A fast-paced society is all my generation has ever known. There is fast food, quick internet, instant messaging. Fast, quick, instant everything is what my peers and I have come to expect. I can post a tweet, and three seconds later, the entire world knows what I am thinking.
In a place where words are instantaneous and information is prompt, it is natural for the value and the “exactness” of communication to degrade. The internet is overcrowded with poor speech and bad writing. Hence, if that is all a reader knows, that is all their palette can appreciate.
Why should my generation care about formal prose or poetry? If people understood what a writer means through poor language, why slow down one’s pace and provide poetic prose to the world?
This question is one that Bobby C. Rogers, professor of English and writer in residence at Union University, answers for his students.
Rogers has taught at Union University for the past 30 years and continues to encourage his students to slow down and appreciate the art of creative writing and poetry.
“I sort of want to ruin students for good writing,” said Rogers. “So that when they encounter bad writing they can’t read it the same way anymore. There’s so much good writing out there to read.”
Rogers discussed the ease at which our generation can type into our phone and send out a message. While not a terrible thing, it enforces the quick-paced environment in which we live. Students do not have any friction that forces them to dwell in what they write and revise their words.
“We are forgetting how to revise,” said Rogers. “The first word is just the first word, not the best word.”
Rogers’ classes are a workshop environment. His students gather in a circle and spend each class period critiquing each other’s writing. When a poem is being read, the writer of the piece is not allowed to say anything while it is being critiqued by peers. Instead, they must sit silent and receive the comments freely. This method of teaching forces students to see how their poem was actually received rather than how their poem was intended to be understood.
“In being in his creative writing and poetry class, I feel more capable to write poetry and write it well,” said Emily Chapman, senior graphic design major. “In those classes, my writing improved so much more in that one semester with him than during my whole life.”
Chapman discussed how Rogers always emphasizes in class to avoid lazy writing. Our society provides the narrative that cliches and cutting corners is normal. Several within my generation have only seen lazy writing and bad prose.
“You are what you read,” Rogers said. “When I read students writing, this is a little bit of an overstatement, but I can tell every word they have ever read in their life. It shapes the way you write and it certainly shapes the way you think.”
Rogers is always straightforward with his students. He wants to see them grow as much as possible.
“I really love his honesty as a professor,” Chapman said. “A lot of professors bounce around on what they think of what you’ve written for the class. He’ll say if something is cliche or cheesy.”
While Rogers enjoys teaching his students, he also pursues the art of creative writing himself. He has published two books of poems, and he is currently working on his third.
Although Rogers has been pursuing poetry for the past 30 years, it still has not lost its magic for him.
Rogers said, “Poetry doesn’t stand still. Poetry is different from what it was last year, let alone when I began teaching 30 years ago. It’s still evolving.”
While some write poetry for personal gain, Rogers always writes poetry simply for its beauty.
“I do not aspire to have great cultural power — I aspire to write a beautiful poem,” said Rogers. “It’s a much different aspiration. The books that sell the most are rarely the books that are most important. I mean you just look back through our literature and you see how few people bought Moby Dick when it was first published. It’s a different project.”
Despite the many people in our world who dislike poetry, it is still a relevant artform and is continued to be taught by professors like Bobby C. Rogers. Nonetheless, as Rogers stated, it is always there if one chooses to stop and read it.
Many might choose to keep in pace with society and refuse to stop for the “Shakespeares” of the world. Even so, poetry is one of the most exact forms of communication in existence, and Rogers will always continue to convey its importance and transform his students’ writing.
