed by main force under even worse conditions than any poverty-stricken European on a ship headed to this continent. These opportunities were denied to the Chinese who labored on our railroads. They were denied to the original residents of this continent, whose own nations and norms were largely and purposely erased by the European immigrants. The historical barriers became legitimized into social norms.

Do I have privilege? Yes. Do I value my privilege? Yes. Do I think I’ve earned my privilege? Absolutely not.

I am for equity. I have no idea how we can possibly achieve it in the United States, and I cannot say I have a lot of hope. My dad was working for civil rights back in 1965;  55 years later, there are more female than male students at my college, and more students of color or of diverse national, linguistic, and religious backgrounds…so some things have changed, though mostly due to “leg up” approaches rather than “barriers down” actions. It is a start.

Equity means that no mother residing in this nation would have to worry about the safety of her young adult son while he is driving to work, walking down the street, taking a jog or a bike ride, or going to a pool or a beach. That’s been one of my privileges. Of all the concerns I may have had as my son grew up (he’s past 30 now), I never needed to think about the danger of “walking while black.”

Because he isn’t black.

And that’s not equitable.

~

Untitled-writer

Thesaurus obscurus

When I moved into my work office many years ago, I inherited a bookshelf with a few books on it. There was a battered paperback Volume I of The Oxford Anthology of English Literature; A Manual of Style, 12th edition (1969) from University of Chicago Press; The New American Bible for Catholics; a Catechism; a Bartlett’s; several old volumes of The Writing Center Journal; and Webster’s Collegiate Thesaurus from 1976. There was a dictionary as well.

Of these older reference works, the one that most entertains me is the thesaurus. The editors employed the alphabetical-style organization, reasoning that a “main entry of a concise statement of the segment of denotation in which a group of words can be construed as synonyms, a strictly alphabetical organization, and the entry at its own alphabetical place of each word that appears as a synonym at a main entry” would “minimize the consultant’s need to grope and guess.” *

But what puzzles me is the choice of entry words in this 1976 text. What college student, ever, would be searching for a synonym for entrammel? Or phthisis? Or incondite? [By the way, WordPress’s spelling checker does not recognize any of these words, although they are all acceptable English terms.] Exanimate may be an interesting replacement for “dead,” but why make it a main entry in the thesaurus? I was a college student in 1976, and I cannot imagine consulting this book in order to find a suitable synonym for drossy. “Worthless” or “pointless” would have sufficed in most cases–and why make the choice of inutile? Wouldn’t that impede the reader’s understanding? Or maybe not–the reader for university writing would have been a scholar, I suppose. brad-hammonds-flikr-books

I find myself wondering whether these choices reflect an era on some sociological level, and on what level that might be. My freshman reading list was longer and “more difficult” than the reading with which my current students are tasked, but those assignments were based on the assumption that we had read considerable canon literature in high school. Nonetheless, in the 70s, we were not scrambling to find synonyms for fainéant unless we were trying to paraphrase a source.

Maybe the answer lies in how long it used to take to get a reference text produced. Surely the research for the collegiate thesaurus would have taken ten years or more; and the text would have been edited by many persons and proofread, typeset, proofed again and again before getting to the printing press, being bound, and finally reaching bookshelves in college bookstores. Were college students in the late 1950s more likely to write using the word culmen or adit?

Honestly, I’m thinking: No.

~

These days, there are many online thesauruses; but they tend to give short shrift to English’s wide range of approximate synonyms, each with their connotations. My students’ papers often suffer from vague and random use of online thesaurus “suggestions.” The electronic thesaurus, like the dictionaries and encyclopedias online, fail in another important way: it turns out that groping around for a word or a meaning can lead to stumbling upon new words, new connotations, and interesting forays into the depths that our language has to offer.

Anyway, I appreciate an out-of-date reference text for historical and linguistic reasons and because–you never know–sometimes those archaic words inspire, influence, or appear in one of my poem drafts. Groping and guessing may impel a Parnassian to chivy exceptional words through the adit of English and wraxel with new expressions.

