Invention in the Poetry Writing Class:
Adventures in Speech Genres

Patrick Bizzaro
East Carolina University

Any speaker is himself a respondent to a greater or lesser degree. He is not, after all, the first speaker, the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe.
Bakhtin, The Problem of Speech Genres

If one goal in teaching students to write poems is to urge them to begin their writing processes as established poets begin theirs, we will soon feel frustrated in our efforts. Clearly, investigations into the writing processes of experienced writers have helped us understand what students should do in composition courses. But in the absence of such "models" for the teaching of creative writing, Ron McFarland (1993) seems accurate when he writes, "We all have one gimmick or another, some trick-of-the- trade to pass on to our students, but few writers would use it as the underpinning for a course" (37). McFarland is correct insofar as we should not be satisfied using gimmicks and tricks as underpinnings for a course in poetry writing. But from the perspective on invention widely held among poets and teachers of poetry writing courses, a pedagogy based on what McFarland calls "gimmicks" seems inevitable.

After all, most poets in considering what should go on in a poetry writing class have come to advocate a Romantic view of the writing process. The underlying assumptions of that view run counter to the inquiry I report on here. In fact, a Romantic view of poetry writing, by its very insistence on the mysterious nature of the creative act, denies that we can or should know much about creative processes.

In fact, the judgment that the creative process is too personal and too mysterious to inquire about is typical of Romantic/expressivist views, especially where matters of invention are concerned. By pointing out where we are in the evolution of thought about creative writing pedagogy, however, I do not wish to detract from this Romantic view or attack it. But I do want to state what I perceive to be the dominant attitude toward invention in poetry writing--that is, a Romantic attitude- -and three common views of classroom practice that are consistent with that attitude.

The first of these views is based on the Romantic/ expressivist belief that expression is valuable in its own right and without further revision since it reflects students' articulations of otherwise-hidden inner thoughts [1]. Second, some who view invention as a mysterious process have opted to focus on a tangible element of poetry writing, the ability to revise craftily, a response that assumes invention is something beginning poets can learn by themselves or something that they can be tricked into by use of what Richard Hugo (1979) calls "triggering devices." Third are those who combine the two above views, accepting expression as something that can be improved upon through revisions that attend to craft. The assumption underlying these three views is that, in final analysis, we cannot truly understand the mystery of our creative processes. And that lack of information requires that we look elsewhere--to instruction in craft--in determining what we should do in the creative writing class.

Unchallenged, these views continue to influence the way we teach students to write poems. After all, many writers who are interested in determining through the means available to them how best to teach creative writing have felt much as Wendy Bishop does when, in Colors of a Different Horse (Bishop and Ostrom 1994), she confesses: "I've often felt an outsider to creative writing 'society' and insecure about my forays into that particular cafe" (280). Many in creative writing society will be quick to see efforts to understand what ought to go on in a creative writing class as "theory" and people who make those efforts as "theorists."

No doubt, writers have had to defend themselves in this Romantic Era of instruction from intrusions into what they do both as writers and as teachers of writing. and that defense has been against theory and the way theory has invaded English departments, a basically destructive, subversive, though hardly a well-known assailant.

Part of the difficulty as I see it is that writers defending the ranks against theory speak about theory in two ways: 1) as though they don't have one--that is, as if speaking against theory does not require a theoretical position from which to speak, and 2) as though "theory" includes a great many things-- literary-critical theories, learning theories, composition theories, creativity theories, empirical research, case study, ethnographic inquiry, and on and on . . . . [2]

There is nothing wrong with these defenses of the Romantic/expressivist perspective on invention in creative writing classes, but there is little new in them. They characteristically begin in the belief that poetic invention is a mystery we cannot understand and that reading as a writer involves nothing more than studying technique. In any effort to improve what we do, we should feel the burden of finding better ways to engage students in the writing of poems. Bakhtinian speech genres provide such an alternative to these Romantic views of instruction in a poetry writing class, relieving young writers of the burden they must carry when they are led to believe they write in isolation, cut off from all prior poetic effort, and yet must participate in an activity described variously as miraculous, mysterious, and unknowable.

