Let me turn this structural analysis into a narrative about the two basic urges at the root of teaching. We often think best by telling stories. I am reading a novel and I interrupt my wife to say, "Listen to this, isn't this wonderful!" and I read a passage out loud. Or we are walking in the woods and I say to her, "Look at that tree!'" I am enacting the pervasive human itch to share. It feels lonely, painful, or incomplete to appreciate something and not share it with others.
Elbow continues, focusing here on the desire to "unshare" (my word, not his):
But this urge can lead to its contrary. Suppose I say, "Listen to this passage," and my wife yawns or says, "Don't interrupt me." Suppose I say, "Look at that beautiful sunset on the lake," and she laughs at me for being so sentimental and reminds me that Detroit is right there just below the horizon--creating half the beauty with its pollution. Suppose I say, "Listen to this delicate irony," and she can't see it and thinks I am neurotic to enjoy such bloodless stuff. What happens then? I end up not wanting to share it with her. I hug it to myself. I become a lone connoisseur. Here is the equally deep human urge to protect what I appreciate from harm. Perhaps I share what I love with a few select others--but only after I find a way somehow to extract from them beforehand assurance that they will understand and appreciate what I appreciate. And with them I can even sneer at worldly ones who lack our taste or intelligence or sensibility.
Elbow relates these two desires, to share or not to share, to writing teachers:
Many of us went into teaching out of just such an urge to share things with others, but we find students turn us down or ignore us in our efforts to give gifts. Sometimes they even laugh at us for our very enthusiasm in sharing. We try to show them what we understand and love, but they yawn and turn away. They put their feet up on our delicate structures; they chew bubble gum during the slow movement; they listen to hard rock while reading Lear and say, "What's so great about Shakespeare?"
And, course, even getting it right can lead to its opposite urge:
Sometimes even success in sharing can be a problem. We manage to share with students what we know and appreciate, and they love it and eagerly grasp it. But their hands are dirty or their fingers are rough. We overhear them saying, "Listen to this neat thing I learned," yet we cringe because they got it all wrong. Best not to share.
Elbow then turns to poetry and explication:
I think of the medieval doctrine of poetry that likens it to a nut with a tough husk protecting a sweet kernel. The function of the poem is not to disclose but rather to conceal the kernel from the many, the unworthy, and to disclose it only to the few worthy (D. W. Robertson, A Preface to Chaucer [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1963], pp. 61 ff.). I have caught myself more than a few times explaining something I know or love in this tricky double-edged way: encoding my meaning with a kind of complexity or irony such that only those who have the right sensibility will hear what I have to say--others will not understand at all. Surely this is the source of much obscurity in learned discourse. We would rather have readers miss entirely what we say or turn away in boredom or frustration than reply, "'Oh, I see what you mean. How ridiculous!" or, "How naive!" It is marvelous, actually, that we can make one utterance do so many things: communicate with the right people, stymie the wrong people, and thereby help us decide who are the right and the wrong people.
The rest of the essay is wonderful, and I suggest writers and writing teachers check Elbow's work out. As a writer, I think often about this desire to share, the problems inherent in sharing one's writing, that "defensive urge that stems from hurt" when the sharing leads to some form of rejection, the many times I've thought, "Best not to share." Later on, Elbow makes the point that it's okay to feel that way, to want to "guard or protect the purity of what we cherish." However, he qualifies that statement with something that struck me as being particularly true: "So long as that act is redeemed by the presence of the opposite impulse also to give it away.
Here, Elbow (methinks) means that teachers shouldn't, for fear of being bitten, make students think writing is Edenic fruit. One might be tempted to make writing sacred by cutting students off from it, by making it something beyond them. But I think Elbow also says something here about writing, about the writer's impulse not only to write it but to give it way in spite of all the potential for hurt. It isn't brave the way facing monsters and soldiers and love is brave, but it's something, isn't it, that in spite of how much we cherish our writing, how much it is the process itself that gives it its purity, that we still give it to the world, where it more often than not falls into "dirty" hands. Earth, Frost wrote, is the right place for love. And for writing, too. I don't know where it's likely to go better.
For further reading, check out FlashFiction.Net's suggested readings of flash fiction and prose poetry collections, anthologies, and craft books, by clicking here.
Todd B. Stevens is currently an MFA student at Rosemont College. He has studied English at Cornell and Villanova. Todd worked for many years as a bookseller. His poetry has recently been published in Mad Poets Review and Off the Coast and is featured in the anthology Prompted:
Poems, Essays from Greater Philadelphia Wordshop Studio, which will be published in late May, 2010.
Kristin Sparnroft is an MFA in Creative Writing candidate at Rosemont College. A former high school English teacher, Kristin now spends her days providing in-home childcare while working on several creative projects. Upon graduation, Kristin hopes to travel and complete a creative non-fiction novel that focuses on her time as a teacher in an alternative school. 