Mary Cappello

MC

Our first conversation reminds me of that one-minute lecture that they did at the University of Pennsylvania—Charles Bernstein knew how to do it. I mean, who else could do that? It also reminds me of Lacan and the 50-minute hour, the idea that in psychoanalysis, people really say what they need or want to say in the last five minutes. Of course, there’s something to be said for those five minutes. But I love the opportunity for us to open things and have more room to explore. There’s so much to say, especially about pedagogy. Pedagogy is me in the way that Toys R Us [Both laugh]. It’s scarily overwhelming, actually.

JZ

How did this commitment to pedagogy or exploration of it first emerge for you?

MC

Where to begin! One option would be with one of my most profound and important teachers: my immigrant grandfather, a shoemaker from Teano, Italy. Beginning when I was eight, he taught me to play the mandolin. The ritual was that my brother and I would go to my maternal grandparents’ house once a week by bus (we lived in Darby, Pennsylvania, and they, in nearby Llanerch) and my grandfather would teach me mandolin and my brother guitar, and then my grandmother would make lunch for us, and then we’d walk in the garden, and then we’d go home. My grandfather was always trying to get me to slow down. As a musician, I had a terrible sense of timing. He’d tell me to play more softly, and it’s something I’m still trying to learn. These earliest lessons are from the teachers who tap into your essence. I actually found a handwritten copy of the music my grandfather drew out. He would very carefully write my name in the upper  left-hand corner—Mimi, he called me. The piece I’m showing you is called “Studies in Contrasts,” which I feel has informed all of my work. It was always about incongruity. [Laughs.] You know, it’s all here. At the bottom he would put his initials, JP, and the date, which here was September 1971.

There’s always been something of the artisanal in my practice as a writer and as a teacher, and it really goes back to the influence of my grandfather and the atmosphere of his shoe shop. None of us ever have only one pedagogue, right? It’s about the range and types of teachers who have been part of our lives. Early in the 1970s, my mom read a poem in the Saturday Evening Post by a woman named Eileen James, and she saw that this person lived a few blocks away from us. My mom was cultivating her own sensibility as a poet and intellectual and deep reader, and she saw that this person was in the neighborhood and found her address and knocked on the door, and they developed a lifelong friendship. Eileen would orchestrate these poetry workshops for kids in the neighborhood, and she had lots of kids herself, kind of a “yours, mine and ours,” running all over the house. She later married Jerry Spinelli, who was also formative in my upbringing. This is before he was the Jerry Spinelli who we all read and love and know. Stargirl was based on Eileen.

JZ

Goodness! I loved that book so much.

MC

I keep in touch with them to this day! I just emailed Eileen yesterday. Eileen veered into children’s book writing, and Jerry, of course, writes YA fiction. But long before Jerry wrote his first book, and later, Maniac Magee, that won the Newberry, he took a liking to me as a 12-year-old. It’s the kind of thing that can’t happen now, sadly: bachelor male interested in doing things with young girl. I was an athlete and a reader, and he bolstered those interests, validated my tom boyishness, came to my track meets, took me to the Penn relays, gave me one of my first blank books for my poems and stories.

JZ

How did the pandemic shift your understanding of pedagogy?

MC

When I think about what’s happened for me in my life since 2020, I realize it has everything to do with pedagogy, which has been totally life changing, actually, in three ways. One is that I decided to be quiet during the pandemic. I decided not to write for quite a long time. I didn’t want to produce more verbiage about what it felt like having to isolate as a white middle class person. What could I offer there? I was also thinking that this cataclysm called for a different language and an entirely different approach to my aesthetic and my writing. I wanted to wait for a language to appear to me. And in the midst of this, my 10-year-old nephew, Hayden, had to be left home alone. There was no alternative. My niece, his mom, was a single, working class mother, and his school had shut down. There was no daycare available. I figured, I will try to Zoom teach him, even though I know nothing about elementary school education. Hayden loved to draw, so I thought, I’m going to try to use art as the way into his other subjects.

JZ

Did using art as a framework make the learning experience easier for him?