1. Speech Genres: What Teachers Need to Know

As most creative writing teachers know quite well, many of our students enter the classroom, often enthused by the opportunity to spend the semester writing poems, but just as often prevented from doing so because they are poorly read in the very genre in which they hope to write. Teachers working within the Romantic/expressivist tradition add to this problem by approaching invention as a mysterious process and poetry writing as something that happens in isolation.

By contrast, the effort reported upon in this essay was made to determine if an introductory poetry writing course might wisely be arranged by speech genres to enable students not only to become better readers of poetry, but better writers as well, writers conscious not only of how the poems they write participate in some ongoing "utterance," to use the term as Bakhtin does, but of the subtle ways their poems differ as well from other poems in the speech genre studied.

Bakhtin defines speech genres by placing them in the context of his interest in the relationship between language and social activity. He writes,

All the diverse areas of human activity involve the use of language. Quite understandably, the nature and forms of this use are just as diverse as are the areas of human activity . . . . Language is realized in the form of individual concrete utterances (oral and written) by participants in the various areas of human activity. These utterances reflect the specific conditions and goals of each such area not only through their content (thematic) and linguistic style, that is, the selection of the lexical, phraseological, and grammatical resources of the language, but above all through their compositional structure. (944)

For Bakhtin, language is suited to activity which, in turn, as social encounter, gives cause for making utterances. Significantly--and here Bakhtin departs from Saussurean theories of language--language according to this theory is a social construct, one that reflects the "specific conditions and goals" of each social situation. In short, "language creates rather than conveys our reality . . . and . . . does so in a process that is collaborative rather than individual . . . " (Clark and Holquist 9).

From this perspective, then, social situations rather than individual expression give language its "thematic content, style, and compositional structure." Bakhtin continues,

All three of these aspects--thematic content, style, and compositional structure--are inseparably linked to the whole of the utterance and are equally determined by the specific nature of the particular sphere of communication. Each separate utterance is individual, of course, but each sphere in which language is used develops its own relatively stable types of these utterances. These we may call speech genres. (944)

Bakhtin stresses in this passage the dynamic social nature of language; its dependence on a social context for content, style, and arrangement, as determined by the sphere in which it is used, though individual in each separate utterance, results nonetheless in "relatively stable types of . . . utterances"--that is, utterances unique to each sphere. This particular quality of speech genres interests me most as I reflect upon ways I might adapt this theory to practice in my poetry writing courses. This adaptation, however, works against the Romantic/expressivist notion of invention employed in most poetry writing classes.

As Bakhtin writes, every speaker except the very first, "the one who disturbs the eternal silence of the universe," is a responder who presupposes "not only the existence of the language system he is using, but also the existence of preceding utterances--his own and others'--with which his given utterance enters into one kind of relation or another" (951). For Bakhtin, then, each listener is, in turn, a responder, and each response is a continuation of preceding responses: All speakers continue the utterance that precedes them. As Bakhtin puts it, "The desire to make one's speech understood is only an abstract aspect of the speaker's concrete and total speech plan" (951).

Not only does this notion of dialogue, as Bakhtin forwards it, work against the Romantic view of invention-as-mystery, but, as Ewald (1993) claims, "Bakhtin's questioning of the conventional concept of author resembles other such challenges to the myth of the solitary writer" (334). Rather than working in isolation, then, Bakhtin believes authors collaborate with their predecessors, contributing to and changing received utterances.

How might this information help us in a poetry writing class? Bialostosky believes that by teaching students to read poems as speech genres, we enable them to "see" poems differently. More specifically, such a view permits students to understand poems in the context of shared "'real-life conditions' such as 'membership of the speakers to a single family, profession, class, or any other social group, and . . . to the same period' " (216). The benefit of employing poems as speech genres is most apparent as a way of enabling students to draw upon the knowledge and experience they obtained prior to entering class.

