Richard Jeffrey Newman

I miss read­ing. I really do. In a big, big way. And it has, espe­cially over the past cou­ple of days, been mak­ing me very, very sad. It started after I read Joshua Bodwell’s arti­cle in the most recent issue of Poets & Writ­ers, “You Are What You Read.” “Not long ago,” he begins

I had an unset­tling epiphany that prob­a­bly shouldn’t have come as a sur­prise but nev­er­the­less left me dis­heart­ened for the bet­ter part of an afternoon.

I won’t get to all the books I want to read in my lifetime.

For the aver­age reader, this is one of life’s rel­a­tively benign epipha­nies; as a writer it’s a seri­ous lim­i­ta­tion. After all, writ­ers are read­ers first. Most of us were con­sum­ing books long before we ever picked up a pen or pen­cil, and con­fronting the fact that there is a limit to the num­ber of them we will read feels a bit like real­iz­ing there’s a finite amount of oxy­gen in the room.

I don’t really buy the oxy­gen metaphor, but I endorse wholly the idea Bod­well is try­ing to get at. Indeed, a jolt of regret ran through me more strongly than I have felt in a long time when I read the words “writ­ers are read­ers first,” because I can’t remem­ber the last time that state­ment would have been say­ing some­thing true about me. Sure, I read. I read for school, both mate­r­ial that I am teach­ing and that my stu­dents write; I read the news­pa­per and arti­cles in mag­a­zines; I read blog posts and occa­sion­ally the dis­cus­sion threads they spawn; I read emails and memos and occa­sion­ally schol­arly arti­cles and other sim­i­lar mate­r­ial that feeds my aca­d­e­mic work; but it has been years since I have been able to cre­ate at the cen­ter of my life a space for the kind of read­ing that nour­ishes me as a writer, read­ing that puts me back in touch with myself just for the sake of that expe­ri­ence, that con­nects me to lan­guage in ways that are chal­leng­ing and revi­tal­iz­ing, that affirms my right to claim a place in this world sim­ply because I am, that shapes who I am and shows me pos­si­bil­i­ties of being I would not oth­er­wise have imagined.

It’s easy to lay the blame for this state of affairs at the feet of my adult respon­si­bil­i­ties – hav­ing a job, need­ing to work extra hours because we need money, being a part­ner to the woman I mar­ried nearly twenty years ago and a par­ent to a thir­teen year old boy – and, to some degree, putting the blame there is not inac­cu­rate. Those respon­si­bil­i­ties do take up time I could oth­er­wise spend read­ing. It is also true, how­ever, that I sim­ply have not pri­or­i­tized read­ing the way I used to, not so much in terms of how much time I can give to it, but in the sense that I’ve made choices about how to use my time that have pushed the kind of read­ing I am talk­ing about here to the mar­gins of my life. I did not start this post think­ing about New Year’s Res­o­lu­tions – since I don’t really believe in them any­way – but it is appro­pri­ate that I should be start­ing it on New Year’s Day, the day after I fin­ished the first book in a very long time that I read just because I wanted to read it – though I didn’t start read­ing for that rea­son (about which more below) – Stanley Fish’s How to Write a Sen­tence and How to Read One.

Fish divides his book into the two sec­tions named in the title, treat­ing the first, roughly, as a dis­cus­sion of form and the sec­ond, more or less, as a dis­cus­sion of con­tent. Of course, since the two are not really sep­a­ra­ble, his analy­sis of one often bleeds over into an analy­sis of the other. Nonethe­less, the dis­tinc­tion is use­ful, since it allows Fish to ground a lot of what he has to say in the notion that a sen­tence is a mate­r­ial thing, like paint, an object with a struc­ture and char­ac­ter­is­tics inde­pen­dent of the par­tic­u­lar con­tent the sen­tence has been fash­ioned to con­vey. Too many peo­ple who want to write – at least this is true of too many of the stu­dents I meet who say they “lo-ove” to write (and they almost always turn “love” into a two syl­la­ble word) – just don’t get this. Here is the first para­graph of Fish’s book:

