Ferocity Mill

I mentioned in my last post that I’ve been taking a creative writing class from a professor whose personal pedagogy veers so far off the beaten path that it seems to have made a U-turn and is heading merrily back toward ignorance. Sadly, this is not an exaggeration. Every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 9 a.m., I settle into my chair, pull out my notebook and pen, and hope (beyond hope!) that today will be the day in which we actually write in class.

Of course, we don’t write. Not as a class, anyway. The old “conventional” methods of writing instruction have been tossed away, in favor of a format I’ve learned to refer to as “The Douchebag Lecture.” This is where a professor stands in front of the class and talks about his pet social issues and personal views on something or other for at least thirty minutes, thus ensuring that there is “no time” (as if he had apportioned it in the first place) for writing exercises or workshops. He spent the aforementioned half hour yesterday talking about the uselessness of The Canon, and assigned us all to create “[our] own canon.” Because apparently that’s a better use of our time than, say, writing our own poetry.

After he was done proselytizing, he spent the rest of the time asking the class what we thought “poetry” was, and writing people’s responses on the board. He then put up a poem on the projector (on a transparency, even! Can you believe those still exist? I’m surprised he doesn’t carry a Walkman to class, as well) for us to discuss.

The poems, plays and essays he chooses to share are generally lovely enough in their own right, but they also tend to contain some sort of undisguised social commentary. For example, the poem he picked yesterday was about a group of friends on a warm summer evening, sitting on the porch watching TV with the sound off. The poem used typical imagery (all of that “bathed in the blue light of the flickering screen” jazz) and was an obvious dig at American culture. I have no problem with that, not being a huge fan of American culture myself, but after reading the poem, he devoted multiple minutes of class time to discussing “what the author could have been trying to say, here” – as if it was something that had to be discovered.

I was unimpressed. So I used my class time to practice my haiku skillz.

Pompous prattling,
audible idiocy:
not creative writing

“No time” for classics,
but your play is required? Who’d
you blow to get this job?

“Blah blah blah blah blah,”
I hear when you open your
worthless, worthless mouth

I’m not paying to
hear your piddly world views. Your
voice inspires no one

I would rather do
anything else than be here -
you useless time-thief

Subtlety eludes
you. Cliche’ is your main game.
You are teaching … why?

:::