[WARNING, this post does contain sexual imagery and strong language, proceed accordingly - The Editors]


Floodmark presents: "Seven campus novels you could get from any competent MFA either born or working in the Midwest, but gay, because it’s genuinely so easy, you guys", by Matthew Fox Kerr. 


1. A Town With No Chill

In 1971, Z___, a senior at U____, takes advantage of the college’s liberalism and creates
an independent study course on 'community organizing', which he uses to organize a
series of increasingly controversial protests against the Vietnam War. His advisor is D___, a
recently tenured poet, who specializes teaching poetry about pastoral sex. The two of
them, although focused on the anti-war movement, write endless letters to one another
about Dagny Faire, a fictional poet known for a single volume of poetry, detailing his
affairs with his private school fencing instructor, his university boxing coach and, finally,
his alienist. The letters end ambiguously and abruptly, leaving the resolution ambiguous.

2. Strange Music from Across the Grove

Ivan, a 21-year-old former violinist, has never quite gotten over the publicity of his
childhood adoption into a wealthy Franco-Persian family. In this retelling of Chekhov’s
The Cherry Orchard, he is studying abroad; his only friends are his socialite younger
sister, Ava, and small number of gay men studying abroad. He is horrified and confused
as his mother, Adrienne and his sister, Lam, arrive in Miami and announce that the two of
them most drop out of school, in order relocate as a family in Switzerland. Ivan initial
protests, especially upon learning that Adrienne believes they are less than a year away
from revolution and that his family intends to marry him off to the son of French
mobster, and must come to terms with whether or not he is truly like the rest of his
family.

3. The Baffling Bolshoi Brothers

Danny van Eyck was born in South Korea, was adopted by a white couple in
Massachusetts, and then spent the next 17 years being told he was adopted from North
Korea. This information is final straw in his decision to transfer to another school. In the
meantime, he’s just gotta spin his wheels listening to extremely Christian lectures on
science, Tolkien and advertising, acting in a royalty-free piece of Cold-War propaganda
about Chinese acrobats running away to become missionaries and practicing gay sex with
his co-star, Other Asian Danny, who’s also not Chinese.

4. Aristophanes The Frogs

Myron van Veen is excited to go to college, where he can make art and do drugs, not
necessarily in that order, but hopefully at the same time. After a disastrous first trip, he
becomes obsessed with classmate Alexander Richard Conrad Hyde, a.k.a. Connor, whom
Myron’s convinced is his 'Dark Half.' He also finds himself in a love triangle between
anonymous students, 'California', a religious woman studying mycology, and 'R*ger', a
sexually liberated boy, who excels at multiple division III sports. He produces art
prolifically but, perhaps unsurprisingly, most of it isn’t very good.

5. The Father

Beginning the morning after their celebrated scientist parents were convinced the world
was going to end, stepbrothers Sandy and Che (Singles Tennis and Intramural Lacrosse,
respectively) silently contemplate if going to the same college where their parents teach is
a good idea. The school, an unidentified Chicago school referred to as The University, at
first provides ample opportunity for them to develop their separate identities, they soon
find themselves pursuing the same man, an ethno-botany PhD and small time pot
dealer named Jack Amsterdam. As he plays them against each other, the resulting feud
results in expulsion.

6. Snakedick!

Pledging Kappa Omega Nu involves breaking into the reptile house and fucking
somebody doggy style. So Michael John-Thwarton doesn’t super get why everyone
freaked out when he just took his boyfriend. The resulting web of intrigue spans
generations and poses tough questions, about class, masculinity and anal sex. Michael is
mostly uninterested, and is much more pointedly concerned about why nobody will
answer any of his questions about the lizards.

7. Imagine the Horror

Ben and Josh are identical twins participating in a sleep study. When Ben goes to sleep,
Josh wakes up; when Josh goes to sleep, Ben wakes up. Each is living in a world where
they each drowned the other by accident as a child. When he wakes up, Stephen
Woodridge Wells discovers that he imagined both lives and remembers them in great
detail, despite being extremely unsure of his own life. That fall, he returns to a college
campus he doesn’t recognize, and discovers he lives a large house full of handsome men
his age, whose only common social connection seems to be a house-wide book club,
during which scenes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses are read, discussed, and, occasionally,
acted out.

[Cover sketch currently unavailable]

In his head, Matthew Fox Kerr usually refers to himself as Sludge Johnson. He previously was an extremely terrible intern at a tech review website and is working on one of these novels, but she wont tell us which one.