In her book The Writ­ing Life (1989), Annie Dil­lard tells the story of a fel­low writer who was asked by a stu­dent, “Do you think I could be a writer?” “‘Well,’ the writer said, ‘do you like sen­tences?’” The stu­dent is sur­prised by the ques­tion, but Dil­lard knows exactly what was meant. He was being told, she explains, that “if he liked sen­tences he could begin,” and she remem­bers a sim­i­lar con­ver­sa­tion with a painter friend. “I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, ‘I like the smell of paint.’” The point, made implic­itly (Dil­lard does not bela­bor it), is that you don’t begin with a grand con­cep­tion, either of the great Amer­i­can novel or a mas­ter­piece that will have in the Lou­vre. You begin with a feel for the nitty-gritty mate­r­ial of the medium, paint in one case, sen­tences in the other. (1)

There are few plea­sures that I enjoy more than get­ting my hands dirty in the tan­gled mess that the sen­tences of my first drafts usu­ally are; and if we’re talk­ing about poems, in which case you need to add to that mess the lines over which the sen­tences break, and per­haps a meter and/or a rhyme scheme, then the plea­sure is even greater. Right now, there are two piece I am work­ing on, an essay and a poem, each one need­ing revi­sion. I have set them aside until I fin­ish prep­ping my tech­ni­cal writ­ing class for next semes­ter – I am writ­ing this post to take a break from that prepa­ra­tion – and I can’t wait to be able to pick each one up again and give to revis­ing it the solid chunk of time that it will need (and deserve).

My stu­dents, or at least the over­whelm­ing major­ity of them, feel no such plea­sure in revi­sion. Indeed, most of them barely know what revi­sion is, think­ing instead that the only changes that ever need to be made to a piece of writ­ing they’ve pro­duced are gram­mat­i­cal or proof­read­ing cor­rec­tions. These stu­dents, I think, can usu­ally be divided into two large groups: those who find writ­ing to be a real chore, but who are nonethe­less able and will­ing to write for class with some degree of com­pe­tence, and those for whom writ­ing can be a truly painful expe­ri­ence, who are con­vinced it is a skill they will never acquire – that they are con­gen­i­tally bad at it any­way – whose work is most com­monly labeled reme­dial and who there­fore hate writing.

There are rea­sons that this sec­ond group feels the way it does, and I could devote an awful lot of space to med­i­tat­ing on why, but those rea­sons don’t con­cern me now. Nor am I really inter­ested in why the first group feels the way it does. No one is oblig­ated to like writ­ing. What I am inter­ested in is a stance towards lan­guage that, in my expe­ri­ence, these two groups seem to share. More inter­est­ingly, it is a stance I remem­ber being artic­u­lated in an essay on poetry that I read a long time ago but that I can’t lay my hands on right now. (I want to say the writer was Wen­dell Berry and that the essay was called some­thing like “A Poet’s Edu­ca­tion” or “The Edu­ca­tion of a Poet,” but I can’t remem­ber for sure.) In any event, accord­ing to my mem­ory, the essay­ist was ask­ing why peo­ple so resisted the idea that writ­ers in gen­eral, and poets in par­tic­u­lar, should have, or require, as for­mal an edu­ca­tion in their art as painters, say, require in theirs. I read the essay at least 10 or 15 years ago, and it is likely older than that, so I think the piece was part of a con­ver­sa­tion about why MFA pro­grams were nec­es­sary. The rea­son the writer felt the essay was nec­es­sary, if I remem­ber the argu­ment cor­rectly, is that while every­one seems to under­stand paint or sound as mate­r­ial about the prop­er­ties of which peo­ple might be igno­rant, and about which, there­fore, aspir­ing artists or com­posers need to learn, since just about every­one who wants to be a writer is already a native speaker of – has already, on some mea­sur­able level, mas­tered – the lan­guage in which they want to write, it is much harder to see how peo­ple might be igno­rant of lan­guage in the same way.

