Out of the Fog

One of the worst things that can happen to a writer, especially if she or he is associated with a college or university, is the possibility that the writer in question–(hereafter known as the WIQ) will start to believe that credentials and a beefy CV are intrinsically significant beyond the narrow walls of higher education.

Some of America’s best writers never went to college and they were no worse the wear for that. Later on, those same uneducated poets found themselves teaching at colleges, largely because there have always been a few progressive professors of English throughout the ages who implicitly realized that having Robert Frost or Kenneth Rexroth on the faculty was a shrewd move.

Still, though I am a writer who teaches, I love Kenneth Rexroth’s characterization of the university as "a fog factory". (Rexroth taught at the University of California at Santa Barbara but he meant "the university at large").

My dad was a college president and he used to say that higher education is hamstrung by its fidelity to what he liked to call "late medieval deviance" by which he meant that colleges are the direct descendents of monasteries which were in part constructed because of primogeniture–that is, there weren’t enough farms to go around so plenty a late medieval boy had to go to the monastery since he couldn’t find a niche anyplace else.

My dad was a funny man. He had private nicknames for the quarrelsome faculty members that he had to listen to over and over again in what must surely have been nearly unendurable faculty meetings. I remember that one professor in particular (who never supported any initiative as far as is known) earned the title: "the singing capon".

WIQ are all too often impressed by their academic rankings, titles, affiliations, publishing bibliographies, not to mention the conferences they’ve attended and the fellowships and awards they’ve received.

I fear that far too many of them fail to get out of the fog factory long enough to experience or endure the actual lives of their fellow citizens.

I was talking last night with my friend Gary who met his wife Lorraine in Manhattan while they were both volunteering in a Catholic soup kitchen.

I seldom see American writers in my rounds visiting non-profit organizations that provide relief for disabled citizens.

A few years ago I tried to convince some academic writers that it would be a fine thing to develop a summer writing program for teenagers who have disabilities much like the programs for teens offered by organizations like the Dodge Poetry Festival.

The look of horror on the WIQ’sfaces was palpable even to a blind writer with a speck of something like seeing.

But I can tell you without hesitation that the best thing I ever heard in a poetry class was a poem by a blind and deaf teen from Ethiopia who worked with a laptop that had a refreshable Braille display and in turn had a human translator by his side.

He wrote a true "out of the body" lyric that involved riding the spines of other animals.

I think it’s really really good to get out of the "fog factory"  once in awhile.

S.K.