Up Chuck and die

There is no appropriate way to try and describe teaching, no matter what Mr. Kotter says about the matter. Or maybe there is no way to describe my teaching. Each semester I seem to find some unintentional theme to my semester. Last semester, as my students read a poem about a married couple eating a baked ape that the wife may or may not have had slept with, someone said “this author is really morbid.” Strangely, they’d said that about every author we’d read that semester—the diary of a grave robber, the review of Texas Chainsaw Massacre with cannibal subtext. Usual freshman comp sort of stuff.

I’d really try to clean myself up a bit in the classroom; no stories about bears attacking my friend’s crack house or being propositioned by old German men on trains. Still, this only seems to go so far. For instance, a college invited me to her class to be ethnographically studied as a member of a community of poets. I can’t imagine that a room of Boise freshmen would be all that interested in talking to anyone at seven thirty in the morning, so I put on my best teaching outfit: a purple shirt and cowboy boots. I think I wore pants. I read them some poems and talk for an hour while they took notes. Describing the experience wouldn’t really do it justice. What might do it justice would be their excerpted comments from their essays:

"His choice of the color of his clothing sent a strong message--I am in touch with my feelings."

"I was scared for my life throughout the class. The guy seems as though he was one bad day away from shooting up the school."

"The drawl of the classroom is no more this Friday morning as Erik Leavitt, the Cheshire Cat Poet, vehemently translates Fragment 133 from black print to vivid illustration."

"With all this talk of bloody teeth and spiritual spittoons I think, 'that's too much, Erik Leavitt, too much.'"

"I think, as I often have in the past, why anyone in their right mind would get forearm tattoos. To have any kind of respectable job would require unbearable summer after summer in long sleeves, irritating questions at interviews, and the worst aspect, explaining them to your grandchildren. I soon came to understand Erik's take on the issue--Erik has little or no social conscience. Erik is a poet and suffers from 'poetic diarrhea.'"

"Poets have a certain stigma about them. You never talk to your mom on the phone about meeting a poet. They are not known for being cool or anything of that sort. The idea that I had of a poet was a beanie wearing hippie that would show up and want to recite a poem about how the clouds remind him of cotton candy. Thankfully, that was not the case."