resurrection post: the elusive myth of the crazy professor

[i haven't been here in 1 year, 7 months, and 15 days ... i return to an empty room, but that's okay. i returned for reasons other than audience ... that doesn't mean you're not welcome. :-) ]

where DOES it come from? and why is it perpetuated. and worse than the crazy professor is the crazy poet, and the crazy poetry professor. i don't know ...

i had one of my brightest undergrads, who aspires to a life in academia, tell me today, 'i don't know what i want, but, i don't want YOUR job ... ' i nodded, instinctively, before i realized that i was actually agreeing with him. when he left, i thought, 'now, why did i do that. i love my job.' and i am pretty sure that i love my job ... mostly.

but i understood what he said somewhere down deep, understood that he was commenting on my 'job' not my 'career' that as one of the silent sets of eyes i see peering at me twice a week, he knows how difficult he and other students can make my 'job,' how the room before i walk in is weighted down with the talk of midterms and exams and work schedules and dates and papers due ... until i bolt to the front of the room and have the audacity to address them as though they are caught up in the spell of poetry i imagined i left them in two days ago, and that they might have also, like me, burned themselves this morning trying to remember the cover of dana levin's last book while pouring coffee or left keys on the kitchen table because they were thinking of roethke and all of those poor little plants ...

i understood also that he was saying, my job is a JOB ... as in, dang. that doesn't look too easy. as in, you get paid what? as in, you went to school for how many years and you walk back and forth from where to where, and how many students? theses? committees? editorial boards? councils?

and you say, you're a writer? ... who writes?

i believe i heard him say, quite clearly as his voice emphasized first YOUR and then JOB that my task is actually impossible, that somehow in the midst of subsidized capitalism and all spin presidential elections, and schools of business, and homecoming games, that i had the onus of making not just poetry matter, but the writing of poetry ... his writing of poetry. my task was to make his poetry writing somehow matter to him ...

and quite frankly, i believe this is why i agreed. i cannot, and do not know how to, make his poetry writing important to him ... i CAN show him, though, that his poetry writing is important to me.

i can also, and this is really a personal choice i've made, show him that my poetry writing is important to me ... i can show him how i exist and live and teach in the world as a poet. i can share with him, by reenacting the causal chain of events that led me to discover a busted vent fan under the floor boards that support my desk, insight into my serendipitous inspirations. i can demonstrate the way poetry enters me and assumes navigation, so when i talk to them in class, i am cutting swiftly through the water, steam rising ... i can share with him the mournful but necessary act of cutting a line i love but which is bad for my poem. i can show him what my poetry means to me, how it keeps me up at night, how i search for new ways to read it, hear it, and see it, and i can share with him the way a certain emotive verb, or a nicely crafted stanza that he brings me, turns my day just a little on it's side ... gives off just enough murmur to stir me, maybe even to thank him for it ...

maybe there are some ways that i am supposed to also show him how poetry doesn't matter at all, that if it can be a great thing, it can also be nothing ... that the pages over which we struggle in and of themselves do not wrap wounds, or fill stomachs, or unhinge explosive mechanisms strapped to the chest our someone's last hope. and in imagining this world where poetry means nothing, he is somehow moved to bring meaning to it ...

the vocation itself is crazy. who, in the world, becomes a poet? and who, by choice? they must be crazy to imagine there is such a place in the world that they can tack down and make their own. but the JOB is, very, very much an endeavor that seems not likely to be taken up by those wholly sane or reasonable. make poetry matter? i've read numerous essays on how poetry may or may not matter ... i am not always moved to become part of the regime of optomistic wordsmiths who 'do the work' of the universe when write. i do not always believe myself that poetry matters. and i wonder on many of those mornings before i storm into the classrroom, 'how do i do this' ... 'how do i do this again?'

yet we do. every day in every state of this country ... in countries adjacent to ours ... in communities opposite us in another hemisphere. for all the great ambiguities in life, for the complications and differences ... the subject, the act of writing, the practice of poetry, in some form or another, is a human utterance most traditions share, regardless of country or culture. somewhere, somehow .. through the ages, men and women and children have been able to successfully perpetuate the crazy idea that, in the end, poetry means something to someone somewhere much of the time ... nuts, huh?