MC

I think it complicated the process in interesting ways. For example, one day, I had put together this lesson on the still life. The idea was for us to create still lives in our separate houses and then photograph them or show them to one another. We watched a video about still lives, and then we were going to read the famous William Carlos Williams poem, “The Red Wheelbarrow.” I wanted to call that a still life poem, and try to show him, here’s what we just did with objects. We were reading “So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow,” and he had a total breakdown around the word “depends.” It made me realize that in prior sessions with him, he was having something I can only describe as cognitive or perceptual pain when trying to perceive letters and words; he’d get a headache and have a kind of meltdown. He would sometimes pretend he was reading. This was totally beyond my purview, but on the word “depends,” he got up out of his chair and destroyed his still life. He started weeping. I’m in Rhode Island. He’s in Delaware. I’m totally out of my depth, of course. This became the pivot point that changed my life and his life and his mother’s life. We realized that he was seriously dyslexic, and this had been overlooked somehow. I did some reading about dyslexia and discovered that half-moon shapes are incredibly difficult for the dyslexic learner. Here’s the word “depends”—all shapes of that kind! My partner, Jean and I went into a crash course on how to get Hayden the instruction that he needed. He’s now in a school that caters to children with such learning differences, and you can find his mom and Jean and me weeping when we get reports saying he loves to read out loud in class. I hate to use the word “journey.” [Laughs.] But it’s been life changing for all of us, and oddly without the pandemic, this wouldn’t have happened.

The final thing that happened for me was that my mom was diagnosed out of the blue with an advanced metastatic ovarian cancer. Jean and I taught the last classes of our careers over Zoom from the precincts of my mom’s one-bedroom apartment, which led to a whole other type of relationship to learning. Bearing witness to my mom’s death and sadly, her suffering—even though she was the most exuberant and alive human I’ve ever met—really meant that I had to confront my own ignorance. Every day I thought that I understood something, and then it was undone. I continued to learn from her after she died and discovered books I had never read while going through her things. One was the Portuguese feminist classic, The Three Marias, that she was holding in a picture. There was one day where I forgot my knapsack, which had everything in it, all my teaching stuff, my computer. It required that I fall back on her library.

JZ

I think we’re in a moment where we’re often somewhat in denial about the pandemic. It’s understandable, but I think a lot of us have not accounted for the ways in which we’re readjusting to being social. We all went through this, but we can’t really linger on it; we have to move forward. Was your official retirement in the middle of the pandemic? How did having your last classes via Zoom, for instance, sit with you afterward?

MC

When I say that I retired, I should also say that I still love coming to other people’s classes, and I’ve been doing plenaries and workshops and keynotes. I did one in Oxford in June, where I was teaching a seminar for advanced graduate students and faculty, and then I did a really fun class with the poet Cori A. Winrock, who asked me to come in to talk about my book Lecture, which you and I discussed last time we spoke. I’ve mostly left behind the administrative piece of it, and I have to tell you, I almost quit before 2022. I wanted to quit in the summer during which we were required to take part in something called a “learning management system.” It wasn't just about mastering Zoom. Beyond this requirement that we presumably become videographers overnight, we now had to learn the tools that were commensurate with online teaching. This introduced a nightmare because it demonstrated to me that the system was dead set on turning us into managers of information and deliverers of content. Not teachers—and not students. I take those words quite seriously: teacher, student, pedagogue. I mean, in the “learning management system,” for example, the student is called a “learner.” Which doesn’t even sound grammatical to me.

JZ

It sounds like a tongue twister.

MC

Talk about a passive way to describe a student! The learning management system was horrifying because it required that we spend a lot of time in front of our screens. I was required to parse my syllabus in 1,000 different ways, put it into modules, and post every single reading assignment while somehow also having “conversations.” You might have heard of Blackboard and Canvas—we had Brightspace, which we joked was a “dim space.” For my students’ sake (after doing one semester of this in the very replete way that they wanted us to), I decided to pare it way down. My students were thankful, because no one could spend this much time in each of their classes navigating all these links.

