Poetry Field School

My first experience teaching poetry workshops began, like many, during graduate school. As part of my funding package I was assigned one section of Creative Writing Workshop per semester—a prospect that, though exciting, seemed kind of preposterous. I didn’t have an English degree (in fact, my college hadn’t even had an English department) and I was self-conscious about my lack of bona fides. My idea of a college professor was someone who could effortlessly spout theory and drop-quote any author in the Western canon, whereas I was more likely to quote my mom. I attended the TA training session hoping it would ease my fears and give me some direction, but instead felt even more out of place. Everyone else seemed to have the same well of background knowledge—what the definition of “quid pro quo” was, for example. It reminded me of the first day of my advanced high school English class when, mid-discussion of Yeats’s poem “The Tower,” I’d raised my hand to ask what “phallic” meant. It’s not that I didn’t feel smart or do well in school—I did—but I’d always been off-pace somehow, caught up in my own world of influences and obsessions that had very little overlap with either formal education or cultural cachet. Now, teaching seemed like it had the potential to be a public unveiling of this fact.

I spent the final days of summer trying to calm myself by triple-checking my grading rubric math and collaging syllabus covers out of vintage photographs of women jumping rope. I combed through my closet, searching for an outfit that conveyed the right combination of professorial authority and personal style; I should have been more focused on finding something I couldn’t sweat through. When the first day of class finally rolled around, I was so nervous. I remember walking towards the English building trying not to hyperventilate, muttering: You are in a movie. You are in a movie playing the part of a woman who is very good at teaching.

I wouldn’t call my classes a disaster, exactly, but there were definitely some bumps. For one thing, my nerves never fully went away. Lecturing was often an out of body experience—a bad and awkward one, characterized by frequent lapses in train of thought. Another hurdle was that many of my students didn’t seem particularly interested in Creative Writing Workshop. This was a development I found surprising but not altogether unreasonable. Can I just tell the ones who don’t care that they can stop attending, and I’ll give them a B? I’d asked my course supervisor. The answer (obviously and unequivocally) was I could not. Yet, I had neither the confidence nor the appetite to proselytize the value of poetic writing, so instead of challenging the apparent ambivalence of my students, I mirrored it. Our mutual indifference reflected back and forth with increasing vigor until I was the one arriving late to class with an unclear agenda and unfinished assignment handouts. After four semesters of middling student reviews, misplaced attendance sheets and failed “no phones” policies, it was easy enough to conclude that teaching was simply not for me.

After graduating, I held a variety of jobs: barista, nanny, volunteer coordinator, until finally securing a position as program assistant at a small liberal arts college. I liked getting the perks of academia (library access, healthcare, fitness center, free French classes) without having to be an academic. And I loved the students, with whom I formed close relationships through my role as academic advisor. Talking things through with people was a lot more comfortable for me than instructing them had ever been. It’s funny, because in a lot of ways the stakes are higher in academic advising than they are in teaching poetry, but the setting allowed me to both extend and admit the limits of my knowledge, something I’d never been relaxed enough to do as a teacher.

Over time, my duties at the college were expanded to include working in the writing center, where the small, informal classes served as a nice midpoint between teaching and advising. It’s largely this experience that led me to accept Peter Burghardt’s (if you’re not familiar, here is my happy chance to tell you to check out the wonderful Spect Books) invitation to lead a community workshop at University Press Books in Berkeley. I still felt pretty unsure of myself as a “teacher" but the format of the participation-led workshop was a better fit than the more hierarchical models of typical college courses. And I really loved talking about people’s poems with them; editing has always been my favorite part of writing and since the content of this class was up to me, that’s what I focused on. We didn’t really talk about “the value of writing” or even “how to write.” It was a collective deep dive into the mechanics and properties of poetic language in a way that felt generative and useful, qualities I’ve always prized in any endeavor. When a few months later a series of tumultuous life events resulted in a sudden relocation to Los Angeles and no particular job prospects, I decided to see if I could offer a workshop of my own.

“Going to be offering a poetry writing workshop in LA, DM if you want to sign up” I tweeted, with little expectation of getting any bites. When someone messaged me to ask for details, I was pleasantly shocked and also forced to acknowledge that I didn’t really have any details to offer. “When would work for you?” I asked. More people signed up and eventually we reached quorum. One student even offered up her home as our meeting location in exchange for discounted tuition—good news since I was sleeping on a friend’s couch at the time. At our first class, everyone sat in an uneven circle eating chips as we workshopped. I remember halfway through class, one of the students reached up and removed what turned out to be a clip-on ponytail. “Oh, you thought that was my real hair?” she said, laughing at my shock, “No... I just came from a costume session.”

Right away, I was so much more at ease than I had been teaching any other class. There was an intimacy and candor to our meetings that made me better able to provide constructive feedback in ways that were natural to me. Previous teaching experiences had always involved at least mild bouts of imposter syndrome as I chased notions of “expertise” that continually eluded me, but sitting in the living room of a Los Angeles punk house, I was able to speak of poetry as I experience it—not as an academic discipline only accessible to those with specialized knowledge, but as art made out of the material of language, open to all. While I understand (and have been the lucky beneficiary of) the role of academic institutions within the poetic ecosystem, I do not think they are fundamental to one’s growth as a writer. Good poetry workshops have as much to do with listening as they do with talking; good poetry teachers are those with finely tuned ears, not fine pedigrees. The anxiety I felt so many years ago, before that very first class—the shame of not having read the right things or having gone to the right school—is a marker of the increasingly professionalized landscape of poetry. But the truth is, community-based writing workshops have been an integral part of the poetic tradition far longer than those housed in academia. Many of my favorite writers—June Jordan, Jack Spicer, Jayne Cortez, Audre Lorde, Dodie Bellamy, CAConrad, LA Warman, Vi Khi Nao, and Ben Fama, to name a few—have made a practice of offering poetry classes without institutional affiliation. In The Gentrification of the Mind (a book I was turned onto by my student Rachel Rabbit White) Sarah Schulman writes:

One hundred radical students in low-income writing classes in New York City could actually have an impact on our literature. And, it can help those of us who are good teachers and need to work for a living, to realize that while we need jobs to survive, we don’t always need institutions in order to teach.

It’s been nearly four years since I started the Poetry Field School (named in homage to the practical, hands-on pedagogy of experiential learning programs and also as a nod to William Carlos Williams’s assertion that poems should be approached as a “field of action”) and in that time I’ve had more students come through my classes than I can count. Teaching independent poetry workshops is much more than my job; it has, in many ways, become my politics. My courses are sliding scale and the student body is largely comprised of artists, queers, sex workers, and low-income laborers. People take my classes for all different reasons—some are highly skilled poets looking for structure, others have never really written before and just want to give poetry a try; it is my belief this only adds dimension to the courses. We meet each week, online or in my living room, and for a few hours we talk about the craft of poetry. There’s no set curriculum, we follow tangents as they arise, passing around a box of cookies or swapping book recs during breaks. Work is encountered, not decoded, and students are encouraged to respond using all their senses, with the understanding that all feedback is useful insofar as it is genuine and resonant. I love my students absolutely and share everything I can with them, as they do with each other. The spaces we create sustain me as a person and a writer; they’ve expanded my life, my sense of possibility, and my belief in the power of community to eclipse hierarchy in ways I never even imagined.