Cover illustrations my Matthew Fox Kerr and Vernon Meidlinger-Chin

Despite our growing mastery over words, us writers have a rather silent art form. In comparison to other artists, writers have a much more difficult trial of self-advocacy: actors, dancers, and musicians can invite others to their performances; visual artists can post photos of their works-in-progress to social media. But if a writer tried any of these tactics, it is unlikely that they would generate similar praise and approval. Writers, if lucky, may have a selected few whom they can trust to read their work and respond with comments more fruitful than “Nice job” or “I really liked it”. Lord knows suffering artists need the confidence boost… but we’re in greater need of making our art more public, more visible, more vocal.

So: how do writers develop a sense of community and feel acknowledged as artists?

Well, it isn’t easy.

First off, we have to separate experiences into online and IRL. In real life, finding other writers is like hunting for chameleons: we’re jerks that hide in plain sight. Maybe we just need to start hosting alcohol-initiated book clubs at our houses to start making these friends… 

Online, using just the right search phrase can help you locate websites which host dedicated writers. From my own experience, my writing community often exists only in the month of November, which I’m sure many of us will recognize as National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). The website NaNoWriMo.org is a resource I’ve found useful for beginning a story or fleshing out the plot, with forums full of feedback. For those other eleven months of the year, I’m left dry.

I hope you weren’t reading this article in hopes that I would have some magical answer to solve this dilemma. Because I’m still struggling myself.

Only recently have I found an opportunity to meet fellow writers who are looking for test readers: author Maggie Stiefvater monitors a Google Forum through which writers can pitch their books and search for trial readers. I’ve had on and off success with one girl, in part because she lives on a different continent, but also in part because, well… life gets in the way. We’ll both go a week without emailing a response because there was that college homework, or that friend’s party, or that Youtube cat videos marathon.

If you find someone who is a fellow writer, be the writer friend that you want to have: ask them about their writing, gush over their characters, wipe their tears with their brand new form rejection letters. Channel your inner Mom and nag someone again and again to read your work. Give one another the time of day – set up Skype dates to discuss the five book chapters that you exchanged last weekend. Hold one another accountable as readers, writers, and critics. 

A writing community is essential to growing as a writer. To find those people who will support you as a writer, you’ve got to put yourself out there – it’s like querying for a friend. So don’t wait for your friends at lunch to ask you about what you’re writing: change the conversation from Chris Evans’s glistening physique into your Vikings erotica that you’ve been rewriting for four years. Something that is very hard to do is to be your own advocate. But no one else is going to do it for you.

Express your need to share and talk about your writing with your online and real friends. Because it is a need: not a want, not a hobby, but a defining aspect of who you are. And people have to know that it exists. So get loud about your writing.

Read more of Cam's work on Floodmark.

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When two summer camp teens admitted to me that they hadn’t heard of Elie Wiesel, I scolded them. I spelled out his name in a yell and demanded that they read “Night” – which they also hadn’t heard of. And I felt such an uneasiness as I spoke of this notorious human being in the past tense: he was a Holocaust survivor, he was a noble prize winning writer, he was one of my favorite authors. 

Those among us who have read “Night” know of its indescribable ability to drag and trap you between the barbed wire fence sentences: Elie was in multiple concentration camps, and we outsiders have the privilege to set aside these horrors on a coffee table when they get too intense.  

A few months ago, I reread this memoir for a college class on adolescent literature. When I was in middle school, I got to experience this book as living writing – I wrote to Mr. Wiesel, expressing how much I loved his book and how important I knew it was. And he wrote me back, encouraging me to keep reading and learning. It was a pivotal moment when I learned how conversational books were, between the reader and the text , and the reader and the author. This memory with Mr. Wiesel defines me as a reader and a writer – as a person.

Reading “Night” was the first time that I found a work of literature that showed how suffering could be repurposed. I learned that art –even literature –could find words for the unspeakable, and pain had a place. 

As a future middle school teacher, I expect to teach “Night” in my classroom. But now, I do not know how my future students will experience “Night”. I do not know how much different this story will be now that its author is dead.

Never before has someone’s death felt like a victory for evil. I’m terrified of our growing age of questioning – of insisting that photographs were photoshopped, that physical proof is not good enough. Now that the most predominant Holocaust survivor is dead, I worry that it is only a matter of time before humanity will be convinced that this history was a hoax.

