Big River: Authentic Listening

Authentic Listening


In early Spring of 1982 I had the experience of a 
lifetime for a poet-writer-teacher.  I was one of 
six Fellows chosen to work with world-famous writer, 
publisher and bookstore owner Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  

This was a three-week stint at the Atlantic Center 
for the Arts in my home state of Florida.  We worked 
on structure and content in the morning and spent 
the afternoons walking the beaches of central Florida 
with our Master.  

In the evenings we enjoyed oysters and beer with 
Lawrence at J.B.'s Fish Camp.  Midway through 
the adventure we witnessed screaming and pandering 
autograph seekers crush our oyster-eating Master at 
a public reading of his work.  We painted pictures 
of a live nude model with Lawrence taking part 
alongside us.  Lawrence Ferlinghetti is one of the
most human of all the teachers I have had.  

Truly he is a master of many arts.  He is candid 
about the arts and politics of our world.  He was 
passing through Florida from a trip to Nicaragua 
where he befriended Ernesto Cardinale, a big fan of 
Ferlinghetti's work.  

Ferlinghetti is as passionate as he is quiet.  
He is a beautiful man full of humor and wit, 
who also possesses the seductive combination of 
grace and tact mixed with an irreverent sense of 
"reality."

We worked in an ideal situation with six student 
Fellows and one master of the craft.  We met for a 
three-week period which was a pinnacle of my life 
as a poet.  I was "intensely poetic" at that time. 
All of my senses, dreams, observations, feelings, 
thoughts and discussions were aimed toward the 
focus of being a poet and writing poetry.  
It was a marvelous experience never to be 
repeated in the same manner again.

See Ferlinghetti and me!

 

This fully involved teaching environment which 
can be provided by a visiting artist in the schools 
or a guest lecturer at a writer's conference is 
very valuable.  I am reminded of a similar circumstance:  
I studied French in both high school and college, but 
it was not until I spent three weeks in a farmhouse in 
St. Malo, France, fully involved in the culture and 
the speaking of French, that I spoke and lived 
(and even dreamed) in French.  I not only spoke French, 
I felt French.  Then it was back to North America and 
a life of WalMarts and ordinary madness.  It is rare 
that one has the opportunity to completely enmesh 
oneself in the pursuit of one finely pointed star 
upon the road map of dreams and desires.

This touches too on the fine point of the master.  
Ideally disciples seek out the master.  If you are 
teaching a group of juvenile delinquents how to set 
up a strictly laid out set of plans for the setup 
of safety signs and placement of bags filled with 
litter beside a busy interstate and your disciples 
are arsonists and graffiti-ists, abusers and 
assaulters who don't want to be on the rainy 
roadway on a Saturday morning, then how does the 
master conjure up the great American novel of classroom 
delegation and order and spoon-feed his students the 
way to be, to impact their lives, to touch them for
a moment of time prior to incarceration  or forgiveness?  

Well ... you must do it, you must do it, you must do it, 
says Nike and the master litterpicker supervisor.  
"Rewrite , rewrite, rewrite," Ferlinghetti would say.  
"People are ignorant," he would say.  "You must make 
your point very clear, then edit, make it more clear, 
then repeat."

You never really know what is on the mind of some masters.  
Take Miss Philpot, my Third Grade teacher at Ortega 
Elementary School in Jacksonville, Florida.  How did 
she miss seeing the horrible scars and abrasions on my 
face those strange weeks when I fell down hard on 
sidewalks and my mother yelled at me for having to 
go the hospital?  Those strange days when my father 
took me off to New Orleans in a plane that flew through 
storms of surreal abuse and kept me from coming back 
to Miss Philpot's classes with my daily looks of 
frowning sadness.  Don't ask questions seemed 
to be the motto in those days.  Those days, when 
"there was no abuse in the homes of students."  
No emotional gaps, no tales told of horror in 
dark fearfulness.  There are many ways of crying 
out for help. 

I had a mad crush for my Second Grade teacher. Sadly for
me she took maternity leave and 'disappeared' after 
only a month of school. I still recall riding my bike 
over to her house to trick or treat at Halloween.  I still 
have a 'thank you note' from her in which she miraculously 
signed her first name,Ann. 

In Seventh Grade at St. Matthew's School, my 
teacher of the "new math," Sister Pascal, ruled
 her classroom with terror unspoken.  She knew how 
to turn fractions upside down and inside out.  
We feared her for a whole year even before getting 
her in class.  And two months into Eighth Grade ,
a phone call came one weekend that our Sister Pascal
had died!  

Apparently, she had been running to say goodbye 
to another nun at the airport and fell over with 
a heart attack.  We all came to pay our respects 
to pale Sister Pascal lying in repose at the foot 
of the altar.  Dressed in our blue pants or skirts 
with white blouses,  we all realized that even masters 
are vulnerable.  I never was much good at mathematics 
"new" or "old" thereafter.  I did however learn 
something about the great humanity of teachers,though.

I attended the University of the South (more popularly 
called Sewanee) beginning with the first year 
the college admitted women (1969), passing through 
Kent State days and graduating in 1973. 

Three teachers/professors I had there I consider to be 
masters: John Reishman, Charles Trawick Harrison and Andrew Lytle.  
There are, of course, many more, but I will limit my discussion 
to these three men.

A recently deceased master of many things was an influence 
on me at a time when I drank good Tennessee bourbon from 
a silver cup with my initials on it.  Given to me by a girl 
named Drucilla Mary Marr, it was a cup that held all the 
promise of a southern gentleman about to embark on his career.  
Mr. Andrew Lytle discovered Eudora Welty and mixed with the 
likes of Allen Tate and William Faulkner and for many years 
edited the famed Sewanee Review.  Sewanee's renown 
has increased these last few years due to its fairly new 
summer writers' conference.

