Panicking over Poetry (otherwise known as the time I was a doofball and sabotaged my own dream)

When I was twenty-one and fresh out of college, I started an MFA in poetry at the University of Memphis. I spent an interesting year writing some poems. I got to meet a few cool visiting authors and poets.

I dropped out at the end of the year.

The end.

Flash forward 25+ years.

If you asked me, even a couple of weeks ago, about this small chapter in my past, I would've made light of it. I am not the kind of person who feels regret. I figure that things happen the way they happen and there's not much you can do about it now. The Year of Poetry always seemed kind of silly to me.

In fact, I used it in what I thought was a self-deprecating, humorous way in my official author bio:

See here for this nice snippet from the back flap of my first published novel:
Jody Casella majored in creative writing at Rhodes College and started an MFA at the University of Memphis. Then in a moment of fear at the sheer impracticality of being a poet, she quit writing, earned an MA, and started teaching...

Over the past few months I've been purging my house. It's been a fascinating and sometimes horrifying trip down memory lane. Opening closets and digging through the basement, the garage, the attic, is an excavation of the past. Stuff that fits well in other rooms, other houses, other periods of your life, but no longer fits the life you have now. Things you thought you should like-- a set of too fancy china. Pressed white tablecloths. Ha ha. I am not a pressed white table cloth kind of person. You have to IRON white tablecloths. And I don't iron. (PS. Adios to the freaking iron.)

All of this tripping down memory lane has got me revisiting past selves too. The Self, for example, who made the decision to quit the MFA in poetry.

When I lived in Lexington Kentucky, I worked as a teacher of academically gifted and talented 4th and 5th graders. My job was to formally identify kids in giftedness and create suitable challenging academic plans for them.

Something I know about academically gifted kids is that no matter how smart they are --and some of these kids were at the prodigy level -- they will eventually hit a wall. The barrier is something new-- an idea, a problem, an experience-- that does not come easily to them, something they have never seen before and can't immediately comprehend.

This is a scary encounter for a gifted kid. These kids have been told all of their lives how brilliant they are. So when they hit the Wall, they panic. They have no strategies for dealing with a challenge. I've seen kids burst into tears trying to work on a math problem. I watched a kid have a tantrum--the lying on your back/kicking on the floor kind-- when he couldn't understand how to fit together pentominos.

It seems ridiculous. But what's going on psychologically is the kid is calling into question everything she knows about herself. If she can't understand this stupid math equation, how smart is she after all? The trick is to teach kids how to work through frustration, how to tackle problems, how to practice-- when they've never had to do that before.

I taught these gifted kids for seven years. I watched some of them hit walls and freak out. I watched many hit the wall and find a way to go around it or knock the damn thing down. Most of the kids never hit a wall. But they would, eventually. And I told them and their parents to be prepared for the inevitable.

I never ever ever thought about any of this in relation to myself. I was not a gifted student when I was in school. I struggled daily through math and science classes. I had to study hard for tests in every subject. The only area where I excelled was writing. But that had nothing at all to do with school. I wrote on my own. Journals. Stories. Two novels before I was fifteen that I did not show a soul. The few people who knew what I was doing, said I was a good writer.

Writing was my talent. When I went to college, I majored in it and knew that I was one of the best writers in the school. My writing got very little criticism. And then, I started my year in the MFA in poetry program....

At first it seemed like I would glide along as I always had. The professor, a brilliant poet named Sharon Bryan, chose me as one of her first students to fill her brand new program. I got a scholarship-- full tuition. Plus, a decent stipend for being the managing editor of the literary magazine.

I shared an office with Sharon. The workshop classes went well. All praise for me-- no shock there-- I had talent, remember? But there was a bit of uncomfortable nudging. Sharon saw me "working" on my poems in the office we shared-- how I dashed them off in minutes before a class with minimal thought. How I never revised anything. When she gave me suggestions, I blew them off. The poems were perfectly fine the way I'd written them.

She pushed me in the other classes too. Analyzing poetry, dissecting line breaks and rhythm, figuring out how poems were put together and choices the writers made. I didn't always understand what was going on. I had to think about writing in a way that I'd never had to before. Papers that I was used to throwing together the night before, were suddenly things I had to tackle earlier, and possibly.. gasp.. revise.

University of Memphis was considered easy. The program, one of my previous professors told me, was beneath me. And there I was.. struggling. I was supposed to have this natural talent--writing was the ONLY thing about myself I was proud of, sure of, and suddenly I wasn't sure of it anymore.

So. I quit.

What the hell was I going to do with an MFA anyway? Teach poetry?? HA. What a silly job. And poetry. Jeez. What a ridiculous subject to focus on. Nobody even reads it. Was I really going to devote my life to writing little poems and hoping some literary magazine that has a circulation of like, 50, will publish one and possibly pay me 20 bucks?

