Poet, teacher, and founder of Brooklyn
Poets Jason Koo emailed me a few days ago to tell me more about its new
venture, The Bridge, which he describes as “the world's first poetry
networking site connecting student and mentor poets.” After a few exchanges, it turned into a real
interview, which appears below. Brooklyn Poets launched a campaign to develop The Bridge; their Indiegogo page has
a video and more details.
I enjoyed exchanging thoughts with Jason about
poetry and mentoring, as well as new ways of teaching and learning–“delivery
models,” as we say in the education business–and, of course, The Bridge.
I guess the first question I have would be: Is this a social media poetry site?
Essentially, yes. The Bridge would be a
social network for poets, though something like "craft network" would
be closer to what we have in mind. There are a few examples of poetry networks
out there, such as poetry.com, but the design leaves a lot to be desired and there's a lack of seriousness about
craft–it looks like a site for amateurs.
Ah, the BBS and message boards. I remember them well. So The
Bridge will take a different approach, I take it?
What we're hoping to build is a space where amateurs can interact with
professional, teaching poets–poets who wouldn't be caught dead on a site like poetry.com.
You see this on Instagram, where professional photographers share work in the
same community as amateurs. But in our community, poets wouldn't just be
sharing and commenting on each other's work, liking it, etc.; student poets–a
better term than "amateurs"–would have an opportunity to get serious
critiques of their work from mentor poets they admire.
On poetry.com,
a "review" of a work consists of a little comment and some stars and
everyone tries to accumulate points and badges. That sounds like a lot of fun,
but no one's going to learn how to become a better poet that way.
Well, you also have an actual faculty, a
super line-up of poets, from Melissa Broder to Jenny Zhang.
On The Bridge, a
"critique" would, at the very least, consist of a rigorous written
response to a student's manuscript, whether it be one poem or a whole book,
plus line-edits, etc. This is something I provide all of my college students,
but that I personally never received from any of my mentors at the
undergraduate or graduate level, great as they were–I'd get verbal feedback in
class and sometimes a few written remarks, but never the kind of rigorous
critique I was looking for and felt I deserved.
Now, mentors will
have the choice on The Bridge to add on services, if they choose to; they might
offer off-site video or phone conferencing or even make themselves available to
meet in person, should the student requesting a critique live in the same city.
And they'd be able to set their prices based on those extra services.
But
Brooklyn Poets would be setting a minimum quality standard for critiques and
pricing per poem-bundle, something we think is fair for both teacher and
student. Tentatively, we imagine pricing like this for written critiques of
student work:
- 1
poem (1 pg) $15 - 1-2
poems (2 pgs) $20 - 3-5
poems (3-6 pgs) $40 - Writing
sample (10-12 pgs) $70 - Chapbook
(24-32 pgs) $100 - Full-length
book (48-64 pgs) $145
I like the honesty and
straightforwardness of the approach.
There would also be a
vetting process where prospective mentors would have to submit a CV and offer a
sample critique of a student poem–and here's the cool part: prospective
mentors would critique poems that students had submitted for a free critique.
So say a student simply does not have the money to pay for even a 1-pg
critique, he or she could submit a poem for a free critique that would get
a random prospective mentor. The student just wouldn't know the mentor's work
or how long it would take to get the critique back; paying a specific mentor
would mean you'd know that mentor's work and skills/influences and the
timetable for receiving the critique.
So, up until the free critique bit, I
was imagining The Bridge to be a cross between a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC)
and a low-res MFA program. Am I still on the right track?
In a way, it would be like a cross
between a MOOC and a low-res MFA, but without any kind of grades or
certification involved. We're not looking to replace undergraduate or graduate
programs in writing–those things offer valuable services that I myself have
benefited from, such as live, in-the-flesh interaction with mentors and
peers, teaching experience and degrees that you might use to get a job.
Some students might look at The Bridge as an alternative to the MFA and use it
as such–students interested solely in the craft of poetry who aren't
interested in spending the time or money on an MFA and aren't interested in
teaching. I meet a lot of these people in my work for Brooklyn Poets; they
range from students in high school-college to retirees. But I imagine students
in MFA or PhD programs for creative writing using The Bridge as an addendum to
what they're already doing; perhaps they're not satisfied with the two or three
mentors they have in their program and want to get feedback from other poets out
there whose work they're admire. Good students tend to outgrow what one mentor
can teach them; and if a mentor is any good, he or she will be pushing
students to push past them. As Whitman once wrote, "He most honors my
style who learns under it to destroy the teacher."
So I guess you're of the mind that
writing can be taught? I mean, I am as well, but I'd love to hear your thoughts
on this.