I do feel we could have been much more imaginative during the pandemic. We played our parts; we were all asked to Zoom in, so we Zoomed in. I tried to be inventive. I thought about the fact that when we enter a room that is called the classroom, it is really a sacred space, a place apart. It’s a place where you become someone other than yourself, both as teacher and student, and you have a sacred charge: to be present to these individuals and their lives, about which you know nothing, and to bring a history into that room. When we go into this room, we cross a threshold, we know that we’re entering a different space. I was thinking about the fact that the Zoom room is the same space, no matter where we are, so I asked my students: can we do something to signal that we are entering a room of our own making, quite apart from the one in which each of us is literally residing, each to his own square? At the start of class, one student would take charge of taking us in and across. I had a lot of musicians in the class one semester, so several of them chose to perform a piece of music, which worked beautifully.

Perhaps we could have asked students to launch individualized research projects, and we could have given each of them a bibliography based on their interests, and maybe it would be pandemic related. Could we have linked what we were going through to whatever their subject was? We could have experimented with: okay, our students don’t like to have their cameras turned on sometimes. It’s really demoralizing when you’re trying to teach people with their screens blacked out. What if, instead, we developed practices of listening to one another without seeing each other’s faces? It’s the crisis of imagination that is always with us. And in my students—I see new forms of anxiety. Social phobias, brand new forms of depression. I realized my students were afraid of each other. That’s a whole new pedagogical challenge. They were afraid of being in a public space, afraid of being together.

JZ

Were they comfortable coming to you and saying that, or was that something that only became apparent through observation?

MC

It’s an interesting question. It helps when you teach creative writing. I make very clear in my creative writing classes that writing is not about confessing, nor is it a therapy session—there’s a counseling center you can make use of, and I’m not your therapist, right? But of course, we do learn more about our students’ inner lives than in other classes. We learn about what they’re coping with. In some cases, the social phobia phenomenon was something I remember them talking about directly in class. The depression, not so much. One semester I realized the entire class was depressed. These are all things that have to be navigated now. In order to learn, there’s got to be vulnerability, openness, a sense of risk—these are all prerequisites. As I wrote about in Lecture, it’s not just about information. It’s about being able to dream together.

JZ

On the topic of Lecture, because it was something that made such an impression on me when we first spoke, I want it for the record here: you mentioned something so delightful. You said it’s okay when people fall asleep during a lecture. [Both laugh.] I would love to hear you just talk a little bit about that, because in my experience it’s not that you’re not engaged, necessarily. It’s almost a meditation when that happens.

MC

Oh, absolutely. I saw that Jonathan Crary was interviewed in this magazine, and I was so delighted to see that, because it’s his marvelous book 24/7 that informs the way I think about these questions. Ours is a culture that is sleep deprived and dream averse. I’m not sure if he said that, or if that’s my parsing of what he wrote; I did teach his book when it first came out. For me, the lecture affords a nap in public. [Both laugh.] If we’re sleep deprived and dream averse, we need this affordance. It’s okay if you fall asleep! I actually said this about my book on mood, Life Breaks In. No one will believe you when you say you wrote a book that was meant to help people sleep. It’s not going to put you to sleep, but I’m a real believer in the necessity of “hover and drift.” I studied at SUNY Buffalo in the 1980s, at the Center for the Psychoanalytic Study of the Arts. I still place great stock in the unconscious and the sense that we never know ourselves fully, and that we all are walking reservoirs of past impressions, of potentialities, of messages that we can’t allow ourselves to hear, and that we won’t evolve as people if we don’t find ways to allow our unconscious in. Hover and drift also requires sleep and dream. The best kind of teaching, the best kind of art, takes us to that place.

JZ

I’m thinking of the times when I’ve meditated consistently—it’s always been, for me, more of a sensation of dropping into my body. It’s this feeling of my head being miles away from my hands in my lap or something like that. All of a sudden, you’re really on a different plane.

MC

That’s a really interesting way to think about it, and it makes me think about mind-body connections. What is embodied teaching, what is embodied learning, what is embodied writing? Attention is at the center of this. When I consider wanting to cultivate sleep by way of a lecture—it’s not an opiate. It’s that you’re able to relax a particular type of attention, yes, but only so that another type of attention can come into being. That attention is not one thing. When people say we live in the age of distraction, and we’re not attending—we are attending a great deal, but in a particular way. Our attentions are being colonized and corralled, we’re overstimulated. There’s a stasis to that attention.

JZ

I think of it as “brains in a jar,” too, when we demand that students are always absolutely attentive, especially when we’re on screens. Nobody’s thinking about the body, the body isn’t in the Zoom room. These are quite literally just floating heads.