~~

* Seriously. Try to unpack that series of dependent modifying phrases. I even edited down the sentence!

 

 

Epistle as writing practice

I am often asked by my peers why “young people” do not come to college with exemplary writing skills. Because I feel protective of my students, I wish to defend them–not always an easy task. My first response is that they have not had enough practice in writing to develop adequate fluency, and I generally follow that by admitting that many of my students have never really read books for leisure or out of passionate interest and that they are quite adept at other forms of communication (social media, looking at you!). Last year, I decided to spend one class period on epistolary writing. I recognized that one way I developed confidence in expressive writing was by writing letters. Lots of them. Every week to my parents, almost as often to my sister, to my best friends, to sweethearts, grandparents, anyone I cared about. Probably 30 years of letters, which later morphed into lengthy emails as the technology developed. Letters. Who writes them any more? Certainly not today’s college freshmen, if my students offer any objective measurement of their generation. The epistolary mode offers students a chance to exercise the use of second-person as a governing pronoun, a style that formal academic writing shies away from except in certain forms of persuasive writing–the opinion column, for example. Teaching my students NOT to employ “you” is such a constant effort that I thought letting them write letters would give them a much-needed break from prescribed academic conventions and allow them to loosen up their sentences a bit. Before I assigned in-class letter-writing, I asked whether any of them ever writes letters. Not one hand went up. I withdrew from my tote bag a clutch of old correspondence (yes, of course I would be that person who keeps the letters people write to me). After flourishing an envelope–with a 29-cent stamp–I disclosed the contents, a ten-page, handwritten letter from a dear friend. The students audibly gasped. “How long did that take to write?” “Did you read all of that?” Sure! When long-distance phone calls were expensive, letters were social media. We couldn’t just snapchat a photo of ourselves standing on a pile of snow and caption it “Snow!” We’d have to send a photo. Or we’d have to describe without the visual–and this is a practice my students have almost never had to employ. Lack of informal writing practice translates into lack of writing practice, period. I even read passages from three letters aloud, and the students were impressed with the vivid writing…writing by “non-writers.” “You could write like this, too,” I told them. “You just haven’t needed to do it, and therefore you think you can’t do it.” Then I asked them to think of a person, a specific person, and come up with a reason or purpose to write to that person, and then just write. The response was amazing. Some of these students wrote more in 15 minutes than they ever have for an in-class assignment. Most of them enjoyed it! One student even said that “this old style of long form texting intrigues me” and plans to start writing letters to a sibling once a week. Success! ~ Letter Writers Alliance is an informal site promoting the hand-written, postal-mail delivered epistolary correspondence. Members can sign up to find a pen pal or just browse the site for stationery, pens, letter-writing tips, etc.

Keeping the minutes on violence, with Lucille Clifton

Wow. I found this post by Lesley Wheeler worth re-blogging. It hurts my heart that she found so many of her students had experienced this kind of fear and violence in their schools. But it makes me pleased to be a writer if I can be in the company of people like Lesley and her students, facing what is horrible and difficult and discussing and writing about it. And reading, too–reading poems that face the “dark” in human beings can be as liberating and enlightening as reading poems that offer “hope” or balance. The heart does need rest now and then; thoughtful reflection offers more rest than many folks realize. Thank you, Lesley, for being a teacher.

Lesley Wheeler's avatarLESLEY WHEELER

For a workshop on Tuesday, Election Day, one of my undergraduates submitted a poem based on the day he hid in a closet during a middle school shooting. A different student said there had been a shooting in her school, too; another described an active shooter just last week in the high school her sister attended; a fourth said a friend had died in the Parkland massacre. Stunned, I responded with something like, “Are you telling me that four out of the fifteen of you have had a near miss with a school shooting?” Then two more raised their hands. Six.

