Making the Poet

“So,” I say, “didn’t go so well…”

Carrol just nods. She’s back from a year of University in the US, and that means I’m back teaching the day shift at Berlitz Taiwan, on special loan, so to say, for this one class. For the past few months she’d been emailing me faint-voiced letters from her dormitory room as she struggled through her first creative writing class - an intro to poetry - and her instructor’s sweeping pen notes in the margins that called for her to “try and engage the reader” and “clarify, clarify, clarify!” My own academic career in creative writing hadn’t gone well, either, I pointed out several times in my responses. Afterall, when I’d first taught her in Taipei a year back, when she was a highschooler who didn’t go to highschool, I was still a writer who seldom wrote. Undergraduate study had nearly killed the spark in me to write, something only the the energy and optimism present everywhere in I’d been in Asia, and Taipei especially, rekindled. She should be very suspect of my advice, I’d said.

I can tell now, though, she’s itching for another go at poetry, smarting at the failures (perceived or real) in the US, feels the need to go one more round. Clearly she believes I can help. I decide to believe, too, at least while I’m in class.

“Well, you’re in my class again, and if I’m going to teach you poetry,” I stop and wait for her frantic nodding, “you have to understand this first: we’re not here to write poetry, we’re here to make a poet.” Here again I pause. I didn’t have a plan for the lesson. A magazine article deadline loomed, and I was up all night before dealing with new arrivals to Taiwan who were crashing at my place while they sorted out their vacations and lives. I’d brought two of my favorite poems to class - a Lee Young-li and a Seamus Heaney - but that’s all. To anyone who hasn’t taught an ESL class for as long as I have this sounds irresponsible, but the best lessons always come running off your cuffs in the thick of the storm, as effortlessly as rain water. Faced with her silence, I’d made up the the objective of the course right there on the spot.

Now I have to get to the next point, which I also don’t yet know. “What’s the difference?”

She’s still wearing her hair in the same choppy, graceless style common here for girls would don’t want to be ‘girls’ in the narrow Asian sense. A year past I’d agonized over how to tell her that in America, it would look slightly ridiculous. She looks around the room for inspiration - to the whiteboard where I’d dashed MAKE A POET quickly, then to the crackling miniature tropical tree, dying, in the corner, then back to me. It was an unfair question.

I take another run at it. I say “Like gongfu.”

“Gongfu?” For a second she doesn’t realize I’m speaking Chinese, and tries to figure out the word in English.

“Gongfu, like TaiChi or BaGua, you know, Chinese fighting.” She doesn’t get it, and so just sits and waits for an explanation. I give her a question instead. “What makes a fighter good?”

“Practice.”

“What does that mean - give me a full sentence, a complete idea. Explain it to me.”

“They practice a lot, and so they can do it very well.”

“Do you think a fighter thinks about every punch they throw, I mean, after they’ve thrown it?”

No response. Strange question. “What I mean is, when they practice, do they worry about each little punch?”

“Yes.” Wrong direction. Still, though, she is right. The moment of tension, then focus, and release. Indeed they did worry about every punch. They thought of nothing else, in fact.

Stymied.

“So, when they’re finished, I mean, they’ve got their tea and their sitting on the meditation rock or whatever, are they thinking about the punch they threw ten minutes ago?”

“No.”

“Then why are you thinking about those poems you wrote a month ago?”

She doesn’t have an answer for me, but that’s because this runs pretty close to the bone. I understand. It’s the same reason I still think about that thesis that put me on the outs with the whole department, or when I was a sophomore why I’d kept a handful of short pieces for months on my desk, leaving them to go oily on the spit as I turned them around and around in my head.

When she’d sent me her poems to look at, I’d seen in her myself, the young poet. Fresh in school, so possessed of a desire to write good poetry that the tepid responses I’d received from my instructor, a poetry fellow on his second term, bewildered me. When asked for suggestions, just weeks before, to help her raise the grade of her final submission, I’d found myself suddenly in that fellow’s shoes. Page after page of poems, and each one good, but not worth revising. Carrol is anxious now across the table. It’s infectious.

So I cut the bullshit. I tell Carrol what no teacher ever told me. That no one poem matters. That her professor, like all of mine that came after that first fellow, had reacted as they had to, as a teacher should. They were saying: Great. Well-done. Now do it again a thousand times. Just like gongfu.

I lean in. “Poets are made of tiny, tiny bricks, thousands of them. What difference does it make if any one brick is that much shinier than the rest?” Here I was again, in the place teachers so often find themselves - suddenly understanding things better, more clearly, and totally spontaneously. Knowing something myself only as each word falls from my mouth.

“The young writer sees only the finished work of great writers, the poems that capture something extraordinary. They think this, then, is what we should aspire to, and try to find this in every poem they write - make every poem a masterpiece.We must remember, though, that those great writers had first to write a thousand other poems, poems that never quite made it, poems that had to be left behind.”

I ask if she understands my meaning. My heart’s pumping. She nods. Then she asks:

“When do I know if I’m done, and this poem’s good? Not just gongfu?”

The high wears off. “I have no idea. I haven’t gotten that far yet. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see what happens. Maybe it’s always gongfu. Let’s take a look at Seamus Heaney; he’s smarter than me, maybe there’s an answer in there.” And that’s when the course started.