There is no reason for this website—for this blog—to exist. It probably has no meaning for you. And that may be true of art in general. I’ve spent the last few days finding and arranging quotations from writers to include in the creative writing class I’ll be teaching in the fall. The one that often bugs me—probably because it resonates with me—consists of two short sentences from Vladimir Nabokov: “A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual.”
That’s hard to swallow, but I think it’s a necessary fact to swallow. In the past weeks I’ve been putting what I think—I hope—are the finishing touches on my fall 2020 course. But in the winter and spring I was doing the heavy lifting, sifting through my home library, trying to find poems and short stories to include. It became clear very early on that my reading list wasn’t very diverse. In the months since then, I’ve tried to improve that. Partly because I’m thinking of covering my own ass. (I don’t want to be that teacher.) But partly because I’m thinking of what I owe my class.
But I don’t think I owe my class, as a class, anything. I don’t think it’s useful to think of the twenty-ish students I’ll have as a single unit. I think Nabokov is right. A work of art has no importance whatever to society. To a class. But it can be important to the individual. Or a group of individuals.
The other day I was talking on the phone with a friend of mine, a great writer and a great teacher, and he stumped me with one of those oh-shit kinds of questions you hope you don’t get in a job interview. He asked me, “What are you most excited to teach?” I sat there in a stupid silence. Maybe because we’re good friends the silence went on longer than it might otherwise—because I didn’t want to bullshit him. But when he asked me the question, I honestly didn’t know. I’m not sure I know now.
I do know which unit, which poems, I am most anxious about teaching. They come at the end of the poetry section of the course, a two-week unit that progresses from “simple” observation to witness to a discussion of power and then of protest. What is the importance of seeing something? And then of saying something about it?
These are the political poems. Some of them move me deeply. As an individual. Others, if I’m being honest, seem to be addressed to the society. This unit is the most self-consciously diverse unit in the course. More women poets. More poets of color. Poets from oppressive Eastern European regimes. Good for me. I’ve checked all the boxes.
I don’t know how I feel about some of these poems. Or about the unit as a whole. Maybe the problem is I see them as a whole, which of course they are not. Not any more than my assemblage of students makes a single, cohesive class.
The more I think and write about the poems I am most nervous about teaching, the clearer I become about the poems I am most excited to teach. There are the poems that originally got me hooked on poetry. My gateway drugs. Poems from books that still bare the stamps of the high school English class I stole them from. (Oops.) It will be interesting to see if and how those poems engage me now. If and how they engage my students, my writers. (Not my class.) But there are other poems I look forward to. Like Naomi Shihab Nye’s “Rain,” because I have included it in a unit called “Growing Pains and Joys,” and the discussion of the poem may very well have nothing to do with the fact that she is a woman or the daughter of a Palestinian refugee. There’s the poem by Sharon Olds called “The Clasp,” about the physical hold a mother has on her daughter’s wrist, that breaks me every time. Which may not be any better than Olds’s “White Anglo-Saxon Protestant”—included in the “Observation & Witness; Power & Protest” unit—but which certainly seems freer, largely because I haven’t placed the same kinds of expectations on it. Because it is a more personal poem, and not an overtly political one.
I think it’s just as naïve and absurd to expect that a group of poems, a type, a class can have any importance to the individual as it is to expect the single poem will have any importance to a group, a type, a class of people. Maybe by grouping the “Power and Protest” poems together, I rob them. I neuter them. Maybe—probably—doing anything other than looking at a single poem at any time necessarily dulls the luster. As I assemble my packets, I am acutely aware of how easily I could burn through 65 minutes on a single poem, and how difficult it will be to discuss any more than a couple of poems in any meaningful way.
But I remember being told by my first undergraduate writing teacher that poems are never finished, they are merely abandoned. So, too, are reading lists and course syllabi. There will be time to change the arrangements of poems. Maybe I will, and maybe I won’t. Here I am again, thinking about the class, as though it’s a single thing, and not thinking very much about each individual student. Individuals I don’t know at all now, and whom I probably won’t much better by the end of the semester. Because they are not complete individuals yet. And neither am I. Part of what breaks and thrills me in “The Clasp” is how aware it makes me of my failures, my guilt, my broken parts, my over-compensations. As a person, as a father, as a teacher. Part of what motivated me to pay so much attention to my inclusiveness in the reading list was to cover up holes, failures, and an incompleteness that I know are there, syllabus or not. I am trying to present a version of my sophisticated, socially-conscious self, when maybe it’s just as important to pull down the façade and be present with my students and admit to them that I am no more cohesive as an individual than any of my reading packets, that I am barely more complete now than the first poems I abandoned as an undergraduate.
Wherefore Art 