Bialostosky extrapolates Bakhtin's theory just enough to make classroom adaptation possible.

As Bakhtin indicates, there nowhere exists a complete or systematic enumeration of such genres, but our repertoires include lots of them. The apology, the giving of direction, the greeting, the farewell, the invitation, the request, the boast, the taunt, the command, the anecdote are a few of the everyday speech genres we are familiar with. (220)

Biolostosky stresses his belief that by organizing a course in the reading of poetry around speech genres, he has given students the opportunity to satisfy their expectations about specific utterances. He writes,

these genres . . . combine expectations about what will be talked about (thematic content), what sort of language will be appropriate (style), and what parts the utterance must have (compositional structure or what the rhetoricians called 'arrangement') with expectations about the situations in which such utterances will be used, the sort of people who will use them, the sort of people they will use them on or with, and the sorts of purposes for which they will be used. (220)

From a certain perspective, then, by advocating the arrangement of a poetry writing class in terms of speech genres, I am also advocating extensive and innovative uses of modeling. In "Apologies and Accommodations: Imitation and the Writing Process," Farmer and Arrington (1993) assert that Bakhtin and modeling go together comfortably, inevitably. All language exists, then, in "an atmosphere of the already spoken" (25). And if this is so, from the Bakhtinian perspective, we can hardly expect our students or ourselves to be free of predecessors.

2. Uses of Speech Genres in a Poetry Writing Class

Naturally, giving the assignment in the syllabus is simply not enough since students hold fast to the Romantic/expressivist notion that poetry writing is a mysterious activity and that each new effort at writing a poem is made by authors in isolation.

The first step, of course, is making certain that students understand what is meant by speech genres. To do so, I ask them to list fairly standard kinds of things they say each day to the people they see--that is, I ask them to brainstorm various situations they enter each day that require what we might call "patterned" or "rehearsed" speech. They point out a range of such speech situations, including greetings, discussions about different courses, conversations about (and often during) sporting events, and many others.

I list these speech situations on the board and ask students to choose one speech situation they agree, as a group, might be most interesting to write about. Each student, working independently at first, is asked to describe what typically happens in that one situation, inventing dialogue if possible but, in any event, describing the speech situation in terms of content of what is typically spoken, various styles with which it might be spoken, and arrangement of what is typically spoken. Of course, my students are busily completing the work Bakhtin never finished--that is, making a list of "spheres of communication."

I ask students, then, to get into groups and discuss the speech situation, devising a composite analysis to be read to the class. As each list is read, students take notes to further understand how others perceive a given speech situation.

As an assignment for the next class, I ask students to look through the anthology and build a mini-anthology of readings that in some way reflect poems in or about the speech situation we have explored as a class. We build this mini-anthology as a class and spend the next three class hours reading as writers in this speech genre, looking closely at content, style, and arrangement, paying particular attention to how these poems fit into our prior experience with the speech situation.

During fall semester 1994 we wrote a range of poems that fit into Bakhtinian speech genres. As an example of what might result, here's a notecard and a poem in the genre of "drunkenness" written by Alex, a college senior majoring in theater and minoring in English.

Let me add a word of caution, though. Because I am still learning how to use speech genres in my classroom, I am not reluctant to point out my error in handling certain speech genres such as the one that follows. Poems of drunkenness, though accessible to students, really are characteristic of what Bakhtin calls secondary speech genres, a far more complex synthesis of several primary speech genres. Clearly, Alex's poem involves dialogue not only with others who describe a first experience with drunkenness, but also with those who contribute to utterances about the particular event, the fear that arises from being inexperienced with something, and poems focusing on place, adulthood, and other related matters. Still, the dominant theme in Alex's poem is drunkenness, as you can see.

