Why I Hate Poetry Readings

If one were to look at my Facebook updates posted during these past summer months, one would believe that I had a nice summer. I posted pictures of Peter and me at our beachside condo, lounging by the pool, reading for fun, chasing down the Italian ice vendors, etc. And for the most part, it was a pretty great summer. Except for one thing. 

I got fired.

Let me rephrase that. I was replaced by a colleague to do a job I was forced to do in the first place. But, yeah, mostly, I was just fired.

You see, the way things work at my university, department chairs serve with no pay or course reduction. Chairs essentially coordinate the efforts of the department while attending endless numbers of meetings as the “voice” of the department. Why would anyone want such a job? I didn’t. The job was foisted upon me because in my small department with only (at the time) four tenure-track positions, one person had already been chair, the other person refused, and the newest person had only been on the job for less than a month.

That left me. I should have run the other direction.

I was resentful and bitter all last year. Sure I called regular meetings, set agenda and took minutes, took care of three new part-time adjuncts, ordered new equipment for department offices all the while teaching 24 credits and trying to work on my book, but I did it all (except for teaching) grudgingly.

Throughout the year, I tried to face problems head on. When I found out that a colleague was talking about me behind my back, I went straight to the culprit and asked him to consult with me directly if he had problems with my leadership. When I tried to hire someone to teach a class and was faced with administrative roadblocks, I sat down with the administrators and asked what to do. When I was told that I had done just about everything wrong that I could have done wrong to hire this person, I took my lumps and apologized publicly. 

Honesty, I thought, and forthrightness, would be the best way to communicate effectively with my colleagues. (Those of you who are in academia can see the naiveté in this thinking, but I thought I was blazing a trail of open communication here).

And maybe my honest communication policy would have worked if I had been honest with my feelings about the job in the first place. I deeply resented being punished with this additional service load my first year after being awarded tenure. I wanted to recuperate from my tenure application year and recharge my batteries so I could start my book.

I wonder what would have happened if I had just said all of this before taking on the position. But I didn’t, and I trudged unhappily through the year.

The problem came when I wrote a negative review of an instructor’s class (I even wrote this grudgingly, begging the instructor to let me sit down in conversation with him rather than committing to paper my evaluation). Said instructor went crying to an administrator, threatened to quit, and within a day, I was replaced.

Ironically, the administrator who fired me, did so via telephone as I was standing in a grocery store, three thousand miles away from Montana. It felt surreal to be fired while standing in the chips and dip aisle, and it’s truly a wonder that I didn’t rip open a bag of Tostitos and just go for it right then and there.

I’ve never been fired before, and I have to admit I didn’t handle it well. I vacillated between being incredibly angry at this perceived injustice to finding it a hilariously ironic that I’d been fired from a job I really hated. I know at some point that I’ll be grateful at this turn of events, but I’m not quite there yet.

Mostly I’m just embarrassed that my colleagues think I’m really bad at something. I was brought up to try my best and give my all, and for the most part, I think people see me as a hard worker who tries to be better than just competent. Being fired, however, labels me as incompetent.

So as I pick up the pieces this fall, I’m integrating a few new things in my life. I’m taking piano lessons for the first time in twenty years, and I’m learning to speak German so that I can communicate with my in-laws in more depth than simply making yummy noises while I eat strudel.

But I’m also still trying to practice honesty, this year, for myself. For too long I have held on to resentments because I didn’t want to tell the truth. So ladies and gentlemen, here it is. My first in a series of truth-telling columns:

I hate poetry readings.

There. I said it. It’s really hard for an English professor to own up to this, but I have attended at least a hundred poetry readings in my life, and few of them made me want to do something other than throw myself under a bus.

Here’s my problem with poetry readings. I teach a class called The Oral Tradition. In this class, we read The Iliad, The Odyssey, and Beowulf. We study methods of oral composition and storytelling, and I, along with my students, am always fascinated with how oral storytellers performed their work. Storytellers didn’t memorize the whole of The Iliad; they couldn’t. So they memorized stock phrases and names and retold the story as they remembered the basic plot elements. And they didn’t just tell the story: they PERFORMED it because they were essentially composing on the spot! In hexameter! Now that’s talent!

Today’s poetry readings focus on that: reading. Performance is not often part of the occasion. Instead, I silently die inside as I listen to someone labor over each precious word, pausing from that affected, pretentious reading voice that makes me want to hold the poet down and tell her ugly things about the world.

I honestly believe I would react the same if Shakespeare himself were just reading his sonnets. It’s poetry in performance (read: As You Like It or Taming of the Shrew) that really melts my butter.

And of course, that’s the irony of all this. My bread is literally buttered by the study of poetry. My B.A. and M.A. theses focused on poetry as did my dissertation. I love teaching students how to scan a line of poetry, unearthing its meter, and how to recognize alliteration, assonance, consonance, and all those great sound devices that can make words sing.

And the thing is, I really love reading poetry. I like seeing how a line breaks, where white space infiltrates stanzas, how a slant rhyme performs on the page. I like reading a line out loud to myself over and over so I can roll its sounds around on my tongue. I have read Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” aloud to myself dozens of times and cried each time, thinking about misspent youth. In my head, I recite parts of Maya Angelou’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” while I wait in line at the grocery store (though not so much on the day I got fired).

And I can see the value of poetry readings in the university setting. Our students spend a considerable amount of time composing poetry manuscripts for their senior theses, and they should have an outlet for sharing their work.

But I still hate poetry readings.

So how do I plan to use this revelation in this year of being honest?

I plan to say “No thank you,” the next time I’m invited to a poetry reading. There’s no reason to be rude to the inviter, but I’m also not going to be held hostage by poets anymore. 

That’s a really funny image, isn’t it? Being held hostage by poets. Yet the power poets have had over me is tremendous. Not anymore. Like Plato, I’m expelling poets from my republic. Well, at least from the part of my republic that is reserved for activities that don’t make me want to rip the ears off my head.