What I’m Reading: ‘To the Writing Students at Orientation’

In the midst of the school year’s whirlwind, I often forget about the world beyond campus, and I see this happen to my students as well. It is easy to fixate on the work at hand and forget that we are situated in a location with a broader community, and that our academic work could very well deal with issues occurring in our immediate surroundings.

Brenda Hillman’s prose poem “To the Writing Students at Orientation” from her book Seasonal Works With Letters on Fire (Wesleyan University Press, 2013) is a powerful illustration of how to break out of this myopia by balancing professional responsibilities, local landscapes, and the world at large.

The poem begins by listing the week’s news headlines: earthquakes, wars, etc. Hillman, a professor of poetry at Saint Mary’s College of California, then moves to more local details, such as what birds are migrating on campus. She insists, “That locale is outside your head. The other locale, not yet named, is inside you.”

That other locale is the writing that students will do in college, which, while inside them, will inevitably lead them to connect with others: “You are lonely with ideas … & you need a community.” I take this community to be not limited to those affiliated with academe, but to extend beyond the town/gown divide, where people grapple with complex problems, perhaps the very ones we are trying to articulate in our classrooms.

Andrew Grace is a visiting assistant professor of English at Kenyon College.