To “Making” The Workshop Packet

As a poetry writing student, almost every semester of my undergraduate and graduate career, one question came up once a week: “Did you make the packet?”

Every week we had to submit poems to the professor, usually three, but Jerome Rothenberg was a sadist and wanted five. The following week, we would be given photocopies of the poems the professor thought worthy of discussion. This would be our material for the week’s workshop.

Making the packet was big. No one was promised a spot. This was before the “everyone gets a ribbon” philosophy took hold. Professors understood you would learn from reading and critiquing as well as from writing, so they didn’t fuss much with democracy or equal time. They sat at their desks on Friday afternoons, reading what must have seem like a mess of bad writing. Perhaps the question was never what to leave out, but rather what, if anything, to include.

I wrote a poem once about sacrificing vegetables, my vegetarian ethos carried to an extreme. I imagine the reading of that was followed by a very stiff drink. It did not make the packet.

Making the packet was good, but making the front of the packet was best. The tone-setter. The first impression. The one everyone sees when they pick up the packet to work on it. This poem. This title. This font. All the artistic choices seen over and over again.

Equally good was the last poem. This would be the last poem discussed that week, the one that would reverberate through the weekend. The final note. The dessert. The last word.

But any place in the packet was better than none. One week goes by. That happens. Two weeks. That hurts. Three weeks. The professor hates me. Four. I should have majored in math.

 

After a particularly long stretch of not showing up in the packet, I go to Milt’s office. It smells like books and leather. I want to know what what I can do, why I’m not making the packet. This is my first semester as a transfer student at this school and my southern, outsider ways have not yet been burnished.

“Do you know the Bronx?” he says, landing heavy on the “x”. No, I don’t. “My mother lives in the Bronx,” he says, “Lived, I mean. She lived in the Bronx.” I’d been to the city, but it all looked the same to me. I didn’t know the Bronx from Staten Island.

We talk for an hour and never once talk about my poems. He doesn’t care if I make the packet. He doesn’t care if there is a packet. He walks me through the Bronx right there in his office and I get to know his mother. He moves his hands through the air as if to point out her apartment over there, the deli over here. He sits forward and puts his elbows on the desk, “Do you see? See what I mean?”

I don’t remember if I ever make the packet in his class again. 

But I asked the question of every poem, “Do you see? See what I mean?”