In a nutshell: Among the postmodern humanities, creative writing stands out as a field where teachers are generally active practitioners of the craft they teach. I invited poet Ada Limón to discuss the permeable boundary between her teaching and her writing.

By Criticality guest blogger Ada Limon

In May of 2001, I received a fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown for the following October through May. I was fresh out of New York University graduate school where I had learned to make poetry the priority in my life, and now I was heading to a residency where all that was required of me was to live on the tip of Cape Cod, in a small, cozy apartment, and write. I was beyond thrilled.

Then, without warning, it felt as if the entire floor fell out from underneath the universe. The hard fact of student loans crushed my chest with a daily agonizing weight. I worried about money. I worried about love. I worried about my art. September 11^th sent me into severe mental unease. I was attending one of the most prestigious art colonies in the country, and I was a terrified wreck of a wordsmith. Anxiety and fear left me so petrified I couldn’t think straight.

The only way I could get through it was to walk. A lot. Six to ten miles a day. My favorite walk was to the Long Point Lighthouse, also known as the loneliest place in the world. I’d walk the four miles out there, look at the lighthouse, turn around, and walk the four miles back. When I’d get back to my warm apartment, thoroughly worn out, thin-skinned and cheek’s raw, I found I could finally, finally write. I would rarely pick a different route. I would rarely vary the routine. Because that’s what I required: a routine.

To me, that’s what teaching poetry is about. It’s about providing that necessary routine, that forced march to the lighthouse, that structure that quiets your students’ brains for even the smallest moment, and says, “Now writing is important.” I’ve recently started teaching for 24PearlStreet, the Fine Arts Work Center's online writing program, and it’s offered me a chance to give others the important time and space to view their poetry as a priority. It’s also infused my own work with more urgency.

After years of living in New York City and working for magazines, I now live in the country and do exactly what terrified me so many years ago when I started as a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center: I write full time. Now, well out of my twenties, I can organize my time better, I’m healthier, I can exercise daily without walking for an exhausting 3-4 hours, and I have less of the anxiety I had then (even though I still worry about money and those damn student loans). But I still need to be reminded that I’m an artist and that my work has value. Twelve years ago, the lighthouse walk for me was like a reset button in my brain: walk to the lighthouse, turn around, become a writer. It was my physical syllabus, instructions for productivity.

Just yesterday I was talking to my friend Jennifer L. Knox and I said, “I just want a syllabus for the next five years.” As artists, we may not think we need structure, but we do, we need some small sense of clarity in the creative mayhem. Even though my class is an online course (so I don’t leave my office in the bluegrass), this sense of community, this sense of value has allowed me to rekindle my own love for deadlines, my own need for something solid to rely on.

Each week we write a new poem with a topic I assign based on big-ticket subjects: the Heart, the Body, the Home, the Wound, the Song, etc. We read poems from at least six different poets from different eras and backgrounds that tackle these giant subjects with distinct voices, and then we write our own. Notice I am saying “we,” because I am writing right along with my students. I follow the writing prompts, I re-read my reading assignments, and above all, I make sure I write my poem by the given deadline. And you know what? It works.

Because it’s an online course for no credit, the class is full of people in different stages of their creative lives. But regardless of where they are, they are all desirous of the same thing, which is to figure out how to solve this dilemma (a quote from a current student): “My poetry and my education is so important to me, yet I can't seem to figure out how to give it the importance it deserves.”

Sometimes the structure of a class, a syllabus, a routine, is what we need to remind ourselves that our writing is important. A routine is a powerful engine of productivity even for us vagabond artists. That strenuous walk I used to take out to the Long Point Lighthouse was probably not the thing that got me writing; it was probably more the fact that at the end of the windy hike, tired and emptied and sore, I said to myself, “Okay, now this time is for writing.” And I did what I was told, I wrote.

Ada Limón is the author of three books of poetry, Lucky Wreck, This Big Fake World, and Sharks in the Rivers.

Indolent Books

The Lighthouse: Structure in the Storm