MC

I really do think we need more publicly embodied spaces. When I try to watch a Zoom reading...

JZ

It’s impossible for me! I was thinking about one semester when I had a very funny teacher. It wasn’t that she was cracking jokes all the time, but she left the door open for laughter in a really lovely way. What’s the place of laughter in a classroom? What’s the place of laughter in pedagogy for you?

MC

What that makes me think of is: what is the place of play?

JZ

Exactly.

MC

I think there’s an affiliation that can be pursued between lecturing and stand-up comedy. I used to love to listen to Sandra Bernhard. Her stand up is essayistic. And you’re making me think of my student, Ayad Akhtar, who actually created a character based on me and our relationship as teacher and student in his book Homeland Elegies. Or his play Disgraced. He enables you to cry and laugh within seconds. It’s genius. There’s a place for play and laughter and also pleasure, which brings us back to the imagination. Of course, it’s tricky, because are we laughing at? Are we laughing with? Laughing together? We’re in a moment of offended sensibilities, and because we’re on the lookout for offense around one another’s utterances, maybe laughter is less accessible.

JZ

It’s hard to laugh or play when we’re afraid! I wanted to ask you also about flow state, because you’ve written about it and I came across a passage I loved in an essay of yours called “Flow” in Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction. You write: “Where did this phrase come from—‘It flows’? From music and the assumption that all writing be lyrical. From the idea of writing as a craft set to glide on still waters. From a romance with a several century’s old Coleridgean attitude of waft—Wordsworth’s poetry as the ‘spontaneous overflow of emotion.’ From assembly line culture and factory output. From electricity and tears.” Your words got me to thinking about how we romanticize the flow state. And not only is it the flow of language, but also the flow of being. I just wanted to hear where you stand on that now, especially since I know that essay was actually against or anti-flow.

MC

It was anti-flow as a lexicon that my students fell back on time and time again in creative writing, this shortcut. If I heard one more time that a piece of writing “flows”—it was crazy making. I wanted to find a language for what this piece of writing really was doing, which would require that we study it, that we look carefully at it, that we have experiences with other texts like or unlike it. It takes a lot of work to find words for how writing moves. Flow means nothing, so I banned that word. There are various words that I’ve banned from my classes over the years. Words I ask my students not to use in a knee-jerk way, if at all. I require them to come up with a different, better word, every time the word automatically appears. It becomes a kind of experiment on the self. “Society” was another one. I also kind of banned “opinion,” which sounds horrible. I used to like to excite my students by saying, you know, “I don’t give a shit about your opinion.”

JZ

“I don’t care how you feel!” [Laughs.]

MC

We would discuss the difference between opinions and ideas and how we can’t have conversations with opinions. We don’t even know where our opinions come from. If you can find out where they come from, then it might morph into something like an idea. Originality is hard won and takes years and years to arrive at, if we ever do. The distinction between opinions and ideas is important to me, especially in the classroom. Opinions have this funny tendency to be over-valued (everyone has a right to one) and disavowed (it’s just my opinion). Dialogue or discussion is pretty much impossible in their name. It’s a bit like the difference between criticism (unprocessed judgment calls) and critique (intellectually engaged inquiry or ethically committed analysis). 

JZ

How do you think discourse is meeting us in this new phase of the digital culture?

MC

Flow is really what the digital age inserts us into endlessly now, right? When I think of flow, I think of flux. Maybe what’s missing with the contemporary flow into which we are inserted, which is pretty much mono-temporal, is that it doesn’t change. I’m not on social media all that much, but when I do dip in, it always looks exactly the same. How do we take ourselves out of that flow? So much of what I used to try to cultivate—in myself as much as in my students, because when we teach, we’re teaching ourselves as well—is the necessity of distance. There’s no learning, there’s no getting a grasp on the ungraspables, on the mess that is reality, on the complexities that are beyond us all, without trying to distance ourselves from the things that we’re sutured into. We’re so inside of it. Noam Chomsky describes ideology as the unspoken framework for thinkable thought: it’s the very thing in which we reside. So how can we change it if we can’t stand outside of it? I had a student come up to me once after the first day of class, and he said, “I’m really going to love this class, because I can see that you, like I, think outside the box.” I thought, Okay, well, there are a few things we have to talk about, right? First of all, it’s not a good sign if you like a class because you think the teacher thinks like you. Let’s always be open to that which is strange, alien, foreign, and not me. Another word I can’t bear is this word, relatable—again, it’s not even grammatical, not that I’m a member of the grammar police [Laughs.] How about something I cannot identify with? Is the world presented to me to find myself in it always? How about not finding myself? So that was one thing, but the other thing was that I wanted to surprise him by suggesting that I’m really not interested in thinking outside the box, that what I am interested in is having us study the box and even learning to love the box. [Laughs.] We would talk a lot about the difference between restraints and constraints. Especially in poetry writing classes, where students usually come in thinking it’s a free-for-all.