As a Catholic-raised, current agnostic, Mr. Wiesel’s death makes me religious: it makes me want to believe in something that offers peace, some reward for someone so remarkable. My hope that he is reunited with his family is one offering of peace. But I know that another offering of peace is to remember to fight injustice, and to remember how he dedicated his life to this.

It has been over a month since Elie Wiesel’s death – and I barely remember it. I barely remember that there was an author behind one of my favorite books; I barely remembered him when he was still living. I have no idea of how his death has impacted the Jewish community, or the all survivors of any horrors. I have no idea how to convince two summer camp teens to care about a man who was once, so recently, living history.

But I think that “remembering” starts with a willingness to listen and to speak.

Read more of Cam Best's work on Floodmark.

With writing schedules packed full of research, drafting, and revising short stories, poems, and novels, it’s easy to neglect perhaps the most important skill: getting started. I’m among those writers who normally bum around in life until inspiration hits them between the eyes and they hit the ground running, no stretching beforehand.

Tell any athlete to just play a game of sport ball while expecting them to win all the points without warming up, and they’d understandably laugh in your face (I’m assuming this, on account of I don’t associate myself with people who willingly sweat for fun. They don’t find me all that exhilarating either).

Artists need to warm up beforehand just as much as athletes do. The brain is a muscle too, and we’ve got to stretch it (though gym teachers don’t exactly equate hard thinking to hard workouts, much to my dismay) And if we don’t know how to start writing, we’ll struggle more when we don’t know what to write about. The dreaded Writer’s Block will strike again, and we will be slave to this dark, soul-sucking obstacle.

So wouldn’t you know that I was on my lazy ass browsing through Facebook, when I saw that my friend had tagged me in a post advertising a writing app. This app is called The Most Dangerous Writing App. Aptly named, The Most Dangerous Writing App demands that writers write for a continuous period of time without stopping… or else all their work is deleted.

Deleting a writer’s work is arguably up there on the list of Horrendous Things to Do, next to “hitting someone’s dog with your car” and “castration”. It’s the stuff of nightmares. Creator Manuel Ebert comments that “ ‘tis better to have written and lost, than never to have written at all” in the Help section of the app, which nearly motivates me to hypothetically delete any Microsoft Word documents on his laptop and see what he says after that.

But here’s the thing: no one is asking you to pen the next Wasteland in this app. No one’s stopping you from writing “John Tucker must die” 100+ times just to get that word count. But here’s a suggestion on how to find a happy medium between creating a masterpiece and copying monotonous nonsense. 

With this in mind (and not nearly enough alcohol in the stomach) I decided to give the app a try. I started off with 5:00 on the clock and practiced writing down whatever came to my head. I found that while I was writing, I instinctively wanted to slow down or stop writing. I’m used to taking a fraction of a pause, often to find the right word I’m looking for or to further formulate an idea before jotting it down. The app forced me to be reactive and–just as Ebert notes – “shut down [my] inner editor”.

For my second go at the app, I turned on hardcore mode and settled on writing for 5:00 about a topic I knew about. I expected this round to be much more difficult, since I would have to actually make sense. I still found that I completely lost my typical writer’s voice – I was writing the way that I speak, which is very informal and rambling. I’d also learned that ‘hardcore mode’ meant that none of the writing would be visible: you’re able to see one letter at a time, which can almost make you forget what word you’re writing. Gods forbid it’s “supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”.

Let’s look at a breakdown of biggest pros & cons for the app:

PROS: 

• break through your writer’s block – write about anything that comes to mind, transition into any topic
• increase typing speed
• forces writer to complete designated time to solely writing

CONS: 

• hard to stay on topic or have writing seem coherent –feels like throwaway writing
• focus is on quantity, not quality
• hardcore mode breaks down the writing process into such small pieces that words feel more like letters – feels too removed from idea-generation portion of writing process

Considering that I was initially against using this writing app, I’m glad that I gave it a try. It’s a useful tool for the kind of writer who struggles to get their fingers moving, who feels so much pressure on getting the exact words and ideas down on the first try; I don’t necessarily think that this is the best app out there for helping to generate ideas on what to write about. Still, The Most Dangerous Writing App is definitely something to consider adding to your writing arsenal.

IN ACTION: 

Round 1 (5:00)

Round 2 (5:00 hardcore)

Read more of Cam's work on Floodmark here.

