Melanie Carter is Senior Instructor in the Department of Rhetoric and Composition, and a 2012 winner of the AUC Excellence in Teaching Award. But along with her reputation on campus as an excellent teacher, Melanie has had considerable success as a poet. In the following interview, she shares her thoughts on both the craft of teaching and the craft of writing, along with describing her early background in journalism (including an uncle who won the Pulitzer Prize).
Q: Since you recently won the AUC Excellence in Teaching Award, let?s start by talking about your teaching philosophy. What makes you so successful in the classroom?
I imagine I try to do what many of us aim for: to open up possibilities. To urge students beyond the formulas they?ve been taught to rely on. I want them to understand how altering our approach to language can alter the way we see the world. In RHET 101 I have asked students to write creation myths to explain where their writing comes from, for example. And I do an exercise in the Poetry Writing class in which students build metaphor out of elements chosen at random. A student might select a couple of index cards and end up with bird and ocean, for instance. The exercise, then, is to begin to question ways they might be similar. Both could be blue, certainly. But might a tiny bird hold inside itself a wisdom? A sort of oceanic depth? Could its flight be seen as a wave? And if so, a wave of what? It?s a simple activity, but once we begin nudging at possibilities, we realize nothing in the world is as mere as we thought it was. And, maybe more importantly, we?ve had a hand in showing that?and in creating it differently. When realizations like this happen early on, in 101, for example, I think it can help students see that their writing really does matter. Their minds can bring forth extraordinary changes.
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Q: You are highly regarded as a poet. Was this an early child hood interest, or something you picked up later?
As a child, I had wanted to write fiction. I remember lying in bed, thinking of the same opening image of my novel, over and over again. Poetry is what I turned to, well after childhood, when I realized the ?stories? I was trying to write were really moments or ideas being explored.
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Q: Who are your favorite poets, and why?
I love poets whose work shows a love of language?those who emphasize the musicality of it, or truly play with intricacies of meaning. Wallace Stevens won?t come as a surprise, then. Other favorites are Lucie Brock-Broido, Robin Behn, and Jack Gilbert, a poet whose language is more quietly dazzling.
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Q: Your first degree was in Journalism, from the University of Florida. Your degrees after that were in English (University of South Carolina) and Creative Writing (University of Alabama). Did these changing areas of study reflect changing interests on your part? If so, then what led to these changes? For example, why did you decide not to be a journalist?
I had an extraordinary model in my uncle, a journalist who won a Pulitzer for his editorials on the civil rights movement. I learned from him that words mattered, and that you didn?t have to be strident. You could move people with beauty, with the care you took with those words. Because of him, journalism was my entry point. But I realized early on that I don?t have a reporter?s personality. So, after working in the newspaper business for several years, I returned to graduate school to study what I truly loved?literature and creative writing?and on the way, discovered that I love teaching, too.
Q: For several years you taught in Japan, at a school for the blind. Tell us about how this happened, and what this experience was like.
I was in the country as part of the Japan Exchange and Teaching program. My first year, I worked at an academic boys? school. In my second year, I spent part of each week at the school for the blind. It felt like a gift. Classes were very small; one had only three students. So, it was possible to really speak to one another, and for the communication to be meaningful. What?s funny is that I?d originally become interested in Japan because of the intricacies and beauty of its writing systems. Looking back, the school for the blind may have been where my interest in sound began.
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Q: What made you decide to come to AUC?
I?d been very interested in the Middle East, but knew almost nothing about it. The closest I?d come was a couple of transit nights in Pakistan on the way to Nepal.? So, an interest in the region made me look at AUC, initially. When I realized I would be able to come and teach writing, though? A dream come true.
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Q: Has your experience living in Egypt shaped your poetry writing in any way? If so, how?
What I can say with certainty is that it will shape it. And I imagine that will happen after I leave, when Egypt becomes a place that I can turn back to and explore and in some way reinvent.? Writing about a place after leaving it allows for remembering, for keeping a time and place in place. But it also allows the place to evolve, and for the artist to have a hand in the path that evolution takes. I suppose it?s also a nice way to be able to live forever in a place you?ve loved.
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Q: Many people write poetry as a kind of private hobby, but you seem to have had some solid public success. I noticed that you have been a finalist for the Pushcart Prize and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. This leads me to a more general question about the field. How do you keep track of the best poetry being written today? Do you do this mostly through reading journals? Books? By attending conferences? Attending readings wherever you can?
Friends will send books or recommend poets. But one of my favorite pastimes is simply to stand in a bookstore and pull volumes off the shelf. It?s especially fun to do this when traveling, since the language on the street and the English translation on the page seem to bump up against each other in an interesting way. I?ll also say that I don?t limit myself to finding poetry in the poetry section. I?m sometimes happiest when I discover it disguised as a novel or book of essays.
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Q: It seems that some poets work by inspiration and others by regular labor. The Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke tells us that after he became the secretary for the sculptor Rodin, he shifted from the method of inspiration to Rodin?s own method of patient scheduled work.? It seems, then, that the same poet might use both methods during the same lifetime. What about your own method of writing? And has it changed over time?
It hasn?t changed at all, though not for lack of my trying. A poem typically will come to me as a phrase first, or occasionally an image. That can accompany me for days, weeks, during which I?ll hear the phrase over and over. Eventually, it will drive me to sit down and work with the idea on paper. I keep various lists of words that I like for one reason or another, too, and I often use these to play with possibilities.
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Q: What about your favored time of day for writing? And location: do you write best at home, or elsewhere?
At home, before dawn, especially for beginning a poem. It?s a time when things aren?t yet solidified, when boundaries of buildings and of reason haven?t fully materialized. So, a time when a path that appears necessitated for a phrase or a poem is more easily sidestepped. And for the structure to be created, original to the piece.
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Q: On some level poetry is even more intensely personal than prose writing. When the words first come out, I would guess that they feel extremely private. At what stage are you usually willing to share poems with others? Do you let them ?cool off? a bit first, or do you share them pretty quickly? And when you do share them, is it usually with fellow poets, or is it more likely to be with close friends?
Private is an interesting word. I?m not certain I would have thought of it that way. I won?t share something until I feel it?s close to being finished, and that can take a while. I write slowly, not editing exactly, but building by way of examining the various sides of each block, moving words around, looking at connections among images and ideas. Often, I am working with the notion of possibility or potential: If such and such, Because such and such? so the working out of the poem is also a working out of logic.? I?ve come to terms with not being a particularly linear thinker, but I know that my reader may need a clarity I?ve not articulated yet. Once I feel that is in place, I tend to share with friends who, if not poets, are certainly writers. And I share based on their potential interest in the topic.
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Q: If you lived your life again and had to choose a different profession, what do you think it would be?
It?s difficult to answer because I like this one so much. That said, I am interested in both creation and Creation. In the various ways science and spirituality intersect. So? a quantum physicist perhaps? Or a Buddhist nun?!
Q: Perhaps we should close by inviting you to tell us what you?re working on right now. Any big projects?
It is more a theme, an idea, that I?ve been working with and watching evolve over a number of years now. Earlier, I mentioned my interest in sound. My current pieces explore the idea of sound as something that can be altered by a listener. There are notions there about power, creativity, the nature of reality and where it is constructed. It?s enormously fun to think about? and really, could I be in a place with a greater wealth of material than Cairo?!
Source: http://academic.aucegypt.edu/bulletins/fb/?p=3607
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