Me and Annie Dillard

I was very lucky to find myself in Annie Dillard’s Poetry Writing class in January, 1980.

I had taken off the fall semester to work for a settlement house in St. Louis, and when I found myself back on campus, I discovered that Annie Dillard was now a member of the English Department Faculty. I had never read any of Annie’s work — honestly, I had never heard of her — but several friends told me that she had the hottest, best, and most difficult class to get into. Just a few years earlier, Annie had won the Pulitzer Prize for Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek. This was her first year teaching at Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut. Several of my friends tried to get in to her class that fall and were rejected. So, without expectations, I showed up for her first class, with writing samples in hand.

She told us a little bit about her class, gathered up our samples, and went into another room to look at them, as we sat nervously. A few of my classmates I recognized from a verse writing course we had taken the prior year with another professor, from which my samples had been largely generated. A few minutes later, she came back in and handed us back our papers. A lot of us were sent packing. As she handed me back my work, she said “You’re in.”

The first assignment she gave us was to read the poem “Trees in the Garden” by D.H. Lawrence, and to write a poem with that structure. I had a cold at the time. I wrote what I knew.

The first lines of Lawrence’s poem were:

Ah in the thunder air

how still the trees are!

I wrote:

Ah, in the thunder air

How shrill the coughs are!

Lawrence:

And the ghostly, creamy coloured little tree of leaves

white, ivory white among the rambling greens

Me:

And the ghostly, creamy coloured flowing phlegm of sinuses

Full, overflow-full behind the watery eyes.

And so it went. I added, somewhere in the middle, “Oh that this too, too solid phlegm would melt away!”

I handed it in, and Annie read it to the class. She would do that when she wanted to highlight something to teach us. To my delight, the class laughed. Her note on that poem was “You missed a chance to write a serious poem, but this is a scream!”

To Annie, art was repetition and variation. Poetry was first and foremost communication. She liked short words, like “nub” and “jut.” I liked T.S. Eliot’s poetry, and had memorized much of it. Annie didn’t care for Eliot. She gave us a metaphor to understand why: suppose you were on a plane, flying above the clouds, and every now and then the peak of a mountain would jut up through the clouds. We can imagine what lies under the cloud cover. We can picture in our mind’s eye what we cannot see. She told us that she used to think that this was good writing: to tease us with just enough that we had to figure out the rest. She came to realize, instead, that writing is first and foremost communication, and it is the responsibility of the writer to elucidate the valley beneath the clouds, to explain it clearly so that the reader can understand.

It was hard to argue that point. I put Eliot away for the semester.

I was far from her best student, but I learned so much from her about what was a poem, and what was not. As one who was attempting to write poems with political meaning, she would insist that the poem as art came first, and that any overtly political meaning had to come indirectly, if at all. On the rare occasion that I would attempt to slip in a poem with a political slant, she would write “avoid heavy-handed irony” next to one line, and point out the places where I was “pious” and/or “didactic.” I was young and idealistic, but I found myself forced to decide whether to be stubborn or instead to take advantage of her expertise. This was Annie Dillard. I could write anything I wanted whenever I wanted to, but if I was going to benefit from her teaching, I would have to write something that she could critique and from which I could benefit. I grew a lot that semester.

The best part of her critiques were that they were specific, and pointed out exactly what worked and what didn’t: what was overwritten, and when I showed a “good ear.” Looking back at the relatively few poems I had saved from that class, almost 30 years earlier, her comments were spot on: yes, that was a “weak word for a line end” (we want to end a line of poetry with a strong, masculine ending if possible, and usually not a preposition). Yes, that was a “cliché.” Better to say “jut” than “jutting.” Keep it simple. Yes, that had a “nice sound,” but that other line was “awk passive.” And, often, “puns good.”

In one poem I used the word “pulmonary” and she wrote, “The word lung is terrific — try to use it.” She would point out where what I wrote was “overwritten” and which was a “dead line,” a line that just sat there and did nothing. She told us never use a word like “pain.” “Pain” was a “dead word.” “

Describe the pain” she would say. After taking her course, I have a very hard time reading bad writing. The “dead lines” and “dead words” still jump out at me.

I could see where a 30 line poem could have 5 good ones, and 25 that belong on the cutting room floor. But those 5 lines could be the basis for art, and then we re-write, cut, re-write, cut, and when we work it long enough and well enough we may end up with something worth saving.

As I started to get it, she prodded me to get serious. Of one poem, the basis of which was a pun, she wrote, as you can see in the picture I took of it up top:

“David — Okay, mighty good sounds for such a slender joke, mighty sonorous & authoritative sentences for such a wee structure — you’re getting the good sounds now — might as well do something with them — simple visual description (like parts of this) is plenty good enough.” And she always signed her notes, “Annie.”

I took this course in the spring of 1980, over 40 years ago, and remember this much and more. I went into the class wanting to learn poetry. I came out learning how to write. I may not be a brilliant writer, but I learned how to recognize great writing. I learned what worked, and what doesn’t. The lessons stuck. And that is the mark of a great teacher.