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Should I Write This Essay or Finish a Poem? Teaching Writing CreativelyPoetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms, and Figures of Speech by StephenAdams; Created Writing: Poetry from New Angles by Paul Agostino; Elements of AlternateStyle: Essays on Writing and Revision by Wendy Bishop; The Elephants Teach: CreativeWriting since 1880 by D. G. Myers; The Grammar of Fantasy: An Introduction to the Art ofInventing Stories by Gianni Rodari; On the Teaching of Creative Writing by ...Review by: Patrick BizzaroCollege Composition and Communication, Vol. 49, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 285-297Published by: National Council of Teachers of EnglishStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/358939 .

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Review

Patrick Bizzaro

Should I Write ThisEssay Or Finish a Poem?Teaching Writing Creatively

Stephen Adams. Poetic Designs:An Introduction oMeters, Verse orms,and Fig-ures of Speech. Peterboro, Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 1997. 237pages. $14.95 (paper).

Paul Agostino. Created Writing: oetry rom New Angles. Upper Saddle River,NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 140 pages. $20.20 (paper).

Wendy Bishop, ed. Elements fAlternate Style:Essayson Writing nd Revision.Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1997. 185 pages. $22.50 (paper).

D. G. Myers. The Elephants Teach: Creative Writing Since 1880. EnglewoodCliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1996. 224 pages. $33.40 (paper).

Gianni Rodari. The Grammar f Fantasy: An Introduction o the Art ofInventingStories. New York: Teachers & Writers Collaborative, 1996. 139 pages.$25.95 (cloth); $13.95 (paper).

Wallace Stegner. On the Teaching f CreativeWriting. Hanover, NH: The Uni-versity Press of New England, 1997. 72 pages. $8.95 (paper).

As a teacher of creative writing, I have had either the good luck or the mis-fortune of never having taken a creative writing workshop. Instead, like a

Patrick Bizzaro is Director of Graduate Studies in English at East Carolina University. His Re-sponding to Student Poems: Applications of Critical Theory (NCTE, 1993) explores the relationshipbetween composition theory, creative writing pedagogy, and critical theory. His poems haveappeared in over one hundred journals and six chapbooks. He is also the editor of Dream Gar-den: The Poetic Vision ofFred Chappell (LSU, 1997) and co-author with Robert Jones and CynthiaSelfe of The Harcourt Brace Guide to Writing in the Disciplines (1997). His articles on compositionand the teaching of writing have appeared in CCC,Language Arts, Teaching English in the Two- YearCollege, and other NCTE journals. And he is currently trying to finish writing a poem...

CCC 49.2/May 1998 285







286 CCC 49/May 1998

great many writing teachers of my generation, I studied literature in grad-uate school. That was long ago; in fact, I believe my graduate school train-ing first betrayed me by becoming hopelessly outdated 20 or 25 years ago.

In the meantime, I have joined other mistrusted senior faculty, whowander through the aisles of college bookstores warily touching books soloved by younger colleagues that these books have become the texts se-lected to be passed on to our students. Like many others, I occasionallypurchase one or two of these books, sneak them into a bag, and take themhome to be read.

I do have my training in literary studies to fall back upon, though. Butgetting that training meant postponing the writing of poems until aftercompleting my dissertation on Shelley and the Pre-Raphaelites. Soon Ihad published enough poems to be asked on occasion to teach the verykinds of workshops I had never taken. No doubt my training in literarystudies influenced not only how I ran my workshops but also how I readand responded to my students' poems. At least I was curious, as a result ofnever having taken a workshop, about what I might do to help my stu-dents improve in their writing of poems. New at this kind of teaching, Ipaid close attention to what worked for me in my poetry writing work-

shops and what didn't. I even went so far as to tell people-many ofwhom had done graduate work that required taking workshops-aboutwhat I discovered there.

