Mlle Hazelwood (Home)

There are the obvious things I’d rather do than grade:

• paint my nails
• play beerpong (I don’t even like beerpong very much)
• eat Pringles covered in cheese (don’t knock it…unless you don’t want to gain weight)
• drink Wedding Cake Martinis at the local hole
• have sex
• finish reading Cheryl Strayed’s Wild, or any book, really
• blog about poetry
• actually write (essays, poems, YA fiction, you name it)
• go swimming in my complex’s pool (because I still live in Georgia for now, dammit)
• go for a walk
• take my bike out
• buy new dresses
• listen to Seabear, or rap, or William Fitzsimmons

And then there are things I don’t want to do, but I want to do them more than grading:

• change the kitty litter, which is a bit smelly
• wash the dishes (which have been in there for a while)
• vacuum up the kitty litter (you’re beginning to see I’m messy, aren’t you?)
• do the laundry
• put away the pile of clothes on my bed
• write a research paper (which thankfully, I don’t have to do)
• take out the garbage (also not a favorite)
• clean out my closet (major mess)
• clip my toenails
• clip my cats’ toenails
• run (I don’t run…right now)
• pack up every book I own and carry them to the uhaul all by myself (a week away, and I have helpers)
• live through a hangover
• eat meat again (okay, this is a lie; I wouldn’t eat meat again for $1,000)
• go on a date with a really egotistical dude
• be forced to submit my work to journals (hello, rejection)

There’s probably more, but you get the idea, right? It’s not even that these papers are so bad (blessed universe, thank you)—except for that one about how awful women are—but I’m just burned out. Burnt out, if that’s better. I’m ready to graduate, sleep for a week, watch some daytime tv, read books, and then apply for jobs in New York.

noun

the inversion of the usual order of words or clauses

——

Look at that! A student taught me a new word, and in an explication of “The Road Not Taken” at that. Should I have already known this?

A boring, uninteresting, crazy cat lady. I really do blame some of this on grading.

The sad part is that Scott Russell Sanders warned me about this years ago in his essay “The Writer in the University”:

Instead of reading the major works of our predecessors and contemporaries, we read stacks of apprentice work.

…

As teachers, we must describe analytically what, as artists, we do instinctively. Surrounded by colleagues who are scholars and critics, we may be tempted to write for that specialized audience; our experience of the world may be cramped; our ears may lose the sound of unfettered speech. The ethos of the academy is aloof, rational, dispassionate. Insofar as writers take on these attitudes, their art is likely to suffer. On the other hand, if writers violate the decorum of the academy…they may be dismissed as hotheads or curmudgeons. And yet, without passion, without an openness to the unconscious, without a willingness to appear ignorant or foolish or rude, without omnivorous curiosity, without a sympathy for the full human range, the writer is doomed to superficiality.

Denise Levertov has cautioned that “teaching, even at is most rewarding, uses up some of the same kind of energies that go into [one’s] own work; therefore I think it is extremely risky for any artist to teach full-time—perhaps especially if he enjoys teaching.

It’s true, too. You can probably see why it’s about time to take a break from teaching. You can read more of Scott Russell Sanders’s essay in his collection Writing from the Center .