Teaching Poetry to Stones

As a creative writing teacher, I wage a daily battle against boring poems

Illustrations by the author

I love teaching Introduction to Creative Writing. It’s a wonderful triathlon: We start with fiction, then move on to poetry, and lastly we write stories from our lives. And I do my best to persuade students to abandon their hastily selected majors and join the writing program so they can help us uphold our time-honored tradition of disobeying our parents.

But this semester, something’s gone wrong.

I, a man who is more like Peter Pan than a man, have become the parent, and the students are my disobedient children.

How did this happen?

How is it possible that the lost boys turned into cynics, rolling their eyes at the great Pan himself, party poopers only grudgingly joining their leader on fabulous adventures?

If only this was true. If only I was Pan and they were the lost boys. Then I would know exactly how to handle the situation.

I would fly the killjoy boys to the lagoon and hurl them to the mermaids who would drown them and eat them. Then I would write my own student evaluations: “They never attended class. I never saw them. Please send more, better ones. Send ones who don’t hate happiness and magic.” — Pan

This semester, my students’ hearts hardened into wrecking balls, but not during the fiction portion of the class. They were soaring then, as free as my hope for them.

The problem was poetry.

These innocent-looking youths turned Dead Poets Society into a story about a despised teacher who can’t handle the pressure of colossal resistance and ultimately kills himself. When the news of his death reaches the students’ ears, they stand on their desks and cheer while urinating on copies of Leaves of Grass, then they take out their math and accounting textbooks and zealously dig in.

These past many weeks, while walking to this favorite class of mine, I got in the habit of thinking about death. I would see a scrap of paper drift by in a lazy breeze and think:

Me.

Hello, scrap of a slaughtered tree. Murdered, pressed flat, and cast out. Hello, me.