February 14, 1980: Poetic Apprentice
February 14: Allen held class at his house. He was sitting behind a table and I was sitting right in front of him, unable to see him without putting myself in a very awkward position. My head was down, I was looking at several loose sheets of paper in his notebook. Allen handed me two poems of mine that should have been in the pile to be handed back to the students. He handed them to me without breaking off his lecture. I was embarrassed because he hadn’t written anything on them and obviously he’d misplaced them and never read them and now was handing them back to me unread. All week I’d imagined him having read those poems, I imagined that when he saw me today his idea of who I was would include in it that I had written those poems. As we spoke before class I was certain of it, behaved believing it, and believed it was part of the way we talked together.
When it was time for the break, everyone left the room except Allen and me and he walked slowly to the door and made some kind of comment about being absentminded and I was almost in tears but I was so mad at the same time that I didn’t cry but I wouldn’t say anything either and just stood there glowering with my back turned around from him and my arms crossed. He finally looked up at me with nervous concern and said he was sorry if he’d hurt me, but he said this walking away from me towards the door with his back to me. I could hear from his footsteps that he’d stopped and turned and was walking back towards me. He was still trying to mollify me and I suddenly yelled at him without turning around “You’re so fucking bored with all of us. I know you’re used to sitting around and talking to Sanders and Corso and Burroughs and Snyder, people who interest you, your peers, but you could be more understanding and hide your boredom a little better.”
Downstairs, Sue Rhynhart and I and the other kids from the class sat down on his large front porch and there was a crowd in the street too, curious. A lady who seemed drunk was being straightened out and supported and kept vertical by a leather-jacketed biker, a woman, and a child. The biker was yelling, “See, even though you throw me out of the apartment I’m paying for, I’m still going to bring you home to show there’s no hard feelings.” But she refused to go through the front door, grabbing the doorknob and doorframe and yelling out that he’d kill her if he got her inside.
It was still snowing and for some reason, I can’t remember who initiated it, but Sue R. and I tried to kiss but she was taller than me and it was a clumsy, but friendly, failure.
After the intermission, Allen gave us an assignment and the rest of the class period to complete it, but he also wanted to use the time to talk to us individually about our final projects. Mine was an already completed collection of essays, stories, and poems from my notebook, some of which were unkind to Allen and his teaching methods, but I’d written them vaguely so that nothing could be PROVEN. I handed him my manuscript and then smugly went to work on the tape recorder, nonchalantly, wanting him to have to challenge me about what I’d implied but didn’t have the courage to say outright. When nothing was said for a very long time I turned around and he wasn’t reading my manuscript at all, but talking to Anita in the back of the room, telling her that her project had already been done in the current issue of some magazine. All in a single dream, Valentine’s morn.
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