poetry is not a zero-sum game
there is room for you (and you are not alone)
Hello readers—thanks for being here. It’s been six months of this experiment now: six months of weekly essays here. Kind of hard to believe. I have benefitted from your presences and am grateful to be read by you. Thanks for your comments and thank you for sharing what I’ve written with others.
Just a note to say that if you are receiving these essays in your email but email stresses you out, you can always read them in-browser, or, if you use an RSS reader, you can add them using the address https://bewilderment.substack.com/feed. Once a week is a fast pace for writing and a very fast one for reading, especially when your inbox probably already has a lot of other interesting (?) things in it.
This month, a back-to-school month, I’m going to try to write four pieces loosely about writing—about teaching it and studying it, making it and doing it. For any and all who are re-entering the beautiful and difficult space of the classroom, happy new year!
I teach writing in universities as well as outside of universities. Right now I am employed by a university to teach writing. At many universities there is the writing everyone does, and then there is this other kind of writing: “creative” writing. That’s what the writing I teach is called, though I prefer to call it “writing” so as not to differentiate it too much from the process and activity that happens in biology labs and in literature classrooms. The adjective “creative” changes the ordinary activity called “writing”: in some circumstances it can make the writing seem suspect: is this ‘actual thought’? ‘real work’? just flights of fancy? therapy? What is this writing-with-the-adjective-creative-in-front-of-it? In other circumstances, I have seen the word “creative” make writing and the writing classroom feel impossibly out of reach, painful, or rarified. In this case, “'creative writing” becomes a place where one may be ranked (a “good” writer, a “bad” writer) or even a place where one cannot enter (because one senses or has been told that one is “not a writer”). So I think a lot about these two words, “creative” and “writing”, and how they are deployed together and apart in the places I work, and where those deployments come from, and what effects I observe and extrapolate from them.
The way I learned to write, to think about writing, and to think about “creative writing” means I can only imagine writing as something that’s done in the company of other people. This is the foundational truth about writing: we don’t do it alone. I mean it literally, too: I learned to write at the kitchen table and grew up doing my thinking and writing there, with at least one but up to five other people around me. Given this, how could I untangle some parts of my thinking and call them purely ‘mine’? As far back as I remember, thinking and writing have been things to which incidental noise, speech, music, and others’ ideas have contributed. And, of course, as most people do where I come from, I went to school, and there I learned to think and to write (and to draw and to sing and to run) in the company of peers and teachers.
Now I am the teacher, and the other people in the room when I think about and practice writing are students. In the writing classroom, in the best cases, there is the incredible sensation of—a student once called it ‘flying’—thinking together. Not me telling you, not us competing to be heard, but us, together, working something bigger than any of us out. It’s an incredible gift, that feeling of thinking-flight. And it has never happened to me when I’m working alone, but it’s happened many times when I’ve been thinking with others.
When I say ‘we don’t write alone’, I mean this in a permeating way, even outside the rooms where we are physically together. We don’t invent the alphabet, we don’t design private grammars, we don’t learn to speak or think in isolation. Our ideas come from our contexts, contexts of thought and of body. We read and are read books, we hear songs, we attend services in our religious traditions, we eavesdrop on strangers on the bus, and we sit in class where dozens or even hundreds of other language-users immerse us in the complexities of language. We learn about the world from others, in formal and informal education—even the hot pot that, touched, teaches me it is hot is an other whose company made it possible for me to know.
And writing itself is only possible because of other people’s labor, now and in the past. Not only my ideas and the technology of alphabet and grammar book, but the material possibility of writing is given to me by others. Everything that my writing uses to make itself is shared or inherited, from the design of the ballpoint mechanism in a pen, to the circuitry of my laptop keyboard, to the format of the A4/Letter paper the printer is built for, to the syntax of English, to our literary traditions that will, often before I realize it, make it possible for me to sort a given piece of text into the categories “poem” or “not-poem”.
All that said, I was educated in the way most people of my age and place were, which is to say in a system of education that was more or less openly competitive, in which one wanted—I wanted—to be a “good” writer, to be the “best” writer, even. After all, the writers we read were the best. They were the models, implicitly and explicitly, and so the frame of bestness was the model as well. To be a writer, I mean a Writer, to be read, seemed to mean to follow a path toward writing that came to me along a line of white, landed, nominally or actually Christian, English-speaking men (and some women). I didn’t think much about that as a young person; I didn’t have the language or the framing to do much thinking about that beyond noting it. I didn’t yet think about the way the literature I was given, in the education I was given, was shaped by a place and time where competition—in economics and also in a distorted understanding of science—was imagined as the natural state of things, and in which competition it was also ‘natural’ that those writers (people who looked, more or less, like me) should come out on top, so smoothly as not even to seem to have competed (much less made or broken the rules).
But now I think a lot about the way that frame was made, and what it means—that it is not a neutral or natural frame, that the aesthetic priorities given to me by my education are not historically neutral or neutral now. And I think it’s not a coincidence that in light of that education, I often thought that the point of learning to write was learning to be good at writing—by which I meant, good at (re)producing things that would be recognizable as poems in the tradition of the best writers, the ones I had been given to read.
I’ll come back to that idea of writing as “making recognizable things” later this month, but for now I’m going to turn back to competition and poetry. I had the real privilege of attending a big university in the US where there was an MFA program in writing housed in the same department where I was doing my undergraduate degree in English. And, perhaps to keep the numbers up for the MFA classes, once undergraduates entered their third year of the English degree, if they had taken all of the undergraduate workshops, they could petition to join MFA workshops. So I did this, and I was permitted to enter these workshops in poetry. I took an MFA workshop as part of my undergraduate degree for at least three semesters. (I now look back with some awe and a lot of gratitude on the kindness and tolerance of the more mature and much more worldly students in the MFA program who were my peers in those classes.)
