The je ne sais quoi of the creative writing department, by Sarah Black
Posted Monday, March 12, 2007 @ 04:59 PM
Sarah Black posted this as a comment to my most recent entry, "Spit out on the shores of the English department." It made me so nostalgic and pinpoints so exactly the je ne sais quoi of an ASFA graduate's college experience that I couldn't help but repost it in its entirety. Sarah has always gotten at the meat of things much faster and more simply than I have, and for once perhaps you can't dismiss my long, aching sentences as a melodramatic flair I have when it comes to the observation and writing of my own life; here is another person's account which is not unlike my own. In short, "See! Look! I'm not crazy!" The feeling she describes of having lost half my vocabulary—if not an entire literary language—has been hitting especially hard lately.
Thanks, Sarah. I hope you don't mind.
I'm taking a 100-level Literary Analysis class that isn't too bad because it's small with interesting material, more like an intense book club than a notes-and-lectures class. Most of the kids can say insightful things without having the vocabulary, so even if I have to go back over similies versus metaphors (though we were asking "is this a pastiche?" by sophmore year), at least I don't have to deal with anyone making obnoxious comments about Prufrock.The first year of college seems to be when Creative Writers realize that not everyone considers poetry to be the Most Important Thing In The World. People here roll their eyes whenever I point at passing flocks of geese and say "hey, look, it's my place in the family of things," or snidely allude to Mark Strand as we drive through corn fields. I've left many parties this semester just to read Adrienne Rich or McSweeney's in the comfort of my new single; when I confessed this to my friends they just told me "we know, Sarah. We're not surprised; we know." I didn't realize what a large portion of our conversations came from shared literary experience until I couldn't say "what are you, fucking Kubla Kahn?" or base my descriptions of people on Faulkner characters. It's like we spoke our own language for so long we forgot that other people could refer to lanyards as something other than "you know, like the Billy Collins poem about his mother."
Of course I'm just considered a literary nerd in a community where everyone has their own nerd universe (my friends Rob and Sam spent all of Saturday night building one of these). I live across from a Billy Collins fan and joined the writers' workshop this semester, but it's still a far cry from our world where a person was inextricable from their poetry and we never thought it was weird to describe food as "bitter, like my heart." I didn't understand the unevenness of our education until I tried breaking the ice at parties with things like "High school? Yeah, I used to go down to the Creative Writing department and sleep under my desk for four hours" or "Did anyone else have couches in their classrooms?" We adored our heroes for their writing, overlooking a long catalog of personality flaws and personal demons because all we saw was their talent. There wasn't much we wouldn't sacrifice in the name of good poetry; can you imagine any other high school where tests would be extended because you had an upcoming reading to plan for?
I submitted to Grinnell's literary magazine for the first time last week, and though this semester's issue won't be coming out for a while, I was reminded of the excitement and nervousness and frustration that surrounded submitting to Cadence, which felt like the year's single measure of personal worth, a feeling five times magnified with senior readings. There's nothing that seminal in my short experience with college life. People here are accomplished and well-rounded, they're athletes and actors and volunteers, while I'm in the corner telling the bored crowd that "dude, I met Joel Brouwer once." For some kids the shock of college is in living far from home, meeting people with abstract, complicated sexualities, or being academically challenged for the first time; for me, it was finding people who made a 790 on the SAT Math portion but hadn't read "The Second Coming." Sure, in French class I didn't know what the Champs-Elysees was and I've been laughed at for my explanation of why oil and water don't mix and how there's less snow on the ground even if temperatures didn't rise above freezing, and I've cited Barthelme short stories as sources of scientific knowledge, but goddamn it if, for one beautiful moment, that wasn't all we needed.
Welcome to the past, bucko. You're swimming through the archive of rocket-fish.org. If this isn't where you were headed, I suggest you get out of here while there's still time.
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At first I thought, this is too long, maybe I should just make it a Livejournal post or Facebook note.
Then I figured that Glynnis would just post it on her blog if she thought it was worth reading at all.
Thanks, doll.
12 Mar 2007, 5:26 PM.
In all seriousness, I'm not sure a week has gone by in the past ten years of my life where I haven't thought about Kubla Khan.
Actually, just yesterday in Arabic class I was off in lala land, thinking about Xanadu, even though I haven't read or talked about that poem in years and years.
Wow, that sounded way more odd written out than it did in my head.
13 Mar 2007, 12:48 AM.
u r so gud @ updating ur site lol
26 Mar 2007, 6:25 AM.