Like Spinning Plates

I started taking a class. Last Tuesday. Advanced Poetry writing. I was fucking nervous. I haven't been in a class since the spring of 2005. I know the professor. I was in the first class he ever taught here, which happens to be the class that precedes this one in subject matter. Which was back in 2004. The class is six other students, all undergraduates, and myself. They startle me with their youth. Their smooth skin. Their bright, eager eyes. Their carefully planned first day of class clothing choices. I'm wearing my work clothes: a sweater so I don't look like ten pounds of crap stuffed in a five pound sack. Last time I saw my mother, she noticed that I had some gray hairs on my temple and in my beard.

Our first assignment: go to our library and find twenty journals that publish contemporary poetry, and read this fifteen page article “a few times” so we can “really talk it through.” After work, I'm on the couch reading my article, and I have a moment. This whole thing feels odd. I haven't had homework in years, since I was a full time student, and with its duty and obligation come a litany of flashbacks that crash against my current surroundings. I am suddenly hyper-aware of all around me. My feet tucked into an old blanket. The napkin in my lap holding a half peeled, half eaten Clementine. The cat, ever peering from just beyond the edge of my paper. I finish my orange and decide to make some tea. Leaning against the kitchen counter, kettle warming to my left, my homework in my hand, I wonder to myself: is this what being an adult is? Dishes in the sink, tea and oranges on the couch? Bills clipped above the doorway and kitty litter to be scooped? Car payments, loans, utilities, and eight to five?

It's Thursday and I'm in class again. I ran to the library after dinner Wednesday night and lurked around the stacks in the basement, opening journal after journal and keeping a list on paper of what I found. I look around the table and every other student has typed their list up, their names and the date at the top of the paper. I feel a flash of foolishness, though I know this isn't the type of class where we'd be asked to hand this list in. I know he asked us to do this just so we'd get a sense of what our library had, what our resources were, and where to find them. We each read through our lists. Apparently, most of my classmates searched for their journals on-line. Our assignment for next Tuesday: find twenty journals in the library and to hold them in our hands.

We come to discussion of the article. It was a speech by former poet laureate Mark Strand in which he attempts to defend poetry. He starts by creating a fictional account of his attempt to write the very speech his giving, where he has a series of encounters with a student and his girlfriend. They ask him questions pertaining to the speech and poetry in general. To each he replies with an eloquent response that speaks to a certain aspect of poetry, but to each response he backs off, reflects, and determines that, to a degree, he is full of shit. The speech continues with this pattern until he decides, at the end, it is best not to give it at all.

Of course, this is meant to be cheeky and clever. People like cheeky and clever speeches. It wasn't until I read the article a second time, wrote out each argument and his reason for discounting it, that I realized that the structure of his speech was also the point: poetry attempts all these things, but is not any of them wholly. Poetry is about coming as close as you can to encapsulating an experience, whatever it may be, but it never fully recreates it. There is always a gap, a layer of mystery. And just like any abstraction will fail to capture an experience, any attempt at defining poetry will suffer the same fate.

I looked around the table again. Everyone had their articles out, and everyone's article was pristine. I was the only person at the table with my notebook out, which was full of summaries, arrows, connecting lines, and ideas, jotted in four colors. “What did you all think of this article?” Prolonged silence. At the end of the table a young lady speaks up: “I didn't like the end.”

“What about it didn't you like?”

“I don't know. How it ended like that. I didn't like that.”


There is a small panic in the other student's eyes. A furrowed brow an a pout when the professor disagrees with them. A beaming that occurs when he does. I realize that it's all on the line for them. This is what they are: students. Is this how we're different? This is their identity, and they need to succeed. If they don't, they fail more than their class. Here I am, strolling in, doing my homework before and after work, between cooking and cleaning, from the quiet comfort of my house. I could drop this class tomorrow, and if I do, so what? I still eat. I still work. I am no longer expected to succeed, and no one will come down on me. I won't come down on me. I have nothing to lose, I have nothing to fear. They have no idea what life outside of college will be like, but they know that it depends on everything they do now.

I remember what that was like. It's terrifying. It's overpowering. But it's not mine anymore. And I don't belong here. I can see how every question, every statement the professor makes, is designed to elicit a train of thought. Formed to gently massage out a response. Baby steps. I get it, and though it's entertaining to watch, it's uncomfortable. I am between two worlds here. From nine to eleven, Tuesday and Thursday, I will be an undergraduate student. From two to eleven I will be a young student affairs professional, and I don't belong there either. I see through the bullshit. I am put off by the constant dishonesty, the self serving political jockeying. I refuse to pray on the altar of my resume, and for that I will only watch others step over, pass by, as I struggle in the same position.

Maybe that's naive. Maybe I'm not so different than my class mates, only further along the curve. I've been there, and though the material may be new, the methods boring now. Maybe in ten years I'll be able to look back on this entry, on my take of home and work, and I'll see how immature I was, how much I had to learn. Still, the feeling remains. I don't belong here. I am no longer a college student. I am not a professional. I just live in limbo, playing the role of both.

I saw one of my work study students at the library the other day. He was quite unsettled. He didn't recognize me in “normal clothes.”