This is a point that I think almost every fresh­man com­po­si­tion text I have ever tried to use has missed, with the excep­tion of They Say, I Say, by Ger­ald Graff and Cathy Birken­stein: the idea that col­lege fresh­man need to learn how to write not at the level of large rhetor­i­cal forms like nar­ra­tion, descrip­tion, comparison-contrast and the like, but at the level of lan­guage, of how lan­guage works to struc­ture and cre­ate mean­ing. Graff and Birken­stein do this by fore­ground­ing the use of lin­guis­tic tem­plates that they say every com­pe­tent writer uses. So, for exam­ple – and those three words right there are an exam­ple of such a tem­plate: so, for exam­ple–their book con­tains exam­ples and exer­cises that resem­ble a kind of aca­d­e­mic Mad-Lib (remem­ber those?). Here are two mod­er­ately sophis­ti­cated exam­ples of templates:

In recent dis­cus­sions of __________, a con­tro­ver­sial issue has been whether ____________. On the one hand, some argue that ____________. From this per­spec­tive, ____________. On the other hand, how­ever, oth­ers argue that ____________. In the words of one of this view’s main pro­po­nents, “___________.” Accord­ing to this view, __________. In sum, then, the issue is whether _________ or ___________. My own view is that ____________. Though I con­cede that _________, I still main­tain that __________. For exam­ple, _______. Although some might object that _________, I reply that ________. The issue is impor­tant because ________. (9)

Any­one who has ever writ­ten an argu­men­ta­tive or per­sua­sive piece of writ­ing should rec­og­nize as one they have used the struc­ture of rea­son­ing that is given form in those two exam­ples. More to the point, that struc­ture is avail­able to every­one; and it can be learned, like the play­ing of scales or the mix­ing of col­ors, through prac­tice. My stu­dents often resist this notion because they think that using the tem­plates will make their writ­ing pro­gram­matic, that it will strait­jacket them into a voice that is not their own; and it’s not only my fresh­man com­po­si­tion stu­dents who feel this way. My cre­ative writ­ing stu­dents who worry that read­ing other poets will some­how con­t­a­m­i­nate their style, rob them of what is unique in their work, are express­ing a sim­i­lar fear; and I think it is in part a fear rooted in a con­scious­ness of them­selves as already hav­ing mas­tered the lan­guage they speak, in which they express them­selves using a voice that is already no one else’s and that they feel they will lose if, for exam­ple, they try on for size the tem­plates that Graff and Birken­stein are talk­ing about or really study as mod­els to learn from the cre­ative writ­ing of estab­lished authors.

The irony, of course, is that those stu­dents who do con­sciously and atten­tively work with the mod­els I pro­vide for them in the class­room – whether that work is to adopt the mod­els or to work pur­pose­fully against them – start to sound more like them­selves than they did before; and this is because the scaf­fold­ing that the mod­els pro­vide actu­ally allows the con­tent of my stu­dents’ ideas, or cre­ative vision, to reveal itself more fully than the mud­dled, muddy, poorly edited lan­guage in which they all-too-often oth­er­wise write. Indeed, Graff and Birken­stein make pre­cisely this point in a cou­ple of dif­fer­ent ways, point­ing out, for the ben­e­fit of instruc­tors using the book, that “tem­plates have a long and rich his­tory. Pub­lic ora­tors from ancient Greece and Rome through the Euro­pean Renais­sance stud­ied rhetor­i­cal topoi or “com­mon­places,” model pas­sages and for­mu­las that rep­re­sented the dif­fer­ent strate­gies avail­able to pub­lic speak­ers” (xvii). Later, in a sec­tion addressed to stu­dents called “Do Tem­plates Sti­fle Cre­ativ­ity?”, the authors make the point more directly:

