THE NEXT GENERATION: A TEACHING PHILOSOPHY STATEMENT

My teaching philosophy has been shaped as much by the students I have taught over the
last three years, perhaps more so, than even the greatest teachers Ive had during my
academic career. Yet what they both have taught me centers around what I believe is the
most grave and challenging responsibility of teacher and students alike: real engagement.
That is, first, to engage the texts, whether classic or contemporary, published or student
work, with as much Zen focus and warm-blooded charisma as possible. And then, second,
what I consider the real hurdle, yet satisfaction, to success in teaching: engaging students
as they are as much as I would readily wish them to be, and then guide them as they begin
to realize themselves as writers and students as well as sometimes rocky newcomers into
as one of my students recently put it, aptly, I thinkthe whole adult thing.

When I entered college, whether I knew it or not, I was undertrained and vastly unread in
my discipline of choice, literature, its histories and theory, legacies and traditions. Still, I
had at least one clear advantage: an unstoppable curiosity and willfullness to master the
material, enthusiastically, readily. As an undergraduate, I could imagine that one day, if I
continued on the path to being a published and practicing writer in the craft of poetry, I
would be called on to share the erudition that my passion had ennabled me to slowly but
surely acquire. Simply put, my job as a teacher would be easy: just fill-in all the holes and
gaps that the next generation of like-minded would-be writers required. O, how nave.

After three years of teaching introductory and intermediate creative writing at various
universities in the tristate area, Ive realized the stakes are hardly that straightforward. In
fact, as most adjuncts will attest, the difficulty is not in surmounting what they don't know,
but in how to convince them why they should need to know it in the first place: truly,
vitally. To achieve this sense of radical engagement with my students, I favor a twopronged approach. On the one hand, I want to make available to them only the most
challenging and ambitious texts, since this might be the first or last encounter in their
training where someone isnt trying to decode what John Milton or Bernadette Mayer
mean, cram them with this or that historical fact, but rather, to address them as a practicing
writer living today. To show them how urgently and vitalizing these and other spirits are
to engaging their own lives in a world that, as we know, is media-saturated and skewed
toward entertainment, facile, junkfoody pleasures, that prepares our students and writers

very skimpily in the way of reflective, scrupilous, absorptive readingthe most

indispensible resource to achieving literary art in any genre. On the other hand, in order to
dramatize what makes a Pertrarch and Jorie Graham relevant right now, right here, I
refuse to stare down at or intimidate them, nor pretend their encounters with great writing
will be immediate or simplistic. To do this, I feel compelled to engage and relate to their
interests, and this requires knowing the diversity of their lives, however briefly the
classroom (collectively) and its office hours (individually) afford. In emphasizing the
formulas and mechancis of popular culture most students (and teachers) are consuming,
creative products after all, nearly all the time, I want to make them more deliberate and
conscientious consumers; and, in a sense, welcome their spritely un-academic
connossieurship into the lively debates and aesthetic gambuts of creative writing. This
works best without even the slightest whiff of patronizing low culture, or force-feeding
some program on mass-production. Rather, its to show that contemporary and
postmodern writers, like all others before them, are of their time; that they engage that
time with evolving rhetorical and poetic strategies theyve learned in a particular literary
context. Essayists, novelists like David Foster Wallace and Susan Sontag take pop culture
seriously, and invariably, without much self-consciousness at stake, so too do most of my
students. I see this as a common language we share as creators in the classroom, a text we
can always be exploiting as much as departing from.

For this very reason, when we are looking at a flash fiction story of Lydia Davis, or
reading a short story of Chekhov, I want them to be aware of what conditioning as viewers
and participants of narrative theyre most likely to expect, question, downright resist. A
conversation on the abbreviated storyone without a proper introduction, climax or
closingmight therefore have the same resonance to them as a David Fincher movie. The
tonal amorphousness of a John Ashbery lyric can be juxtaposed alongside David Lynchs
dreamlike odysseys; the nutty encyclopedia of pastiche in The Simpsons or Family Guy
sits particularly well as an embodiment of a Pynchian text. And while this might sound like
a soft-sell or apologia for literature, its rather one method to increase the awareness in
these students that our choices as writers, the way we shape our imaginations and allow for
them to be shaped by what we read and consume, is everything.

