The Book Begins to Speak: On Teaching RENDER / AN APOCALYPSE

I assigned Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse to my Advanced Poetry Workshop at Cleveland State this spring because this year marks ten since the book’s publication and I wanted to see what would happen. I don’t typically assign books in workshops for the same reason I don’t use content-based writing prompts—a workshop, like a poem, is about exercises in structure (time, form, technique) and ways of thinking that make poetry happen; not about learning how to write a good poem or what kind of content makes a poem good (I couldn’t teach that anyway, and can think of no greater desiccant to a poetic imagination or practice than to suggest that there is any such thing as “good” content for a poem). Render is a book that exemplifies mastery of both—form, poetic thinking. It is, I think, especially valuable to a pedagogical objective of showing how these dimensions can fuse within individual poems and across a collection simultaneously, both momentarily and over time, adding up to an individual aesthetic experience of language that is particular to interacting with a book as an object. It is also, in my estimation, a good book of good poems.

One objective of the workshop this semester was to encourage students to think about what their poems could look like as a collection; what the experience of a book of poetry offers that’s fundamentally different from reading single poems published in print or online, how this can be reverse-applied to inform personal effect-oriented thinking about craft decisions, and ultimately how they might structure their own labor and time this semester toward production of a final manuscript they can conceive of as a sustained collection of material rather than a simple sample or evidence of work. For me, as an instructor, the teaching question is framed like this: most workshops conclude with a revised portfolio of completed work, but what does the semantic shift to a collection and its subsequent conceptual remodel change about the process and its product?

To get some different ideas of what first books can look and work like, we read three of them: a chapbook (Angelo Maneage’s THE IMPROPER USE OF PLATES, published by Ghost City Press in 2021), a new first book published this academic year (Michael Joseph Walsh’s Innocence, from the CSU Poetry Center), and Rebecca Gayle Howell’s Render / An Apocalypse (a first book published ten years ago, also by the Poetry Center, in 2013). Each collection has its own relationship to thematic arrangement and presentation of content (form, thinking), ways of expressing internal dynamics over time (thinking, form), degrees of “togetherness” and “doneness” (which we got into recurringly and troubledly, wondering whether this quality is necessarily requisite for a book of poems to be published or publishable at all). All three are small press projects that create reading experiences not usually marketable with mainstream profit margins, which is to say they may be seen as challenging or difficult depending on one’s position, but I would discourage the assumption that any book is difficult. Where is the value of a poetry class if not in willful encounters with the unknowable?

Before we discussed any of their contents, we talked about each book as an object. Render is a book which especially rewards discussion of materials and production, initiated by details of its own material production and interpretable object-ness. To hold this book is to feel the forms of thinking and care a small press literalizes into being. Others in this series have taken care already to remark on Render’s physical presentation as a kind of instruction manual, guide, or almanac; how its tactile textures and visual interjections echo poetic thinking about and through work, labor, process and processing, transmuting materials from the naked living earth into products that generate sustenance and market value. There are no page numbers in Render, only numbered poems. Illustrations of a working farmer, a gutted pig, and a woman bent screaming over a pile of shattered canning jars demarcate the three sections of the book. My copy, pulled from the drawer of damaged and misprinted books we keep in the Poetry Center office, is an object I cherish especially for its obvious, incidental flaw: the cover, inaccurately trimmed, leaves a thin white margin along the bottom where the Pantone code for this third print run’s light blue color peeks out from under nothing. Because each run of Render is printed with a different color on its cover, you can tell which one you have by whether it’s blue, silver, or orange. Only one student had a silver copy, from the second print run, ordered from someplace on the internet. There’s a first-run orange one on display behind the desk in the Poetry Center office. We’re in blue now. Orange is increasingly rare. These material facts alongside choices of cover and interior stocks, fonts, layout, arrangement of illustrations and blurbs, definitions on the back of both sides of the book’s bifurcated title—render, apocalypse—pre-design an experience, announce an interior outward, and instruct a reader (though they may not realize so) how to use this instrument they hold in their hands. In class, Render encouraged thinking more deeply and particularly about a book, the book, as an intentional object: one which contains durational sensory and emotional experiences of thinking we refer to as reading, which can be had for only a little bit of money and carbon, no batteries, no precious metals.