Like many healthy servings of whole-grain existential crises, a friend’s mid-April Facebook post pinned itself to my bulletin board of self-doubt. My friend quoted Ursula Vernon, a freelance writer, who wrote:

If ONE MORE PERSON says “What if they’d medicated Van Gogh!?” I think I’m permitted to set things on fire. If they’d medicated Van Gogh, he’d either have painted twice as much, or he’d have been happy and unproductive. And you know what? Starry Night wasn’t worth a terrible price in human misery. It’s neat. It wasn’t worth it.

Sometimes I wonder if being an artist makes me jaded to ART. Because it’s not magic and it’s not mystical, it’s just paint or pixels. And it can do amazing things! But you don’t owe humanity to be miserable just so you can move paint around in interesting shapes. Jesus. Art is not some kind of Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas bargain where you agree to be miserable so everybody can go “oh! Neat!” for 5 minutes.

I remember staring at this text, at the dozens of “likes” and distinct absence of comments on this post. This was something on which I wanted to comment, but I knew that I would need some time. Even now, on a Tuesday afternoon, eviscerating a package of Twizzlers, I’m not all that sure how to begin. So I’ve looped a Disturbed song and I plan on listening to it until I can figure out a more eloquent way to say, “Please, sit the fuck down, Ms. Vernon.”

Admittedly, not all artists have sob-stories – but we’re not going to talk about those potpourri-douchebags. Let’s talk about the messed-up ones: these types can make messed-up art or happy art or any gradient in-between. I’m personally one of those messed-up – messed-up types. And it was through reflecting on my artwork that I realized maybe I wasn’t as okay as I was pretending to be.

A little less than a year ago, I was diagnosed with Dysthymia – a less melancholy cousin to Depression, but still one hell of an ovary-buster. At best, this is the only “prize” on my Life Lotto Card, though I’ve still got a lot more scratching to do. 

I’d first noticed that something was up –or rather, not –when I was, you know, crying uncontrollably multiple times a week. But in addition to that, my insecurities started pouring out in short, visceral poems –I’d started finding words to describe it. It – the sadness.

Put bluntly: art therapy. 

And guess what? When my art stems from mental health, it is not for you. When I find myself at a low-point, I’m thinking about my paints, my pencils, my word choice, and how to tell a story – I could not give a donkey’s left nut what someone else besides me thinks of my art. Art is so confusingly selfish and selfless at the same time. It is how I say “Listen”; it is how I say “See me: witness”. It is the voice I have shaped like a blade on a leather strop. My art is an extension of myself –to quote Sweeney Todd: “At last, my right arm is complete!”

 Ursula Vernon’s comment that art isn’t worth the “terrible price of human misery” opposes all emotions and experiences that do not revel in happiness and joy. I am sick and tired of the taboo against expressing a gradient of unfavorable emotions in public. The misery is already there: art is simply an outlet for letting the wound breathe. 

The erasure of mental illness through denying its useful contributions [i.e. art] to society is nothing short of ableism. Society doesn’t encourage the mentally ill to stay ill for the sake of producing pretty pictures – Society barely believes that mental illness exists.  My art gives me a voice to ensure that I do not isolate myself and suffer in silence. 

Remember my Dysthymia? Trying to claw through the hordes of cringe-worthy childhood memories to find the root of this rotting tree takes me back to when I was around twelve years old. That’s very nearly a decade of a stiff upper-lip and academy-award-winning denial. My mental turmoil was typically only found in my art. Until I finally thought to start seeking professional help, my paintings, drawings, novels, and poems were how I survived. And yet, if I had the choice to not have this heavy sadness, I do not think that I would take it.

Now maybe that’s the masochist in me.

But I don’t know how much lesser of a person I would be without these artistic revelations. My poems are mantras to calm me when counting back from ten doesn’t cut it; drawing a human face helps me feel less lonely. And it’s very hard to tell where my mental illness ends and my art begins.  We can’t and shouldn’t separate the artist from the art – what is this, New Criticism?

Mental illness is a lens through which I see this world. I am okay with the notion that it may be unrealistically dismal. I am okay in knowing that I do not necessarily have a choice in taking off this lens. I am okay with what I have felt because of my sadness, what I have done because of my sadness. And I am not sorry.

Accepting my mental illness is essential to coping and overcoming it.  When I think of treating mental illness, I think of putting a rug over a stain in the carpet: visually, no one else may ever know that the stain is there, but as the homeowner, I know. I know what food or drink or child made it. I know how much money I spent on the cleaners. I know how I found a way to accept it. Now, the rug is a part of this room. And this room is a part of this house – my mental illness is a part of who I am as much as my being White or American or Female or a Future English-Teacher.

