The Maine Humanities Council Newsletter ~ Fall 2001 ~ p. 4 & 5
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The Maine Humanities Council Newsletter ~ Fall 2001 ~ p. 4 & 5 |
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1 Back to School (cover page) 2 A Pitcher, Some Milk 3 Somali Alphabet 4 and 5 Wes McNair at Drury Pond 6 Born to Read 7 Teaching Beowulf Extras Extra Information
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The Humanities InterviewBirdsong Rising: A Visit With Wesley McNairQ: How can you leave all this and go back to school? A:I suppose for some people the turning of leaves signals the end of the year, but for me it's a beginning. The release of those new colors and the release of new energies and a new semester somehow go together. I always feel a great sense of anticipation when fall comes and students are back in the classroom. Q: Does teaching older adults in a teacher workshop differ very much from your experience with undergraduates at Farmington? A: I always think my broad mission in teaching, whether it's in a seminar or a conventional classroom, is teaching others to tell the truth. We live in a culture of lies. Anyone who has reached maturity in America is familiar with the lies of advertising, the lies of the politicians. I think one of the reasons my students, whoever they are, want to study poetry and poetry-writing is that they want to learn how to use language to tell the truth. There is the feeling I think we all have that language should serve something higher than what it serves in the public forum. So in pursuing this broad mission, every classroom I enter seems similar. Q: Can't a poem also lie? A: It's a tricky thing because you have to lie to tell the higher truth of poetry. You're always adjusting the literal fact to get at some universal sense of your subject. Poetry connects us to our intuitive selves, the deepest selves we have. For that reason poetry can be a little threatening to people. It insists that not only we tell the truth but that we live real lives. People all around us are doing everything they can to kill off this intuitive self. There are a lot of ways of doing the job - alcoholism, excessive work, excessive church-going. So teaching poetry is a kind of subversive activity. Q: Plato would have kept poets, and poetry, out of the classroom. A: But they belong there. Didacticism may be out of fashion, but I think all poets are teachers. We have an obligation to hand on the tradition. Q: What impels you to give up part of your summer to go back into the classroom? A: Teaching these summer seminars is so important to me because I think poetry teachers are a different breed. We learn from the first grade on that we're not supposed to daydream, we're supposed to pay attention. The public schools as we have inherited them are mechanical places that involve left brain skills. What these teachers of poetry want their students to do is to daydream -- because they are interested in a different part of the mind, the part in charge of envisioning or imagining or intuiting. In a school devoted to left-brain skills, they can feel a bit lonely. When they come to these seminars, they find other people who think the way they do about education. One of the best moments in any seminar is when they say, "Let's get each other's addresses," because you know it's the beginning of a larger community of the sharing of information and values. I think that kind of sharing is what's going to advance culture in the long run, not the mechanical skills at all. So I wish that school systems would value poetry and the arts in general more than they do. I mean, it's no accident when we look back and try to find what the deepest values of a culture were, we turn to the artists and writers. That's where the true record is. That's where the real thinking about the culture happened. Q: Should every English teacher in Maine take your seminar? A: They're in the trenches. They're fighting the battles we all want them to fight. Yet they have little time to pan back and look at the development of their teaching. In the past decade there's been an explosion of teaching materials on poetry. To take one example, the Lannan Foundation will send, free of charge, a whole set of videotapes of leading contemporary poets reading and discussing their work, to any teacher who'll write a letter requesting it. Among other things, the seminar helps people figure out how to make sense of all these resources. [Editor's note: For more information on Free Lannan Videos, visit lannan@spdbooks.org.] Q: How do you begin a poetry seminar? A: With the sayings and drawings of children. I always like to begin that way because poetry has to do with naming the world in a new way. We were all poets once. We didn't have all the dead habits of language that we learn from other people and all the names had already been used for the world. So we had to make up our own names. My kids weren't any different from other kids but they were always saying poetic things. I often tell students about my favorite short poem, which was said to me once by my nephew, who must have been four years old at the time, when his leg feel asleep in the movie theater. He didn't have the habit of language to say that, so he said: "My leg feels like ginger ale." It's a poem for me because it does what all good poems try to do - to make us aware of the mysterious world that exists just outside any language that we might have invented for it so far. Q: The participants from the four summers always gave you rave reviews. What do you think of them? A: I am very, very encouraged by the quality of the teachers. It gives me such hope for American education. Each one of them has a compelling life of the mind that I want to learn more about it as they talk about the poems in our anthology. They are so smart, so interesting. They always are able to extend my understanding of the poems. Q: For those who can't participate, is there any particular book on teaching poetry you'd recommend? A: Anything by Kenneth Koch. 
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In our camp we are a long way from urban America. Most summer nights, the only illumination besides the light from our gas lamps comes from a camp across the pond and the moon. Sitting on our porch in the dark, apart from store fronts, blinking towers, and computer screens, I am in an America that is not yet caught. The pond is a place of risings, the sun rising, the trees rising out of their reflections on the water to meet the sun, a fish rising to make ripples in a reflected pine. Birdsong rising. Before bed I take the dogs out under the moonlight, daylight on an alien planet, everything around me turned to black and gray and loneliness. Beside the canoe small waves wash over the moon as it rests in reflection. Far away on the pond the reflected moon appears again in an eerie strip of light. Back inside the camp, I look through the door's windowpanes and find the strip of light has disappeared; by the canoe the moon, lengthened into an oval, is boiling with waterbugs. What is more peaceable than a canoe resting at the dock in the sunshine as the waves slip gently under it, swaying its bamboo seats and their elegant crochet of shadow. In the gathering calm of twilight I see the image I have learned to look for: blue holes that gradually appear at the end of the point between the trunks of trees which had seemed full and solid before. Through that distance, the mystery of more distance.
- Excerpts from On Drury Pond: A Poet's Journal," |
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