Tools of Potential and the Salt-Corroded Jar of Young Poets' Tears

I had occasion again today to tell my cherished stories of the fabulously mean teachers and professors I have encountered throughout my academic career: My first poetry professor at Vanderbilt, Kate Daniels, who threw my work at me, (not to me, mind you), several times across her desk and would narrow her eyes saying, "If this is the best you can do, then you need to find another class,” or my second poetry professor, Mark Jarman, who would pound his fist on the table and insist, "You will write in American English. You will write in your own goddamned American English!" or my early English lit. professor who told me I was doomed to write dreck forever because I didn't know Latin, or, progenitor of them all, a teacher I had in high school who would read my convoluted essays and say, "This isn't Sartre, Michelle." 

In telling these stories I am reminded again how grateful I am I received my education where and when I did because, as I understand it from several of my friends who received theirs elsewhere, the kinder, gentler education standard that is so pervasive would probably never have permitted my dear, mean professors to throw things at their students and rattle the tables with their demands the way they were free to do at my schools and at other similar schools where, for some of them, their rubric for teaching excellence was based in part upon how many students left crying during office hours.

This is not exaggeration.

My fiction professor once told our class that he loved to keep his office door open when the department head had his office hours because, lined up on the cushy humanities couches, there would sit all the would-be writers, literary critics and academics waiting for him with their pride trembling--going into his office brash and leaving in a crumpled heap. The department head would then lean out his door and call, “Next,” like spider says to fly, and the students would nervously eyeball each other to see who was next up to slaughter. 

And, oh, my fiction professor said, he would sit in his office and laugh and laugh. 

This wasn’t exactly how it worked with me. I would rather sew my tear ducts shut with a dull needle than let them know where my tearful goat was tied. I always had the opposite reaction to that sort of thing. With me it was, “Oh, well, we’ll just see who’s the tougher one here and whose paper is trash, and who won’t know what because she doesn’t know Latin, and who’ll cry uncle first with all the extra work. Pile it on, you rotten so-and-so, and we will just see,” which is equally as reactionary as crying but might have been the rising up for which they were hoping, though for others they had to cross through the veil of tears first. And writers, even writers-in-training, are all such punks, (I suppose all late teen, early twenties know-it-alls in every discipline are). We all deserved it. We all needed it desperately. What a mess our academic and professional lives would have been without the rough stuff. How our raging, unteachable arrogance would have taken all our hopes of progression away. 

Although I am quite formidable and take it as a solemn duty to thicken the over-precious artistic skin, I, myself, have never thrown anything at any of mine, yet, (though this is often a sore temptation), nor do I measure my success by how full I can get the salt-corroded jar of young poets’ tears I keep under my desk, (still, there is the jar, or at least the myth of the jar, which serves my purposes just as well), but I’m also not as wise in the craft or as long in it as they were and I suppose how “spider to fly” I eventually become will depend on how many years I put in, how much I love it, how hard I work and which permissions are granted by whichever institution employs me, (brave bastards). 

I hope the young ones coming up appreciate the biting insistence. They have no idea how important it is in life to learn how to receive and rally to the challenges of those who respect them enough to demand excellence of them--and how important it is to know that the ones who don’t do that, don’t do it because they do not value them at all--and those are the ones--the ones that constant billow the smoke and sunshine--those are the ones of whom they should be most wary, because those are the ones who will be the most crippling to them in the end. Those are the ones who will give them every excuse to sit still and indulge the stupid fantasy of the level playing field. Those are the ones who will hand them a greasy mirror and tell them that the obfuscated shine they see there is the light for which they should strive, when the real light is far removed from that place. And because of this they will never learn how to charge uphill in their strength, or how to take a fall on the downslope and get back up on their bruised feet again. 

The ones who do respect them however, will break the mirror, stir the stillness, murder the excuses where they lie, disillusion the level fantasy, direct the attention toward real light and be the ringing voice that calls for the uphill push as well as the will to shake off the inevitable, unceremonious fall. This process is often unpleasant. It is always unpleasant to discover you've been had, been lied to, and that you were never the hot stuff you thought you were, but the unpleasantness is a small price to pay for being given the tools to meet your potential. 

These tools are: Steel in the spine and work in the hands. Let them hold this like a prayer to that noble thing inside them that is worthy of prayer. 

The steel in my spine and the work in my hands.

Let it be so.

-M.