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The Capricorn’s Pedagogy dante micheaux Great names were whispered throughout the newly renovated townhouse on West Tenth Street. Occasionally, a name became flesh as it dashed out the door and into a taxi or on foot to the grand literary life it led—or so I assumed. The house was a jewel and I was one of a small group of people privileged to share it who lingered long after class before returning to East Harlem (in my case) or the outer boroughs. That cohort and those to follow owe much gratitude to the unsung heroine Melissa Hammerle, whose efforts at New York University should earn her at least a century’s worth of acknowledgment in American letters. Being awed by the company of great names, however, faded quickly. I studied with Breyten Breytenbach and Kimiko Hahn; Yusef Komunyakaa and Sharon Olds; Phillis Levin, Phil Levine, and Anne Carson, but a great poet does not a great teacher make. The worst of them simply tried too hard, assigning pitiful texts they either thought would be useful, based on the abstract printed in an academic press catalog, or wished for during their juvenescence, when becoming a poet required only adept reading comprehension, an autodidact’s determination, and no degree. One poet’s craft class was so inadequate that a few of my peers asked me to facilitate a Saturday morning workshop on prosody. I had studied with Marilyn Hacker 120 at a public institution uptown and they wanted to know what she had taught me. I turned them down and advised them to complain to the new director of the program. Other poets did not even try to pretend they knew what they were doing and made it up as they went along. One was a bona fide genius: a true scholar and born educator. She had the answers but it was graduate school, and everyone was afraid to admit that they had no idea what a teleuton was. The best of them offered what in their opinion were great poems and helped us out of the muck we brought in on a Monday night. This did more than any anthology of received forms could have done because it illuminated the teaching poet’s own foundation and helped me visualize the trajectory of where she or he thought strong poetry was going. Phil Levine was safely in this latter group. To be honest, I had never read any of his work but certainly knew who he was. I had heard stories, mostly about his humor in the classroom and penchant for red wine. As most of my cohort did with our other professors, I read all of his work several weeks before my first class with him. Phil is a strong poet, possessing a genuine passion for poetry as an art form, a High Romantic aesthetic buried beneath that midwestern working-man braggadocio and a vast amount of twentiethcentury American poetry at his beck and call—and that was him at seventyeight , in khaki pants and running shoes! From his work, I understood that he understood people. His poetry never attempts to mask our base motivations and neither did his teaching. As an MFA student, I had a reputation for being arrogant, and, as my publisher told me during our first editorial meeting a few months after I left the university, one of my peers had berated me at a literary soirée as the “pompous Negro.” Too true, I am afraid. When I began the program I was coming down from the high of being the first person in my immediate family to go to college, let alone graduate and go on to more advanced studies—the child of a teenaged single mother. I had a fellowship, not a basketball scholarship. I was engaged in a noncommercial discipline with no lucrative prospects. My story is not new. For me, Poetry was and is a serious endeavor. I did not enroll because I wanted to be the next Robert Creeley or because being a successful lawyer was not in the cards, or because I lusted after Marie Howe and might stumble across her in the hall and become entangled. I did not seek Poetry, nor did It find me to heal my past. In fact, the moment anyone started crying in a workshop was an opportunity for me to take a bathroom break. I did not have time for any bullshit. 121 Phil recognized this immediately. Perhaps it was a...

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