December 10: dancing before walking

As you may know, I teach freshman English composition at a community college in Chicago. While I do believe I am rather good at teaching, I am not particularly good at teaching composition. It’s kind of boring and, when the students don’t listen to or do what I ask, it slides into painful.

My students are rarely interested in the composition topics I give them but, when I encourage them to pick their own and presumably much more compelling topics, they can’t come up with any. They don’t seem interested in researching much about the world outside of themselves or sharing it in an essay format.

Most of them have been writing unsuccessful arguments, process analysis, and compare/contrast essays for at least 10 years. They don’t understand or care about the stymied logical and grammatical standards that further confuse the already confusing thoughts in their heads. Here is the feedback they most frequently receive:

Dear Student, I appreciate your effort here. You have some interesting ideas, but I have a hard time understanding your point because of your vague thesis and lack of specific evidence. While your organization generally follows the model we discussed in class, your paper is too short, lacks secondary sources, and ends without a compelling conclusion. Don’t let your lack of clarity get in the way of your good ideas.

Or at least it’s the feedback I most frequently write. I will copy and paste the above paragraph, with some modifications, about 40 times over the next week as I grade final essays. But one sentence I will not change is the last one:

Don’t let your lack of clarity get in the way of your good ideas.

I will include that sentence on 99.9% of the papers I grade.

I believe that no matter how clever and creative I am as a comp professor, the rhetorical essay, as the avenue for learning how to get ideas from the head onto the page in a manner that others can understand, is painfully ineffective.

But you know what’s not ineffective?

Poetry.

As a writer, I fully believe that the words that come to the mind of anyone capable of expression can only come to that mind. The particular and singular net of one person’s experience captures from the ether combinations of words and images that can be caught by that net alone.

Those words, once caught, often sit and that net and rot. The rules and regs for getting those words onto the page are unreasonable. I am a free market writer. A Republican of English comp.

But you know what’s not unreasonable?

The rules of poetry.

Over the last few years, I have developed a series of composition assignments that I call “verse essays.” The first one uses Carl Sandburg’s Chicago as its rhetorical mode. I wrote about it back in 2018 and shared it here.

Recently, I developed a second assignment using Wallace Stevens’s “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and gave it to my Composition II class.

I don’t think my creation of these assignments is original at all. Actually, I am a bit embarrassed by the triteness of it. I am sure a million English teachers have asked students to read Stevens’s poem and write a similar poem.

But I am not asking students to write a poem; I am asking them to write an essay that looks like a poem.

I do not teach this assignment as a lesson in how to write poetry; I teach it as a lesson in composition. I can, and do, give composition students essay outlines to use to build their papers for every assignment. My outline models are essentially Mab Libs—fill-in-the-blank templates—in which they simply replace the sentence in the outline with the sentence they will use in their essay, but they still don’t do it. Even after teaching them how to do this for 12-16 weeks, I receive outlines with thesis sentences like, “I will put my thesis here.”

But when I give composition students an outline in the form of a poem, with almost no instruction other than “write a piece like this,” they do it. All but the most recalcitrant compose on time, completely, and with vigor. The compositions students create from this assignment are rarely unclear, vague, trite, or too short.

This is the place in my essay where I should provide some of my students’ verse essays, but they’re not ready (neither the compositions nor the students). Or perhaps I could write my own “13 way of looking” verse essay, but I’ve already done that here.

If I created a comp class in which students wrote verse essays rather than rhetorical compositions, I think I would get in trouble: This isn’t supposed to be creative writing, it’s meant to be composition! Students need to write sustained examinations of worthwhile topics using clear and compelling language that draws on the body of scholarship and is framed by original and meaningful insights, not poems!

Okay.