Gun violence in the US is insanely, horrifyingly prevalent; every new mass shooting refreshes the horror and also increases the number of Americans directly affected. A good friend’s father’s retirement center was recently in lockdown because of an active shooter. And when I described the workshop discussion to a…

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Writing self

Among the students I have tutored over the years was a young woman recovering from a traumatic brain injury. Writing was difficult for her on several levels. Reading on the screen or page tired her eyes and made it hard to focus; while using voice-activated software helped for that part of the writing issue, it did not resolve her larger cognitive loss: she found she could no longer tell a story. The ability to tie together research, concepts, and chronological moments to compose a logical narrative evaded her.

As we worked together, I learned how writing can restore the self. She began to reflect, through writing, on her process and her memories and to tether things together on the page so that they “made sense” to me–her sounding board. When something made sense to me, she would re-read it and decide if it reflected what it was she had been trying to say. Gradually, she felt more restored to herself, a slightly altered-by-trauma self, but a cohesive self who could tell a story again.

~

When I tutor students who are multilingual, particularly if they are fairly new immigrants here, I find that writing plays a similar role in reflecting or re-creating a self. These students learn to work and write using American English as their mode of persuasive communication, and in the process they develop as people who live in the United States and who consciously employ those terms, phrases, writing techniques, and concepts. They are much more conscious than “native” speakers about the fact that they are using Americanisms and writing in an American style; what they end up with is a self that they can deploy when necessary in American society.

~

Brain diseases, strokes, and dementia dismantle the story-telling ability. Whether we use the metaphor of braiding, warp & weft, or nuts & bolts, we mean that story has structure–and in dementia, structure comes undone. With that structural demise all too often comes the unraveling of the self. Each gap weakens the links that give us our own story-made self and leaves the human bereft of that consciousness we rely upon for being. The person whose brain has stopped constructing self stories is no less human, physically; but the self–that sentient, much-valued ego–disappears.

When I am with a hospice patient whose mind has stopped composing narratives, I see that the narrative of pain and envy and sorrow seems to depart. Is there a story that contains only peace? Could that even be a human story?

I don’t know what to make of all of this.

IMG_5015

Sometimes, I wish I had the peace and confidence of a house cat.

Gratitude

Friday morning, I had the opportunity to spend an hour with high school students at our college-sponsored poetry festival for teens. I also got the chance to hear visiting poet Patrick Rosal read poems, talk about poetry, and answer student questions. The young people found Rosal engaging and inspirational.

My “workshop” group talked about apologies: what the word’s etymology is, what its connotations are, whether they’d ever felt sorry and what about, blame and forgiveness, excuses and reasons. I gave them four poetry examples. They really liked what they perceived as the the “sorry/not sorry” stance in William Carlos Williams’ poem “This Is Just to Say.” That a short, century-old poem resonates with 15-year-olds pleases me immensely; and I’m glad I could introduce them to it.

I decided to write a gratitude response poem to Dr. Williams, following his style.

~

Thus, I also extend my apologies to the poet.

~

 

 

This Is Just to Say

Three plum pits
on a white
dish
testify to
that cold
juicy sweetness

Those seeds
met soil
and grew

Those plum trees
flower
even now

 

~

 

Not enough

The fall semester is about to begin, a very busy time for me and my colleagues. I need to be nose-to-the-grindstone, yet I have some deep and worrying concerns that distract me from the evaluations, curriculum preparation, scheduling, and staff meetings. Among the 40+ students who attended our university’s summer “bridge” program for college transitions, at least six openly expressed fears about being accepted and wondered how to deal with prejudice on and off campus. I am pretty sure they spoke for others who kept such fears to themselves.

We do not have answers for them. We can only say: Be yourselves, and be that well; say what matters, and say it forcefully but non-violently; and tell us if you feel afraid or need support–we promise we will stand with you.

That promise I take as seriously as any promise I make to my family members or best-beloveds–even though my students are “strangers” to me. I will intervene if I notice that they are threatened in any way. I’m a writer; I know that words, too, can cause harm.

And maybe that promise is not enough.

And maybe marching is not enough (read about marching here and here).

I am by nature a quiet person. But being quiet is not enough.

hate has no home

It is not enough. It is, however, a start.