Letter to an Old Professor

In an attempt to kill two birds with one blog post, the following is a letter to my old professor. It's a little overstated, as expressions of gratitude are wont to be. The first few paragraphs are really about a book of poems called Romey's Order, which you can find info about here. I'm guessing, based on the fact that google's first autocomplete when I put the title in the search bar was "Romey's ordering sandwich" rather than the book title, that it hasn't gotten as much attention as it deserves.

I discovered the book at Grolier’s, a bookstore in Harvard Square that claims to be the oldest all-poetry bookshop in the state or country (I can’t remember which).  I unearthed it incidentally, while wayward from my jogging route in search of some iced tea.  Supposedly it was frequented by John Ashbery in his time as an undergrad; I can only imagine that he discovered the place in a more admirable and deliberate manner than I did. 

Anyway, I liked that the title, Romey’s Order, makes explicit what all poetry about place (and maybe all poetry, period) aims to do: make the wildness and disorientation of what we see around us into something less wild, more human, by virtue of being expressible.  Yet the modifier, that it’s Romey’s order and no one else’s, prevents pretense, maintains the humility crucial to good writing. 

I did find the perpetual reliance on hyphens a little tiresome.  But I told myself that it’s just Riley’s willingness to capitulate to all the dichotomies of the modern South.  The image of the abandoned ditch-pipe in the grass that opens the book is reminiscent of the wonderfully disruptive idea that drove my final paper for your class, Studies in Environment and Place, in my junior year: the fallacy inherent in the positing of nature as “a place or state of original purity, uncontaminated by human intervention and avarice” (Di Chiro, 302). 

But I digress.  I’ve meant to write you since graduation, but wanted to “do it right,” which for me has been the great excuse: I can’t finish my novel until I feel more certain I’ll “do it right,” and I’m considering leaving teaching due to what it requires to “do it right” in the environment I’ve chosen.  Since leaving Haverford three years ago, I’ve been teaching High School English in Lawrence, MA.  It’s an abandoned mill-town, its people mostly Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants whose forebears got the message of the mill closing a little too late, and picked the right place for a new start, but in the wrong decade.     

The education reform movement is an unexpectedly quantitative one (and prone to buzz-words): every day I take data on who has achieved “mastery” of wildly subjective skills, such as: “TS12: Explain how one specific event creates textual effects and emotional charge.”  There is a little bit of energy left for heart, which I have used at points to incite conversation about place, seeking to learn about Lawrence through their writing and the entry points they find into the texts we read.  I have always thought that Of Mice And Men is about empathy and self-reliance; to them is it about loyalty and betrayal, and the dubiousness of dreams.

My first year I gave a quiz on metaphors.  Nearly everyone who scored high missed a certain question.  “Directions: Label the phrases below as literal or figurative language.  Explain your answer.” The first phrase in question was “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”  I read the papers: literal, literal. Literal: when you get jumped if you are walking somewhere, if you don’t die, you become a better fighter.  You get stronger at defending yourself. 

I ended up giving them all credit for the question, in an inadequate act of concession to the relativity of experience, a nod to the cartography of the 18 miles between their neighborhood and my own. 

The best part of the year, undoubtedly, is the memoir project.  I still technically collect mastery data (can you use sensory details? can you use exposition and context?) but I know the students feel the shift away from the centric emphasis on this taxonomy of how to be a writer and reader; they sense an opportunity to be the experts, for once, that they already are.     

I encourage them to ground their memoirs in place, and with varying degrees of cliché and originality they delineate Lawrence’s broken windows or the clear rivers of the Dominican Republic, a juxtaposition that is dismantling.  It’s a reminder of the idea I first read, heard, and uttered in your class: that we live out our geographies, unable to transcend them, and that we shouldn’t want to, as they are our histories. 

Thanks for reading.  I’ve owed you more than a letter, as it was in your class that the notion of backdrops was rendered impotent for me, when I realized that writing about what I see is writing about myself.   More than I hope my students are able to “explain how one specific event create textual effects and emotional charge” (TS12), I hope that they can read and write until their experiences and their expression begin to converge.  And hopefully they’ll realize what I did when I set out to write about the ditch-piped landscape of North Carolina, thanks to an assignment in your class. 

The places that limit you can liberate you, too.