it tries to break
the open door

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• I write in chaos. My desk is a mess, my floor is a mess; even if I’ve just cleaned, something is always a mess. I’m cultivating synchronicity, you see.

• I usually write at my desk where I sit on an exercise ball, but if it ‘s cold or I’m feeling especially lazy then I bring my laptop to bed. One day I will buy a kotatsu to use instead of my bed on cold days.

• Mostly, I wear my PJs or an old bathrobe while writing.

• I like to have the television going in the background or else a relevant Spotify playlist. For example, while working on my thesis, I listen to music related to the work of James Joyce. While I was writing about Lady Gaga, I listened to, well, Lady Gaga.

• I have a large French Press that lives next to my desk.

• When I proofread my work, I print out a copy (usually in a font different from the one I wrote in) and take it to a cafe. Sometimes, if the weather’s warm, this involves drinking a coffee (soy)milkshake.

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and shines through
where tonic wine
should slosh in

concrete gutter
without grass

This week, I finally had the chance to use an adapted version of an activity I first read about in Geri Lipschultz’s “Fishing in the Holy Waters” (College English 48.1 (Jan. 1986)), an article I mention briefly in my thesis. The core of the activity amounts to having students add standard punctuation to the text of the final episode of Ulysses. While Lipschultz describes using this activity in the composition classroom, I used it in a literature class that was reading selected parts of the novel.

Instead of asking them to add in the punctuation as an assignment, I had them do the entire activity in class: first they worked individually, and then they worked as a class with one student retyping the text into Word on the computer at the front of the room. Due to time constraints, they only got through 1-2 pages as individuals and a few sentences as a whole group, but given that one of the major reasons I wanted to try this activity was to show them how slowly one needs to read Joyce, I think of that as a success rather than a failure.

The greater success, however, came in the brief discussions held after each step in the process. My students demonstrated a strong understanding of both the content and style of the passage they worked on. They were also able to see different sides of questions that have no definitive answer—such as whether Joyce’s depiction of Molly is insulting or admiring.

The activity showed students who were put off somewhat by the difficulty and reputation for obscurity of Ulysses that they could, in fact, understand it.

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before they brown
covering the concrete
that rapidly dampens

in circles of darker
gray than the clouds

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Let us, however, consider it at the very least an illustrative coincidence. Canons often leave out whole populations for reasons that have nothing to do with the worthiness of the work they produce, and when a canon is supposed to function as the common core for an entire nation, then citizens of that nation who find that they have been left out because of their gender, race, or any other such factor must come to identify not merely with but actually as what they are not. As Judith Fetterley noted in The Resisting Reader,

To be excluded from a literature that claims to define one’s identity is to experience a peculiar form of powerlessness—not simply the powerlessness which derives from not seeing one’s experience articulated, clarified, and legitimized in art, but more significantly the powerlessness which results from the endless division of self against self.

Fetterley argued specifically that with American fiction’s canon being coded male, despite certain exceptions, women reading that canon have to identify as male while, simultaneously, being reminded that they are not. VIDA’s count reveals that any canon of poetry formed today would almost certainly have the same kind of effect. Even if a conscious effort to avoid the exclusion of women writer were successful, certainly other groups would be excluded. This is because canon formation is a political process.

There are worse things for “common ground” to be than a “trash heap.”

Not a Poetic Canon

What Bishop fears from the death of the canon is the loss of that common ground (whether or not it smells of mildewed french fries), or perhaps more precisely, the loss of a common language. He asks:

is there even one collection of poetry published in the last twenty-five years that most poets have read, and could discuss with one another, unprompted?

But I am unclear as to why it is so important that any random selection of poets should be able to discuss a particular collection. How much more exciting it would be for a random selection of poets (and other readers of poetry) to engage in conversation by reading each others’ favorite texts! How much more we could learn from each other if we taught each other the language we use to talk about our schools and our work—even if that mean engaging in the poetics equivalent of a Berlitz lesson (and why not? the realia would be right there in the form of the poetic work that should be the center of such discussion anyway).

In that space, there would be the equivalent of  a canon, yes, but it would be provisional and temporary. Its arbitrariness would be recognized.

We do not need homogeneity, or a single might canon, to talk to each other.

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Yes, I worked for this company. No, I wasn't there when it went bankrupt. (Photo credit: turnerw82 on Flickr)

For me, change has rarely been a series of edits. What I have excelled at is redrafting my life. I have now lived in Belfast for just over two-and-a-half years. The last city I lived in longer than this I left more than ten years ago when I moved to San Francisco to pursue my MFA. I rewrote my life as a struggling poet in pricey city. That draft was discarded after two-and-a-half years when, following my graduation, I moved to Japan. The first draft of my life there was at an eikaiwa school; the second, much happier one, at public elementary schools. There are a few more drafts between that one and my current draft as a doctoral candidate. And with every paragraph of my thesis I write, I get closer to the day when I will have to redraft my life again.

Just as a new draft isn’t an entirely new work, redrafting your life doesn’t mean discarding everything. I never stopped writing poetry. My experience teaching English as a foreign language inspired and continues to inform my doctoral research.

The really scary part about redrafting, whether in life or in writing, isn’t the unknown. New discoveries and challenges await. I find that exciting, but even if it made me nervous, it still wouldn’t be the hardest part. No, the most frightening part of redrafting is rereading. What if you find a mortifying mistake? A paragraph you’re ashamed to have written or a hairstyle you’re embarrassed to have worn? All of this has to be faced.

One can redraft without rereading, but that only rarely leads to better work, let alone a better life.

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concrete & glass
rises from the sidewalk
—empty

its alarm
may not be false