Monthly Archives: August 2013

There’s No Place Like Home

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My hometown on a late-August evening.

My hometown on a late-August evening.


Next week a new academic year begins, and we are preparing to reenter what a friend of mine called “the maelstrom that is our lives” in academia. This means we are finishing up things here in Maine and preparing for the roister and roil of a new semester in Brooklyn.

Which has me thinking a lot about the idea of “home.” What do we mean when we talk about our home? When my childhood friends ask, “When are you coming home?,” by home they mean the town in which I grew up, the town where my parents still live. My friends in New York ask the same thing, but by home they mean Brooklyn. And wherever we are living at the moment, I will refer to that place as home (as in, “Look at the time! have to be getting home.”).

Obviously, this is not a problem. We are lucky to be able to spend time happily in two different places. What I mean when I say I have been thinking about the idea of home is that I have been considering what “home” means to my students (and, by extension, to me).

I teach in a commuter college, so many of my students still live at home with their parents. For them, there is no hanging out in the dorm’s common room until the wee hours of the morning, eating pizza and watching junky movies. More often than not, they leave the college to go to work, then to their family’s home to study before getting some sleep. They have not yet made homes of their own, a prospect that both excites and worries them as they contemplate graduation, finding a job, finding a spouse. Yet even as they face life after commencement, they are grounded to their sense of home as a physical place to which they return at the end of each day.

This is not the case for the students who come from someplace other than the five boroughs. Some of them are from other states, some from other countries. In my freshman courses I am always amazed at the number of students who say they arrived in New York mere days before the start of Fall classes; while some are staying with family, others have to find apartment shares or other places to live after they arrive.

For these students, the ones whose families are far away, the idea of “home” is a lot more complicated. Even if they have not explicitly thought it through, they have an innate understanding that they have, in some way or another, lost the home they once had.

I don’t mean to suggest that a student who moves to New York to go to college can never return home again. She most likely will go home, whether to visit family or to live, but something will have changed. Or, rather, some things will have changed. Her home will seem different because it is different (despite the childlike belief we all have that when we leave a place it goes into stasis until we return), but it will also seem different because she is different. The very act of moving to another place will have fundamentally changed her, and she will not see her home in the same way as she did before. Yet some part of her will always consider that place home.

This is what we are getting at when we talk about someone’s hometown. “Hometown” is understood to mean the place where a person grew up, not necessarily the place where she makes her home now. “Hometown” acknowledges that we are influenced in many ways by the place where we grew up, and that we continue to be influenced by it (some more than others) throughout our lives. And that each of us — even those who end up living their whole lives in their hometowns — finds that in some way or other we lose that home as we get older.

Which brings me back to those students who are living at home while going to college. For they, too, will find that their homes have changed by the time they graduate. The separation is not as sudden, nor as obvious, as it is for the students who move to the city to attend school. But in the end that separation does occur. That physical place, home, will seem different to them in much the same way that it seems different to students “from away” (as we would say up in Maine). And this is as it should be.

This question of leaving/losing home is one that recurs throughout my teaching. In many courses (both composition and literature) I use the poem “One Art” by Elizabeth Bishop. This villanelle talks about “the art of losing” and examines the ways in which personal loss, even devastating loss, can be borne. In the poem Bishop talks about losing names, cites and places (among other things), and I find that often the most fruitful and rewarding discussions we have as a class will be about the question, “How can you lose a place?” My students from away often nod in agreement as we discuss what it means to move, to leave behind a home, a family, even a country. The students who still live at home also recognize something of themselves in this idea of a lost place; they may still have to “practice losing farther, losing faster” before they recognize the loss, but the loss is there nonetheless.

Most of them don’t know it yet, but the “art of losing” a home is bittersweet. It is what fuels nostalgia, what gives a hint of melancholy to even the most enjoyable trip back to one’s hometown. It is why I think wistfully of how my hometown will look and feel as August gives way to September and the days shorten and cool, while we are “back home” in Brooklyn. It is why I miss the ocean when I am away from Maine (yes, I know, New York is a port town, but I mean the ocean that opens before you and sends waves rolling to crash against the shore) and why I find myself thinking it would be nice to stay put instead of taking the train south next week. This doesn’t mean I don’t like living in Brooklyn; I do. It just means that, like my students, I have lost the home I once had and, while I have a new home where I am very happy, I still haven’t quite mastered “the art of losing.”

Why Study Women’s Poetry?

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For the Spring 2008 semester (during my first year as a full-time instructor), I designed and taught a new course, Contemporary American Women’s Poetry. I was working straight from my dissertation, and the course gave me the opportunity to see the poems I’d been living with for so long from a new perspective, that of my students. A poetry course can be a tough row to hoe, particularly when students have avoided studying poetry and are suddenly faced with going through works line-by-line and analyzing everything from punctuation and word choice to metaphor and rhetoric. That this was an upper-level course (juniors and seniors) only complicated matters because, in addition to analysis, students must now work at synthesis — in simple terms, coming up with their own ideas and interpretations. It isn’t enough for them to simply tell me what each aspect of the poem is (X is a metaphor for death, Y is a word that has two meanings and the poet meant both); they must also tell me how those parts combine to make a whole, and then tell me what the whole means.

