In Class With Professor Lisa Spaar of the University of Virginia

By Frontier Poetry | June 26, 2019

A primary mission of Frontier is to provide high quality resources and practical help for serious poets—so we’ve been reaching out to poetry professors to help give clarity to this strange journey and stranger craft. This month, we got the chance to hear from Lisa Spaar, Professor and Director of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia and Pushcart Prize winner among other honors.

What features do you believe define contemporary poetry today?

Lisa Spaar: I would say that the prevailing poem of our current moment is a post-post “confessional” poem driven by issues of identity—identity with regard to gender, race, politics, demographics, geography, a defining trauma—but what’s exciting about contemporary poetry is that there is, if one makes an effort to seek it out or to pay close attention, so much aesthetic and thematic diversity out there as well, from the nervy moxie of Cate Marvin to the syntactically intricate and emotionally subtle lyrics of Carl Phillips, from the anguished and tender vulnerability of Ocean Vuong to the erotic poems of Jericho Brown, from the personal/political acumen of Kyle Dargan to the daringly vernacular sonnets of Terrance Hayes.

What are the most common pitfalls you see students falling into as beginner writers?

Some new writers are afraid to read poems by other people, fearing, I think, that doing so might impede originality or interfere with one’s own voice. The opposite is true! Poets must read, and read deeply as well as widely! Imitation is crucial on the path to originality. If you can work your reading into your writing praxis, this is one way to “converse” with and grow from the poets you love. One exercise that’s very fruitful is sometimes called the “negative” or “backwards” poem. You start with a poem you like, such as this poem by Charles Simic,

Eraser
by Charles Simic

A summons because the marvelous prey is fleeing
Something to rub out the woods
From the black board sound of wind and rain
A device to recover a state of pure expectancy

Only the rubbings only the endless patience
As the clearing appears the clearing which is there
Without my even having to look
The domain of the marvelous prey

This emptiness which gets larger and larger
As the eraser works and wears out
As my mother shakes her apron full of little erasers
For me to peck like breadcrumbs.
© Charles Simic

And then write, line by line, its “opposite”:

Chalk

Several resistances in spite of the arrival of the boring teacher;
anything to illuminate the paper,
to bury the taste of white noise, of marbles and dust;
several ideas to destroy all hope.

Infinite scribblings, infinite panic
whenever the markings disappear, the markings inside
but only when you sleep:
the gift of the boring teacher.

And an enormity which diminishes
whenever the words collapse and rise,
a void that draws into itself all the immense meanings
that I devour like air.

The idea is that if there is a “logic” to the original, there will be a logic to the “opposite” poem as well.

This works similarly in another exercise, in which you, again, start with a poem that you like, such as “Bulletin” by Jeffrey Harrison,

Bulletin
By Jeffrey Harrison

The newspaper comes
a day late
to this remote lake,
with its headlines
on the latest shooting—

a delay
like that between
the sudden slam
of a screen door
and the report

of its ricochet
from the opposite shore,
coming, it seems,
from deep in the trees
like a gunshot.
© Jeffrey Harrison

& then write a line of your own between each line of the poem:

Bulletin
The newspaper comes
as it always does,
a day late
& a dollar short
to this remote lake,
fringed by firs & hawks,
with its headlines
of night’s planetary gossip
on the latest shooting—
stars, comets, Venus held aloft.

a delay
means little here, a pause
like that between
the new moon and the sliver new,
the sudden slam
of one season into the next,
of a screen door,
one month ending, the longer light
and the report
there’s more of it to come,

of its ricochet
through the bedroom window
from the opposite shore,
which, receding, might be winter,
coming, it seems,
as from a different century,
from deep in the trees,
itching for leaves, eruption,
like a gunshot,
but, greening, flowering, not.

& then, finally, pull out the original lines and see what your lines add up to; you can tweak them a bit to make them cohere:

Spring Cometh
as it always does,
a day & a dollar short
fringed by firs & hawks,
& night’s planetary gossip
stars, comets, Venus held aloft.

It means little here, a pause—
the new moon turning sliver-new,
one season abutting the next,
one month ending, the longer light.
There’s more of it to come,

through the bedroom window
which, receding, might still be winter,
as from a different century,
itching for leaves, eruption,
but, greening, flowering, not.

I’m also surprised that many emerging (and established) poets don’t invest in books of poems, relying instead on grazing the Internet and grabbing poems from anthologies rather than exploring entire, intentionally curated volumes. Support poets! Buy their books, just as you hope people will buy and read yours.

I think, too, that emerging poets of any age are often afraid to venture too far into the poetry of the past, but I think one of the most rewarding ways to read is via a kind of family tree. For example, if you love the poems of U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith (and who doesn’t?), then it’s worth finding out what poets she loves, what poets helped shape her – Elizabeth Bishop, for example, and not just Bishop’s work that’s in the anthologies, but the full menu of her wonderful books. And then let Bishop lead you to her contemporary, Robert Lowell, but also to her mentor, Marianne Moore, and this will take you back to Emily Dickinson (again, not just the anthologized work, but all nearly 1700 of her rockingly wild and original poems and fragments), which can in turn lead you to the Brontës and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or, antidotally, to Walt Whitman, who can propel you forward to Pablo Neruda, Ruben Dario, Langston Hughes, June Jordan, the Beats, Kazim Ali, and so forth.

What is the most common piece of writing advice you find yourself giving your students?

To remember that not writing is part of writing. Periods of latency, dry spells, writers block, or just the exigencies of one’s job/family/what have you can keep you from writing, but lived experience (travel, conversations, music, coding, anything) and reading, reading, reading are also integral to a writer’s growth. I also encourage my students not to rely on a bolt of lightning or a visitation by the Muses in order to get started. Like musicians, who practice daily scales, writers need to write when they don’t feel like it. Exercises and prompts can help. Even asking a friend to give you a handful of words to use in a poem can help to spark a poem.

I recommend the film THE FIVE OBSTRUCTIONS by Lars Von Trier to poets, to all writers. Without giving too much away, I’ll say that it’s a movie about how being given “obstructions” and constraints as an artist can lead to better and better work.

What poets are you teaching this semester? 

What’s the best thing about teaching poetry and creative writing?

What book of poetry / craft would you always recommend to new poets?

Lisa Russ Spaar is the author of many collections of poetry, including Glass Town (Red Hen Press, 1999), Blue Venus (Persea, 2004), Satin Cash (Persea, 2008), Vanitas, Rough (Persea, 2012), and Orexia (Persea, 2017). She is the editor of Monticello in Mind: Fifty Contemporary Poems on Jefferson, Acquainted with the Night: Insomnia Poems, and All that Mighty Heart: London Poems. A collection of her essays, The Hide-and-Seek Muse: Annotations of Contemporary Poetry, was published by Drunken Boat Media in 2013. Her awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rona Jaffe Award, the Carole Weinstein Poetry Prize, an All University Teaching Award, an Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia, the Library of Virginia Award for Poetry, and the 2013-2014 Faculty Award of the Jefferson Scholars Foundation. Her poems have appeared in the Best American Poetry series, Poetry, Boston Review, Blackbird, IMAGE, Paris Review, Ploughshares, Slate, Shenandoah, The Kenyon Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, and many other journals and quarterlies, and her commentaries and columns about poetry appear regularly in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and elsewhere. She was short-listed for the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for Excellence in Reviewing, and has taught at the Palm Beach Poetry Festival, Seattle Pacific University, and the Vermont Studio Center. She is Professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.