Cursed Tongue: Liberal Load

Posted by CursedTongue on August 8, 2006

My major in college was English Writing. Counting all of the writing classes I took, my classmates and I must have gone through about sixty trees worth of paper, because every poem, essay, and story was copied 15 to 20 times so everyone could have a copy of each. We were supposed to read each of these, make suggestions for improvements, which we would then discuss in class.

By discuss I mean the class picked the work apart while the author fervently bit their tongue and tried not to radiate hate-darts from their eyes. Inevitably, someone would pick out the least salient snag in the story and proceed to get entirely wrapped around their red pen about it. They called this from of torture peer review.

I attended a mini peer review session, for Beginning Poetry 101 with the professor, and a couple of starry-eyed First Years. I had used one line as an ending to each stanza. The professor was on the repeated line like a drifter on an abandoned Ciabatta Burger, “I hate this line. I really hate this line.” Had I been a starry-eyed First Year, this proclamation that my work was worthless, and I was a complete hack would have crushed my soul to dust. I surely would have crumpled and wept. But instead I was incredulous that a teacher would say that to a student.

I looked at her, expecting her to offer an explanation. She was, after all, a teaching assistant with a Masters Degree and had what, maybe five whole poems published in various pretentious liberal arts journals. She said the line was vague. I couldn’t argue, that having been my point in writing the line.

There were a couple of other upperclassmen in Beginning Poetry with me. Will was sweet and always offered wise criticism kindly. (Just so you, Dear Reader, know it was possible to offer helpful criticism.) Connie, on the other hand, seemed more interested in being a smart ass than being helpful.

I don’t even recall which poem she took issue with. But the particular axle that she pole danced around was that I was not considering my audience. I thought that her point was valid, as the rest of the class seemed to be scratching their heads. However, her critique did not address the actual issue of what was wrong with my work, and could have been applied to any poem that stunk.

Not addressing the actual issue at hand seemed to be a mainstay of peer reviews. So I went back to the drawing board and wrote my next poem with the very specific audience of Beginning Poetry 101 in mind. I wrote about Flunk Day. It is a celebration in the spring where classes are cancelled and students get drunk on campus before noon, play on the lawn with Super Soakers, sprinklers and Slip N’ Slides–festivities which eventually turn into coed mud wrestling. (Or something like that.)

Instead of group review, we were instructed to pass our poem to the left and write a paper on the poem we received. Connie had my poem. She wrote a textbook 3-paragraph essay about how I was not considering my audience. That the focus of the poem was too narrow. That no one else in the free world could figure out what Flunk Day was. (Since then I have found out that Coed Mud-Wrestling Day is sanctioned by many fine liberal arts institutions.) That I was a complete moron for treating a class assignment as practice, as opposed to assuming that everything that comes out of my pen will be publishable gold.

After my initial muffled explosion of frustration and anger, I realized that she was shoveling up a load of organic Grade A Liberal Arts Horse Pocky, and I really was a moron, for having taken peer reviews of my work seriously.

My absolute worst peer review experience was in Senior Portfolio, a class meant to cap off our careers as English Majors. A class that I assumed the point of which, was to bring our past work into some sort of coherent package. Hence the use of the term: PORT-FO-LI-O.

The first thing I did for my portfolio was to rifle through my past work, and pick the best of it. The framework for the draft that my classmates would get was shabby, I’ll admit. And I made a few jokes about how I threw it all together, because I had worked the space bar on my keyboard into a state of semi-brokenness over it.

In the peer review my classmates completely tore me to shreds. Not my work. Me. Two people in particular were upset that I had used past work in my PORT-FO-LI-O. Perhaps, they were jealous, having little command of vocabulary, they hadn’t understood the word PORT-FO-LI-O and had started from scratch. The professor didn’t take exception with my use of past work, that being the point of Senior PORT-FO-LI-O. Only, he didn’t bother to say that during peer review, a process that requires the author to sit silently and take more abuse than a piñata on Christmas.

Putting forth earnest effort and receiving scorn and horse pocky, I quickly lost interest in school and instead of continuing with a double major, I looked for the quickest way out of college. I finished in 3 and half years, and moved in with my Grandpa for a brief period of time. He said he would believe I graduated when he saw the diploma, which of course the school would wait until June to print. He died before I got that expensive little piece of paper in the mail. And out of respect for the public, ever since I graduated, I have kept my poetry to myself.

- Sarah Letnes

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