Here's Alex's treatment of three poems leading to analysis of her poem, "Our Moonshine Time," and the poem itself. Not only does this effort tend to fit comfortably into the notion of speech genre as it might most profitably be used in a poetry writing class, but Alex's responses to poems in this genre reflect her growth as a person entering the dialogue about drunkenness.

Poems on drunkenness

"Tequila" by Elizabeth Spires

1. The loneliness, isolation in the mountains
2. The separation from neighbors ("I'll leave a sign on the door . . .") is purposeful and drunks often do the same. They push people away with alcohol.
3. Alcohol is a barrier between the sober and the drunk
4. Marathon drinking ("up all night")
5. Trips to the bars
6. Free verse, first person

1. Victimization
2. Shared and related behavior ("When I drink I am too much like her . . .")
3. Drinking to forget, to become isolated
4. Free verse, first person
5. Where they drink is very important to the poem

1. Typical bar scene which embraces the cliches of a bar. This gives the poem a sense of familiarity
2. Place is very important to this poem because the alcohol is a side issue
3. Free verse
4. This poem offers a glimpse inside a bar which might be unique, but most likely is occurring over and over in every bar everywhere

1. Free verse, first person
2. Loneliness, boredom is related to our age and the conforming rules of society. This is opposed to drinking because it's a habit or a lifestyle.
3. We drink for excitement and danger. We climb the roof for the same reason.
4. Shared experience, related behavior. I drank moonshine because I was with her and because she asked. We are in the same tedious stage of life.
5. Availability. Beer wasn't exciting enough to get me to drink for the first time. Nothing would come of drinking beer. Whiskey, and moonshine at that (real corn squeezing!), was extreme enough.
6. Marathon drinking (up all night)

1. Alcohol wasn't a barrier; it was a leaping off place in this poem. The moonshine brought us even closer together as we alienated our outside (parental) world.
2. We were not drinking to forget; we were drinking to start living.

Here's Alex's poem:

Our Moonshine Time

What was allowed had already been done.
Thick with pizza and sick of movies that show
you a lot of a woman, but none of a man, feeling
slammed shut with rules that fit my age,
but suffocated my body and spirit. I listened
closely to her tales of moonshine and intoxication.
She wrapped her arm around my neck and made promises
of an unstable evening. I agreed to the bad
influence, eagerly handing in my virgin tongue.
We sat facing the moon, our backs supported
by the chimney. She handed me a jar of
white lightning and we burned our throats
simultaneously, counting to three for courage.

As Alex was correct to point out about Baker's "Eight Ball at Twilite," the genre of drunkenness comes quite close in some uses to being yet another secondary speech genre. Nonetheless, Alex is able to negotiate the complexity of such a treatment and focus on her own first experience drinking moonshine.

Let me note here that not only was I able to make certain that students read widely as writers in their chosen genre, but by writing about three poems in that genre and then focusing on the way their poems entered the dialogue with the other three, I was able to use their description of features of their poems as a way of evaluating the poem's success.

Naturally, Alex could have gone further in her analysis of the poems in the speech genre. In future efforts, I will ask students to write their preliminary analyses of poems in a speech genre by using worksheets which focus on the three elements Bakhtin stresses--content, style, and arrangement.

3. Some Conclusions

Second, by acknowledging their participation in such a dialogue, students can better see how invention takes place. Since we are working with the notion that utterances arise from "diverse areas of human activity" (Bakhtin 944) and that "[t]hese utterances reflect the specific conditions and goals of each such area," invention is a less miraculous activity than it was perceived to be by those in the Romantic/expressivist tradition. Any new utterances, including poems by students, are made in a larger context and within a community of other speakers. Invention in this sense is a continuation of an ongoing dialogue. Every new utterance is in its content, style, and organization linked to all other utterances in that speech genre. Bakhtin even makes concessions to individuality: "Any utterance--oral or written . . . in any sphere of communication--is individual and therefore can reflect the individuality of the speaker (or writer); that is, it possesses individual style" (947).