In those workshops there was one poet whose work I felt especially thrilled by. That this poet was withdrawn and private added to the aura around her work for me. She seemed absolutely at a remove, mysterious. And poetry—the poetry of bestness, since her poems seemed best to me—therefore was also mysterious. How did she do what she did? I could not write like her, I found. How, in a world where poets like her existed, would I ever be able to write anything? I spent many months trying to write poems like that poet, trying to capture the ways she used words and images, trying to imitate her tone. I loved her work so much, and in ways I couldn’t articulate, that it came to seem to me that she was the “best” poet, and that in order to be a poet at all I would need to imitate her. There are still images from her poems that I think of, twenty years later!
Then I graduated from the university with my BA, and I was accepted into that very MFA program—a great gift on the part of my teachers to me, it is safe to say that that admission shaped the course of my life. (Thank you, Ray and MDB, Maria and Maria, David, Jan, Jeff and Karl, thank you, my fate, I’m unworthy, how beautiful my life.) As I prepared to begin the MFA, I thought about my feelings for this poet’s work, and I thought about what those feelings did to me: I felt wonder at and joy in her poems’ beauty, and I also felt jealousy, and I felt competitive, and then I felt incapable and small. My awe at her work often left me bereft of a sense of my own. In trying to make poems that seemed “successful” to me—which meant, poems that only hollowly recalled hers—I had lost some of the joy and richness that drew me to poetry in the first place. That joy and richness was the play of poetry, the multiplicity of it, the maximalism of it, how there was always more of it to be had, and all so different. (My college education had by that point complemented my high school reading with a broad awareness of contemporary US poetry, some contemporary poetry from Ireland and the UK, and a fair amount of 20th-century poetry translated from Spanish and Japanese.)
Poetry, I was coming to learn, meant making things, not just falling in line behind someone else’s made things. I knew that the three years of the MFA program were a gift. I wanted to spend them open to as much as possible, not anxious about whether or not my poems were good by comparison to poets I admired. I wanted to be a learner, not an expert. How can I change my approach, I thought. At that point, I came to a conclusion and made a decision that in hindsight were some of the most important parts of my writerly education.
I decided that for the duration of the MFA program, all three years, I would not send any work out or try to have anything published. I would only write, read, go to class, work, see friends, and try to learn everything I could about everything. I would try to understand what I was doing and could do. I would not worry about publication. I would try to find other things to hook my reasons to. I don’t think I put it this way then—I don’t think I had the language or the self-awareness—but I knew that changing my focus from ‘success’ in terms of publication or recognition to the ongoing practice of learning to write and read and think would keep me from feeling competitive. And, corollary to this, I realized—and this is verbatim; I recall the realization happening, in the third-floor corridor of Lind Hall—that there simply was room for both the poet I revered and for me to be good writers.
In the years since, that understanding—that art is a category and a way of life capacious enough for all art, that no one person’s artistic or intellectual life is a threat to any other’s, that writing is not a zero-sum game—has been at the center of my writing and teaching life. How I think about it has gotten more intricate, but that’s the basic fact and it’s still there, at the ground level of what I do and how I do it. I’ve learned what it means to say that art/writing has space for all of us by editing and publishing others, by reading and thinking, by being published myself, by hearing students and other writers talk about their complex feelings and longings around publication (and not publishing, too).
We don’t have to compete. We don’t have to accept a system built on scarcity, whether that’s a publishing and awards system or a grades and rankings system. (Later this month, I will write about what I mean by not accepting such a system.) There is room for all of us to be careful, thoughtful, serious, intent writers and makers of texts. In fact, that’s what’s most needed in the writing classroom, and in the world, I think. We need one another’s company. More thinkers, more makers. Less sense of others’ beauty or ability or even success on the world’s terms as something that diminishes anyone else’s. Less walking into the writing classroom or even into the book with a sense of “what good writing looks like” in advance (the thing I struggle with most in the writing classroom is the desire to ‘fix’ writing rather than describe it. You may have been there, too? In a workshop where everyone wants to tell the writer how to make the work better, but the work is sitting there just begging to be read? ‘Fixing’ a poem almost always means making it conform to established ways of being rather than taking the time to see how it might contravene or expand those ways of being, i.e. seeing what it does).
It’s transformative to understand that more art simply = more art, and one thing this realization transforms is our loneliness. So many of us feel deeply alone. Competition increases that feeling. Maybe remembering that writing is first of all shared—your kindergarten teacher guiding your hand along the lines of the letters, your parent reading to you—is a way toward an art in which there is room for all of us to make things that are worth the lives we spend on them, an art that is for everyone, for ordinary life, and not only for sale to the highest bidder. Writing is for everyone, and it is one of the most fundamental things we do. We make letters, we use language, and language moves through us. No one is excluded. You’re already home. What if we start there, in the writing classroom or at the writing desk—with the sense that there is room for all of us? How much deeper might we go into our investigations of the living world and the world of our literary pasts? How much more freely might we invent if we did not feel that somewhere in the work of writing was lodged the work of winning?
What might that look like, the world that comes out of writing with seriousness and intention, accompanied by rather than in competition with one another and the whole history and present of human thought and art? Let’s go find out.
Thanks for reading.
Oh, I've missed your writings. I remember reading your blog at OhBara, was it? I think I even sheepishly mailed you once asking whether you taught writing classes online (sadly, not). Thankful you're taking the time to your share your thoughts on writing and process. There is room for all of us -- yes! I'm going to embroider that next.