American Originality

I've been reading American Originality: Essays on Poetry by Louise Glück, one of the most formidably intelligent and articulate poets writing in America today. In the middle section of the book she includes the introductory essays she wrote for various volumes in the Yale Younger Poets series, for which she was a judge for eight years. One of the writers she introduces is Peter Streckfus, and what she had to say about his work sent me to my computer to see what sort of sampling might be available online. While I was looking, I stumbled on podcast in which Streckfus was interviewing... Louise Glück. I had not heard her speak before, and was very much taken both with what she had to say and with the thoughtful, graceful, self-effacing way in which she said it. I was particularly gratified to hear what she had to say about teaching writing. She talks a little bit about how it happened that she came to be a teacher, despite her own early resistance to the idea, and then about how the teaching wound up, against her expectations, having a salutary effect on her writing. Here's the passage that spoke most directly to me, which occurs at somewhere around the 21 minute mark in the half-hour podcast:

I felt passionate about my students' work... Oftentimes students were not very good, especially at the beginning. And they did write... hopeless poems. But if you could hear how they spoke in class and if they could think critically and if they said surprising things, then there was something in the brain that could be harnessed. And in each person it was different. You tried to sniff out the genius in each person. And maybe someone would come in with a poem completely void of action, or image, but it might be that the person wasn't going to get to those things the usual way. And part of the task was to figure out alternative approaches. Or is there a way to turn that sort of thing into a piece of magic? Over and over and over you're dealing with different kinds of problems, and I learned things I would never have learned just sitting at my desk looking at my white paper...

I think that's an eloquent and accurate summary of what the role of the teacher in a writing class ought to be. It's not about a set of rules. It's not about telling students what to do and how to do it. It's about—and I love this formulation—"sniffing out the genius in each person." And if it turns out that someone is trying to write something that doesn't fit in any of the received categories, so much the better; it's an opportunity to invent Something Completely Different.

I also understand and respect what she has to say at the end about how that kind of attentive engagement with student writing can wind up being good not just for the student but for the teacher as well. "Teachers as learners" has been a buzzword for decades now. But what exactly might that look like? Glück provides us with a compelling example.