Restructuring a life's sentence

I had trouble this morning introducing my American Lit Survey students to some poems that can be counted on to choke me up--Yusef Komunyakaa's "Slam, Dunk, and Hook," with its young men seeking moments of freedom and beauty on a neighborhood basketball court while Trouble stands on the sidelines "slapping a blackjack / Against an open palm"; and Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art," featuring the poet's fruitless attempt to convince herself that the "art of losing isn't hard to master"; and Denise Levertov's "Making Peace," which argues that writing peace into the world is a responsibility we all share:

a line of peace might appear

if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,

revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,

questioned our needs, allowed

long pauses . . .

                        A cadence of peace might balance its weight

on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,

an energy field more intense than war,

might pulse then,

stanza by stanza into the world,

each act of living

one of its words, each word

a vibration of light—facets

of the forming crystal.

 

In class we focus on analyzing elements of form and meaning, but in the end I want poems like these to spark reflection and action. I want to ask students so many questions: Where do you cultivate beauty? How will you cope with loss? What sentence is your life making? What word is each act bringing into the world--and how do are you linking your words with others'?

 

I have reached the point in my life when I'm not satisfied by academic discussions of literature. Sure, I get excited about examining interesting metaphors and stylistic choices, but I also want to make it personal--or at least point out to students how they can take literature personally. My next essay is coming out in Pedagogy soon, and far from an academic exercise in name-checking all the trendy scholars and theories, it's an impassioned plea for the importance of continuing to teach what some call "divisive concepts."

 

Writing that essay gave me great joy, a quality often missing from academic writing. In an article in Inside Higher Ed today, Deborah J. Cohen and Barbara J. Risman ask how faculty members can "Cultivate joy in their writing." They argue that the pressure to publish or perish "discourages joy in writing--beyond focusing on a utilitarian means to an end, it creates fear, loathing and pressure. We're told that if we do it enough, our careers will survive."

Well, I've done it enough, but it's not clear that my academic writing has accomplished much more than to keep me employed. I'm happy when I see that others have cited my articles, but if I'm part of what we call the scholarly conversation, it's an infuriatingly slow-paced and unrewarding mode of communication.

 

Cohen and Risman ask us to discard the utilitarian approach and pursue writing as an art that we practice for a variety of reasons, both personal and professional:

 

The painter makes art to thrive, to share the meaning they find in the world with others. So, too, if a writer recognizes their work as their art, they sit down to do it to share their gifts with other people and society in general. And the process of writing itself becomes a way to thrive, to contribute to the world.

And that's what I want to do with my writing about literature--and also my teaching. As I near retirement, I've been toying with the idea of teaching a class I'm calling Lit4Life, focusing on literature that can help us create a meaningful life. But why not write about it too? 

 

All this to introduce my summer writing project: a series of reflections on literary works that challenge us to live meaningful lives. I'm calling it Life Lines at the moment, but that will change. Who is my audience? What readership shall I appeal to? Where do I imagine publishing? Not even thinking about those questions right now. I want to immerse myself in writing for the joy of it and postpone academic questions until I see the words on the page.

 

I'm tired of squeezing myself into the constricting mold of academic writing; instead, I want to take a risk, to follow Denise Levertov's plea, to restructure the sentence my life is making just to see if I can recover some joy, make some peace, and find a place to thrive in the long summer pause.

And that's why teaching poetry choked me up this morning: because the questions I wanted to aim at my students' hearts circled back and hit mine instead.