You Were Never (pandemic) Me, 2022
“Building, breaking, rebuilding.”
This was not the blog I intended to write today. Actually, for the first time ever, I had developed an editorial calendar for the next few months based on my recently offered and reprised Embody 2022 workshop and the upcoming season of Lent. (Note: If you are curious about joining the Embody workshop to help you better plan and put in motion your new year, click here.)
Then I read a poem. Or rather, I re-read a poem.
I am back in the physical classroom after two years of teaching remotely in Zoom, and it feels brand new. I have the anxiety of a new teacher and sometimes don’t know how to fill class time or even plan out a lesson. A couple of weeks ago, I simply ran out of content before the end of the class period so I just kept talking—at least I know how to do that. After 20+ years of teaching, I am totally unprepared.
Like everything post-covid, I am starting over. Nothing seems sure; nothing seems clear. Assignments that I taught for years no longer make sense.
Each semester in Comp 1, I teach a lesson in description and concrete, specific imagery using Carl Sandburg’s poem “Chicago” as a template for what I call a verse essay. It is a descriptive essay but rather than three to five paragraphs, it is six stanzas—it has a thesis and an argument, but fewer words. There are Comp gods somewhere spoiling for a fight regarding the validity of this approach (I wrote about that here), but I don’t believe in them, anyway.
Last week, when I sat down to prep this assignment—which I have taught at least five times before—it made no sense to me. I was totally baffled by my own materials so I delayed teaching it. I filled in yesterday’s class with something unmemorable—and brought Valentine’s Day candy—and hoped that it would make sense today.
Perhaps it is the full moon or the urgency of having to roll this assignment out tomorrow or the confluence of using this assignment as a blog post and therefore halving my already unmanageable workload, but today it all makes sense.
Especially now that I have rewritten the whole thing.
The Template: 2.0.22
For 2019, 2020, and 2021 versions of this poem and lesson, click here. For the post-Covid approach, please read on.
Your first essay is a verse essay using the form of Carl Sandburg’s “Chicago.”
The title of this poem comes from a postcard sent to a man called A.J. Liebling who wrote a series for “The New Yorker” labeling Chicago as The Second City and dragging the city through its own bluster, grit, and dirt.
Chicagoans were not pleased. His hate mail produced a memorable postcard that read, “You were never in Chicago.” Whoever wrote that card believed Liebling so missed the point of the city that he must not have ever been to Chicago at all.
Your first assignment is to write a verse essay about yourself so that no reader can miss the point of you.
“You Were Never Me” by You
1st Stanza. Welcome to Me.
Describe 5 things that you do well or that you are known for.
______________________________________
List 3 adjectives that describe you.
______________________________________
Share your nickname or pet name(s)/roles that describe you in the world. What do friends/family call you (you can have more than one)?
______________________________________
You were never 2 (adj), 1 (attribute), also known as 3(nickname).
___________________________________________________________________________________.
2nd Stanza: Unpack your adjectives
They say I am ___________________________________________________________ and I believe them, because ___________________________. (metaphor/simile for yourself)
And they tell me I am ________________________________ and I answer: Yes, it is true I have ___________________________ . (sensory description)
They think I am ____________________________________________________(describe how you are misunderstood), but I know I am ___________________________________. (simile/metaphor for yourself)
3rd Stanza: Describe what you do well.
Come and show me another person who __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________.
4th Stanza: Show me what you got.
What is a word that ties all your skills and talents (from the intro) together? Describe what you do and how you do it (in a minimum of 5 full narrative lines--claim, evidence, analysis).
___________________________________________________________________________________.
____________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________.
____________________________________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________________________________.
5th Stanza: List 3 -ing Words. Things you do/actions that you take on a regular basis that tell me about you.
______________________________________
______________________________________
______________________________________
6th Stanza: Revisit what makes you, you. Drop the Mic.
Revisit “thesis”
Your word
+ adjectives / -ing verbs
+ things you do well/known for
Remind the reader of the most important you-nesses of you & help her experience what it is like to be you because they were never you.
Because I am a good, though underprepared, professor somewhat stymied by the pandemic, I completed my own assignment.
Again.
You Were Never (pandemic) Me, by Me
Collector of cards, carver of words, into and from
the page. I connect you to the language that connects you
To yourself. To what you did not know you had.
To what you thought you had
lost. I am shot like Mercury from the sun:
Enthusiastic.
Sheer.
Disappointed.
Professor, writer, writer, poet.
You were never a disappointed carver of words also known as a writer.
They say I am enthusiastic, and I believe them because I prefer my sleep in pill form. I take
my rest in performance; my energy burns and rises like helium.
And they tell me I am sheer—the edge of a cliff, billowing sunlight, a pastiche torn from everything—and I answer, I am at the window, a gauzy curtain like a sail. See through me, wind fills me, caught by me.
And they think I am a disappointed hoarder, lover, privileger of words, consuming learning like the expanding universe eats what is not itself, because I do not recognize my margins, the poem breathes one more
line—come and show me another person who taps 26 unremarkable keys, soft clicks an arrhythmic dance of
emails, poems and essays, reports and complaints, into precise and boundless moments on a moment.
Or whose pen-point incantations—pinioned, spread open with the elation and despair of birth onto the white space of
remembering, revising, releasing.
What is possible: the beginning and the word, the cow and the moon, the deafening echo of nothing and the soundless space of it all. I trade in the possibility of never was/always is. A future perfect possible I will have been writing all my life: the line’s precipitous fall before me. I step over. And, impossibly, land—not through faith but of force, of the will to fail standing, fall through time’s indifferent horizon, like the diving man caught between death and suicide, no possibility of flight from here,
or here.
You were never so disappointed by possibility—
what you have and what you have lost, carved out of the page.
Remembered, revised, released—a messenger and a message,
shot like Icarus from the sun.
For the last few years, I simply revised the poem a bit each year. Actually, I lost 2017’s and 2018’s versions because I copied over them in my materials. I didn’t really think about how the poem or the project might evolve. Or how this application of poetry would lend itself to other projects and lessons.
And, of course, I didn’t know anything about the Covid.
But here we are, and here I am having written this assignment five or six times but never really understanding how much I didn’t tell me until now.
