Asking Students to Skate, Fly, and Dig
How taking a class in writing poetry helped me become a better teacher
In January, I signed up for The Carnegie Center’s Poetry Gauntlet, a year-long challenge to write 100 poems. I am pleased to announce I have finished the course and kept the faith.
However, the real benefit for a writing teacher in taking a writing class is to remember what it is like to be a student, to be asked to produce — consistently, relentlessly— a creative product you consider to be thoughtful, moving, artful, whatever superlative you want to attach.
Over the year, I began to think about the poetry activities as a teacher, how I would have taught it, and, simultaneously, thinking about the activities as a poet, occupying the liminal space between instruction and creation. I found myself thinking about the efficacy of my own instruction toward the poets in my classroom, holding myself to the same expectations that I, as a teacher, would have held myself, as a student, if I were in my own class.
Heady stuff.
As a student, I saw that some of the practices and activities I used as a teacher may have been less inspiring and productive than I thought they were when I actually sat down and attempted to employ them in my daily poetry practice.
Yet the one foundational principle I found to be endlessly helpful as a student that I’ve modeled as a teacher and that was modeled elegantly for me by our instructor, poet Christopher McCurry, is the necessity of movement in the act of creation, specifically the three postures all writers employ: skating forward, flying above, and digging deep. That list may sound like a good block that metaphor example, which my journalist husband would quickly excise with his red pen, but I believe it is apt: no animal skates, flies, and digs (bats? squirrels?), but a writer must.
Let’s unpack.
SKATING: There’s a need for students to have forward propulsion, to kick off from the wall of hesitancy and get some momentum going, gliding and striding over the page to get a piece of writing progressing, advancing. Further is essential.
FLYING: There’s a need for students to be able to see the big picture, to soar above the piece they are working on, to see where the roads merge and fork, where the hills need to filed down and the valleys built up.
DIGGING: There’s a need for students to dig deep into their memory, into place, into their values, feelings, family, community, and bring up good stuff. Sometimes they run out of air and need oxygen. Sometimes they hit veins of gold, explore caves, and treasures emerge.
So how do you make this happen in your classroom? Using your own practice.
SKATING
Teach students how to make goals, how to stake a claim and build something. Clear, unambiguous goals tied, not to quality, but to output. Show students from your own work how to create goals that are tied to generative work, research, and revision work. Show students how to go forward with projects even when you don’t know where the project is going. Give them lots of prompts and prods and pushes if necessary to get them off the sidelines and into their own great work.
FLYING
Once the skating forward process has generated a sizable product — a working, rambling mess of sentences and paragraphs — show students from your own work how to disconnect from the speed and soar above the piece to see connections. Practice - in front of them- observing trends and patterns in your work. Show them how to identify themes that emerge, how to cut away what is extraneous, how to put this with this and that with that.
DIGGING
After the shaping has started, then it’s time to get down to the essential question: What have I come to the page to say? Am I saying it? How can I say it more clearly, more artfully? This excavation process is delicate, time-heavy and weary, which is why this last posture is so rarely “taught” or even encouraged in a traditional writing classroom. There is no time. There is no quiet, brave space to hold an audience with one’s self. However, you can still model that in your own work - show student the moves of stillness and how to wield rumination as a revision tool.
Hey, I’m presenting with a bunch of cool people on Friday, November 17 at NCTE-Columbus. Come see us at The Greater Columbus Convention Center as the National Writing Project presents “Write Across America” on the Main Level, Room B-130-132 at 12:30 (Session Code 2: G.45).
Liz,
Could you share the reading list your had for last year's program. I'm working on an MFA in poetry and would love to see it.