Notes: Written at four in the morning. I'm on a feckin' roll. For the record, I have nothing against Marlowe, Eliot, Yeats, or Browning. I dislike Sappho for Greek-related reasons, and I really think Emily Bronte should have stuck to prose.
o o o o o
Grace signs up for her Poetry workshop as a joke, and within two weeks of class, she realizes that it is a joke. The class itself is not so much a workshop as it is group therapy for a cluster of angry poets and bored slackers. Grace can probably find higher functioning people in a psychiatrist's waiting room.
Granted, there are a couple of students whose work is fairly decent, some of whose poems Grace actually enjoys, but for every one of these, there is usually one or more of the following:
1.) a Sylvia Plath/Avril Lavigne wannabe, prone to writing poems about the moon and/or menstruation;
2.) a lovelorn teenage male who is either striving to be the next e. e. cummings or desperately needs his keyboard fixed;
3.) a stoner with pupils dilated to the size of nickels who probably confused poetry with pottery and registered for the course by mistake.
While her fellow classmates write soul-baring poems that give too much information about their sex lives and early childhood traumas, Grace mostly writes parodies of other poems. She pokes fun at Sappho, ridicules Marlowe, and mocks Emily Bronte to such a point that one of the Sylvia Plaths asks Grace if she has anything personal against Bronte. Grace doesn't; she just thinks Bronte should have stuck to ill-fated romances on foggy moors.
Grace likes her professor enough. Dr. Willis genuinely seems interested in teaching her students, and Grace respects her for that, even if she doesn't believe creativity could be contained and taught like monkey see, monkey do. Willis is careful with praise and criticism, and never outright says anybody's poetry is crap, though sometimes Grace thinks she should. Perhaps she's just phoning it in, the way Grace herself is doing, eager to get the semester over with and never again have to analyze a poem that has more punctuation than it has words.
One day, after Grace presents a parody of The Hollow Men (she has nothing against Eliot; she likes Eliot, but liking something always compels her to make fun of it), Willis asks to see her after class. Some people take Eliot way too seriously.
"I want to talk to you about your poems," Willis says, and Grace bristles in reflex.
"If you want to tell me that they suck ---"
"They don't suck. They're quite good, actually, though the piece today hit a little close to home. But you can write better than that. You should write better than that. You should write something that isn't so removed from yourself."
Okay, if Willis says anything remotely close to "writing from your heart" or any of that shit, Grace is dropping the course, credits or no credits.
"You want me to turn into one of those Sylvia Plaths?"
"I want you to write poetry that is poetry, and not just words."
Maybe this is a good time for Grace to point out that she never does anything people want her to do. But Willis backtracks herself and says, "It's just a suggestion, Grace. You don't have to take me up on it. And please, tread lightly on Yeats."
Grace sits in an empty classroom later that day, notebook laid across her knees, and attempts to write while Sophie, in the background, unscrews the pencil sharpener from the wall. Poetry that is poetry. What the hell does that mean?
Grace doesn't really write poetry. She scribbles stuff down on scraps of paper, scrunches them up afterwards, and usually tosses them into the trash. Except for that one time Joan got another one of her crackheaded ideas and found her poem while looking through the Dumpster.
Grace writes because it's cheaper than therapy (which she doesn't believe in anyway, because Joan spent six weeks with a shrink and she's still as crackheaded as always) and slightly more cathartic than free-form swearing. And she doesn't like what she writes; she doesn't like seeing her feelings on paper, so ugly and naked and raw between the blue lines of looseleaf.
So she's not going to do any of this just because her teacher told her to. She keeps up writing her usual poems, and she tries to ignore it when Willis looks at her, a little disappointed. The problem is that Willis is the first good teacher Grace has had since forever, and there is a part of Grace that doesn't want to let her down. Dammit, life was so much easier when she hated everybody.
One day, Grace has a mini-breakdown after having to deal with too much Caroline, and emails Willis a copy of Sewer Walking.
Two days later, Willis again asks her to stay after class and hands back the copy of her poem, with notes and suggestions in green. Good, Willis has written, and Grace pretends that she doesn't care.
Grace works on a few more poems for her end-of-term portfolio. Since she doesn't have to share these in class, she decides to mix things up. It is probably one of those momentary lapses in judgment she will regret later, but at the time she feels brave enough to trust her own feelings.
She writes more about Adam and paper boats; she writes about Joan and the way she lights up the world through her bizarre blunders; she even writes about Luke, almost emulating Browning --- Robert, not Elizabeth. Her poem about Luke is similar to My Last Duchess, but with more science and less bloodshed.
She doesn't write about her mother, for many reasons she cannot explain. She does not want toexorcise her anger through words. Or maybe she is afraid her mother will taint this too, the way her mother has done with almost everything else in her life.
When she finishes, she feels sick to her stomach. She is proud, but scared, and she needs some ibuprofen to get rid of a pounding, post-poetry migraine.
It is still unbearably frightening to see the ebb and flow of her words on paper. But it is also exhilarating, the way falling and flying are really the same.
o o o o o