JZ

You can’t know that piece of it until you know some of the rules, right?

MC

Exactly. What is freedom? Is freedom the ability to be without any kind of definition? Our bodies are definite, are defining of us in a beautiful way. A poem is a stanza is a room. So what kind of room do you want to create? And then my students start to discover that a constraint is productive and generative. That’s a breakthrough.

JZ

When I was studying poetry, it was always my experience that my favorite poems were the really structured ones, the villanelles, the sonnets. They were the ones that were constrained, technically, and for that they felt they had a real purpose. Because then you’re thinking to the form and it’s a bit of a puzzle. You’re figuring out how to open it up a little bit for yourself.

MC

And you discover that free verse also is not without form.

JZ

And certainly not without difficulty! There are rules to every choice you’re making. Maybe not rules, it’s not punitive. It’s more just that there are contours and a shape that hopefully a poem is making. I think a lot of people would come into these classes similarly in terms of making something shapeless. But you can’t move without some edges, the writing needs a scaffold.

MC

A box is a contour! Exactly. And then, how do you want to shape that box?

JZ

Did you find that instruction on constraint freed your students a little to consider form in new ways?

MC

It probably upset them a bit. Again, risk, vulnerability, anxiety. These are parts of learning, and that’s why it’s a sacred charge. But fear or anxiety is different from desperation. I feel what the current political realm augurs is something more like desperation. That’s what makes things teeter toward terror, which feels really different from fear. Folks like those in power right now—they think they’re not going to die. There’s a real interest in omnipotence, and with it, I suppose, something like immortality, and a refusal to admit one’s own limits. We’re finite creatures. This is what we all will know and know in common, that our lives will end. We live together as companionably and compassionately as possible while we’re here.

JZ

I wanted to ask you about feeling “met” by pieces of writing, feeling recognized or held by pieces of writing. I’m wondering what you’re feeling met by right now, what’s reaching you?

MC

Lucy Ives’ most recent collection of essays, An Image of My Name Enters America. I had read a different book of hers a few years ago that came to me through Catherine Taylor and the press she co-founded, Image Text Ithaca. The book, called The Poetics, is a collaboration between Ives and the photographer, Mathew Connors. I found myself underlining endlessly and wondering, who is this writer? I wrote her a long letter. A few months ago, I saw that she was giving a reading at one of our wonderful bookstores in Providence, Riffraff, which Lucas Mann and Ottavia De Luca run, and I went to hear her. It confirmed she is the genius that I thought she was. I read the book and immediately felt, this is a real book. She’s a fully thinking, deeply readerly writer and sentence inhabiter.

Also, Anne Boyer’s work is the kind of writing that I love—it’s an embodied encounter as poetic as it is intellectual. I’ve been reading Alexei Navalny’s autobiography, Patriot, and it’s making me feel very close to him.  It’s probably not a good idea to be reading it before going to sleep because it’s giving me nightmares, but maybe that means it will instruct me on the deepest levels. I don’t know why I’m always surprised by writers who have access to humor while living under conditions of supreme oppression: wryness and the ability to laugh as forms of resistance. Every so many pages, after describing a kangaroo court, or layers of lies produced by the regime, or trumped-up charges (which now seems like an apt pun), he says something like “you who live in places where the rule of law still exists might not believe or recognize what I’m describing.” Need I say more?

JZ

Before you retired formally from teaching, were there classes you never got to design that you wish you still could?