As for the belief that pre-established forms under­mine cre­ativ­ity, we think it rests on a very lim­ited vision of what cre­ativ­ity is all about. In our view, the above tem­plate and the oth­ers in this book will actu­ally help your writ­ing become more orig­i­nal and cre­ative, not less. After all, even the most cre­ative forms of expres­sion depend on estab­lished pat­terns and struc­tures. Most song­writ­ers, for instance, rely on a time-honored verse-chorus-verse pat­tern, and few peo­ple would call Shake­speare uncre­ative because he didn’t invent the son­net or dra­matic forms that he used to such daz­zling effect. Even the most avant-garde, cutting-edge artists…need to mas­ter the basic forms that their work impro­vises on, departs from, and goes beyond, or else their work will come across as une­d­u­cated child’s play. Ulti­mately, then, cre­ativ­ity and orig­i­nal­ity lie not in the avoid­ance of estab­lished forms, but in the imag­i­na­tive use of them. (10−11)

Fish’s goal in How to Write a Sen­tence is to illu­mi­nate some of those forms, not in the template-sense that Graff and Birken­stein are refer­ring to, but as sen­tence “styles,” by which he means ways of orga­niz­ing the world; and he wants to do this illu­mi­na­tion with as lit­tle ref­er­ence to for­mal, pre­scrip­tive gram­mat­i­cal terms as pos­si­ble. By and large he suc­ceeds, though not at the level which first excited me about his book, which was that I might be able to use it in my classes. Pub­lished as a hard­cover, the book costs just $19.99, much less costly than the rel­a­tively inex­pen­sive (for col­lege texts) They Say, I Say, which I think costs around $40 or $45, if you buy the vol­ume with read­ings. Unfor­tu­nately, while I really like a lot of what Fish has to say about sen­tences – “the suc­cess of a sen­tence is mea­sured by the degree to which the [writer’s intended] effect has been achieved” or “The first thing to ask when writ­ing a sen­tence is ‘What am I try­ing to do?’” (37) – the sen­tences he chooses as exam­ples, through­out the book, would be entirely inap­pro­pri­ate for my fresh­man com­po­si­tion stu­dents, who are nei­ther aspir­ing writ­ers nor Eng­lish majors. Here, for exam­ple, is a sen­tence from John Milton’s An Apol­ogy Against a Pam­phlet (1642) that Fish uses as an exam­ple of the “sub­or­di­nat­ing style:”

For me, read­ers, although I can­not say that I am utterly untrained in those rules which best rhetori­cians have given, or unac­quainted with those exam­ples which the prime authors of elo­quence have writ­ten in any learned tongue, yet true elo­quence I find to be none but the seri­ous and hearty love of truth, and that whose mind so ever is fully pos­sessed with a fer­vent desire to know good things and with the dear­est char­ity to infuse the knowl­edge of them into oth­ers, when such a man would speak, his words (by what I can express), like so many nim­ble and airy servi­tors, trip about him at com­mand, and in well ordered files, as he would wish, fall aptly into their own places. (Qtd. in Fish 57)

It’s not that I think my stu­dents are unable, intel­lec­tu­ally or otherwise, to appre­ci­ate sen­tences like the one I have just quoted, but were I to assign them Fish’s book, I would be derelict in my duty if I did not pro­vide them with a good rea­son to use Mil­ton to develop that abil­ity. Fish takes for granted Milton’s rel­e­vance to his read­ers, and to the degree that he does so, it is clear that I, and peo­ple like me, not peo­ple like the over­whelm­ing major­ity of my stu­dents, are his audience.

An obvi­ous point, per­haps, but think­ing through this dis­tinc­tion in terms of audi­ence between They Say, I Say and How to Write a Sen­tence has been for me less about the dif­fer­ences between the audi­ences, or even between the books, than about fig­ur­ing out the rela­tion­ships between and among myself as a writer, a teacher and a reader. I started out by say­ing that I miss doing the kind of read­ing that feeds my writ­ing, and Fish’s book, despite the fact that his exam­ple sen­tences are taken over­whelm­ing from canon­i­cal (white male) writ­ers (with whom there is noth­ing wrong; it’s just a very nar­row field of vision), con­nected me once more to one of the ways that read­ing can be so nour­ish­ing. Here he is tak­ing apart, as a writer, not a teacher and not a critic, but as a writer, the first sen­tence of Agatha Christie’s book Neme­sis: “In the after­noons it was the cus­tom of Miss Jane Marple to unfold her sec­ond newspaper.”

