The Poet in the Classroom
By Tony Steel
Tony
Steele teaches a class at St. Thomas University
I decided to become a writer at thirteen when I first read the poems of T. S. Eliot and e. e. cummings. While I still admired the realistic novels of John L. Tunis and the romance of Summerset Maughm, the linguistic violence of verse seduced me to a lifelong dream. Fifteen years later I was living and sometimes studying in Santa Barbara, California. There my writing of poetry began to interest others. I took Creative Writing courses at the University of California from Alan Stephens, Edward Loomis, and Marvin Mudrick. Christopher Isherwood was Writer-in-Residence one term and that too was a delight. I was constantly writing in those days and these courses gave me three things a beginning writer needs: deadlines, an audience of peers and feedback from a mentor.
Alan Stephens taught me syllabic verse, which carried me a long way in exploring my meditative side. Even though, as I later learned, he despised me personally, he was always charitable and encouraging — both in poetry writing and in my academic studies of American Literature. I turned in three to ten poems each week for distribution to the class. I can still smell the intoxicating ink of the Thermofax machine. Loomis taught me the value of minimalist language (“write little, do it well”), as in the writings of Ernest Hemingway. Mudrick was less helpful (he read our stories to us and there was little class discussion), but his curmudgeonly discernment was inspiring. Mudrick once said, “Poetry is only wallpaper,” and so we began to publish “Wallpaper Poems” on Thermofax and gave them away all over campus or stuffed them in bags at the bookstore. It was a powerful medium because as well as writing poems, the wallpaper gang could draw all over the wax masters in the psychedelic style of the day. None of these professors gave marks in their courses, except at the very end, as required by the University Administration. Loomis explained once that at the end of the term he would look at our portfolios, close his eyes, and “see our grades in letters of fire.” I have often used this line myself with my own students. Regulations not withstanding, I have always despised marks. If I had my own school, there would be no marks, as at Summerhill, Antioch and Reed.
But the two teacher-writers who inspired me most, rather more for their childlike emancipated personalities than for their writings, were John Cage and Paul Reps. Creative writing classes were defining moments for me as a student because at last I had a live audience to try my metaphors on. In later life, writers can be stiflingly isolated unless they find an intense and demanding writing workshop like the Ice House at UNB. But as a rule poets don’t get along with each other and workshops tend to turn into pissing contests.
As a university teacher of English for over 35 years I have naturally taught many courses in literature, composition and creative writing. My belief has always been that the chief motives for studying literature are delight and to train oneself as a writer. Study shows what can be done in words and also what has already been done sufficiently and thus need not be repeated. Literature is a pleasure and an anodyne but the writer must not be entirely a hedonist, for what is writing if it can offer nothing more lasting than common pleasures, the “blessing in this pleasant breeze”? Consequently, I am always teaching poetry even when studying prose or nonfiction (in fact I make little distinction between verse and prose).
I encourage my students to imitate the writers they are studying. To write one original Petrarchan sonnet is worth a hundred pages of secondary criticism by Renaissance scholars. Even to slavishly transcribe an admired text is of great value, for it gives you the kinetic feeling of the words of a Keats, Auden or Williams flowing from your pen. I think there’s a writer buried in everyone, even those like the students in my first year class at St. Thomas University who say they “don’t read poetry.” I tease them about their allergy to uneven right hand margins, but I suspect someday the seeds of poetic flowers will germinate in their brains.
Now I have been retired from university teaching for five years and so of course I am teaching more than ever. It is a pleasure that continues, to cross verbalswords with youth. The bliss is perdurable because the students always turn out differently from what I expect — that is, if I ever find out. As the writer says in Fellini’s 8 1/2, “I have nothing to teach, and I am teaching it.”