Third, because our focus is on certain specific spheres of communication, students find themselves reading widely and "reading as writers," thinking during their reading time about how they might contribute to the dialogue taking place on the pages in front of them.

For the time being, I believe I have found a method of invention in a poetry writing class that might be used either as an alternative to the Romantic/expressivist view of instruction in creative writing or in addition to "triggering" devices that typify what McFarland calls "tricks and gimmicks" writing teachers use with their students. and when I look at the efforts made by Alex (and others in that class), I am encouraged as I reflect on what I have learned as a teacher using Bakhtinian speech genres.

Notes

[1] In his professional book, Teaching Creative Writing, published in 1937 as "A Publication of the Progressive Education Association," Lawrence H. Conrad writes about the then-current view of students, a view not many of us today would claim as our own, even though we may claim pedagogy based on this view. "With our increased knowledge of the needs and aptitudes of the adolescent years, we have come to set a high value upon creative practices wherever they may be introduced in the curriculum . . . " (3). Conrad continues by stating that the true value of creative writing is as a record of the emotional and psychological development of students, including college and university students.

[2] See, for instance, Sanders, "The Writer in the University" (1992), Lehman, "What is Postmodernism" (1994), and Frenza in "Tradition and the Institutionalized Talent" (1992), all published in the AWP Chronicle, for the range of defenses. For instance, Lehman uses sarcasm in his definition of postmodernism since, as he writes, "nobody, with the exception of a few academics, really likes the term, but it won't go away" (2). Frenza uses guilt by association, a tactic that might suggest that Luce Irigaray and Madonna hold much in common: "Like Madonna, academic critics are self-involved with their own fabulousness, gratifying themselves with their own intertextual prowess, their etymological riffling, their eclectic thievery of fashionable styles. The resulting style, however, is really the awful antithesis of style, like Madonna's: practiced manipulation and self-advertisement" (20)

Works Cited

Bakhtin, Mikhail. The Problem of Speech Genres. Trans. Vern W. McGee. In The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Patricia Bizzell and Bruce Herzberg, eds. Boston: St. Martin's, 1990. 944-963.

Bialostosky, Don. "From Discourse in Life to Discourse in Poetry: Teaching Poems as Bakhtinian Speech Genres." Practicing Theory in Introductory College Literature Courses. James M. Cahalan and David B. Downing, eds. Urbana: NCTE, 1991. 215-26.

Bishop, Wendy. "Afterword--Colors of a Different Horse: On Learning to Like Teaching Creative Writing." Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy. Wendy Bishop and Hans Ostrom, eds. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. 280-95.

Bishop, Wendy and Hans Ostrom, eds. Colors of a Different Horse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and Pedagogy. Urbana: NCTE, 1994.

Bizzell, Patricia and Bruce Herzberg, eds. The Rhetorical Tradition: Readings from Classical Times to the Present. Boston: St. Martin's, 1990.

Clark, Katerina and Michael Holquist. Mikhail Bakhtin. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1984.

Conrad, Lawrence H. Teaching Creative Writing. NY: Appleton, 1937.

Ewald, Helen Rothchild. "Waiting for Answerability: Bakhtin and Composition Studies." College Composition and Communication 44 (Oct. 1993): 331-48.

Farmer, Frank and Philip Arrington. "Apologies and Accommodations: Imitation and the Writing Process." Rhetoric Society Quarterly 7 (Winter 1994): 12-34.

Frenza, D.W. "Tradition and the Institutionalized Talent." AWP Chronicle 24 (1992): 20.

Hugo, Richard. The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing. NY: Norton, 1979.

McFarland, Ron. "An Apologia for Creative Writing." College English 55 (Jan. 1993): 28-45.

Sanders, Scott Russell. "The Writer in the University." AWP Chronicle 25 (1992): 1.