I’m sorry for the deviation from our multipart discussion. It will continue on schedule. Please don’t mind the aside.

For DamonReynolds on Scribd.com

Despite having ham-handed my way through two years as a freshman comp teacher at a university, along with a semester leading a Creative Writing recitation, I don’t fancy myself a teacher. Although I enjoyed the work and did my best to find interesting assignments that would connect with my students, I failed as many times as I succeeded.

My failures came from looking at teaching as I thought a teacher should look at teaching: like an authoritative voice that KNEW what he was talking about, when in fact, I had no idea. I didn’t know what I was doing when I was teaching composition because I’m not sure that I ever learned composition myself – I only learned how to mimic it. And teaching students how to ape isn’t teaching them anything.

So often my teachers would talk about “giving students all the tools they needed in their toolboxes” – which is a stupid, clichéd metaphor, but perhaps more dire: all that talk about the “toolbox” never wanders to what’s inside it. Sure, writing may very well be a craft, and it might have tools that are learned, but the sad truth is that most of the teachers I knew, myself included, didn’t know what those tools were. We only knew how to use them, mimic them, as we’d been taught. We knew grammar and sentence structure by learning the arcane experience of “what sounded right” and through practice our ears got better, after worrying over thousands of typed sentences.

But how do you convey “what sounds right” to a student who doesn’t know? Not by talking about a lame duck toolbox metaphor, I’ll tell ya that. The real kicker of it is – my sentences have gotten better over the years, they sound better to my ear and they do a better job at conveying my meaning, but they still aren’t wonderful. They’ve reached serviceable, but probably not much more.

I mention all this here because it shows the only lesson I’ve ever learned about writing (and probably life, too): experience is everything. No “theory” is worthwhile until there is so much significant experience behind it that the theory becomes self-evident. With that as our underlying given, it seems obvious that all our talking about a “writer’s toolbox” is meaningless to students. They don’t have enough experience to know what we mean.

I have an account on Scribd.com where I publish creative writing. Despite all the junk on that site, I try my damndest to polish everything I put up there as much as I can. I don’t have an editor, so there are surely errors. However, I like to think my work up there is as close to publishable quality as I can make it. I still have a lot to learn, but you should have seen my sophomoric attempts. The stuff on that site is better.

Still, it came as a surprise to me, after I put my book of tech poems up on the site, that an 18 year old poet with the screen name of DamonReynolds left a comment asking for poetry “pointers.” I read the few poems he’d listed (aside from the poem he’d put up for 10 dollars) and found them lacking. My first reaction was dismissal of his suggestion. The audacity! I doubted he’d read my work at all, since he didn’t comment on it, just asked for tips.

I fumed for a bit, and then calmed down. Who was I to accuse someone else of audacity? No one, that’s who. Maybe, anyway.

Instead, I set to thinking. Sure, I could go through and deconstruct his poems one by one and suggest improvements to them, but my experience teaching freshman composition taught me that any suggestions I would make, based on the lessons I’ve learned, would probably fall on tin ears. So if that wasn’t an option, I was left with suggestions in the “general” category. General tips, what could I offer?

It was that line of thought that brought me to the beginning of this article, ruminating over what makes good teaching in the first place. Experience. That’s what. It would do DamonReyonlds no good to hear me talk about concrete ideas vesus abstract ideas, the imperative importance of tweaking your words until they say EXACTLY what you mean, or the value of an original metaphor over a clichéd one. Those lessons must be earned. But what advice could I give, then?

For awhile, at least since I received my master’s, I’ve joked with my friends that if I ever taught at university again, especially Creative Writing, I would teach a class called “Dedication through deadlines.” The class would meet once a week and our meetings would only consist of paper collection. Specifically, I would require each student to present me with 5,000 words a week. This requirement would be strict. Students that met 5,000 words a week for an entire semester would pass the class with a high mark. Students that didn’t meet it would fail. I would not critique the work, read it, or comment on it. I would only provide deadlines and expectation.

The reasoning (and hope) behind this is that I don’t think any writer can learn anything from exercises, peer commentary, workshops, or lit theory, until s/he has enough experience to understand how to use that high-level information in practice. Before that can be done, the keyboard must be pounded, and pounded regularly.

So here is my advice, DamonReyonlds, since you asked for it:
1. Read a book of poems once a week. Write down a list of your three favorite poems from that book and do your best (in writing) to explain why they are your favorites.
2. Write a poem every day. Put the poems in a drawer, in order, then pull them back out again a month later and rewrite them.
3. Do this for an entire year (at least), without skipping a poem or a book. A year is a very conservative estimate. It will probably take longer.
Take that advice and several things will happen:
You’ll get better at appreciating poetry.
You’ll feel more comfortable writing poetry.
You’ll get better at writing poems that mean precisely what you meant to say.
You won’t need any “pointers” from me.

I hope that helps.
-m.