The village of Monteagle, Tennessee is home to truck stops 
and a historic summer home to many southern aristocrats.  
It also is the place where Andrew Lytle drank bourbon and 
poured out many a fine tale to his disciples around a roaring 
fire inside his idyllic cabin.

As a senior at Sewanee I was very much affected on a deep 
level by the occurrences at Kent State University where four 
people close to my age were shot down by the National Guard.  
I wrote many stories for Andrew Lytle's Advanced Fiction 
Seminar and received high marks and good comments, but the 
story I liked enough to publish in Sewanee's student 
literary magazine, The Mountain Goat, was one for which 
I received a "C" from Mr. Lytle.  It was titled, 
"Tin Soldiers" and was roughly based on my own 
answer to the question, "What would happen if the 
National Guard brought their tanks and guns to an 
idyllic college environment such as Sewanee?"  

It was inconceivable to me that that could occur and 
yet indeed it had in Ohio.  The story was impassioned, 
began humorously, had a love interest and  a surreal, 
tragic ending.  Lytle hated it.  It became  my first 
published story and one story that for me did what I 
still feel a short story should do and not just fit 
a formula with standards that had made the great writers 
of the past successful in the eyes of the critics/historians.

Sewanee is the Episcopalian sister school of Kenyon College.  
The center of the campus in the Cumberland plateau of 
Tennessee is a Gothic cathedral very much in the style 
of Canterbury or Oxford. Being  a Roman Catholic, 
I began after a few weeks of Episcopalianizing with other 
freshman to miss the Catholic liturgy. The campus chaplain 
lined me up with a new professor fresh from Notre Dame.  
Dr. John Reishman became one of my lifelong friends that year.

I still recall our weekly drives down the mountain in his 
tidy little Dodge Dart to attend mass at a very small 
country church, complete with cows lowing outside and 
with the ramblings of an alcoholic priest.  Afterwards 
we would drive back to the Reishmans where inevitably I 
would be invited in for what amounted to an all-day brunch
of eggs, toast, sausage and endless Bloody Mary's.  John 
had just married a delightful woman named Claire who had 
a job as a principal of a local private high school.  
Together I thought they had an enviable life as fellow 
teachers in an ideal environment.          

I recently listened to the sound of Beethoven on a 
compact disk.  Still owning boxes of LP record albums 
and a few zillion cassettes, I have been one of the last 
remaining earthlings to buy a CD player.  I have to admit 
that the quality of sound issuing forth from my old 
hippie-style speakers with the new CD is amazing.  
With eyes closed the sound of Beethoven was so real 
that it was as if the piano was right there in my 
living room.  It brought back a memory of my first 
experience with a truly live-sounding stereophonic 
living room performance. 

The year was 1973 and I was at the home of Dr. Charles 
Trawick Harrison, nationally renown Shakespearean master.  
I was a part of an elitist tradition Dr. Harrison 
generously provided for a small number of his students 
by inviting them over to hear a symphony on Thursday evenings.  

It was indeed an honor, and though to some it may seem 
a forebodingly formal thing to do, the conversations 
were always lively after a cold bottled beer or a 
taste of one of Mrs. Harrison's culinary delights.  
And to sit there with the infamous Dr. Harrison and 
watch as he leaned back in his lounge chair and 
laughed so guttural and hard that you couldn't help 
to join in and to feel right at home, immediately 
put at ease.  

Dr. Harrison had a stereo that was an envy to all 
of us students.  And though he didn't play Lynard 
Skynard or the Allman Brothers at full volume, he 
did give a fellow teacher ABBEY ROAD by those 
rapscallion Beatles for a Christmas present and 
was appreciative of all things musical.  When our 
immediate taste for beer or cookies was extinguished, 
the music would begin and for the next hour or two we 
would be surrounded in symphonic sound.  

Dr. Harrison's love of music was as infectious as 
his love was for Shakespeare, dear Mrs. Harrison, 
his and anyone else's dogs, gardening and the delicate 
changes of season on the mountain.  He is in my mind a 
true scholar, a poet, writer as well as a master teacher.  

The first day of his very formal seminar class in which 
both he and honor students wore black academic gowns, 
he asked us which flowers we had seen in bloom on the 
way to class.  None of us could respond, so he flung 
open the doors to the balcony balustrade and had us all 
go out and find some -- not to pick but simply to admire 
and then to learn the names of. 

One of the greatest masters I have known has no university 
degree, did not even finish high school.  Her name is 
Sophie Mitchell. She raised my mother.  And in many ways 
was a mother to me in turn. Today at over 90 years old 
Mrs. Mitchell is a landlady and church woman and a kind 
true master of many sorts.  She taught me the art of 
authentic listening.  Out on my grandmother's back porch 
or maybe in the kitchen where she'd be frying up a 
chicken or baking corn bread sticks, she'd give me 
a package of CLOVE chewing gum or some 
JUICY FRUIT and let me talk on for hours 
on end about anything that was crucially important 
to me at the time.  And narcissist that I was, what 
wasn't crucially important to me.  No matter how busy 
she was it seemed like she had all the time in the 
world for me.  

And there were other folks perhaps more closely related 
to me who never did have the time or interest in all my 
little childhood interests.  I can think of nothing more 
valuable for a true master than the skill of authentic listening.
																																						
										
©2000
Jeff Hartzer
																												c 1996-99, Jeff Hartzer,MEd.

Teach Your Children

The Emperor's New Clothes

Until You've Been There

Authentic Listening

Visit Sewanee

Visit Rio Grande H.S.


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