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by Will Alexander

Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, and educator who lives in Los Angeles. His publications include the novel Sunrise in Armageddon.

Following are excerpts of an aleatory talk given to a group of teaching artists by Alexander at Teachers & Writers Collaborative in October 2002. Throughout his talk, Alexander was accompanied on guitar by Alan Smerdjian.

A Thematic of Listening

The key to working with a classroom is spontaneous energy, rather than a set of calculations. When working with a set of formal calculations you see a rigidity: you are working with a manipulation rather than an organic connection. So what I’ve been concerned with is going into a classroom not with any kind of pre-conceived plan. I have students, I know that they’re there to write, but how is that going to come across? Is that going to come across with me giving them a syllabus—you do this, you do that, you do this, you do that? Or will I begin to intuitively feel the temperature of the atmosphere that I’m working with? Not only does it come down to the fact of the way the room is shaped, and the way the students carry themselves, but I also listen to the way they banter amongst themselves before they come in. I’m dealing with a living scape rather than a set structural shape. Once one begins to establish that, one has a way of moving into the particular space of the particular humans there.

First off, before one gets involved in assigning things, one gets to know the human individual. For example, I’ve been working with an organization in Los Angeles with at-risk youth. And these individuals are not really prone to organized structure. Now how do we begin to organize them around a thematic of listening? First of all, I would love to know what they are about, in terms of their particular experiences. Each one of us has a set of experiences that brought us to this room at this moment. So you begin to look at that. So that gets them to thinking, and gets me to thinking, and sets up a rapport because of the fact that I am concerned with their particular odyssey. I had one student who was not listening to me at a youth facility. And it so happened that he and I went to the same grammar school, and that was enough to create a rapport right there. And from that point on he did miraculous work.

Doing workshops, or just working with people in general—on whatever coast, at whatever age—I’m feeling more and more that the human being is coming back into fashion. The human being is coming back into fashion.

Technology: it can be an art for us to manipulate it, to work with it, but it is not our organic capability. To get back to the organic capability you have to deal with the organic imagination. We must remember that all of our creations that we are dependent upon are human creations. In a society that divides itself, that conquers itself by division, we find that technology is always at a certain level at odds with the human imagination. No society is without technology—none. It’s just the way that it’s implemented. Is it implemented toward expansion or is it implemented toward reduction and separation?

The way we can use our technology—a pen and a paper—is to engage the imagination as part of an electric current between the pen and the paper, an electricity that the person draws from. It’s not a set subject that the person draws from. I have to find out what drives this particular student. Is it some kind of sadness? Is it frustration? Is it some kind of immediate joy they’ve had in their lives? In other words, I try to find something that sparks them, rather than giving a dry assignment—”I want you to write about a sunset.” Of course all of these things come into view: within the context of that joy, or that grief, or that frustration, there are sunsets, wind, boats, stars, trees, all kinds of fabulous beasts; all can become part of the intrinsic nature of the writing.

First of all we have to deal with imaginal writing—not just “poetry.” A lot of children think that a poem has to rhyme. What I like to do is let them just write. Because writing is the activity of the inner nature of the wealth of the imagination—what the French theoretician Gaston Bachelard calls imaginal radiance. And this is what you’re concerned with. Not a particular form, or way of writing. That is a secondary activity. Technique for me is secondary. (Now that’ll probably raise a lot of hackles in certain quarters.)

I had this group of 13-year-olds, and they were all over the place, and so what I did was I put a noun on the board, something that was accessible to them as 13-year-olds. I wrote “bird,” and I asked, “What does a bird do?” Hands started going up. Then we got into colors. Then we got into different types of landscapes, then we got into geography. Then we got into astronomy and stars. In other words, you take a noun, and you deal with all the implications of that noun. And those implications turn into subjects, they turn into imaginative motion. In other words, we’re creating motion.

Literacy

When I was seven and a half, I had a problem: I wasn’t able to read, so I was banished to the lowest reading group. For some reason I worked at it, and when I got to the next grade, a teacher came and assisted me—Mr. Beacon, I’ll never forget him—and when I was eight and a half I was able to pick up a book and read it on my own. Now if I had been dropped out of that situation and cast adrift at eight and a half, or nine, or ten, which happens to a lot of kids, I might have gone straight into a gang. Because you have to do something in order to compensate your ego, right? So what’s the next accessible thing? Joining a group of others who are like-minded, who have that problem. On the other hand, knowledge creates independence. Creativity creates independence in an individual. When you write a successful poem that others can acknowledge, it puts you into another level of community. And that level of community can expand and expand and expand. You can go into all different forms of reality. You can go into poetry, you can become an actor, you can become an accountant; you can become a productive member of society with an imaginative outlook.

Q: How do you work with kids who are non-readers in your writing groups where there are also kids who are readers?

A: Well, everybody has knowledge, so they don’t necessarily have to know how to read at all, or well. Give them something that they are familiar with. Find out what is going on in that individual’s life, rather than giving them an assignment, and you’ll find them interested and eager. Come from the inside out, rather than the outside in. And that way there’s an internal growth. When you working with a classroom situation that’s unruly, have patience with yourself, give yourself a chance to evolve with them, rather than looking at the situation as a blockage. If you take time to work with a disparate group of individuals who may not have an initial interest in what you’re teaching, if you take each person aside, individually or in small groups, you can find out what motivates them to exist. The person is the ultimate measure of the poetic range. If you study from desire, rather than external implementation, you see facts as illumination rather than as opaque knowledge.

How to Deal with Violence in Writing

Q: If the expression of pathos helps resolve dilemmas of violence, why is there so much violence in the hip-hop community?

A: Many times you’re dealing with a process that goes from the street to the studio unresolved. You don’t have a transitional point there. You don’t have those intervening forces that allow that initial energy to be transmuted before you get to the studio. There are certain things I won’t let my students put in a poem, certain things they may think are cute, like raping somebody, or killing somebody. Not that I’m censoring them, but saying maybe they could use this energy another way. And explain to them why it might be better to work with that energy in another way. Not deflecting that energy, but giving that energy a different spin.

Q: How would you explain that to a student who really wants to write about killing someone?

A: I’d just go up to him with invisible body language, and say, “Hey, that’s not too good, man, you know that? You can’t do that, man.” He says, “Why can’t I do that?” I say, “You don’t really want to do that, do you? We don’t need this here. Why don’t we try it like this? Can we do this with it?” He says, “No.” You may not get it the first time, second time, third time, fourth time. But then he’ll say, “What do you mean?” You’ve got to soften it up first. It’s not a specific answer you give. You have to talk to people about why something is unacceptable–not because it’s just unacceptable.

Q: A lot of kids will think it’s acceptable because it’s acceptable to them and to their peer group, and what you say doesn’t matter. I work with a lot of kids who are emotionally thwarted, who are stuck there. Could you be more specific about how you push them past that? I can talk and talk and talk for four or five weeks in a row but if he still comes up with the same “kill, kill, kill,” I’m not making any progress.

A: First of all, ask him why he feels this way, before you ask him to change it. “Why do you feel so mad about this?” He’ll start explaining that, and maybe out of that explanation, if you listen closely enough, he may say something else that you can pull out and use, and he will accept it because he himself said it.