I am, yes. I mean, of course it
can–like anything else. I'm amused by this idea that writing poems can't be
taught, but things like yoga and tango can. Imagine signing up for a yoga or
tango class with no previous experience, paying for it, then showing up the
first day and hearing the teacher say, Okay, show me what you can do. And
pointing at the floor. You'd be mortified–and pissed, because that's not what
you're paying for. You're paying the teacher to show you the basics, to
introduce you to the discipline. You're not expecting to become a master
overnight or possibly ever. You're interested in discovering what the
discipline is about and seeing how you like it, how it might change you. And
you pay experts for instruction because without them you would literally–yes,
I'm going to use that adverb–not know how to make the first move.
Poetry’s a lot different than that.
For some reason, in
the discipline of writing poetry, people assume they do know. Or maybe they're
not so arrogant to assume this, but they think maybe their poetic efforts are
best served without the nuisance of instruction, the self-conscious shock of
it. This is the legacy of bad Romanticism–people taking all the Wordsworth and
Keats out of Wordsworth and Keats and leaving–themselves. Poetry as self-expression
rather than art, a "practice"–that is what I love about yoga, how
teachers and students refer to what they do as a "practice."
The
assumption being that they're never going to perfect it. Hell, even lawyers
seem to understand this about what they do! But not poets. Teachers still go
into creative writing classrooms today and tell students just to bring in a
poem and then they'll workshop it–for the entire semester. I mean, really? Why
does a teacher have to be paid to do that? That's like the tango teacher going
into a dance studio and saying, Show me what you can do. And the sad thing is
that there are so many poet-teachers I know out there without
full-time jobs who could teach the hell out of those classes where those
students are being failed by their teachers.
I love that notion. “I could teach the hell out of that poet!”
Anyone who thinks
poetry can't be taught should simply look at a pile of undergraduate
submissions for a poetry contest. I saw this at Quinnipiac, where I teach and
helped judge a contest last year. It was immediately obvious which poems were
written by someone who'd taken a poetry class and which were not–you could
toss the latter after glancing at the title and the splay of the poem all over
the page, usually i i i staggering everywhere with no end in sight. The former
were not necessarily good poems, and some were too obviously written on
assignment (i.e. write a Shakespeare sonnet, boys and girls), but they at least
showed consciousness of poem as craft.
One thing that people don't seem to
consider when they bemoan the culture of MFA programs and poem-sameness blah
blah blah is how much worse poems might be without those programs. I mean,
yeah, I don't want to read 800 sestinas a day–I just threw that in for you,
Daniel–but I'd rather read those than the kind of stuff I see in those
undergraduate submission piles. Or that I've seen in slush piles for various
magazines I've worked for. Yikes.
Reading 800 sestinas a day is something
that would test even the strongest MFAers among us. Lately I've been thinking
about mentors I've had. Actually, I never thought I had any until I myself
became a full-time teacher and realized how much time teachers give students,
and lo and behold, I realized I had had mentors in my life. This was because I
felt that I was, in many ways, un-mentorable and un-teachable. I was this
prideful autodidact who was destined to be a misunderstood semi-genius. Perhaps
a community like The Bridge would be a place where writers like my younger self
are gently, tangentially, and economically, disabused of this notion?
I hope so. But, well,
actually, I think some of that prideful autodidacticism is a good thing, that
feeling you're being misunderstood–you might argue that sort of scornful
self-regard is what allows a poet to develop. Because there is such a thing as
being too open to instruction, too eager to obey what any
mentor tells you to do. Usually the way poets learn is to hear something, scorn
it for a bit or even a long while, then eventually come around to it, either
agreeing with it or just respecting some grain of truth in it. How many times
have you heard someone praise another poet and be like, Aw, that guy sucks,
even though you haven't read him? And then you read him on the sly and gain a
real sense for yourself. Or perhaps you hear 2, 3, then 5 people mention a
poet's name until finally you get irritated enough to sit down and read her. We
want to believe so much in our own awesomeness that it's hard to admit there
are other people being awesome out there. But if you're worth a damn as a poet,
you will admit this. Eventually. And you'll get better because of it.
I remember liking Chaucer,
Spenser and Donne my freshman year of college, mainly because this
upperclassman down the hall approved of them; but he hated Milton, Wordsworth
and Pope so I hated those guys too. I wrote "I AM NOT A POET" on
Pope's forehead on the cover of the Riverside edition of his work; after I
finished Paradise Lost, I threw it across the room, even though I
remember thinking I liked it. Does anyone out there seriously want to tell me
that I'd be a better poet today had I not gone back to Pope and Milton and
realized they were amazing? You need teachers, aka people who know more shit
than you do, to tell you you're an idiot.
I remember talking to
Sandy McClatchy in his office and telling him how crazy I thought he was to say
that Pope was one of the greatest poets. He didn't even get mad; he just turned
around and picked through some papers then gave me this assignment he'd written
up called "Between the Lines," in which you take somebody else's
poem, separate the lines, then write your own lines between them. He told me to
do this exercise using some of Pope's couplets. I, of course, being the
scornful little genius that I was, didn't do that–but I did take one of
McClatchy's poems and do it–trying to impress him and flatter him, I guess, at
the same time. Anyway, I didn't write some great poem out of that assignment or
anything, but because of McClatchy's blithe disregard for my scorn, I
eventually went back to Pope and loved him. I never wanted to write like him,
but now I see how he's secretly behind a poet like Kenneth Koch, whom I have
tried to write like.