As I was teaching the course, I was also organizing a one-day conference on women’s poetry. I decided to title the conference “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” because this was a question my students and I were discussing in class. “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” isn’t meant to suggest that the work of female poets is somehow inferior or less-worthy of study; what we all were struggling with was the idea of studying women’s poetry separately from men’s. We talked quite a bit about why you hear people discuss “women’s poetry” but not “men’s poetry.” We questioned whether teaching a separate course in women’s poetry was somehow buying into the idea that women’s writing was something different, something “Other.” My students (ten young women, two young men) struggled with these issues, often saying that they could see both sides: poetry is poetry and should be taught as such, without regard to sex or gender, versus the very real fact that poetry by women is often not taught in traditional lit courses (or, if it is, there are only one or two works by female poets included in the syllabus). That the scholars and poets who attended the conference were also struggling with the question “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” was reassuring to the students, even if it didn’t help them decide which side was right.

Then in May of that year, I ended up teaching Contemporary American Women’s Poetry as a “mini-mester” course. It was the first time the college was offering these intensive courses, which met from 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. for ten days. After the first day, we all (myself and my students alike) were viewing this as a sort of poetry boot camp. I had six students enrolled (three young men, three young women) and the majority of them needed this course to graduate. And I do mean needed, because graduation came smack-dab in the middle of the mini-mester and if they weren’t doing well they wouldn’t be able to walk at commencement.

Instead of using the poems from the semester-long course, I had the students get the anthology No More Masks! edited by Florence Howe (and don’t get me started on the fact that this wonderful collection is now out of print). We read a lot of poems and did a lot of work. I assigned some poems for them to discuss, and then we did a lot of “down and dirty” analysis and synthesis by picking out poems that appealed to us each day and doing cold readings of them. After three or four days, a young man in the front row raised his hand and asked wearily, “Are all the poems about sex?” The three young women and I cracked up, and I couldn’t help but tease him a little by saying, “Yes,” to which he (and the two other young men) gave a little groan. I then went on to explain that no, the poems wouldn’t all be about carnal pleasure; he managed a weak smile and bent back to his book.

I’ve been thinking a lot about that young man this summer as I work to revise the syllabus for Contemporary American Women’s Poetry, which I will be teaching this Fall for the fourth time. In June I reached out to the wonderful people on WOM-PO, the Women’s Poetry Listserv, and asked them if they were teaching the course what would be the one poem they believed absolutely must be included. I got many, many terrific suggestions (and no, most people couldn’t limit themselves to just one), and have been spending wonderful hours reading and researching and revising the course. But I keep coming back to that question: “Are all the poems about sex?”

What if we read “sex” to mean not physical relations but our own sex, the equipment we were born with (or chose to change)? Are all the poems we (both male and female poets) write somehow about our sex, about being a man or woman? I don’t think there is a poet in the world who would, like Lady Macbeth, cry “unsex me” before s/he sits down to write. We are who we are because we are men or women. Our experience of the world is mediated through sex (and gender, and race, and class).

Yet our experience of the world is also mediated through myriad other “smaller” things. I grew up in a small town on the coast of Maine. I read a lot as a child. My parents were both teachers. I have only one sibling, a sister, with whom I am close. I married later in life. All of these things, and hundreds more, go into shaping the way I move through the world, the way I observe things, the way I react to different situations, the emotions I feel in response to certain experiences. And the way I write poetry. We certainly are not going to break poets down into minute categories — that would be neither helpful nor productive.

So what do I tell my students this semester? One thing that has helped me frame this discussion is telling them about a book I read while writing my dissertation on metaphors of motion in women’s poetry. One obviously important metaphor for poets (both male and female) is walking. In my research I ran across an academic book published in 1991 that dealt with walk poems, and eagerly began reading. Here I was, almost literally hip-deep in copies of poems written by women about walking, wonderful poems that speak to the human experience and condition and do so through taking a particular experience and universalizing it. So imagine my annoyance when it quickly became apparent that the author of this book believed that women’s walk poems focused on the poet’s particular experience rather than on using the poem as a way to link different kinds of experiences together as men’s walk poems do. In other words, Walk Poems by men speak to a universal experience, no matter how particular the subject of the poems may be, while walk poems by women (and yes, the capitalization is deliberate on my part) speak only to the particular experience within the poem. My students are appalled, but the female students are not surprised. Though young, they have already seen this dismissal of women’s experience as too inwardly focused. Too particular. Too, well, female. They push back when they can, fighting the good fight as generations of women who came before them did, but they do get discouraged and it doesn’t help when the very place where they should be judged by their intellect and abilities — academia — is home to some of these very same prejudices.

This, then, is the answer to “Why Study Women’s Poetry?” Because we must.