Urbanite's June poetry contributor is Rachel Eisler. In 1991, Eisler earned a M.A. from Johns Hopkins University's Writing Seminars. She taught English in the Upper School at The Bryn Mawr School of Baltimore from 1992 to 1999, serving as department chair for three years. Now a full-time mom, Eisler works part-time tutoring high school students in reading and writing skills from her home in Oakenshawe. One of her poems will appear in a forthcoming issue of The Dogwood Review. In May she spoke to Urbanite's Lionel Foster about her poem Conk, teaching poetry, and making time to write.

Malcolm X is one of the characters in Conk. How did he find a place in your imagination?

That poem arose directly out of teaching for me, because I read The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a teacher. I'm embarrassed to tell you that I had not read it as a student. It was a total revelation to me. So much of it blew me away, but I think that one scene [in which he gets his hair chemically straightened, or "conked," with lye] was particularly remarkable to me. [Like Malcolm X,] the speaker in that poem gets her hair straightened. I also felt there were so many paradoxes in his life that were fascinating, one of them of course being that he educated himself in prison, that he transformed himself. Reading his life opened my eyes not only to his life, but also to mine.

Tell me a bit about your life and how it finds its way into your writing.

I was born in 1963 in New York. My dad is a refugee from Germany and grew up in New York himself in the 1940s; my mother also grew up in New York. I had an urban childhood in a wonderful way: I lived in an apartment building my whole life, went to school on a bus, zapped down on the subway to see my grandma who lived in Greenwich Village. I'm very nostalgic about that city life, and I write about it a lot. It's like Hemingway writing about Michigan when he's in Paris. As much as I love Baltimore, it affords me a nostalgic point of view to then go back in my mind to my New York childhood.

Both my parents are writers. My dad's an art historian, so he writes about artists, paintings, sculpture, print, drawing. My mother's more of a social historian. She writes about people. 


Were there artifacts or events from your parents' lives that veered into your orbit as a child? 

My father not only writes about art, but he's also a pretty obsessive collector, so I grew up with the sense that a spoon might be just as interesting as a painting. That was incredibly powerful. I think specificity for me is both the strength and maybe the weakness of my work. I'm much more drawn to the concrete and the specific than I am to large things. Or I always use the specific as a way into larger, more ambiguous questions and concerns. For me, the formative thing was the absolute "quidity," that Latin word, the thinginess of my life as a child, the sense that objects were rich and resonant.


Is poetry your primary genre?

It is. Although in terms of ambition and career and adult reality, I think I've learned more recently that, if I can write in other genres, I'm more likely to build an audience. I think building an audience for poetry both as an individual writer and for the genre itself is important. So, for instance, I try and publish things in the Baltimore Sun that are not necessarily poems. It took me a really long time to grapple with the fact that submission was an incredibly hard task and one that required a degree of persistence and follow-through that I honestly don't always have and didn't always want to accept.  


It's been successful, but your idea of submitting literature to newspapers sounds counterintuitive to me. How'd you know whom to approach?

Well, I didn't. The great thing to me about a newspaper is the Op/Ed page. I just felt the place for general readers was the Op/Ed page. I haven't sent a lot of things to the Sun, but having lived in Baltimore all these years, that's sort of been my one [local] venue. I published one light little poem in The New York Times Metropolitan Diaries section, which is not as lofty a proposition as their Op/Ed page. But it's a nice place because it gets thousands of readers.


Between raising your two young children and tutoring other people's children, how do you find time to write?

I'm pretty much a night owl. If I have an hour or two during the day, if I'm not tutoring or dealing with errands or stuff, I'm trying mostly in the daytime to attend to the business of writing. By that I mean reading journals, submitting, talking to people, noticing where people publish, and feeling unabashed about figuring out how [my] own ambitions are going to play out. At night, from about 9:30 to midnight, is when I can actually write.

 
Do you have a favorite place in the house? Is there a certain atmosphere you need to get going?  

No. I think motherhood or parenthood makes the whole question of the muse somewhat irrelevant. It gives your muse a lot more ways to get into your life, even as it constricts the amount of time. 


What kinds of problems are the students you tutor facing?

Kids are reading great literature, and they're also expected to learn how to write in response to it. It's not like someone's saying, "Describe a tree, and then work on describing it better." Someone's saying, "Read two scenes of Macbeth and answer some questions about what you see in this character and in this moment." Kids are being asked to simultaneously do several things that are challenging. I think the larger cultural issue is that kids are obviously reading less, and the language of literature is often simply more remote from the diction of their day-to-day encounters.


How do you help those students understand and appreciate literature?

 I feel like a huge portion of my job as a teacher, oddly enough, is to cultivate their own internal voice as readers. I think a lot of younger readers today don't have a voice in their head that is a reliable reading voice, so when they read other writers, it's as if they're not on the right frequency to pick up nuance. They can't make any connections until they feel like they understand that voice. Is it bitter? Is it pithy? Is it oblique?

I do a lot of reading aloud to students, no matter how old they are, and I find that students of every age are so hungry to be read to, hugely hungry. Maybe it's easier for them to hear a grown-up voice that isn't their parent's once they're in high school, sadly. I almost never send students off to read anything these days without having them hear something of it first. 


You speak passionately about the value and importance of teaching, but I know that many writers teach out of necessity, not because they want to.

 Well, I think you're right, and I will tell you that I think parenthood has made me far more selfish with my time. I'm not contemplating going back to teaching any time soon, as much as I love it, because I think if you're going to do it right, you really have to do it 100 percent. The idea that you're a teacher/writer, particularly of high school students—the way my mind works and my ability to focus works, I just can't swing that. I wish I could.



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