I was operating then from the belief that investigation into how toteach creative writing is as much of an ongoing effort as is investigationinto how to teach composition. Composition has its Conference on CollegeComposition and Communication; creative writing has its AssociatedWriting Programs. In short, as one new to the teaching of creative writing,I thought reflection by creative writing teachers on how they teach stu-

dents to write and how they respond to student writing was a natural andwidely-accepted practice among creative writers. That is until a poet ac-quaintance of mine told me otherwise.

It wasn't until after I spoke as a panelist on AWP's Pedagogy Forum,however, that she approached me, exasperated and, perhaps, slightly em-barrassed. She explained that she was of the opinion that real writersspend their time writing, and that AWP's Pedagogy Forum wasn't reallytaken seriously by writers anyway. Rather, she explained, the Forum wasdesigned as it was simply to help writers receive funding to attend the con-ference. Creative writers, she insisted, "don't give papers at conferences."Having just given a paper at AWP, his new information confused me. I be-gan formulating questions: How should I spend my time? Will my reflec-tion on my teaching be rewarded with better poems by my students? Inshort, should I write this essay or finish a poem?







Bizzaro/Teaching reatively 287

In "Afterword-Colors of a Different Horse: On Learning to Like Teach-ing Creative Writing," Wendy Bishop confesses that she has "often felt anoutsider to creative writing 'society' and insecure about [her] forays intothat particular cafe" (280). In the same volume of essays, Alice Brand ad-mits, "I am not a card-carrying member of creative writers. I was not for-mally taught to write poetry. I didn't undergo the requisite workshopexperience, have the requisite credential or even the New Critical sensibil-ity" (153). Even if I feel that, as a creative writer interested in pedagogy,my emphases may be inappropriate, perhaps even unbecoming, I realize Iam not alone. In fact, I envision there to be a great many teachers of cre-ative writing like myself.

Then briefly during the late 80s and early 90s, NCTE courageously pub-lished books about the teaching of creative writing-books more intended,if we can guess anything at all by a press's marketing strategy, for thosewho are not card-carrying creative writers than for those who are-that is,for those who take their primary identity as teachers or, at least, writer-teachers, but not chiefly as writers. Though not directly related to creativewriting instruction, Stephen North's TheMaking ofKnowledge n Composition(1987) provided the terms and insights that enabled various commenta-tors on creative

writing pedagogyto make sense of the creative

writingclassroom. If the workshop model were a building, it would resemble inmost respects what North calls "The House of Lore," made up of the in-structional techniques "each generation of Practitioners inherits." Northexplains that the house "is huge, sprawling. There are, after all, no provi-sions for tearing it down" (27).

Early investigations into the teaching of creative writing explore thehouse of lore. In particular, Joseph Moxley's Creative Writing n America:Theory nd Practice 1989) and Wendy Bishop's Released nto Language: Op-

tions or TeachingCreativeWriting 1990) do the essential work of classifyingthe lore of creative writing instruction and do so by relying to varying de-grees on anecdote and teacher narrative. At last, serious reconsiderationshad been given to the way creative writing gets taught. But, alas, this wasNCTE, not necessarily a press respected (or even read) by university-levelcreative writing teachers. What influence could these books hope to haveon the way things actually get done in most college and university class-rooms? Whatever the influence might have been, these books proved thatthere is work-important work-to be done in understanding why we

have held to a model of instruction for so long without giving it properscrutiny.

But in recent years, NCTE has ceased its publication of books focusingon the teaching of creative writing, and my insecurities have returned.Fortunately, the books to be discussed here, as a whole, attempt to answer








In particular, he addresses the notion of whether creative writers-in-cluding poets and fiction writers-have historically reflected upon how toteach their students to write. We tend to forget in our hurry to publish apoem or story (or, more likely, in our anxiety about the tenure vote) that,historically, "the critic and the writer would be found in the same skin, be-cause both were dedicated to... literature-in-the-making" (128). We forgetthat John Crowe Ransom was a writer teaching writing and that the NewCriticism was used by creative writing teachers as a method for comment-ing on literature as literature-published, professional writing as well asstudent efforts. Myers' study helps us understand that most creative writ-ers have long attempted to perform the job of instruction dutifully, at thevery least. "The new criticism was first of all a pedagogy," writes Myers.And he continues, "What was sought was an approach to literature thattreated it as subject to conventions, principles, standards, criteria, rules,and rule-like propositions of its own.... The new critics turned their scru-tiny onto the internal structure of poems" (131).

