As my students gave their presentations on dystopias today, I was saddened to think that, in a composition class, where they were given free reign (within reason) to come up with a website that allowed them to imagine and create a culture (and all its parts--politics, social welfare, health, race, class, gender, geography, etc., etc., etc.), that the best they could do was envision Hitler as the god that one dystopia prayed to. Technically, we're not supposed to allow them to do creative work in the comp class--the department is very strict in that sense.
But to me, how better can students demonstrate that they've learned and understood the class concepts by having to develop a web project of their dystopia/utopia? It seems to me, if they have to consider all the myriad things it takes to create a culture, then surely they could come up with something much more impressive than what they did. Last fall, some of the dystopias or utopias that students came up with were amazing--I mean, knocked my socks off. The ones I've seen both Monday and today are just generic and hohum. I was really disappointed in them. They could have done much better. And more than that, they SHOULD have done much better. These students are supposed to be the cream of the crop--the average incoming GPA at my school is 3.75. I was prepared to be impressed with their work, and just wasn't.
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In other news, I got another rejection letter. I don't know what would make my poetry publishable, but clearly, I'm not doing it. Sometimes I think that I just don't write what people care about--and then when I see all the work I have, that nobody wants, it makes me question why I even bother a) writing, and b) sending stuff out. I've had as much success getting my poems published not sending them out as sending them out--which is to say, none.
Of course, when I read Poetry (Magazine), which is the PREMIER literary journal for publishing poems--and if you publish here, you have ARRIVED--I always stumble over how unintelligible the work is to me. Am I stupid? Or do I just value poems that are open and clear? Forgoddessake, I have a PhD in poetry--and most of the poems they print every month I just don't understand. If I had creative writing students who wrote like that, I'd be the first to tell them that they need to consider their audience more carefully and write with language that is clear and concrete and visual. Most of the time, I have no idea what those writers are talking about--and it makes me upset. Because I think if I could write like they do, maybe someone would publish my work. But I don't know how to write in fragments like they do. I don't know how to--and more than that, I don't want to. But sometimes I think, if I want to be published, maybe I have to reconsider my sense of aesthetics? Because what I'm doing is not working. And goddess knows, I'll never get a job in academia if I don't start racking up the pub list.
And yet I still wonder--do I have to sell myself this way?
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I think you can only write the way you write. It's the only way to be authentic. I write in fragments, because that's how I write. I write lyric, because that's the way I write. I focus on feeling and images, because that's the way I write. In another time, when such things weren't popular, I'd have been laughed out of the printing office. Oh well. Times change. You can only be true to yourself and your voice and fuck everyone else.
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