October: something I woke up thinking about

It's been years since I've come to the time I never thought I'd come to, the time when those who write poetry also teach poetry, an almost complete reversal from the time I first became interested in poetry, first as a reader and then as a writer, when most of the poets I read had jobs that paid them just enough to almost avoid working or avoided working altogether 

Note: now almost all if not all of the poets who publish poems in the Poem-a-Day program I subscribe to, sponsored by the Academy of American Poets, are teachers, teaching in creative writing programs or MFA programs etc. I don't respond to the poems, but perhaps I don'r respond because I don;t know how to respond.

When I first started reading poetry I read John Clare, a gardener who attended school to the age of 12. Clare was a real example to me: a wonderful poet with little formal education who made his living working with his hands, until he went mad and was institutionalized.

I don't know whether poetry can be taught, or not. I suppose poetry can be taught, anything can be taught I suppose, and lots of poets are teaching it to lots of poets who are writing what they've been taught. But poetry written by people who were taught to write it is not the kind of poetry I like to read, and it's not the kind of poetry I try to write.

Another way of saying almost the same thing:reading the poetry of class taught poets, I am reading more or less what they've been taught. In other words, I don't need it.

Just as I'd like our government to recognize and honor the separation between Church and State, I'd like poetry to recognize and honor the separation between Writing Poetry and Teaching Poetry.

It probably makes little or no difference to anyone what I think about the impossibility of teaching someone how to write poetry, the proliferation of programs that attempt to do so, and the apparent popularity of those poets who both write and teach poetry for a living. I have to say that much of what I read in the Poem-a-Day offerings are not only not poems as I think of as poems but are not even very well-written. But who cares what I think? 

Here are a couple of poems by poets who neither teach or work inside the creative writing industry, one by Tom Hennen, a working-man, and one by Brooks Roddan, a believer in poetry who disbelieves in it being taught--

Picking a World

One world

Includes airplanes and power plants,

All the machinery that surrounds us,

The metallic odor that has entered words.

The other world waits

In the cold rain

That soaks the hours one by one

All through the night

When the woods come so close

You can hear them breathing like wet dogs.

 (Tom Hennen

from Darkness Sticks to Everything

Copper Canyon Press, 2013)

October

Autumn leaves fall

and make colorful

little piles of wind.

(Brooks Roddan

from A River of Birds

manuscript 2019)