Not usually a procrastinator, I'm making my way through endless stacks of peer's poems--poems from my spring term "Poetic Forms" course, poems I should have decorated with my comments long ago, because I have so much authority on the subject. The poems are due for return to the poets tomorrow, and I have roughly 60 poems to go. For each poet, I've made a neat, stapled pack of all their poems to give back. In only a four week class, I don't know any of them very well. I know some by their consistent vernacular or voice, the font they habitually use--Julie always uses Calibri, at which, as a Cambria girl, I detest to look. I've spoken to Chris once or twice. He game me a ride home once when it rained, even though I clearly had an umbrella and there wasn't much more than a desultory drizzle. Beyond that, I don't know these people well enough to give them anymore than a smile or an awakward and forcedly-enthusiastic "Hey" when we pass one another on campus, so I don't know why I'm bothering to spend an hour giving each person feedback on their poems, but I am. I want them to do well on their final, and somehow I think my comments will help them make good revisions (I later learn that for most, they don't).
I slash and underline and emoticon (yep!) my way through their poems, struggling to find anything constructive to write on some of them because they are so obscure or unclear. As I critique Antoinette's (yes, that is her real name) poems, I feel compelled to comment on her talent for word choice (as if the professor hasn't done that enough already). Really, I secretly don't like this girl because people mistake her random smattering of words as "fresh language". My language would probably be just as fresh if I picked words out of my biology textbook too.
Regardless of where she gets her material, it still works for her, and I feel like I should tell her.
After going through all her poems, I write a small postscript on the front page of the packet, which I begin with a generic line that says something like, "I've really enjoyed having this class with you" as if I'm fourteen and writing in the yearbook of a classmate with whom I've only pretended to be friends all year.
When I finish with Antoinette's I decide I need to do that for everyone, because I don't want anyone to feel left out. Simultaneously, I gag, reminded that this is exactly the type of thing that gets me labels like "sweet" and "adorable"--both labels I hate. More than this, I know that I am acting exactly the way people outside of Utah think people inside of Utah act--nice, because, well, we do.
Except I don't feel like a nice person. As I write each postscript, I can think of a lot of other things I'd rather be writing than a compliment. Though I desperately want to write to Julie, "I hate the font you use. It makes me feel an irrational and unwarranted anger that overshadows the warm reception your careful diction and musical style deserve." Instead I write, "I enjoyed working on the Pablo Neruda presentation with you. You have great insight." I want to tell Chris, "Your feet are HUGE and knobby" because they are and I somehow think something constructive will come out of pointing that out, but I can't think of what that would be, so instead, I thank him again for the ride home. Though I'd like to tell Michael I think he's a tool for imitating e.e. cummings and Robert Hunter, I comment instead about how his work is "adventurous, ambitious, and admirable." It's all these things, but it's also annoying. And for the one kid I just want to tell "You suck," I say "You have a distinctive style!"
It sounds cheesy and lame to say that I actually care about these people and want them to feel good about themselves, but I do. There are a lot of things about these people that really annoy me and make me never want to see them again, but I know that pointing out how much they annoy me isn't going to do any good just because I am likely to never see them again. Plus, a lot of the things that really annoyed me weren't things anyone could change (like Chris's feet). I don't want these people to leave this class and feel like some girl in the class hated them and only had bad things to think about them. I don't want them to be self-conscious or think they were terrible poets.
In the end, I remember the goal I set for myself a year ago: to leave things better than I find them. It's a goal at odds with my personality at times, because I do enjoy being blunt with comments like "You're an example of a self-tanner fail." Sometimes, it's necessary to dish out a little tough love, but this situation isn't one of them.
I didn't get to spend a lot of time with these people due to the structure and length of the course, but as someone who greatly appreciates the art of poetry, I want my peers to have positive associations with their experience with poetry. I knew that even if I don't have any tender feelings for my peers, I did have tender feelings for where each of us were in our progression as poets and for the pieces we wrote (some of which were really bad, including my own work). I know that often times when students don't like a particular subject, it's not because they don't like the material, but because they had a bad experience they associate with it. In this situation, I do not want to become that bad experience.
So I hand back all those lovingly-commented, postscripted packets. I don't feel like a better person, but at least I acted like one.