Another reason to assign this ten-year-old first book to twenty-year-old poets in 2023 was to test whether anything about the “first book” as we conceive of it today had become different from what this term may have entailed in 2013. If we could see any essential distance between the first books of now and those of the decade prior. A caveat: in 2013 I was not working with the Poetry Center or in publishing or teaching at all, could read even less well than I can now, was in my early twenties and hardly a person. So while I’m not even qualified to answer my own question, I am able to make observations about classroom responses to disparate phenomena, synthesize them with my own, and draw conclusions. To further my credibility, I am not sure what’s changed about first books in the last ten years per se. First books are of course more dire, somehow survivalistic. It’s hard to envision a sustainable, never mind professional or lucrative, life of writing that does not require factoring one’s work and sense of self into a model where book publishing is a necessary step somewhere on a timeline, but this is more an unfortunate cultural side-effect of economic conditions than anything having to do with writing itself. As artworks the first books of 2023 don’t seem terribly different from those of 2013 at all, though Render is a remarkably unified collection. There is, I think, a worthwhile conversation to be had about the editorial and popular tides that have grown to favor this quality of thematic unification in recent years—one can perceive, perhaps, far greater distance between the first books of today and those of the nineties, eighties, certainly the seventies and earlier, where a “collection” was more likely to simply be a presentation of works from a writer’s particular working period, content aside. And though book-level thematic tendencies and resonances (uncynically: obsessions, fixations, curses, crises) have always been and will always be of interest to poets and poetry-readers, it’s probably the case that a unified collection is more easily recognized to the editing (cynically: marketing) eye as a feat of artistic work deserving of meritorious recognition through publication. What’s astounding is how Render, apart from perhaps presaging some of our current taste for thematic legibility, creates such coherence from a poetics of such deep mutability and uncertainty. Not only is our speaker never identified, they are never even embodied. There is no “I” in Render, a move that feels more radical today even than it may have been in 2013. There is only you, at once the theoretical reader, ourselves, anyone we could imagine to be listening, everybody living. This voice speaks to us from within and beyond our pale. We spent a lot of time working around this simple technical, formal decision in class, trying to figure out to whom this book was addressed; if we, as listeners, had become humans, machines, pigs, cows, the earth, and when.

It was Render’s voice, its creation and qualities of texture and subtext and persona(e), the ways it washed over us in the room as it modulated, that we returned to over and over, spending most of our class time discussing (one week, two 75-minute meetings). When one can read a book without needing a speaker at all, it is the book that begins to speak. Render’s particular sonics, compressed lines, subtle rhythms and distant rhymes, lull the ear into an incanted and trance-like state: we return to the beginning of language. After spending so much time inside the book, it was hard to step out of this mode of hearing, of regarding language as sensorial spell. And while, as mentioned at the opening of this piece, I generally avoid giving writing prompts that overprescribe a poem’s potential content, I couldn’t help extending what we had just encountered in that primal, auditory, vocal experience of language-mind the book had carried to us, or to which we were carried by it. Taking after Howell’s instructional title convention, I asked my students to write a poem consisting only of how-to statements, read it aloud to the class, then pick one and write a poem with that line as its title. In the order they turned them in a week later, here are the titles of those poems:

How to Catch a Swarm
How to Survive Your First Death
How to Echo
How to Give Gratitude to Pain
How to Drown in the Sky
How to Take Your Testosterone Shot
How to Bake a Pie
How to Fulfill a Fulfillment
How to Hug a Black Hole
How to Go For a Walk

Zach Peckham
Managing Editor, CSU Poetry Center
May 5, 2023