This is another very
long answer, but yes, I think on The Bridge writers can find their way in a
similar fashion and perhaps learn even more quickly, because if they don't like
what one mentor says about one of their poems and then another mentor says
something similar, and another– well, eventually you've got to stop kidding
yourself, right? It's easier to dismiss what a mentor says and build up a whole
self-justifying vendetta against him when you're working only with that one
person for a long time.
That reminds me of what Rick Moody was
saying when he visited the reading series I run at The College of Saint Rose.
He questions the validity of the classic workshop model, as it were, preferring
instead imitative models and a one-on-one mentor interaction. Who else helped
in the design of The Bridge's pedagogical model?
A number of people
were involved, not all of them poets. In the early stages last October, I was
meeting with developers in Manhattan to discuss the possibility of a new
Brooklyn Poets website that would incorporate some kind of geomapping directory
of all the poets living in Brooklyn. This is back when our site was on Tumblr
and I was learning just how limited that site was–how Tumblr was not the
community I wanted for poetry.
Eventually we paid
these developers for a couple of consulting sessions where they took my
original, very basic idea for a website incorporating a poet's directory, and
figured out a way to drive traffic to that kind of site–essentially, how to
make the site "profitable," according to a social networking model.
My worry about a website with a directory was how do you get poets to sign up
and create a profile? There are other examples of directories out there, namely
at Poets & Writers, but no one I know really looks at those things–it's a
static model.
The more I talked to
these guys the more I saw that, holy shit, we could create a networking site
for poets. I didn't even think that was possible, but when you're in the room
with creative developers, they're just like, Sure, why not? Through our early
discussions they kept asking me about different kinds of poets and what they
were looking for, and what I kept saying was that professional poets need
teaching jobs and student poets need cheaper, alternative ways of finding
instruction outside of academia–because there are no jobs, so why would you go
get a degree just so you can not teach?
At first we thought
of setting prices for all the critiquing bundles, but the more I talked to
poets, the more it became clear that not everyone agreed on what was a fair
price for their services. Dorothea Lasky was teaching a workshop for Brooklyn
Poets at the time and offered a lot of great advice on this and sat in on some of
the meetings; I also surveyed many poet-friends of mine, either in person or
via email, about what they thought would be the best method, people like Steve
Gehrke, Tim Donnelly, Nicky Beer, Simone Muench, Jason Bredle, Melissa Broder,
Jeff Simpson, David Hernandez and others, poets in different teaching
situations and at different stages of their careers (Jason, for instance,
doesn't teach for a living).
Ultimately it became
clear that in order to provide the most flexible pedagogical model possible, we
simply had to open it up to the mentors–essentially, to create a free
marketplace where mentors offered their services according to certain
guidelines and then come what may. A lot of planning and thinking has gone into
the design of this site, but I'll be the first to point out that it's still an
experiment–nothing like this has ever been done before, so we don't know
exactly how it's going to turn out. I'm curious to see how it evolves! For
instance, how poets will "value" their teaching services, how often
student poets will request critiques, from how many different mentors, etc.
There's a lot to learn about ourselves as a poetry community here.
How does this relate to your own
experience as a poet, a writer? Is The Bridge in any way a reaction to how
you've been taught or "trained," as we might say?
To the extent that as an undergraduate
I was taught that poetry is an art, a discipline, and not a forum for
self-expression, by people like Sandy McClatchy and the late John Hollander,
neither of whom did "workshop" in their writing classes but made you
read poems and write poems on assignment every week, The Bridge might be an
outgrowth of my training. But as I mentioned before, I never actually got
in-depth written critiques of my work from any of my teachers, including the
great ones I had at Houston and Missouri (where I did my MFA and PhD); I'd get
maybe a comment or two scribbled on the page, sometimes not even that. I'm not
complaining: these were great poets, great teachers, and they were saying a
lot and teaching me in other ways.
But perhaps my
emphasis on providing written critique of student's work comes
out of the puzzling absence of that in my own experience as a student. A
written critique is a much deeper response to a poem: you're writing out of
your own silence back to the writer in his or her silence.
My job would be a lot
easier if I simply cold-read poems in workshop and offered my thoughts then.
But I think you can offer a student more than that. I think what you offer a
student verbally in workshop is different from what you offer that student
through a written response; often you'll think of things to suggest in
conversation that didn't occur to you in writing, and vice versa. I imagine a
beautiful community on The Bridge where poets are regularly sitting down with
each other's work every day and writing sustained, thoughtful responses to each
other–how could we not all get better as writers and readers because of this?
Make a contribution to build The Bridge here.