MC

I’d had a fantasy, especially after having taught for several decades, of a class I would have loved to teach but never had the guts to. A syllabus-less class made up entirely of the students’ questions. We wouldn’t be able to tell what would constitute the course in advance. Each week, I imagined myself curating reading and writing and other types of incitements in response to the questions.

In my poetry writing classes, I used to ask my students to supply me with questions about poetry that they had always been afraid to ask alongside their fears and expectations for the course. Eventually, I would try to answer each of these questions. Then, at semester’s end, I’d ask them to return to their initial question, respond to it, and supply a new question based on what they’d learned. In one of my last classes, a student who was Latinx and queer recorded as his fear: “that my creativity and writing means nothing to no one.” We did devote part of a whole class to that question, but a whole semester could have been spent on it with emphasis on each and every word.

Or, how about a semester-long class on questions as such, typologies of questions and their effects. No matter how experienced or seemingly learnèd one becomes, learning how to ask questions is possibly what all learning is about. Just as I think it would be great someday to teach a class solely on the question as a form, I think it would be just as great to teach (and take) a class solely devoted to the sentence. The shape of the sentence and nature of the question is everything: that might sum up everything we are trying to do.

JZ

I’ve been thinking about this idea of confidence in a writer; it’s a funny way to think about writing or the creative act. But ultimately, is that what we’re most drawn to? A confident style, somebody that we believe immediately? Or do we tend not to believe something that reads that way straight off? It got me thinking: do you know in the moment of writing that you’re onto something?

MC

It’s a great question, because I’ve also been reading a book that came out maybe in the ’90s, but it’s a collection of writers’ notebooks. I like to read writers’ notes; there’s no need for confidence. It’s just musings. For me, confidence in writing is related to teaching, too. There has to be a balance, absolutely a feeling that you can master a page. There’s something really beautiful about being able to do that when you know you can write. But at the next turn of the page, it’s got to be undercut by vulnerability, humility. This is where Emerson comes in for me because he gave these lectures that nobody understood, but they kept returning to hear them again. I don’t know if audiences do that now. They want everything to make sense. Emerson talked about the lecturer himself being overcome by the lecture. And this is so true, too. When you essay, it’s not about knowing where you will arrive. It’s the nature of the wander, but also allowing the work to move through you. It’s got to be mastery and submission, and one has to almost undercut the other.

JZ

There has to be a balance.

MC

I did a stint teaching in Moscow around September 11. Jean and I were about to leave for our Fulbright fellowships to teach at the Gorky Literary Institute. A poll had just been taken in Russia before we left that asked the populace if they could pick one of the three following options for gay people: should they be sent to Siberia, put in psychiatric institutes, or left alone? Which left Jean and me to wonder, well, how will we be treated in this new culture and in the classroom? We won’t be outspokenly out in that realm. It was fascinating and wonderful and wild, and the way that people knew who we were, it was this open secret and they never made us feel even that there was a heteronormative imperative. One day, I was teaching Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons in my poetry writing class, and Jean was teaching a film class covering Tami Gold’s documentary Juggling Gender. It’s a film about Jennifer Miller, who is a bearded woman and a lesbian circus performer. At the Institute, students were allowed to drop into classes with different setups. I had my core students, but then anybody could show up if they wanted to, if they liked what you were doing. The day I taught Tender Buttons, it was standing room only. The word got out that we were talking about this queer writer, this queer text, and Jean also had a ton of interest in what she was doing that day. She had a paper from a student in which the student had quoted The Celluloid Closet by Vito Russo, which is a book about the very present absence of queerness in cinema. Jean asked the student where she got the book, and she said, “Well, I want to take you and Professor Cappello somewhere.”

We ended up at this apartment building that was kind of dingy, and in the apartment was the underground gay and lesbian library. It was basically a quiet reading room lined with books in all languages with the Xerox machine in the kitchen—all books by gay and lesbian writers. This was 2001, and she said, “This is where I got the book.” She explained that this could not be known, you know. In the States, we’re not really used to that. It was an incredible thing, meeting that core group of people in Moscow.

JZ

You can’t help but think about it now. Where are we headed?

MC

I think we’re headed to the place we’re going to create together, because we are emboldened and we’re smart and imaginative. We’re here, and we’re not stopping, and we’re not going anywhere.