It seems important to note that the current rage among many creativewriters against scholarship and reflective teaching suggests that creativewriters have never at any point in history thought about how to comment

on a poem or how to get a student to write one. Myers helps us throughthis misconception, connecting the writing of criticism, using a specificcritical methodology, to a method of commenting on poems using thosesame critical tools. He writes:

The number of poets who actively wrote criticism or vice versa) was notsmall.... When an important ew critic ike Cleanth Brooksappeared n thescene it was a bit unsettling f he was not a poet. It is an open questionwhether some of these might not have been better critics han poets, but the

key point s that their criticism rew out of their practical nterest n writingpoetry. The method that came to be known as "practical riticism" r "closereading" was founded upon the sort of technical discussionof poetic prob-lems that would occur among a group of poets. (130-31)

If there is a myth that creative writers should not think much about howthey write, even if it will enable them to help their students improve aswriters, and no doubt there is such a myth, it is believed with little regardfor the facts of creative writing's history: "To examine a poem was to ex-amine its construction-with the ruthless skepticism of someone whomight have constructed it differently" (131). In short, reflection uponhow, exactly, to criticize writing has long been part of the creative writer'sconcerns. When they have reflected upon their teaching, creative writers







290 CCC 9/May 1998

have generally acknowledged that their critical commentary on their stu-dents' writings constitutes much of their pedagogy. And these commentsare the product of a methodology that is just as apt to be employed in re-viewing published books as in commenting on drafts of student poems, us-ing standards extracted, as the New Critics would have it, "from everyindividual experience of a work of art" (Wellek 150-51)-that is, framingtheir commentary in terms refined for use in commenting on the formalstructures of texts.

My only wish for TheElephants Teach s quite simple: that this excellenthistory do justice to the present. I believe an appropriate place to end thisotherwise thorough study is with the relationship between creative writ-ing and poststructural iterary criticism, a subject on which many contem-porary writers have been outspoken. Myers is clear, however, that aprevailing concern among creative writers, perhaps the most controversialsubject of all in the lore of instruction in creative writing, is if it can bedone at all-that is, if creative writers can get their students to write cre-atively and, if so, how.

On the Teaching f Creative Writing: Responses o a Series of Questions s de-scribed by its editors as "informal commentary by Wallace Stegner...based

upon and extend[ed] from tape-recorded discussions engaged in by [Steg-ner] before Dartmouth audiences" (4). These discussions took place duringthe time Stegner served in residence at Dartmouth as a Montgomery Fel-low in June and July of 1980.

Stegner founded the creative writing program at Stanford in 1947 anddirected it for 25 years. As a pioneer in creative writing instruction, then,he is one of the experts Myers refers to in constructing a history of creativewriting. Myers lists Stegner as one of the group of "second-generation newcritics," who are accurately described as "teacher-writers" 154). This little

book, a mere 72 pages, includes commentary by Stegner on a wide rangeof matters, not the least important of which, since it is the topic addressedin the first three questions, is "whether creative writing can, in point offact, be 'taught'?" (7).

Stegner's response is not surprising, insofar as he makes the distinctionmost creative writing teachers make between genius-"You begin with agift, big or little, and you try to help it become whatever its potential per-mits" (12)-and craft-"a few of the dos and don'ts of voyaging" (10).Within the academy, writes Stegner,

There are limited hings a teacher can do, apart rom encouraging he envi-ronment of interest and criticismwithin which writing can take place. Howcan anyone 'teach' writing, when he himself, as a writer, s never sure whathe is doing? 9)








Nonetheless, Stegner believes a teacher can accomplish some things withwriting students:

He can encourage the will to explore.... A teacher who has been on thoseseas can teach certain things-equivalents of the use of compass and sextant:the language and its uses, certain tested literary tools and techniques andstrategies and stances and ways of getting at the narrative essence of a storyor novel or the dramatic force of a play or the memorableness of a poeticallyhoned thought. (10)

In the end, however, Stegner believes the community of writers can do

more for each other than any teacher can do for individuals in a work-shop. "In my experience," writes Stegner, "the best teaching that goes onin a college writing class is done by members of the class, upon one anoth-er. But it is not automatic, and the teacher is not unimportant. His job is tomanage the environment, which may be as hard a job as for God to man-age the climate" (11).

