Talking with ... CYNTHIA BELMONT

Interviewed by Magdalen Dale
on June 20, 2009

Cynthia has been on the faculty at Northland College for over thirteen years. She teaches courses in both the English and Women’s Studies departments, specializing in poetry writing and ecofeminist theory and criticism. Nine years ago I took an introductory Women’s Studies course with Cynthia at Northland before moving on to Oberlin College and deciding to complete a major in the same field. Now that I am pursuing a graduate degree in creative writing I thought it would be fitting to meet up with my former professor to chat about her experiences teaching poetry.

MD: What people or experiences have been the most influential to you as a teacher?

CB: As a teacher of creative writing my biggest influence was definitely my major professor in graduate school. His name was Robert Siegel. Actually all my graduate professors ran workshops that I took and all of them made clear what the purpose of a workshop is and how to handle it. I wouldn't say any of them particularly stood out to me except for Bob Siegel because I distinctly remember the dignity that he brought to the whole occasion and the respect he asked from us and sort of elicited from us. It is a serious enterprise that we are involved in when we look at each others work and it involves this really fragile balance between respecting the humanity of the writer and also treating the work seriously which often means pretty serious critiques. That line is a magical space to occupy and to get people to occupy. I think that is one of the talents of a good creative writing teacher —- being able to take the work seriously, but also take the person seriously.

As a writer though, I’ve learned the most from reading other writers.

Any in particular?

I tend to learn more from an individual poem than I do from a writer. I'll have this sort of epiphany, this moment with a poem, and then I'll ask, okay, what is going on because it's something that I want to do.

Do have a source you go to find poems?

I read journals. I read the work of my peers. There are poets I have returned to for specific reasons. I find Tennyson to be a really good resource for just listening to language, E. E. Cummings just because his playfulness is a quality I hugely admire, and Kay Ryan for the economy and precision of her language. Those are the three most influential poets that got me started and they’re from really different periods and traditions. I also love May Swenson for the really surprising things she does, the complex tones she evokes. James Dickey has this incredible poetic humility and also just empathy. All of these are things I strive for in my own work.

Do you have a favorite writing exercise or prompt that you use with your students?

I use tons of exercises for my classes. Tons. A lot of the exercises I use are just a really fun way to get people to do one thing in particular and that is to think outside of whatever box they normally live in. My two favorite exercises are exercises that everybody uses, I think. One is the "exquisite corpse" and the other is the "10-minute spill."

The exquisite corpse is a group poem that the class writes together. I start by writing a line at the top of the page and I always write the same line which is from the title of a Wallace Steven’s book. I'll write: "The palm at the end of the mind is..." Then I pass the paper to a student who writes the next line and then they fold down the paper so the next person can only see the line that they wrote and not any of the lines that came before it. I send it around the room a couple of times and at the end we unfold the paper and have this crazy wacky piece of language. I'll also encourage students to not always stop with a hard stop at the end of a line so it will run forward and have some enjambment.

For the 10-minute spill, I put ten words up on the board, some of them nouns, some of them verbs. Then I have the class generate a list of aphorisms, truisms, and various clichés. I give them ten-minutes in which they have to use all ten words and write a ten line poem that takes one of the aphorisms or truisms and bends it or tweaks it somehow, so it's not the same. There are all these instructions that go into the exercise and it seems overwhelming, but whenever I do it, it comes out great and the students come up with all kinds of wonderful wild stuff. I found this exercise in this amazing book The Practice of Poetry by Robin Behn and Chase Twichel.

While your students have learned from you to craft poems and theorize on ecofeminism, what have you in turn learned from your students?

The main thing I've learned from my students is about people. I learn about humans from my students all the time. I can actually say I've learned more about people from my students than from any other experiences in my life because I'm with this group of people, they're all really different, they're trying to get along in a dynamic space, and it's not always easy. The main thing I have learned is to never judge a book by its cover, which is such a cliché, but I have really learned what it means. I can look at someone and think they are a certain way and then they will shock me or surprise me by writing something that I would never expect. All semester I thought they were one way and then it turns out at the end that they're another way. The most recent example I have would be a hockey player who I had in one class, who just seemed like this really masculine guy and then I had him in another class and he elected on his own to write all of his papers on women's studies themes. Don't judge a book by its cover. Don't assume things about people otherwise you'll foreclose their options in your class. If you look at everybody as potentially anything then they will whoever it is that they are.

Where would you like to see the direction of creative writing headed?

It seems like there are more and more creative writing programs all the time and some people seem to lament that. They seem to think "oh it's all cheapened and with everybody taking creative writing can everybody just be a writer." But what I would say is if you look at the blog universe everybody is a writer right now, so it would be best if everybody could get into a formal context versus just floating around writing without knowing what they are doing. That said, I always prioritize the study of form in poetry and I think it'd be great if more people learned the basics of the craft, learned form and the history of poetry. Poetry is the only art form where people feel they can do it without knowing anything about it, without having training in it. You're never going to find a dancer who just decides they are a dancer, but doesn't have some kind of dance instruction and doesn't know the basic moves. You can't improvise if you're a musician without some foundation to improvise from. It's ironic because poetry is the writing genre that has the most formal elements to it and yet it's the genre people feel most free to practice without knowing the elements. So I think keeping form alive is a really good idea. I would like to see more emphasis on form. That and more reading. I always make my students read in a genre. You should read. You should know the heritage and history. So again I think that would be good for all the writers out there, to just read more and work more with the elements of craft.