Yeah. No thanks. Time to grow up, Jody and put away childish things. You want to be a writer? Well, regular people don't get to be writers. And you're not as good at it as you thought.

I didn't write another word for the next five years. Within a year, I was married and teaching high school English. My husband and I bought a house. We started our family.

Something I scrounged out of a closet recently was a folder of old grad school poems. They weren't bad, but I could immediately see how they could be better. The year I was at U of M, I worked harder than I ever had on my writing. I had some amazing experiences too. I had dinner with Seamus Heaney. I had a funny conversation with John Updike at a party. I met Richard Russo and WS Merwin and Marvin Bell and Barry Hannah and Pattiann Rogers.

What would have happened if I hadn't panicked and dropped out?

I'm not saying that I would've become a poet. Still, two more years of careful study on my writing, the interactions with classmates and teachers and visiting writers, the nudging, the pushing, the challenging-- it sure as hell couldn't have hurt me.

But I was the kid having the tantrum on the floor.

I don't have regrets. But man oh man, I wished there'd been someone there to scoop me up off the floor, dry my tears, and say, It's okay. You can figure this out. Listen, writing is your talent, and you are good at it,  but that doesn't mean you don't have to work on it too.

Get up. Climb the damn wall.

Found in Translation

I took a poetry translation class in graduate school. It was a requirement for my degree program that students demonstrate fluency in a foreign language.

The problem was I didn't have a fluency in a foreign language.

When I was in high school I took four years of Latin but I graduated unable to write or understand much of Latin beyond veni vidi vici. (For the record, that means "I came. I saw. I conquered." and supposedly Julius Caesar said it after he came and saw and conquered something.)

For my undergraduate degree there was a foreign language requirement too. The college would waive the requirement if you passed a language test. Since I'd had four years of Latin, the college signed me up to take the test. I panicked. There was no way in hell I was going to pass. I would flunk at an embarrassing level and probably my acceptance to the college would be revoked. 

My only option was to take another language. I signed up for Spanish, which seemed like a more useful and practical language to know than Latin. This time around I was determined to learn the language. I took five semesters and spent a lot of time  memorizing vocabulary words and verb endings, but I would not have called myself fluent.

My definition of fluent is that when you go on your honeymoon to a Spanish-speaking country, you ask for directions to the bathroom and the old guy who is selling ceramic cups directs you to the bathroom, instead of nodding and squinting at you... and handing you a ceramic cup.

Which is how I ended up in the poetry translation class in graduate school.

This seems funny to me now. I couldn't ask where the baño was, and yet, I was going to prove my fluency by translating Spanish poetry into English. 

What I learned in my poetry translation class is that the act of translation is difficult even when you are fluent in both languages. The translator has to take into account all kinds of things we don't normally think about as readers. She's not doing word for word translation, which is how beginners in a foreign language think about translation. She has to make choices. 

If a poem is written in rhyme, for example, should the translator keep that aspect-- even if that means something else will be lost? Words in poems are specifically chosen by the poet. Often they have double or triple meanings. How can the translator ensure that the translated poem works on all of the same levels as the original poem? 

(Did you know there are companies that exist
to help you translate your content into other languages?
Me neither. Until I found Smartling, 
a company that translates websites.)

In the poetry translation class we would analyze several translations of a particular poem and compare them. Sometimes they were subtly different. Sometimes they were very different. The translators were not invisible messengers; they were active participants in the writing process. And sometimes they got it wrong. 

I can assure you that I got it wrong in my poetry translation class. I did my assignments with my Spanish-to-English dictionary splayed out in front of me. I knew it was a hopeless, futile endeavor because I could barely read the poem, much less understand the subtle variations of meanings, the rhythm, the evocation of imagery.

To translate, you have to crawl into the mind of the writer. You have to think in the language. You have to dream in it.

I never looked at translation the same way after taking that class. I know that no translation of a piece of literature is perfect. But I also know that without the translation, the piece would not be available to many readers at all.

I never reached fluency in Spanish, but I got a little closer to understanding it through my kids. When they were young (which is when languages are easier to learn) my husband and I enrolled them in a Spanish immersion school. Beginning on the very first day of kindergarten, their native Spanish language teacher, spoke to them only in Spanish.

Some days after I'd dropped them off, I'd linger in the doorway for a few minutes and listen to the teacher speaking. She stood in front of the class and jumped around a lot, pantomiming what she was saying, talking slowly, singing songs, repeating words and phrases over and over.

The students jumped around too, mimicking the teacher's movements, singing, dancing, repeating what she said.

It seemed like a fun way to learn a language.

Also, they learned very quickly how to ask to go to the bathroom.