Where should a teacher start, then, in developing in students an aes-thetic sense, that is, in helping them deepen what Stegner, in calling them"signs of gift," elevates to the essentials of creative writing: "a feel for lan-

guage" as well as "perceptiveness [and] alertness to the observed world"(13-14). Some teachers prefer to begin by helping students develop "a feelfor language," focusing on poetic design, including meter, verse forms, andfigures of speech. Others prefer to stress "perceptiveness, alertness to theobserved world," focusing on those elements of poetry--including imag-ery, contrast, and voice, that when employed appropriately make poetryaccessible to average readers.

Stephen Adams' PoeticDesigns:An Introduction oMeters, VerseForms, andFigures of Speech attempts to teach students how to gain a feel for the wayslanguage might be used in a poem. On the whole, this book seems to meto go well beyond what a beginning poet might actually use. But Adamswisely compromises:

In all fairness, very few poets (Pound and Auden come to mind) have aspiredto equal mastery in all the English forms and meters; most cultivate one or afew small areas. Yet within his metier, poet is likely to have passed throughthe phase of conscious technique to a stage of instinctive craftsmanship. 36)

Adams seems well aware of the fact that "such discriminations [of the sorthe makes in this book] sometimes demand a high degree of sophisticationand a well-trained metrical ear" (46). Nevertheless, much of the informa-tion in this book would help a teacher accomplish Stegner's high ideal ofhelping students grasp language.







292 CCC 9/May 1998

Adams offers insights such as the following, often with good humor,that students should consider in gaining a sense of how language can bemolded in the making of a poem. He writes:

A poet's choice of meter and form s consciousand deliberate: ne does notwrite dactylichexameter by accident. n making his choice, the poet placeshis work n relation o all the rest of Englishpoetry, both past and present. Amodern poet choosing o write in blank verse is, simplyby that choice, re-jecting the free forms that dominate contemporary oetry and placing hepoem in relation to the literary radition hat stretches back through thegreat Romantics nd Milton o Shakespeare. 9)

It is quite easy, in the haste to get students to write acceptable poems-whatever they might be-to forget historical context, to overlook whatEliot wrote nearly 80 years ago, when he wrote that "what happens whena new work of art is created is something that happens simultaneously toall the works of art which preceded it. The existing monuments form anideal order among themselves, which is modified by the introduction ofthe new work of art among them" (141). Adams' adaptation of this per-

spective on literary history is a useful one for students to encounter andthink about: "An eighteenth-century writer choosing heroic couplets is ac-cepting the dominant meter of the day; but a twentieth-century writermaking the same choice is necessarily evoking the Augustan period" (9).

In Created Writing: Poetry From New Angles, Paul Agostino takes an ap-proach to teaching creative writing markedly different from Adams'. In hisPreface, Agostino writes, "My attempt in writing this book is to createsomething that is alive; something that will speak to people and somethingthey can talk back to" (xi). Agostino's emphasis is quite different from Ad-

ams', yet it is an approach that will assist teachers in their efforts to deepenfor students two other characteristics of a writer's "gifts," as Stegner per-ceives them: perceptiveness and alertness to the observed world.

