Yesterday I participated in a Twitter chat about teaching poetry, moderated by a Frost Place teacher. I use the word participated loosely, as most of my contribution involved blinking and gawking. The Twitter medium has almost nothing to do with how my brain works: I read last night's "conversation" as quick, abbreviated interruptions and announcements, but clearly many excellent English teachers love it and find it useful.

For me, the experience highlighted the importance of staying patient and open-minded about the ways in which people learn. This isn't about being old-fashioned versus cutting edge. Plenty of those eager chatterers are as old I am, whereas both of my screen-savvy sons hate Twitter.

Thank goodness our Frost Place teachers are eager to step into arenas where I do not shine. I can write 20-page essays and synthesize ideas from various historical eras and listen and support and suggest, but I cannot coherently disseminate 140-character poetry lesson plans via #s and @s.

Chestnut Ridge: A Preface and a Poem, from a Collection That Might Finally Have Found Its Form

Preface

The Chestnut Ridge region of southwestern Pennsylvania—also known as  the Laurel Highlands or the Connellsville seam—stretches alongside the Allegheny Mountains from Latrobe down to Uniontown, near the West Virginia border. When I was a child visiting there in the 1970s, I thought of it as The Land Where Nothing Has Ever Happened or Ever Will. But in truth, the region has, over a span of 250 years, undergone an extraordinary metamorphosis, shifting from dense wilderness to chaotic industrial hell before collapsing into the exhausted Rust Belt desolation I knew so well.

As a gateway to the Mississippi, the Allegheny region was, for early travelers, a primary river and land route south into the Appalachians and north into Canada. Thus, it has long attracted wanderers, pioneers, missionaries, immigrants, and schemers; and its strategic importance made it a major battlefield during the French and Indian War. Young George Washington, who suffered a spectacular defeat there during the first battle of his career, returned to the ridge as an aging ex-president, hoping to recoup what he’d lost in unprofitable land speculation. In the 1840s, writing in his travel journal, Charles Dickens mused over the cabins he saw clinging to the hillsides, wondering who might live in this lovely, remote, alluring, mysterious place.

Humans have had an incalculable influence on every inch of our planet, but their impact on the Chestnut Ridge has been particularly brutal. The impetus behind the region’s rapid shift from frontier to furnace was coal—not the hard, relatively clean-burning anthracite coal of northeastern Pennsylvania and the western states but the smoky, soft, polluting, bituminous coal that was the fundamental ingredient in coke, fuel of choice for making steel. The coal beneath Chestnut Ridge was key to the wealth not only of Henry Clay Frick, who controlled most of the area’s coking operations, but also of Andrew Carnegie, who built U.S. Steel on the back of Connellsville coke, as well as financiers such as Andrew Mellon and Charles Schwab and transportation magnates such as the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Thomas Scott.

Meanwhile, the coke ovens burned. The miners carried their lunch buckets down the shafts, into darkness. Children were born, and old men died. In Scottdale—my mother’s hometown, and also Frick’s, a hamlet once known as Fountain Mills but renamed in honor of Scott the Railroad King—I whiled away the summer climbing hay bales and pitching bottles into the quarry and listening to my grandfather try to cough up the coal dust trapped in his lungs. Meanwhile, Frick’s coke ovens, cold and empty, crumbled into the roadside weeds. One might say that the land was reasserting its claim to itself. But the scars—in stone, in flesh: even then I knew they would remain.

**

The Historian’s Wife Describes the Appalachian Plateau (1930)

Dawn Potter

Imagine a massive dining-room table

spread with a damask cloth whose starched

folds are difficult to climb. Once this table-

land was ironed smooth. Then up lurched

Chestnut Ridge, unruly as a soup stain

or a badly darned tear. In those days the sea

came and went, and came and went. When

the waters left, the table was the property

of trees and humid swamps and ferns as grand

as modern man though now he rules supreme.

Then the sea rushed back, and with it sand;

and again the waves fell back, again they streamed,

spoiling the ferns, rotting the trees and their fruit.

Meanwhile, time applied her bitter tinctures;

the careless sea swept in her dustpans of silt.

It was a vast tedium that contrived our future.

[Versions of these pieces appeared in Hawk & Handsaw: The Journal of Creative Sustainability, vol. 5 (2012)]

Lately I've received a little flurry of requests for manuscript reviews. This has been a real pleasure as I love reading and talking about work in progress. In my copyeditor role, I spend much of my day doing line-level repair work. When I judge a contest or choose work for a magazine, I have to think competitively: what's better? what's worse? what pieces speak to one another in this context? Manuscript consultation is a whole different story. I get to focus on larger questions such "What's going on in this piece?" That kind of question may seem obvious; but as a professional reader who gets hired to work at many specific levels, I've had to learn to hone my reactions to the situation. If I've been contracted to look at passive-voice and capitalization problems in your academic prose, I'm not going to have the luxury of standing back and saying, "So what internal pressure pushed you to write this book?" Neither the publisher nor the author has any interest in pursuing that question with me.

But when an author asks me to look at a work in progress, my eyes shift. It's like looking through a different glass: new elements come into focus; others withdraw into blur. My task now is to absorb these voices, these images, these characters; to exist within these structures and frames; to note where they wobble, veer, contradict; and to ask questions about those movements.

I don't want to make the author write like me. I want her to write more like herself.

