I don’t write poetry often, mostly because I don’t think I’m all that good at it, but some-what because of an asshole professor in college. It was an Introduction to Poetry Writing course as an undergrad and for our first assignment, we were to write a personal poem, which I did. While I was 19 years old, I’d lived through a LOT by this point. My poem was about mental illness and my own struggles with it, which is a common poetry theme with folks that age who’ve lived through what I have.
This asshole read my poem aloud to the class and used it as an “example of what not to write about.” He told me it was “horribly cliché,” and a “poor example of the use of the English language,” and that I should “hurry up and drop the class” and “save everyone the horrors of listening to more drivel.” He publicly humiliated me, and worse, he privately stated by way of written “feedback” on my poem that if I “really felt that way,” I should “hurry up and end it all” to “save the taxpayers’ money.”
It’s been 28 years since that moment in time and it’s still burned into the folds of my brain.
Considering this was supposed to be an introductory undergraduate class on how to write poetry, he didn’t seem interested at all in actually teaching us how.
That was the day I:
- dropped his class
- swore never to take a class taught by him again
- stopped writing poetry for a long time
I will add that many students in the class felt what he did was unfair and unprofessional. While my classroom colleagues or students felt I did have a cliché turn-of-phrase here and there, they didn’t see the poem as a bad starting place. Some even liked it. Mostly, they were embarrassed he went off on me so harshly, especially when it was about my struggles with mental illness. I mean, who does that?
This asshole is now the Director of Creative Writing at a university. He is one of the reasons I have very little respect for English degrees because any pretentious asshole can determine whether or not you are any good, despite the fact that writing is, like most art, subjective as fuck. Also, most college English departments seem filled with pretentious assholes like this guy. Not a good look.
It gives me great pleasure to know that I have more publications to my name than he does and have been more widely read. 😛 It took me going to the edge of the world to find my worth and to realize that professors like him don’t determine the worth of anything good.
Funny enough, I began this blog post with a different topic in mind but like most things, my heart knew what I needed to write about before my brain did. I’m sharing a poem I wrote the other day as Molli and I were listening to a song we love from the Xenogears OST (the song’s called Small Two of Pieces by Yasunori Mitsuda). It’s a lovely little thing (the poem), and I share it in spite of bad professors.
We can run to the edge of worlds
but it will never be far enough
Or long enough
with you
time has no meaning,
Yet we will look back over bronze shoulders and see that
time holds all meaning,
And so we will run
to the edge of the world.