The world Agostino is most concerned with is one populated by peoplewho do not read poetry, who believe instead that poetry, approached asAdams approaches it, is intended to exclude all but those who have beenformally trained to enter it. In Agostino's words, "The academic powers-that-be of poetry have turned it into an esoteric art form. And onlymembers can use the club's facilities. Membership is by invitation only; nononmembers need apply" (xiv). Agostino's emphasis in Created Writing son taking steps to bring poetry "back to people" (xiv). Though Agostinomakes some concessions to the world of formal design, he uses as an epi-graph to his book a poem, "Practical Concerns," by William J. Harris,








which ends with "The bird and I talk about singing./Very little about tech-nique." And Agostino gives away his emphases in the first sentence ofchapter one: "The best poetry often speaks in pictures: ideas and emotionsare given faces, bodies, and actions" (1). Agostino goes on in this book tofocus on perceptiveness and ways a student might become more alert tothe observed world.

I believe there are teachers of creative writing among us who wouldfind the emphases in Agostino's book to be much more agreeable thanthose in Adams'. Take for contrast with the material quoted above fromAdams, which brings Eliot's great dictum to mind, the following advicefrom Agostino at the end of a chapter entitled "Where Do Poems Begin?"

All of the poems n this chapter ould have remained unwritten f their au-thors weren't willing to stay awake. If you want to write poetry, keep youreyes open. (35)

Simple as that Still, teachers of writing should keep in mind that Stegnerwanted a balance between these approaches; Adams and Agostino seem towant teachers to make a choice. In fairness to Agostino, Chapter 10, the fi-

nal chapter of the book, does address "Rhyme and Poetic Forms," but theauthor cautions students about using traditional forms. "The problem withusing traditional forms of poetry as examples in the classroom is that inthe wrong hands you get something like this" (119), following this cau-tionary note with a poem that displays the kinds of shortcomings a begin-ning poet trying to write in traditional form might produce.

Grammar n a New Light

There is little doubt that what Stegner calls "gift" and what both Adamsand Agostino hope to nurture in young writers has its roots in imagina-tion, intuition, even instinct. Several books have focused on the primacyof imagination in education along with the way the imagination is enlistedwhen rules are resisted or circumvented altogether. Such books advocategrammar placed in a new light.

The foreword by Herbert Kohl to Gianni Rodari's TheGrammar fFantasy:An Introduction o the Art of Inventing tories pens with a question so basic itseems to be the unspoken heart of each of the books discussed here: "Whatis the place of the imagination in education?" No doubt, this is a concern formany creative writers. But in this wonderful introduction to the work ofwriter and educator Gianni Rodari, t is clear that the attempt to answer thisquestion may constitute the work of an individual's ifetime.







294 CCC 9/May 1998

In many ways, Rodari is the prototype of the creative writing teacher,someone about whom translator and educator Jack Zipes writes, "It s diffi-cult to say which is more important, Rodari's iterary or pedagogical work"(xix). This might be said of a wide range of creative writing teachers inAmerican universities, many of whom are acknowledged in Myers' book.But it is common these days to perceive the elevation of a writer to the lev-el of excellent teacher as a dismissal of that writer as writer, as though onecannot be both excellent teacher and excellent writer. Rodari was bothand, as Zipes points out, "it is impossible to separate one (literary work)from the other (pedagogical work)" (xix). Perhaps, then, and for this rea-son, we can hold Rodari as a model for what other writers might eventual-ly become, a gifted writer with a vision for the future of education.

Zipes is quick to point out that "no work of his makes his multi-facetedlife more clear than The Grammar fFantasy" xix). With an increased inter-est in alternate styles, for instance, the introduction in this fashion of Ro-dari to an American audience is quite timely. What is a grammar of fantasy,and how is it relevant in today's colleges and universities? Rodari under-stood what Wallace Stevens meant by "the imagination is the power of themind over the possibilities of things" (qtd. in Rodari x). There is a great ne-

glect of imagination in our schools. As Kohl notes, "The word imaginationdoes not appear in the government's list of 'Goals 2000,' nor does it turn upon lists of behavioral objectives or educational outcomes. There is no imag-ination curriculum or pedagogy of the imagination in our schools" (ix).