To say that Van Gogh’s Starry Night wasn’t worth the price of his mental illness is to call in a bulldozer and a wrecking ball. It is to buy a new house because something was wrong with the old one. 

Mental illness and art created from mental illness are not aspects of a person to be gutted – they’re aspects to be remodeled at the homeowner’s discretion.

The purpose of Art is to express and to connect. Even if we were to disregard Van Gogh’s appreciation of his Starry Night, we can’t dismiss the impact that this piece has had on the world, or the impact of all art created by those who suffer from mental illness. Every sad song recorded or breakup poem penned serves a purpose. Art that comments on suffering and sadness is a necessity to the world, as much as the contributions of overworked scientists or exhausted mothers.

Martin McDonagh, in his play The Pillowman, has his protagonist [Katurian] explain to his younger brother [Michal] what might happen to the two of them and the protagonist’s writing in a totalitarian world:

If they [the police] came to me right now and said, ‘We’re going to burn two out of three of you –you, your brother, or your stories’, I’d have them burn you first, I’d have them burn me second, and I’d have it be the stories they saved.

The destruction of the artwork is equal to the destruction of the artist. My artwork is my fucking child in a burning building: I would run into it to save her. 

Cam Best is a in-the-middle-of-a-quarter-life-crisis kind of gal who spends way too much and yet not enough time inside her head. She doesn't like to brag but (lies: she does) she dabbles in a little bit of everything: poetry, prose, painting, Alliteration Addicts Anonymous, cinematography, ceramics, Cam-we-just-talked-about-this-it's-a-problem-you-need-help-No-screw-you-don't-tell-me-what-literary-devices-I-can-and-can't-use, and T. S. Eliot. She grew up in T. S. Eliot and goes to T. S. Eliot College, where she's majoring in T. S. Eliot. When she's not preparing a face to meet the faces that you'll meet, she's daring to disturb the universe through teaching young baby middle school children that poetry is actually really cool and she will do more than just fail you out of 6th grade English if you say otherwise.

Photo courtesy of Brooke Austen.

I started my band a little over four years ago, and it has since become the primary vehicle for my soul's ramblings. All of the lyrics we have used as thread in our musical tapestry once began as poems written on a bedside table, and that is one of the things consistently pulling me towards poetry as a form of expression.

I have always been enamored by poetry's ability to mold itself into virtually any other creative shape, despite its beginnings. I love the way writing can oftentimes become collage work, or like fitting together pieces of a puzzle. There have been many occasions in which I have found  myself lying in the debris of Franken-poems that act not only as a problem to be solved, but as their own solutions.   

Because of this, poetry feels invincible.  

The words themselves may live on through text, and if not through text, through oral history, and if not through oral history, through our very being. And while the last shred of the current poetic symphony composed over millennia upon millennia may fade away into nothing but dust and a memory, the impact it had will linger on and continue to chime its mission bells.

Poetry, the great shape shifter.

Ever transforming, ever surviving.

Nothing that I have ever written has remained unchanged. It could be due to my being a perfectionist to a fault, but I like to think of it as evolution. All that I have written has either grown with me, or has been tucked away into the shadows where my words may or may not eventually travel back out into the light. I can never truly tell.  

Yet there is one thing I know for sure: no matter where I go,  my spirit will forever lie awake at night with a poem in the bedroom.  

"Hush, Nightingale,  

crimson shadows over the moon glade  

shall not fall on this night,  

for the time has not yet come  

Make your home among the lilac,

although do not remain there long,  

for if tomorrow remained as it were,  

how would you ever find your song?  

You may meet with your lover there,  

you may see my reflection in your eyes,  

for I have breathed the breath of one thousand people,  

at once, yet from different times  

Come and find me, I have not the time to look for you  

I have too many places I wish to go,  

do not make it so that when the shadows fall upon the moon glade,  

I'll be swinging beneath the weeping cherries,  

in a garden on a star away from home."

Those are the lyrics to a song that began as a poem in my bedroom, the humble sanctuary where much of my creative conception takes place. That room where, for many of us,  our poems have been birthed, enveloped by death, and resurrected  since we learned to hold our pens in hand.

Brooke Austen is the singer and songwriter for the doom-blues band Grandma Strange. Their most recent album, Nightingale, is available on bandcamp. Vernon Meidlinger-Chin interviewed Brooke in February 2016. You can find that interview here. Many thanks to Brooke Austen for lending her voice to Floodmark!