Even before we meet Christie’s detective-heroine, Miss Marple, we know a great deal about her. She has a rou­tine, she fol­lows it, and it occurs daily. Indeed, it is more than a rou­tine. It is a cus­tom, a word that sug­gests tra­di­tion, dura­tion, and an oblig­a­tory prac­tice tied to social class and norms. (These sug­ges­tions are enhanced by the slow progress of her full title, “Miss Jane Marple.”) More­over, oe senses that “cus­tom” is not for her a thing eas­ily tri­fled with. Her cus­toms, we intuit, are method­i­cally, even rit­u­al­is­ti­cally observed. We know this from the word “unfold”; unfold­ing is so much more for­mal than open­ing; merely open­ing a news­pa­per, in any which way, would seem indeco­rous and over­hasty to her.… The word that sets the seal on this mini-portrait is “sec­ond.” The word is casu­ally deliv­ered, but because it comes late and con­sti­tutes a small sur­prise – it tells us that this is part two of her cus­tom, some­thing we hadn’t been expect­ing – it calls atten­tion to itself and to its mes­sage: Miss Marple is not con­tent with one source of infor­ma­tion; she has to know every­thing. And she will know every­thing. You wouldn’t want to be some­one who has some­thing to hide. (100−101)

I remem­ber when I used to write para­graphs like that in my jour­nal try­ing to fig­ure out how and why the words of cer­tain writ­ers were able to move me as pow­er­fully as they did, and it makes me sad that I have not done that for a very long time. Or at least that I have not done it for myself, for its own plea­sure, its own sake; that, most recently any­way, I have done it only in the ser­vice of teach­ing. Indeed, I had not real­ized until I fin­ished How to Write a Sen­tence just how thor­oughly teach­ing had infil­trated my sense of myself as a lit­er­ary per­son, a reader and a writer. It’s evi­dent to some degree in the form this blog post has taken, mov­ing as it does through a dis­cus­sion of writ­ing ped­a­gogy in order to get to here, to the issues that are most impor­tant to me.

I used to dis­miss the warn­ings of writ­ers who talked about the dan­gers that teach­ing could pose to being able to write, to do one’s own work. For a long time, I was teach­ing and I was writ­ing, and I was pro­duc­tive. I’ve pub­lished five books after all (The Teller of Tales is not yet on the page that link takes you to); I have begun to make a small name for myself as a trans­la­tor of clas­si­cal Iran­ian poetry; my own book of poems was well-received and well-reviewed when it came out; but if I am hon­est with myself, I have to admit that the more I became immersed in my pro­fes­sional life, the more I pushed writ­ing and read­ing into the cor­ners of the larger life I was liv­ing as a hus­band, father and more, steal­ing time for it when I could, always putting other things first, and it’s only now that I am allow­ing myself to feel how deeply unsat­is­fy­ing this has been, how, lit­tle by lit­tle, I have let this part of who I am – where I am most fully engaged with the world; or, bet­ter, where my engage­ment with the world takes its best and most endur­ing and most mean­ing­ful and even most joy­ous form – slip away. I love teach­ing and every­thing it stands for, and it’s impor­tant to me to make clear that this post is not about being burned out. I’m not leav­ing my pro­fes­sion. Rather, it’s about remem­ber­ing that my pro­fes­sion exists in the con­text of a much larger truth about who I am, that I am, as e. e. cum­mings said of poets in his intro­duc­tion to Is 5, some­one “to whom things made mat­ter very lit­tle – some­body who is obsessed by Mak­ing.” It is time for me to orga­nize my life once more around that truth.

Tagged Reading, Teaching