one of the “fun” things about working for/ at institutions where so many legendary and highly regarded teachers have worked before you, is that you are, whether you like it or not, continually inviting a comparison that you cannot escape from unscathed. this goes double if the legendary teacher/s in question were your own. and treble if they happen to be dead. often, there will be an unspoken question simmering under the surface of your workshops: “if you learnt from the master, then why aren't you better at this?” but you're only a person. how can you possibly compete with the outsized, yearly-embellished myth that has grown up around these figures? … i'm asking for a friend.
yes. and what's worse is that this uniquely painful variety of the good ol' anxiety of influence merges seamlessly with one of the staple delusions of education: run don't walk from The Myth of the Magical Teacher. you know the one: students are disengaged or under-achieving because they have been failed by a bunch of awful teachers. fortunately, here comes the next crop of idealistic miracle workers to turn things around through the application of tireless energy and enthusiasm. with no consideration given to how outside (structural) factors (such a poverty, for instance) affect the student's willingness and ability to learn. and no acknowledgement of the practical realities and institutional limitations of the classroom environment.
in higher ed, especially in non-vocational adult education spaces, it's a little different: everyone has chosen to be there, and no one is looking to you to “redeem” either their educational experience or their lives; no one is asking you to paper over deep structural inequality (and its resultant rage) with an hour-a-week of cathartic feels about W.H. Auden. phew! on the other hand, participants will come with their own sets of wildly diverse, often bizarrely unrealistic expectations about what the workshop encounter will look like. often these expectations will be informed by experience – or worse, second-hand knowledge of – your legendary predecessors. and because you're not them, and because you can't please all of the people, all of the time, there are going to be weeks when you feel like an abject failure. add to this the constant check-box scrutiny (ref, tef, ofsted) of any educational setting in the year of our lord twenty twenty-five, and you can start to feel pretty shitty about yourself, pretty quick.
at this juncture, i feel bound to say, that during the last year i have had one of the most rewarding, humbling, and genuinely transformative (for me, at least) teaching experiences of my entire career. and if my masterclass participants feel/felt one fifth of the solidarity and intellectually-energised joy that i have felt, then i will consider that a job well done. however, wednesdays notwithstanding, there have also been less nourishing experiences. in the face of which, i have found it helpful to clarify for myself what my teaching practice is and what it isn't, to make peace with the fact that i am not my legendary predecessors, but that this might actually be okay. okay?
i am not my legendary predecessors: and it is worth remembering that the cultural and institutional climate in which they were teaching looked incredibly different to the one in which i find myself. they benefited from an enormous amount of leeway in how they structured (or failed to structure) the workshop experience; the institutional demands placed on them were simply less. no one looked to them to produce measurable “outcomes”, for instance. they were freer to run their workshops like a convivial cult of personality.
i am not my legendary predecessors: i am woman, born a girl, born into a class and culture in which big, confident, charisma-led gestures began to be shaved out of me at birth, with an emphasis instead placed on acts of service, emotional shit-work, the responsibilities of care. accordingly, i have absorbed different skills, and i bring those to the workshop space.
i am not a branch of the service industry: while our interactions will necessarily take place within a context of increased marketisation (inside of the academy and out), it is the serious ethical duty of teachers and students alike to resist this use-driven corporate framing and the roles (end-user/ service-provider) that this frame engenders.
i am a human being: and a mutually vulnerable creative practitioner. this is the spirit in which i approach our sessions.
i am not always (or often) right: and none of my thoughts about the broad field of contemporary poetry nor my editorial suggestions are offered as if i were. i do have a perspective that is shaped and informed by my years of experience as a practitioner, a teacher, and an editor, and i hope that some of the insights i have gleaned will be useful to participants. by “useful”, i mean in uncovering the unique ways in which their poems succeed – often despite themselves – or in exposing moments that might need refining or rethinking in order for a poem to flourish in its chosen context. “useful” also means creating a space in which participants can broach disagreement, talk through and uncover their own positionality and aesthetic disposition, as well as introducing them to work and to writers they might not have encountered before. i hope, in other words, that “useful” also means “generous” and “potentially enlarging”.
i am not always (or often) right: and i have no interest in being so. i will often caveat what i call my “niminy-piminy” editorial suggestions with a remark to the effect that my autistic brain hooks onto/ is puzzled by something that others are happy to overlook. these small stumbling blocks, i attend to, only because each line, each word, each term ought to be thought through and intended. and i attend to them because other editors and competition judges might. it is up to the individual whether to apply my suggestions or not. i hope one of the things we are all learning together is when to bend and when to keep faith with our texts.
i am not always (or often) right: i want participants to seek a second opinion. from each other, from other teachers. i'm not auditioning for the role of All Powerful Oz in anybody's writing life. grow, push, seek, doubt... which is either a really commie or a really jesuit approach. or both.
i'm not here to tell you what you want to hear: we will study things that enrage us; provocations we can push back against. our tech-dependent world creates enough of an echo chamber, we deserve the big, various, challenging world where people disagree with us.
i'm not here to tell you what you want to hear: but i will always be honest, and i will genuinely try to help you take your writing into the wider word to find its broader public. we're all negotiating between dead careerist ambitions and the other less appealing urgencies of poetry-as-art. my advice is not to deny yourself the pleasure and the meaning of doing by chasing only the end goal. i approach the workshop in this spirit.
so yeah, i guess that's my practice, for what it's worth. i'm not a teacher really, but that doesn't mean i have nothing to teach. and nothing to learn. we all do, i think, and that's probably my final takeaway: that teaching and learning are not things that take place only within the workshop environment: they are inseparable from life. with generosity, towards each other, and with patience. that's all i got.