Summer School
I’m off to Pennsylvania for the Westchester Poetry Conference with my poetry writing partner, D. We are attending “Exploring Form and Narrative,” three days of poetry readings and workshops. The conference features Donald Hall, Richard Wilbur, Kim Addonizio, Dana Gioia, Timothy Steele and Molly Peacock. I’m taking a master class with Molly Peacock, because her students love her and because I sat next to her at dinner one night in New York and she was hilarious and warm and brilliant and good. She writes poetry and prose, she wears cobalt blue silk, and she’s very funny; these are things I love in a teacher.
There was a period, about six years ago, where I started to feel blocked as a teacher. I was going to class and not loving every single minute. It was like falling out of love with dogs or honey-on-goat-cheese. I panicked. I pursued, for about two weeks, Ideas of Other Careers. I couldn’t imagine myself in Lubbers Hall, twenty years from now, saying the same things. It was a nervous breakdown or a midlife crisis. Part of the problem? I wasn’t a student any more. So I started taking classes. Now, every summer, I go away to school. Since I recovered Being A Student, I love my teaching again, and it’s going better than ever.
For the conference, I’ve written five sonnets and one narrative faux sonnet. What I will learn about structure might help me with poetry. It will help me as a teacher-I’m thrilled to have been assigned a poetry course for Fall 09. But I’m really there to think more deeply about my book of essays, essays about faith and relationship. It’s going to have an interesting and secret formal structure. The patterns, press, and resolve in the sonnet will illuminate this book-in-progress for me.
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