First Class
Selected notebook entries (1950–53), first published in The Antioch Review (1969), then in Straw for the Fire.
STICK OUT YOUR CAN, here comes a lesson-plan.
Flat words from a fat boy. What pearls are there to cast to colleagues?
To teach by suggestion or “intuitively” takes more time than teaching by precept or lecturing. For you carry the students in your mind and in reading think, “There’s a swell example to show Flossie…” To teach very fast, by associational jumps—to teach a class as a poem—is dangerous but very exciting. It is possible to build up a “charge” with a group and blast away in a kind of mass diagnosis.
I used to teach like killing snakes: a constant pressuring.
To teach too intensively is to get so involved in particular psyches that there can be an actual loss of identity; destructive both to student and teacher. I remember a student saying, “You carry us farther than we could ever go alone. Then when you’re gone, it’s too much to face.” Let’s face it: much of this kind of teaching may perform the function of psychiatry, but it is absolutely fatal to proceed from such a premise or become self-conscious about what you’re up to.
My teaching is a variety of coaching, really: both athletic and musical.
Most good teachers attempt the Socratic assumption of ignorance, but are often handicapped by their very real and sometimes vast knowledge: I have the advantage over such fellows in that I really don’t know anything and can function purely: the students have to teach themselves.
If you teach by suggestion, there must be plenty to suggest from—a bale of examples. Anthologies are often inert.
You’re referee, and sometimes the job is as hazardous as in ice hockey. Sure, it’s possible, with a tweed jacket and a pipe and a choice collection of polysyllables to hold certain of the young at bay, to cow them. But they won’t be the best ones.
We expect the hot flash and we get the cold stale inert lumpish inanities, the heavy archness, the smirking self-satisfaction.
Are there dangers? Of course. There are dangers every time I open my mouth, hence at times when I keep it shut, I try to teach by grunts, sighs, shrugs.
To the extent that I talk, I am a failure as a teacher.
You can’t go out to all of them: all the way. That way lies madness and death. As it is, you work harder than most psychiatrists—and get much further faster, more humanly, painlessly.
I ask you: I beg you: bring to this task all the sweetness of spirit you possess. Leave your neuroses at home, and while there, make them work for you, or exorcise them from your best being.
A too excessive concern over students can mean: (1) death of the teacher; (2) distortion of the student: a sense of weakness or reliance.
The essential thing: that they not be loused up, warped, unduly twisted, played upon, brought to the wrong ends, led to the stony pasture.
I’d rather just sit around and dribble little bits of teaching wisdom… one of the more valiantly disorganized minds of our time.
In teaching, gruffness may be the true cortesía.
In writing you must go ahead; in teaching, so much of the time, you must go back.
I take it I’m to stand up for Poesy, but not say anything to make anyone nervous. For you know: one of the problems of the lyric poet is what to do with his spare time; and sometimes it becomes the community’s problem too. It worries people. I know when I came out to Seattle, the head of my department said, “Ted, we don’t know quite what to do with you: you’re the only serious practicing poet within 1500 miles.” I sort of was given to understand I had a status between—if it were Oklahoma—between a bank-robber and a Congressman.
Teaching: one of the few professions that permit love.
Look, I’m the greatest dumb teacher alive.
You think and I’ll say.
Look how “wicked” we are: we have a poet who’s a full professor.
A hot shot of the hard word—is that what you want? I feel strangely diffident. I’m a sport, an anachronism: nobody ever told me where to go.
I’ve had a most savage attack of humility of late; the notion that seems to horrify some of you is that you’re not only expected to do some work, but actually supposed to teach the teacher. I assure you that is astonishingly easy to do.
How wonderful the struggle with language is.
The recording apparatus must be mature: complete and steady enough to rely on itself. There can’t be any brash barkings into the bass drum or simpers off into the wings or cozy thigh-crossings: everybody hates the unformed. You’re a speaking foetus, get it? A soft-boiled egg wobbling on one leg, looking for the edge of a cup or saucer… You roar, not from a true disquietude of the heart, but from growing-pains… spiritual teething. This fledgling’s cheep would disgrace a magpie.
When you roar, make sure it’s from a true disquietude of the heart, not a mere temporal pinch… In the end, if you aspire to the visionary’s toughness, you not only have to chew your own marrow, but then must spit it in your neighbor’s eye.
In this first assignment just care about words. Dwell on them lovingly.
For Christ’s sake, awake and sing! You’re as conditioned as old sheep.
It’s the damned almost-language that’s hardest to break away from: the skilled words of the literary poet.
