Reading Poetry & Writing Nonfiction

With two sore knees, the left worse than the right, and some achey hips as well, today is devoted to reading. Yesterday's geocache hike in Liberty Lake with some friends was very fun, however. Emerson loved it, as well, like he always does. (Judd and I found this easy geocache on my birthday.)

Today I'm enjoying spending time with Frank Bidart. At first, I wasn't too sure about his poems in his book, In the Western Night: Collected Poems 1965-1990. Jonathan recommended him to me because of the way Bidart uses typography, punctuation, and line layout like a screenplay, to direct the reading of his voices, to really clarify the tone, volume, and inflection (and thus, implied meaning) of his poems. Words in CAPS abound, as well as the use of dashes, elipses, parentheses, and semicolons. (The latter being something Richard Hugo highly disapproved of..."No semicolons. Semicolons indicate relationships that only idiots need defined by punctuation. Besides, they are ugly." - from Triggering Town, page 40 - Chapter 6, "Nuts and Bolts")

But after I started getting further into Bidart's book of poems, I better understood the format and intentions, and as I got better used to how Bidart writes and structures his poems, it was less foreign and I became more comfortable with them. I knew how to "read" his turns and techniques. I don't think I'm bold enough to start trying out CAPS (and the yelling voice that's implied) in my poems, but Bidart reaffirms that it's okay to still use the occasional italics and exclamation point to accentuate a voice or line of dialogue.

I'm also reading Joan Didion's nonfiction book Slouching Towards Bethlehem for my Nonfiction Form & Theory class, which I love. This class is a refreshing change from poetry, and I've always been interested in learning more about nonfiction writing. This class is meeting all my needs, in regards to introducing new knowlege, engaging texts to read, fascinating discussions and learning from my professor and classmates, and the in-class writing exercises that Natalie asks us to do. Jeremy wrote about our last class on April 7th. I volunteered to share what I wrote during our 20 or so minutes of writing time. I passed on the Wild Turkey.

The task: think of some realm, some group of people, some collective of which we have insider knowledge, and write about that in an effort to talk about some larger meaning.

My essay (at least the beginning of one):

Once a month on a Wednesday afternoon was the required faculty meeting. I usually never looked forward to these with authentic excitement. I would have rather used the time to get some much-needed grading done or left the school precisely at 3:05 p.m.—thirty minutes after the sixth period bell, the official end of the teacher workday.

By law, we teachers had to attend these meetings. Unless there was a very legitimate reason for not attending (such as being a coach and with after school practice to supervise), and only if there wasn’t an alternative morning meeting to attend, was a teacher really formally excused. Of course, sick days were always a good reason to miss one of these meetings. Therefore, the second Wednesday of the month was always a good day for using one of the twelve allotted teacher sick days of the year.

I usually took my time walking to the school library, always the designated setting for these meetings. I would first stop at the women’s faculty restroom for the necessary relief, sometimes my only pit stop of the day if I had a particularly hectic lunch break or planning period. The one thing I enjoyed most was the “field trip walk” in the hallway with my 2nd floor colleagues, as if we were finally happily released from our classroom prisons and given permission to socialize freely while still technically on the clock.

High school staff meetings at my school were a bit more exciting than the average suburban high school. At least that’s what I gathered from my friends who taught at other schools, in other districts. It wasn’t uncommon to have raised voices, people walking out, sarcastic comments flying across the room, and even arguing at our staff meetings. When I found out what my friends did at their staff meetings, I realized life could be worse—staff meetings could be long and boring.

My staff was a pleasant mix of young, mid-career, and old blood. One was considered a “new teacher” if under the age of 30 or with less than three years of teaching experience. The veteran faculty had been teaching for 15, 20, 25, even 30-plus years at this one school. Tom, my English department head, had been there so long he starting having second and third generation of students.

These veterans were brash, tough, defensive, non-bull shitters who were skeptical of the administrators—who generally rotated in and out of the school every few years, at least the assistant principals came and went more frequently. And these veterans were all people I admired. They defended us new teachers like we were their own flesh and blood.

And everyone knew who really held the power in that school, whose opinion really mattered most. Tom, Chuck from Social Studies, Helen from the Business department, Sue (also English, who was known for her occasional emotional outbursts and confessionals), Derek and Sharon (also English teachers). In fact, it was really the English Department who were the major renegades. Freethinkers, articulate debaters, argumentative (but always right), creative, and ultimately a subversive bunch—mainly due to Tom’s guidance and leadership.

Tom was a true gentleman, in addition to being a strong head honcho who stuck to his guns. He was a poet, a father, and our sugar daddy of sorts. He was known for his gentle compliments. “That’s a lovely gown you’re wearing today,” was commonly expressed whenever I wore a skirt or dress of any sort, instead of my usually khakis or nice jeans. Tom treated everyone with grace and respect, unless someone was really a jerk. But even then he was never mean to anyone, always gave people some form of quiet respect even when the weren’t deserving of it and even when they never showed respect to the rest of the staff.

Other departments, like Science, liked to roll their eyes at the English teachers. More than once you could hear a sigh or tsk of the tongue, when an English teacher spoke up at a meeting. They didn’t care for or even understand the importance of a passionate plea or speech during faculty meetings. They thought we were just a bunch of hippy poets or Thoreau activists. But really we just saw all the bullshit much clearer than everyone else.

After all, we English teachers were the ones who always had to proctor the state assessment tests, give the AIDS education speech to our students, help the kids with their registration each spring, refer kids to the counselors when they wrote suicidal poetry and turned them in as class assignments. And since our department had the highest failure rate, we also got the most heat.

“Don’t lower standards. Keep high expectations.” This was the rallying cry coming down from the district office and our principal. Then out the other side was the criticism, “Why are so many students failing English? What are you guys doing in your classes anyway?”

We all knew our failure rate was because our students were generally unmotivated and unskilled. They couldn’t read. They hated writing. They cared more about pot, their after school jobs, their cars, anything other than schoolwork and the education process. Or they had really hard home situations that made schoolwork one of the lesser priorities in their stressful lives. The Honors and AP classes were a totally different story. Those classes were the only ones who even closely resembled the ideal students, those imagined scenarios that university teacher-education programs prepared us for.

However, the district office and School Board kept blaming our school’s overall low achievement on the faculty—saying we were poor teachers. Or they blamed it on certain groups of kids, like the ESL or Special Ed kids (who were bringing down our collective image and achievement scores), or the “apartment kids” got the blame. (Never mind the district for revising the school boundaries so that a disproportionate number of apartment complexes fed into our high school so that we statistically had a much greater number of transient, low-income families versus our country club, new home development neighborhood populated rival high schools.)

Anyway, these faculty meetings were really just an excuse to make us to something—the whole conformity factor that so much of the American public school system depends on. It was like the absurd trend of making Fridays “School Spirit” day and asking staff to wear school colors and mascot t-shirts. We weren’t high school students anymore, this was our job.