Teaching Poetry Writing

A Five-Canon Approach

Tom Hunley

• Editore: Multilingual Matters
• Anno: 2007
• ISBN:
  9781847696816
• Argomento: Personal Development
• Categoria: Writing & Presentation Skills

Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five Canon Approach is a comprehensive alternative to the full-class workshop approach to poetry writing instruction. In the five canon approach, peer critique of student poems takes place in online environments, freeing up class time for writing exercises and lessons based on the five canons of classical rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

Chapter 1

It Doesn't Work For Me: A Critique of the Workshop Approach to Teaching Poetry Writing and a Suggestion For Revision

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by faulty pedagogy…

John Undergrad is a second-year college student whose degree will be in Business Management, but he's not all business. While interning at a bank last summer, he received two reprimands for writing poetry on the job. He didn't mind though; the poems came to him, and he felt like he had to jot them down, despite the consequences. He's been a closet poet ever since an encouraging high-school English teacher intrigued him with the irony in Edwin Arlington Robinson's ‘Richard Cory’ and the rhymed storytelling in Robert Service's ‘The Creation of Sam McGee.’ John uses an elective on a class in poetry writing, hoping he'll learn more about poets such as Robinson and Service and how to emulate them. He spends weeks listening to discussions, not of published verses by established writers, but of drafts by his fellow students, and he occasionally chimes in, saying ‘I like it’ or ‘It doesn't quite work for me.’

Then his turn comes; he makes twenty copies of a poem he has written, reads it aloud, and waits. The teaching assistant says ‘It's a bit sentimental, isn't it class?’ One student says ‘The long lines are a risk, but you get away with it.’ A second student, an English literature buff and the class star, says ‘The religious imagery is too Miltonic, and the end rhymes make the poem feel old-fashioned.’ John isn't sure what the teaching assistant means by ‘sentimental,’ he knows he hasn't been trying to ‘get away’ with anything, he's not sure what ‘end rhyme’ is, and he definitely doesn't know what ‘Miltonic’ means. But he has learned workshop etiquette; instead of asking these questions and appearing defensive, he simply says ‘thank you for the feedback,’ and silently vows never to show his poems to anyone again. He tells his friends in the Business Department that he took a poetry writing class because ‘It's an easy “A”,’ and several of them sign up the following semester.

John's sister, Jane Graduate Student, holds a degree in English Literature with a writing emphasis. She completed three poetry writing workshops at her undergraduate institution, where her work received great praise from two college instructors, and she placed three poems in a local literary journal. She enjoys reading Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and her two instructors, but beyond that she doesn't really ‘get’ most poetry. Upon graduation from the MFA program, she plans to seek a job teaching creative writing. She looks at what her instructors do in class, and thinks that it would be fun and easy. However, sometimes she doubts herself, as when she gets writer's block and can't seem to get unstuck or when she reads through poems in the local literary journal and can't make sense of them. She is also concerned because she vaguely knows of forms such as the villanelle and the ghazal, but she isn't confident about her ability to identify and define them, much less write them. As an unconscious means of hiding these insecurities and protecting her status as class star, she finds herself using terms such as ‘enjambment,’ ‘pentameter,’ and ‘metonymy’ without quite knowing what they mean.

While John Undergrad and Jane Graduate Student are composites of students I have observed, their fictionalized experiences typify the results of pedagogical methods used in contemporary college classrooms in the United States. The pedagogical methodology most commonly used in American colleges functions more as a convenience for the instructors than as a vehicle for meeting the needs of students. The traditional workshop model of teaching undergraduate poetry writing has gone virtually unquestioned for the past seventy years and has been ratified by hundreds of universities, treated as the way to teach creative writing, despite a paucity of studies or empirical evidence or proof. Established in 1931 as a method for teaching elite graduate students, the traditional workshop model does not adequately address or even consider the needs of apprentice writers; it does not encourage instructors to take their jobs or their students seriously; it routinely puts students on the defensive and discourages them from taking necessary, productive risks in their writing; and it fosters unhealthy competition among students that hinders their growth as writers. The typical creative writing teacher who simply has students read their drafts aloud and then leads full-class discussions about these student texts is like a physical education teacher who just rolls out a ball and tells the kids to play. The result is the same: undisciplined students without much technique or skill – and a lot of injuries!

Dave Smith makes a good point when he asks in his book Local Assays: ‘Doesn't it seem a bit unnatural to begin a workshop of college students by immediately throwing their poems into a public scrutiny and asking that public for a response?’¹ In that book, Smith goes on to discuss a sequence designed to give students practice critiquing texts before actually addressing each others’ work, but he stays inside the box of the traditional workshop model, rather than offering a substantive alternative to the process that he has correctly diagnosed as unnatural. Teaching Poetry Writing: A Five-Canon Approach, is a book for poetry writing instructors who wish to step outside of the box and consider a paradigm that is quite different from the traditional workshop approach. By following the approach laid out in this book, poetry writing instructors at all levels can ensure that their students are armed with an arsenal of invention strategies, conversant about form and structure, capable of identifying and writing in a variety of styles, equipped to quote large quantities of poetry from memory, and attuned to the oral/aural elements of poetry.