My band Doughty Hill is performing tonight, 7-10 p.m., at Pat's in Dover-Foxcoft, so put on your big boots and your down coat and come listen to us. As side activities, you can also eat pizza and watch your basketball bracket continue to crash and burn.

Basketball brackets are one of the childish amusements I share with Paul. We make them together every year, and every year they are awful. This year we also made them for the pets, Ruckus and Anna, who are currently doing much worse than we are. The lesson in this is that my son and I seem to be very skilled in making stupid choices and stupider choices. We have a weakness for comical mascots, places we've been, Cinderella teams from previous years, and teams not coached by obnoxious old lizards. This is not scientific decision making.

To his great and delirious joy, my seventeen-year-old son has just been cast as Guildenstern in his high school's spring production of Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Probably many of you teachers and writers already know the schtick of this play. The two central characters are minor figures in Shakespeare's Hamlet, and the action of Stoppard's play mostly takes place in Hamlet's wings--which is to say, we're supposed to imagine that Hamlet is being performed on the real stage while Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is happening offstage.  The other characters in Hamlet make brief appearances in this play, but Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are mostly confused about what's going on in that drama.

Stoppard's play is often described as "an absurdist, existentialist tragicomedy," and my son wonders how an audience of local parents will react to such a thing (though apparently a few of the teachers are quite excited about it). In our memory, there has never been such weirdness on his high school's stage. Yet the play was first staged in 1966; it's almost a half-century old.

As I was waiting around for a parent-teacher conference yesterday, I overheard banter between two teachers, one of whom was sitting in a chair in the hallway looking at his phone.

Teacher 1: Are you disguising yourself as a parent? 

Teacher 2: What parent would be wearing a tie?

In a way, this conversation sums up the complications of daring to stage a mid-twentieth-century absurdist, existentialist tragicomedy in early twenty-first-century rural America. The simple acquisition of a public school teaching job opens an enormous chasm. Whether or not the people on either side are more or less innocent, more or less insular, more or less patient with strangeness and the unknown, one side wears a tie, and the other does not. So many complications arise: defensiveness and scorn and embarrassment, a tendency to retreat into oneself, or to become a windy blowhard, or to pretend that what we don't know doesn't matter, or to suspect that the outside world is conspiring against us.

In fact, this is exactly how Rosencrantz and Guildenstern feel.

A Love Note for Teachers on Parent-Teacher Conference Day

Today is Parent-Teacher Conference Day at the high school. As a parent, I have the easy part of this deal: three 10-minute sessions in which my child's individualized weirdness is distilled into (1) has an amazing variety of arcane information in his head, (2) gets distressed easily, (3) gets excited easily, (4) does his homework too fast. The teachers have the hard job. Drooping under fluorescent lights till well past their bedtime, they get to purvey hundreds of kid generalizations to a passel of parents who are more or less upset that their children won't stop being wacky and imperfect.

Dear teachers, I just want to let you know, in case it doesn't come up in our 10 minutes of examining quiz grades and discussing performance gaps, that wacky and imperfect are exasperating but fascinating. I don't expect you to fix them, though I'd be happy if you enjoyed them. Melodrama has a noble history, and homework is boring, but nail him if he doesn't get it done.

Now go home, have a cup of tea and a hot bath, sit down in a comfortable chair, and start reading a book you will never, ever have to teach. Didn't you become a teacher because you loved your subject? Don't forget to keep loving it--for yourself, first. Because if students start to figure out that their teachers are passionate and curious, then wacky and imperfect might begin to seem like the first awkward steps into a broad and mysterious future.

In "The Tears of the Muses," Edmund Spenser wrote:

Through knowledge we behold the world's creation,
How in his cradle first he fost'red was;
And judge of Nature's cunning operation,
How things she formed of a formless mass:
By knowledge we do learn ourselves to know,
And what to man, and what to God, we owe.

Spenser wrote this poem in 1591. His allusions may not match your contemporary conceptions of nature, religion, or humankind. But there's no getting around the truth that "by knowledge we do learn ourselves to know" and that such knowledge helps us figure out what we owe to the world outside ourselves.

On a side note: Spenser dedicated this long poem "to the Right Honorable The Lady Strange"--a real woman but also, perhaps, a metaphor for mystery and oddness; for those unexpected, jarring, epiphanic moments of synthesis and perception. Dear teachers, I'd like my wacky and imperfect child to meet The Lady Strange in your classes--now and then, between tests and quizzes and homework reviews. She is, as Spenser writes, a "most brave and noble Lady," and her presence can change the direction of a life . . . not just theirs, but yours. The vitality of your passion and curiosity is the greatest gift you share with your students. "Through knowledge we behold the world's creation," and that world includes your inner life. By treasuring it, you teach our children to treasure theirs.

I spent some time yesterday afternoon copying out a few Hayden Carruth poems, working to reorient myself within the thought-landscape of poetry. The cadences under my fingers; the grammatical peace; the hairpin turns of lyric and narration, anger and pleasure: the experience of copying out those three poems was so satisfying that I wonder why I haven't done more of it lately.

In "Particularity" Carruth laments, "How it is blurring, oozing / slowly away from / me. This is an / awful moment / / every time." The lines evoke both the withdrawals of aging and the imaginative drought of the creator. The speaker is left with "only this invisible / hereness where I am," "the center of mystery," the flicker in the oil lamp.

The gift of the poem is the way in which it does not say, "I am almost dead."