It’s a fact I don’t take lightly.
While studying The Canterbury Tales in February, I had them use Chaucer’s poetic devices in order to create a character study of someone at the college. After 35 minutes of letting them develop their sketches, I asked them to put their pens down.
“Let’s read some of them out loud,” I encouraged.
Spencer volunteered to read his.
“With brown curled hair to music and capture art
And old food stains on one third of his shirt
He, the unwashed single dwelling freshman
Frequented Commons, the College’s Chaplain —
The church under the wing of Mother Duck,
X-box, Starcraft, and not giving a fuck.
Lacking the life skills to see that he must
Brush his teeth . . . and throw out that pizza box.
Wearing pajama pants in class each day,
And a shirt showing Silent Bob and Jay.
His beard hair like the backside of a yak
Eating fried food until his heart attack,
And yet when confronted, he gave a hymn,
How he was the only one who wasn’t dim.”
Everybody began to laugh, knowing who this Everyman was in their own circle of influence. “Who else wants to read theirs?” I encouraged.
Lily raised her hand.
“His specialty was the Great Orient
and he had been to China many times been sent
He paced vigorously in lecture, wiping his brow
Repeating the right way to pronounce kow-tow —
Not to mention the differences between
The Boxers, Taipings, and the Dowager Queen
His hands shook with fervour and his words were stuttered —
It's just that China made his heart a-flutter
He was crazy about primary sources
About the Tang court with their dancing horses.
To him, the mail room box numbers were historic dates,
And Ming dynasty feminisms were nothing but great.”
One by one, each of the students volunteered to read their characters. Their sketches of professors and fellow students (including themselves) were at turns funny and poignant, angry, wry and ironic. I collected them at the end of the hour, and the following weekend I compiled them in an extended narrative poem, which I then sent back to each one of them.
Through the course of the subsequent weeks, we revisited the poem a number of times with thoughts of other issues it raised, such as the relationship between social order and the order in which characters were introduced. The students could readily identify their characters by ‘estates’.
“There are definitely ‘estates’ on campus,” Katie replied. “Some of whom you never see away from their Wii. The LARPs, BSFFA, Sigma Chi, TKE, The Residents of Peet . . . not to mention all the professors, who probably don’t hang together all that much . . . ”
“What about the narrative situation?” I added. “ . . . Chaucer’s ‘pilgrims’ would never have been on a pilgrimage together. Many of the so called estates on campus will never be together either. What sort of occasion could realistically bring them together? A convocation?”
“Drinking.” Someone said wryly. “Drinking brings everyone together on the weekends.”
“How about Spring Day?” someone else said thoughtfully, “after all, the Canterbury Tales begin in April. . .”
This is how “The Beloit Tales” came into being. It’s also the way that I hope the students my survey literature course made the leap from an academic knowledge of a poet and his poetic method to an embodied knowledge of them.
When the parody edition of the college’s weekly newspaper comes out tomorrow, in it will be an extraordinarily funny poem authored by Roc and the Flying Chaucers that starts something like this . . .
When that April with his showers soote
The frozen tundra of March, pierced to the root,
And bathed was every vein in such liquor
As could be found at a major discounter,
Then longed Beloiters of all sorts and kinds
To be reacquainted with the weak sunshine,
And thus they poured from every office and hall
Through the doors of 840, and Morse Ingersoll
From Godfrey, Middle College, and 815,
Sigma Chi and every place in-between.
North across campus, they each made their way,
To partake in the ritual known as Spring Day. . .
As within Chaucer’s opus, the poem provides a delightful cross-section of the cast of characters making up the little civilization of a 21st century midwestern college campus, revealing them in all their humanity, replite with follies and idiosyncrasies. And like Chaucer, each poet proved to possess the eye of the seasoned traveler, for whom nothing human was ever strange, but ever a consummate delight.
It's been famously said that no one should ever teach a new class for the first time, and at this point in the semester, I am increasingly aware of how the course has failed to serve the students as fully as it could. Too much time spent on some texts and historical periods, too little time spent on others. . . not enough prose, and drama . . . too much levity. But as my 'notes to self' on how I will and won't be teaching the course in the future aggrandize in their neat little piles, I feel in some way, just through the course of traveling together toward Canterbury we have achieved something that looks, feels like a teaching outcome every literature professor should be aiming for.
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