As a result, perhaps the time is right to set rules instruction aside mo-mentarily and consider what might happen if we empower the mind toperceive "the possibilities of things." Rodari does this by examining theway imaginative play can serve as the core of a system for educating chil-dren and young adults. When he tested and instituted this approach to

teaching in the schools of Reggio Emilia in northern Italy, he came to un-derstand that there is grammar as we usually think of it-a systematic ap-proach to understanding the way language works-and, yet, anothergrammar, a grammar of the imagination. Thus, Rodari concludes that chil-dren "need to play with life's rules by using the grammar of their ownimaginations" (xix).

By understanding his upbringing in Italy before, during, and after thegreat world depression, Rodari came to understand that children's lives areso highly prescribed that, if they are to learn how to think for themselves

in some socially productive way and solve the problems around them,they must be encouraged "to fathom what the words, expressions, forms,and shapes of their culture mean" (xix). This encouragement must bedone by fueling the imagination since the imagination has rules of its ownthat must be followed if children are to be interested in seeking more








knowledge about the culture they live in and the way culture shapes lan-guage. As Kohl writes, "This educational vision for young children is closeto Paolo Freire's vision of adult education, and is one that fits into a viewof the world that is cooperative, compassionate, and egalitarian" (x). It isone in which the teacher challenges children to solve problems that canonly be solved through the operation of the imagination. Yet it is a methodthat can be adapted to students of all ages.

A specific exercise chosen by Kohl for its adaptability to students of allages involves talking about Pinocchio. Kohl writes:

Rodari uggests hat children hink about what it would be like to be made ofwood. The analysis an become more specific nd complex.What would youeat? What would sleep mean? Whom and what would you fear? Whatwould the rain do to you? What would happen f you broke a finger or leg?How ong would you live and what would death mean? (x)

Kohl goes on to argue how this kind of thinking might be employed in var-ious subject areas. Einstein, for instance, conducted a thought experimentin which he imagined himself traveling along with a light wave and, by do-

ing so,advanced his

thinking about the theory of relativity. We might con-sider, then, how to teach the sciences by stimulating the imagination.In what seems an adaptation of this kind of thinking, an increasing

number of teachers of writing have been drawn to what has been called"alternate style." Wendy Bishop's Elements fAlternate Style:Essayson Writ-ing and Revision s a useful introduction to this kind of teaching, includingessays from a wide range of teachers who have experimented with the useof alternate style in their writing classes.

Many of the contributors to Bishop's book have been influenced by

Winston Weathers who, in "The Grammars of Style: New Options in Com-position" which first appeared in Freshman English News in 1976, forward-ed the notion that teachers have settled on a narrow range of skills to passon to student-writers, and that there is much more that might be sharedwith students. Not entirely unlike Rodari's view of the grammar of imagi-nation, insofar as both seek "to augment, complicate, tease, challenge, andextend" what writers might do, alternate style intentionally asks studentsto subvert the standard practices most young writers are taught to employ.

For instance, in "'Would You Like Fries with That?' Ordering Up SomeWriting: Fast Food for Thought," Darrell Fike and Devan Cook offer somemethods for helping students develop an alternate style. Students mightwrite "crots" Weathers' term for a unit of prose "characterized by the ab-sence of any transitional devices that might relate it to the preceding orsubsequent crots" [qtd. in Bishop 13]). Or students might self-consciously







296 CCC 9/May 1998

employ lists or labyrinthine sentences, or sentence fragments, or repeti-tion, or what Weathers calls a "collage/montage." Another popular devicefor developing alternate style is the use of double-voicedness that brings tomind Derrida's Glas and, I think, places alternate style in historical context.Not surprisingly, Fike and Cook turn to the authority of a well-known cre-ative writer and teacher, Richard Hugo, for support and perhaps a sensibleword of caution about alternate style. Hugo's well-known comment onthe applicability of rules is a wonderful reminder of why we have rules tobegin with: "That s the advantage of making up rules. If they are working,they should lead you to better writing. If they don't, you've made up thewrong rules" (qtd. in Bishop 18).