Yet in order to be effective, the push has to be casual, even as it is rigorous. Another way
in which Im aware of how influential our contemporary moment on the writers I teach is
the Internet. And its a force I embrace, yes critically, but with enthusiasm for students to

mine from: how does their technological day-to-day reality affect their writing? To this
end, Im a huge proponent of online assignments (between each class), that include course
texts as well as student responses. I see the control space of the online class forum as yet
another way to newly measure student performanceto direct their inevitable web-usage
with as much uncanny learning as I prepare for in the classroom. When students create
dialogues, they post and share YouTube clips from their favorite movie monologues and
scenes. When were reading Frank OHara, I ask them to listen to John Cage and Billie
Holiday at UbuWeb. When its time to root into their memory and work on anaphora, in
the spirit of Whitman and Joe Brainard, theyre required to not only read excerpts but hear
them aloud on PennSound, often as fodder for their own exercises. In this way, a class
dedicated to the crucial gadgetry of accurate, varied description may rely as much on
reading exotic narratives c/o V.S. Naipaul or Joan Didion, in class, say, as it might in
asking students after-class to Google-image-search and describe the photographs of
Cindy Sherman and Francesca Woodman.

Even so, the workshop lineage that I emerged from at Boston College, Boston University,
and Columbia, was mostly traditionalstudents come in and workshop their texts, while
the professor-as-master-craftsman moderates and guides discussion. This conservative,
static model has survived the many revolutions of pedagogy in the academy for a reason:
writers need to master the art of close attention, with writing that is not their own as much
they need to absorb the reactions of being read intensely. Yet, as a teacher at NYU and
Bread Loafs School of English these past two years, working in collaboration especially
with John Ashbery, Ive realized part of my excitement in emphasizing artistic practice
outside of strictly poetic or literary ones, has been by acknowledging one of the greatest
ambitions a young writer must face to advance not only their technique but the potential
significance of those very techniques: how to forge a sensibilitythat is, not just random,
routine likes and dislikes across culture, but a living network of sensations and thoughts
that shows what formed us and will guide us forward.

I want the apprentice poets and writers of my class to leave not only with concrete tools to
apply to their craft, with familiarity and understanding of formal practices both current and
ancient, but also to expand their sensibility as human beings (as portentous as that sounds).
I really believe that to the degree that such as a thing as creativity can be taught,
transferred, encouraged, annealed in young minds, it has to have a foundation that will
resonate and continue to be built upon outside the classroom, when the prompts are done,

the exercises over. To measure this success, I spend great time evaluating and comparing
student work, to question why certain assignments work or fail, on the whole. I try to
continually improvise new approaches to trusty texts because as a teacher, I stay most
committed when theres more self-risk on the line. The students, I think, sense when
something is fresh terrain for the teacher as much as one another. Inevitably, certain
prompts become perennial favorites, because students prove theres more than one
successful way to realize or even depart from my intention, and with surprising diversity.

Finally, as someone who is part of the LGBT community, and sensitive to the subtle
unsaid differences in gender and orientation, among many other aspects, I see my
commitment to being a successful teacher means being also sensitive to the diversity of
students backgrounds, which manifest only sometimes in semi-visible ways. Students who
are willing to workshop and expose themselves to a variety of voices and identities
continually outside their frame of rerence place an enormous trust in their teachers to
communicate respect and safety. In the end, that means honoring what students cant
always fully articulate, what subject-matters they arent perhaps ready to themselves
engage, whether that comes up in a text or on campus. Within these boundaries, the
potential remains that by engaging their poetic craft as well as their culture, even though
their practice and sensibilities are hardly fully formed, they may begin to see the world
through their writing no longer merely as students or young people, but, hopefully,
crucially, as artists.

Adam Fitzgerald