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Friday, January 11, 2013

Voices: poetic and pragmatic advice for students and schools



From my porch, nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains


"The Blue Ridge Mountains, visible from Spartanburg South Carolina, on a clear day, have always had the nostalgic force of a song for my family.”


So begins the final essay, “Confluence: Pacolet River “in John Lane’s book of essays, Waist Deep in Black Water. It is a wonderfully constructed sentence, but that is not why I picked it. I write from a mountaintop amidst the Blue Ridge Mountains so the sentence speaks to me personally. For lots of reasons.

Pacolet River


John has been singing a Whitmanesque song in poetry, essays, and, most recently, environmental studies, an academic program he developed at Wofford College. At Wofford, he is certainly a favored son. It is one part of his family. He attended the school and has gone on to be an award winning writer and the author of many books.

He was just  the featured poet on the Garlingo site: http://www.gwarlingo.com/
Here is a poem from John I have had hanging on my wall for many years. Whitman's grass is faintly echoed, so too the song of self that is  embodied, so to speak, in the world of predator and prey, the singing master and the song of celebratory loss:

Pinelands

I am not the mouse stunned
In the field, am not the piglet
Stopped by the snake's strike
Headed north on the still trail.

I listen for the singing tail,
Seek the places it knows.
When the snake sings I stop,
The way a hawk gliding above
Attends the long summer grass.

My shadow makes palmetto sing:
Call me darkness falling over song.


The many recognitions that have come since the date this poem was written come as no surprise. I have known John for decades. I first met him when he and I were selected as Hoyns Fellows in creative writing at the University of Virginia. The stories of those times are varied and would make great reading I think but for memoirs rather than a blog. But John is, to me, family. He is the distant cousin who has made language his life and reached many people with his words. He has inspired me and taught me much.

Luckily enough, a few weeks ago, I think I was able to teach him something too. I had asked John to write a guest entry for my blog on a topic of his choice. He responded with a profile of another favored son there,  Eric Breitenstein.

This portrait of what a student athlete should be, and rarely is in days of multibillion-dollar negations with TV, has been read by well over 15,000 people. I know this because of my analytics. But what I was able to give John was data that demonstrates that there are still places that are academic communities. The readership of this essay includes a huge percentage of the students, faculty, and alumni of Wofford. From the President of Wofford to students in their first semester there, John’s song of praise became what I would call a common reading experience.




For those familiar with educational initiatives, lots of schools at one time implemented a common reading experience for incoming students. But the tipping point for this fad has long passed. Students often did not read the books or essays assigned (I lead common reading experience seminars so I speak from experience). No surprise really. Who wants homework  based on books trying to get across an ideological message when dorms and roommates and strange faces are the order of the day? So like man well-intentioned educational initiatives, it has been largely shelved.

But maybe it is time to think about this again. At least at a small liberal arts college, the community is strong enough and supportive enough of one of their own that giving them something to celebrate via social media might be worth trying. I doubt this could work at a large college or university. There are too many communities and groups that self-segregate well before they arrive on campus (Facebook has helped with this). But the data is clear—words about students, beautifully written, by a faculty mentor, serves to underscore the mission of liberal arts colleges. Gorgeous photos help too. And it reaches students by the medium they use to communicate with one another.


John Lane


Which brings me to today. Here is the first installment of a long interview with John. I have asked him far too many questions and he has too many great things to say for one entry. The focus here is on how students have changed in their abilities over his long teaching career.

Do you see your own students getting better or worse when they come into your class as new students?

They are different and things have changed. I have now taught creative and not-so creative writing for 30 years and I have seen a great deal of change in the technology of writing. There are fewer paper notebooks in class. 30 years ago when I started there were no computers in class rooms, no World Wide Web, no wireless, no cellphones, little word processing, and the cloud was water vapor, and "texts" was something to be discussed in class and not exchanged on the sky below desk-level. Today the elements of style are digital and free-sourced and content can be bought, copied, cut and pasted at any location. Spelling can be checked. Grammar can be auto-corrected. I am composing right now on my iPad, hunting and pecking on a digital on-screen keyboard with auto replace which is both helpful and a pain in the ass. I have now written poetry drafts using the notes function of my iPhone at meetings where I should have been paying attention, or bored in an airport before boarding a plane, copied and pasted the draft to email and sent to a colleague far away. Does this make me better or worse as a writer? I think the main thing I've seen is that the chance of teaching a student who sees the world through a non-digital lens is low. I always have to remember with assignments they are what's now called "native speakers" of the new technologies and social media and I am speaking an acquired tongue with an analogue accent or a translator.


Do you have suggestions for students, teachers, or anyone interested in writing what they read that might help them develop what we all have—“an acquired tongue”?

Read what you love. Then what you hate. Be an intelligent tinkerer. Use the whole tool kit. Read to write. Take notes and argue with your own certainties. 

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We are all learning languages all the time. It may be French or it may be Rhino, or it may be l’amour propre. Language, as Heidegger and Wittgenstein and many others have said in different ways, are tools. A toolkit these days includes a big bunch of social media gadgets.


                                         Scene from Derek Jarman's film 'Wittgenstein'

I am worried that colleges and universities have, at least at the front end, carried around a bag that comes packed with stuff from the 1950’s. In asking students to apply to schools the movement is toward standardization. The Common Application leadership has taken off the open-ended essay question starting next year. For those creative souls who wish to present something that does not ‘fit’ the four standard questions they are out of luck. In addition, the forms on the Common Application do not permit photos, videos, or anything that would indicate we live in a digital age. And finally, the Common Application does not recognize creative writing be it fiction or non-fiction as a fine art; therefore, those students who have these talents and a desire to share them will not have the opportunity to do so. I will have much more to say on this subject in the coming months.



John recognizes the need to become at least passably fluent in the language spoken by a generation that cannot even imagine life without social media of some sort. I agree completely.

But there is also the need for words, the beautiful words that reach deep inside or across or within.

“I do not watch the river stained by red clay to gauge its flow, to dream its flood, or to fish it for extra protean, but I float it to gain some time to reflect, to recreate. I do not really know the Pacolet, but my history is adrift on it as surely as today I have drifted on the surface of this living stream.”

This is the last sentence of John’s essay with which I opened this blog post. The confluence he speaks of is personal, metaphysical, and to me essential. Writing as refection, the part of ourselves we see in the water and the part of the world that gazes back at us too. And then speaks. Learning to write is also learning to listen. Listen to John and listen to the voices that are inside too. Let them converse. Confluence is just right.





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