The artist (not the would-be): you may have deep insights—but you also need the sense of form. Sometimes the possession of the first without the second may be tragic.
Good poets wait for the muse, the unconscious to spring something loose, to temper and test the promptings of the intuition with the pressures of craftsmanship: they can think while they sing.
If only this rare rich ripe deviousness could be put to some useful work.
I’ll deliver you, dear doves, out of the rational, into the realm of pure song.
It’s true many of the lessons are the same; in fact, almost reduce themselves to one lesson: cutting. But the applications, the variations are infinite.
To be too explicit destroys the pleasure. This the Irish know, to whom the half-said’s dearest.
I have to be concrete. Everything else scares the hell out of me.
Immobility is fatal in the arts.
To bring you out of that purposelessness—surely that is a great thing, even if you move but an inch from yourselves…
The artist doesn’t want to be articulate about something until he is finally articulate. One can talk away certain themes, spoil them.
That intense profound sharp longing to make a true poem.
One form of the death wish is the embracing of mediocrity: a deliberate reading and re-reading of newspapers…
To day there’s no time for the mistakes of a long and slow development: dazzle or die. Would Yeats’s career be possible in this country today?
The “other” poems in Yeats… had to set the stage for his best work. If he had not written at such length, he might not have been heard.
What would you rather be—happy or Hölderlin?
Much of poetry is an anguished waiting.
One of the virtues of good poetry is the fact that it irritates the mediocre.
I can’t understand the condescension many “professional” poets have for the young. Usually it seems defensive, a form of fear or even a kind of jealousy.
Uncle Easy,
You mustn’t be queasy:
I haven’t forgotten
Cousin Rotten.
Behold the heavy-footed bard
With rhythms from the lumberyard.
In him all the oafs, dolts, bumpkins, and clods, living and dead, connect and contend.
A bewildered bardling: no real feeling except a thin intense hatred of his contemporary superiors.
The gutsy, self-appreciating tone
Is something only he can make his own:
The true provincial wit, he never reads
Except the thing his little spirit needs:
I find it comic that he speaks of voice
Who never made a rhythm without noise.
A great one for hurrahing early work; but as soon as the subject departs from the rude thumps and lubberly staves of the lisping idiotic boy, he has “abandoned his muse” or is depending on mere cleverness. What a burden he bears, carrying the weight of criticism for us all. How fiercely he guards his few nuggets of wisdom. In the perpetual hunt for merit, he is content to scavenge.
The critics: they have taught poets much about what not to do—for one thing, to avoid pleasing them.
The critic’s attitude: this poem exists for me to verbalize about it.
A culture in which it is easier to publish a book about poetry than a book of poems.
These shabby detractors; these cheap cavilers, gurgling with their jargon: they’re fatter in the head than the worst priests of disillusion.
The pip-squeak peripheral dippers: they could come to a full circle in the middle of a plugged nickel: it’s no good declaring them frauds: they retain their dubious virtues. It’s true in the tiny areas they leak and squeak in: sand-fleas of the soul on the immense beaches of desolation. Meanwhile the wind’s where it is: the sun plays in the dark leaves of the acanthus. Locality is alive…
How do I know what I said? Half the time I wasn’t listening.
I was committed to the future: and in a sense only the future existed.
I don’t think anybody ever yearned more for a public than I did.
What have I done, dear God, to deserve this perpetual feeling that I’m almost ready to begin something really new?
A profound dissatisfaction with these tin-cans, frigidaires, barbered prose, milk and water fantasies.
If poetry can kill you, I’m likely to die.
The exactly right goose to a tired psyche: the Socratic method is exhausting with uneven material; worse with limited. To hell, I say, with the conference. It’s enough for me to listen, and cut away, and suggest, quickly. Come up before or after class. None of this breast-feeding.
Well, well, have I become no more a dug? Let’s have an end to this shameless breast-feeding from one who doesn’t pretend to know anyway: you don’t cut the mustard always with silver: Any old stick, pie-tin, or pencil’s material to beat out the meter of happy bones.
We may not be going far: but even beyond the door is a great way in this journey. “I’ve lost it,” he said: the gift for the creative reverie. I no longer listen and wait, but hear only the snapping clichés, our whole life driving toward coarse abstractions.
A honey-seeker numb as a bee in November.
To recover the fine extravagance, the bravado, the true bravura…
To find my own labyrinth and wind there,
A placid worm…
You two trees, don’t think you’re a wood …
My feet leap with the dancing dead…
What to do when the fresh metaphors flash forth—that is a facer…
For who would tinker when the muses say?
I call the light out of someone else.
Sing up, sing all, a Socrates of fury.