Bishop's book moves from essays that introduce readers to alternatestyles, to essays that argue for risk-taking in the classroom (including HansOstrom's excellent statement of the reasons for employing alternatestyles), to issues of identity, technology, and correctness. An essay I foundespecially interesting was Michael Spooner's "Sympathy for the Devil: Ed-iting Alternate Style," that answers some questions most readers will nodoubt have, including why a teacher would encourage alternate style andhow a teacher might respond to that style. "Very ikely," writes Spooner,

"the author chose the alternate style as a way to loosen readers from theconventions that editors are trained to enforce" (156).But if teachers think alternate style is a far-fetched way of getting stu-

dents to think about and actually perform the writing students must do,they might, first, place the advent of alternate style, as Myers does innova-tions in thinking about teaching creative writing, in historical perspective,since it seems a logical outgrowth of poststructuralism, on the one hand,and liberatory education, on the other. Second, as an effort to teach writ-ing creatively, they might measure the value of teaching alternate style, as

we might the value of any efforts we make in teaching writing, as Stegnerwould, by whether the effort teaches "perceptiveness, alertness to the ob-served world, a feel for language." And, third, they should determine if theapproach enlists in some productive way the imagination.

Conclusion: Nothing New Under the Sun

Over the past 15 years, instruction in creative writing has undergone con-siderable scrutiny, but, as Myers has shown, there is nothing new in this.The result, however, is greater insight into why we do some of the thingswe do in the classroom, why we ought not to believe everything we aretold about creative writing and creative writing instruction, and, in fact,why we should enlist the imagination in all our efforts at teaching writingby breaking rules we have had drilled into us.








The books discussed here support the view that creative writing peda-gogy and composition instruction have shifted so that-though far short ofbeing one and the same-they once again stand beside one another. Anessential element of the pedagogy of each is response. Increasingly we areaware that methods of response to drafts of poems as well as to essays-in-progress are used to teach the writing process. At least in theory, thismeans that response no longer stands only at the end of that process.

Indeed, Myers' historical account shows that the need to develop a lan-guage for responding to student writing resulted in a language of responseappropriate for use with all literary texts. "The new criticism," writes My-ers,

"wasfirst of all a

pedagogy."As an effort to treat

writing "as subjectto

conventions, principles, standards, criteria, rules, and rule-like proposi-tions," that method of response as used by teachers in both creative writ-ing and composition classes is an effort to examine students writing "withthe ruthless skepticism of someone who might have constructed it differ-ently." In short, the books examined here advance the notion that creativewriting teachers and composition instructors alike tend to read studentwriting the way they read professional writing, using the same tools andvocabulary in discussing each.

Composition instruction has also aligned itself with the usual goings-onof the creative writing class in its concern with stimulating the imagina-tion. If alternate style is any indication, increasing stress is placed on therole of imagination in all writing. Perhaps a pedagogy of the imagination,as Rodari envisions it, may have a role to play in the future of education inAmerica.

In any event, it seems possible, as these books suggest, that we mightoffer our students even greater opportunities than we currently do to ex-plore the perceived world and learn from it.

Works Cited

Bishop, Wendy. "Afterword-Colors of a Dif-ferent Horse: On Learning to Like TeachingCreative Writing."

- . Released ntoLanguage: ptions or Teach-ing Creative Writing. Urbana: NCTE, 1990.

Brand, Alice. "On Seeing the Green Parrotand the Green Salad." Colors of a DifferentHorse: Rethinking Creative Writing Theory and

Pedagogy. Ed. Wendy Bishop and Hans Os-trom. Urbana: NCTE, 1994. 146-57.

Eliot, T. S. "Tradition and the Individual Tal-ent." Modern Criticism: Theory and Practice.

Ed. Walter Sutton and Richard Foster. NY:Odyssey, 1963. 140-45.

Moxley, Joseph, Ed. Creative Writing n America:Theory and Pedagogy. Urbana: NCTE, 1989.

North, Stephen M. The Making of Knowledge inComposition: Portrait of an Emerging Discipline.Upper Montclair: Boynton/Cook, 1987.

Weathers, Winston. An Alternate Style: Optionsin Composition. Rochelle Park: Hayden,1980.

Wellek, Rene. Theory of Literature. NY: Har-court, 1949.

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