Tuesday, a week ago, I made my last drive to Claremont for two poetry classes I was teaching at Pitzer College. This morning, I’ve been reading through the anthologies that the students compiled; these are collections of fifty poems by other writers, and the “editing” is telling - how can it not be? - for the writers who chose each piece. In the last few days, students in my advanced workshop exchanged the table of contents pages for their anthologies so that they could see what the other compilations looked like, and while I’ve been reading - like getting seven new books of poetry! - it’s been interesting to eavesdrop on their trading. They have found that, in some cases, they’ve selected the same poems to include. And I’ve found that there are poems I’d have included myself if I’d been given this assignment. I don’t know if that means, after reading together for fifteen weeks, we came to some agreement about what we liked to read in poems, or that these poems have something in each of them that moves us, or if it’s just coincidence. In reading these, I like to think I’m learning something about who these students will be as writers; I also see who they already are. I’m thinking, now, about the recent article by Dan Barden in Poets & Writers magazine; in that piece, the writer rants, at length, about creative writing workshops. In it, he relates that one friend “said of his students ‘They still teach me as much as I teach them.’” Barden turns on this comment to ask “What do they teach you, exactly?” and he imagines answers that indicate he feels he learns little from his own students. But the question is a good one. As long as we’re reading work other than (or in addition to) our own, I can’t help but learn from students with whom I work; what they say or what makes them speechless about another poet’s lines is something I get, extra, for free, in the time with them and sends me back to reading poems that are worth it. That’s a lot to get. Here are some poems they selected to include in their must-read collections.
“Twenty-Year Marriage” Ai
“Repose of Rivers” Hart Crane
“A Supermarket in California” Allen Ginsberg
“Frying Trout While Drunk” Lynn Emmanuel
“You Can Have It” Philip Levine
“Lady Lazarus” Sylvia Plath
“Having a Coke With You” Frank O’Hara
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” Wallace Stevens
“Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note” LeRoi Jones (Amiri Baraka)