I recently began an undergraduate English class on how to read poetry by having students fill in the blank: Reading poetry is like ______.

“Reading poetry is like trying to unlock a chest,” said one student.

“Reading poetry is waiting for the professor to give me the answers,” said another.

And they’re not wrong, because this is how students have been taught to read poetry. In the classroom, students believe their professors hold an invisible key. It is a master key—it will open the door to any poem. Students wait for their teachers to insert the key into the lock, open the door, and release the hidden meaning. Then, students will also possess the key to the poem, sometimes without ever even having to read it. But the truth is teachers have no such key, and this belief in locks and keys is detrimental not only because it limits student learning, but because it reinforces a system of disparity in which some groups have access, education, the right language and experiences, and some groups do not.

Artwork courtesy of Vernon Meidlinger-Chin.

Poems have history with the language of locks and houses and keys. “Stanza,” after all, quite literally means room. In many poems, the house functions as a useful meta-poetic structure, where the poet writes as an unseen architect. Consider the first two stanzas of Emily Dickinson’s famous poem “I Dwell in Possibility”:

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

As readers, we hope to enter these poetic houses. We often become frustrated when we don’t gain ready access to a poem’s interior. Either we conclude that we are poor readers or we feel that the poem is wrongly written—too inaccessible in its word choice and operation. We leave the poem disappointed that we have not grasped “the meaning”. Yet this is a diminished conception of what poetry provides--and certainly not the way we want to teach students to approach poems. Dickinson’s poem poses an alternative. Her house is one of “Possibility,” it’s “impregnable of eye”, it’s “numerous of Windows,” and has “Gambrels of the sky.” Everything in this house-of-a-poem resists the idea of a poem being reduced to one singular meaning. Still, Dickinson allows a visitor to enter her poem-as-house through a door or window, and even from the sky. Her work is generous, but not because it provides a key to the front door. The poem suggests an approach to poetry, a pedagogy, that encourages students to see the difficulty of poetry as residing not in its one true meaning, but instead in the choice of how to enter the poem. Students often don’t believe they have choices when it comes to reading a poem, or that there is no lock and key, but a multiplicity of ways out and in.

There is also another option rarely presented to undergraduate students--that some poems purposefully leave the reader at the threshold. A locked house is locked because the poet intends it to be so. The claim that every poem should allow every reader access reflects an underlying belief—that the reader has not only the right to move through the poetic space, but also a right to the experience. Often, students' only sense of poetry is poetry from the Western canon. They are encouraged to consider these poems as their own, because poetry of the canon is considered representative of universal experience, despite these works in all reality conveying only a slim cross-section of perspective--predominantly white and male. This is worrying for two reasons--the first is that readers who do not share these experiences will find themselves alienated from a supposedly universal experience, reinforcing any sense of otherness they already hold, and the second is that when readers who assume access to a poem encounter a poem that conveys an experience contrary to those found in the canon, they assume a similar right to access these experiences.

When we teach students to not dismiss poems because they find them too difficult or too outside the realm of their own experiences, but instead to view the poem as an experience to which their own may not align, we are teaching them to respect the boundaries created by the experiences of others. We are teaching students that they don’t have to accept the language of the canon as their own when its perspectives do not reflect their own lived experiences. We are teaching them an awareness of space--the space of their own identities and the intersections between the identities of others. We are teaching students to recognize the experiences of others in the terms through which they are presented, not the terms that convert the experience into a language masquerading as universal.

When we give students “the meaning,” we are denying them the right to possibility. We are denying them the right to engage with the difficulty of a system of language and knowledge that is not their own--this difficulty is a gift. Poetry resists reduction. In this resistance, poetry finds a power to counter dominating modes of thought that perpetuate a disparity of access. We should encourage students to resist being reduced to a singular meaning too. We should encourage students to resist reducing others to a singular meaning. And so, when we give students “the meaning,” we are reinforcing for some students what they’ve been told their whole lives—that, because of who they are, they will never hold their own keys. So instead of keys to meaning, let’s give students ladders. Let’s give them hammers and nails. Let’s let them climb down from the sky. And, let’s give them poems.

Madeleine Wattenberg studies poetry in the MFA program at George Mason University. Her work has appeared in Guernica, The Louisville Review, Cactus Heart, and Gingerbread House. Vernon Meidlinger-Chin interviewed Madeleine in December 2015. You can find that interview here. A huge thank you to Madeleine Wattenberg for lending her voice to Floodmark!