If the traditional workshop model is so ineffective, why do 76% of undergraduate poetry writing teachers still use it as their primary mode of instruction?²

There is no sound theoretical basis for using the traditional workshop model at the undergraduate level, or in most of today's graduate workshops, for that matter. The workshop model was not designed with undergraduates or the ruck of graduate students in mind. It was designed for gifted, elite writers who needed very little instruction, though they may have benefited from criticism on their manuscripts.

Wallace Stegner offers a succinct history of the workshop model in his 1988 book On the Teaching of Creative Writing. According to Stegner, methods used by Harvard professors Dean Le Baron Russell Briggs and Charles Townsend Copeland led directly to the establishment of the Breadloaf Writers’ Conference, initially directed by publishing mogul John Farrar, who hired a faculty that included Robert Frost, Louis Untermeyer, and others who ‘lectured, read manuscripts, conducted seminars and workshops, played a lot of tennis, drank too much.’³ Breadloaf introduced creative writing instruction and the workshop model into the American university system, not as part of the core curriculum, but as a summer program for non-matriculated writers. Other writers’ conferences modeled on Breadloaf soon sprang up. Then, with the establishment of the Writers’ Workshop at the State University of Iowa under the direction of Paul Engle in 1930, creative writing and the traditional workshop model entered the core curriculum at the graduate level.

In what Donald Justice, the former head of Iowa's program, retrospectively refers to as ‘a kind of pyramid scheme,’⁴ Iowa graduates founded scores of other programs, offering degrees in creative writing and using the traditional workshop model as the primary or only method of instruction. In her essay ‘Duck, Duck, Turkey: Using Encouragement to Structure Workshop Assignments,’ Mary Swander succinctly points out the flaws in using the traditional workshop approach with beginning and intermediate writers:

Paul Engle developed the workshop as a place where young, polished writers could come for a year or two and have their work critiqued. Engle assumed his graduate students already knew how to write. What they needed, he reasoned in this post-WWII era, was a kind of boot camp where they would be toughened up to the brutality of the enemy: the attacking critics… When creative writing became ‘democratized,’ classes in poetry, fiction, and playwriting were offered to students with little developed literary skill. Yet most instructors of creative writing clung to a pedagogy intended for those young writers that Paul Engle had brought to Iowa City in the early days of his directorship: Flannery O'Connor, Constance Urdang, William Stafford, Mark Strand, and Charles Wright.⁵

When a creative writing program is able to recruit students who are already polished writers, perhaps the best pedagogy is one in which the instructor facilitates opportunities for the students to learn from each other. The traditional workshop model seems ideally suited for such interaction. According to Stegner, writing with elite students like Engle's in mind: ‘The best teaching that goes on in a college writing class is done by members of the class upon one another.’⁶ But as Swander points out, most of us are working with a very different kind of student population, and as such, we need to use a very different teaching methodology.

The traditional workshop model provides established writers with a source of income that leaves them plenty of time for their own writing. However, a convenience for teachers certainly does not equal a beneficial experience for students. Daniel Menaker states: ‘There is general agreement among professional writers and editors that… these [workshop-oriented] curricula are of extremely dubious value, except perhaps to the institutions themselves.’⁷ And yet the workshop continues to gain ground to the point where it is now assumed that it is the core of any serious writer's training. As Bruce Bawer puts it in his 1998 essay ‘Poetry and the University:’ ‘In the last decade or so, as a matter of fact, many people in the poetry world have begun to take it for granted that the only serious way of preparing for a career as a poet is to enter a university creative-writing program.’⁸

If the traditional workshop model entered American academies as a method for teaching elite graduate students, why do so many undergraduate poetry writing instructors employ it?

According to Swander, the workshop model has been perpetuated, despite its ineffectiveness with beginning and intermediate students, because ‘young teachers tend to model their mentors.’⁹ This is highly plausible, as a partial explanation. Given the lack of attention given to creative writing pedagogy in nearly all graduate creative writing programs in the United States, it is natural for young teachers to model the teaching methods of their mentors, even when teaching under very different circumstances. The workshop model has been perpetuated in undergraduate classrooms largely because of the lack of attention to teacher training and pedagogical theory within MFA programs. Many creative writing instructors use the traditional workshop model because they haven't received any pedagogical training as part of their degrees and they pattern their beginning undergraduate classes after the workshop-style classrooms taught by their own mentors. In her 2001 study ‘Professional Writers/Writing Profess...