How'd the Ballet Turn Out?

Here I'm with my teacher, Mimi MacDonald, on my eighth lesson and last day of adult-beginner ballet class at the Center of Contemporary Arts. I took it for the challenge. I never got good at it, but we all made progress and Mimi (trained by a Soviet ballet master in the strict Vaganova method) understood that maybe my hip sockets aren't like those of classmates 35 years younger; thus my difficulty with the basic turnout. I enjoyed the variety of people in the class, all dressed alike and reaching for the same ideal. It wasn't at all like writing, unless it was like learning the fundamentals, such as the alphabet and how to hold those fat pencils--so long ago I don't remember. I do think now, however, of the people who had the patience to teach me. Thank you.

I practiced between weekly classes with a beginning-ballet DVD (cursing, perspiring, at best making it through 65 minutes of a 90-minute DVD), thinking about what Martha Graham said in her autobiography: "Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired."

Down with "Sesame Street"!

Sesame Street is 40 years old; it debuted on this day in 1969. I was too grown-up by then to watch the show, but my students were then being born and Sesame Street, in its supposedly fun and radical way, aimed to teach them to read and think: "edu-tainment," they called it.

I began teaching freshman composition in 1986; most of my students had been born 1968-69. Freshman comp isn't fun for anybody, but students just a few years younger than my first ones appeared to have attention spans accustomed to Sesame Street's rat-a-tat pacing (modeled on network TV's Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In), and their primary concern in the classroom was entertainment. Their ideal instructors would have been singers, guitarists, bongo-players and tap-dancers, and guest stars such as Bill Cosby. Their ideal teacher was most concerned not with communication but with students' personal comfort levels and self-esteem. Over a span of about five years these ideas rose to epidemic levels. The students spoke in quips or in the disingenuous tones of children's public-television programming -- and to this day, dialogue on PBS kids' shows can drive me nuts.

I don't complain because the students in my college classroom couldn't write; most people can't and don't want to write. It worried me more that most couldn't think, except about games and sports teams.

I don't celebrate Sesame Street.

Unfinished

The closet door in his room opened into an enchanted land, where Polka the Giraffe led him on magical journeys, and Dunkin Bunkin (a rabbit) and Beeky (a woodpecker) had seagoing adventures and talked like 18th-century Englishmen, and their antagonist, Fantod Willie (a rat) made his living selling bubbles. . .

None of these wonderful stories was ever finished. I have the author's manuscripts. They are all about 3/4 complete.

Langston Hughes remembered a teacher who told him, "Always finish." This advice haunts me as I read these stories that almost -- could have -- made it into the world, and made it a better world.

Yes, I Knew Derek Walcott

Poet Derek Walcott is in the news, the NYT reporting 30-year-old charges of sexual harassment forcing him out of a professorship at Oxford. He was the Hurst professor I studied with at Wash U. This was 1989, before his Nobel Prize.

How gruff Walcott was. Students had to go to his special visiting-professor apartment to meet with him. He answered the door reluctantly. He said some snappish thing as I walked in. I stopped, looked him in the face and said, "You're a tyrant."

He did a double take. Immediately he dropped the tyrant act, and we had a productive discussion. Later he told me my poetry was "damn good."

Normally I wouldn't have faced down Derek Walcott, except coincidentally he shares my birthday, 23 January, and I felt as if that were a key to his personality. What else I remember: his light-blue eyes. His white girlfriend. His urge to level things. I wrote a poem that made fun of a Hawaiian bar. He urged me to rewrite it, have yet more fun, and "destroy Hawaii!"Now circumstances conspire to level him. What goes around comes around.

Donald Finkel, 1929-2008; Link to Interview

The poet Donald Finkel, a beloved artist and teacher and my MFA thesis adviser, died two weeks ago and I just heard. The memorial gathering takes place Dec. 12, 11:30 a.m., at the Women's Building on the Washington University Danforth Campus.

In 1994 I interviewed Don for The Riverfront Times in St. Louis. Because I knew him well it became more than an interview; rather, it's a portrait of the artist at the last major juncture of his career: the end of 30 years of teaching, and the beginning of "retirement." Click here to read the interview.

O he was wise.