Composing

I'm spending the early mornings--yes, I have to turn on lights to kick the circadian rhythms into motion, and, yes, as the temperatures drop there are more bugs to stare at dumbly--working on my comps essays. Right now, I'm deep into the "how to apply ecocomposition to the creative writing workshop." First, most obvious point: you compose in a place. A variety of ecocomp folk are fascinated by maps, by context, by how the intensely local influences students, the classroom, the institutional approaches to curricula, and so on. Second, and maybe this should have been first, point: where you are changes how you experience who you are. And vice versa. But place, and self, are such givens that it's hard to get students to see it and, so, to write about it. It's like the joke with the baby fish chatting when the old fish swims up and asks how the water feels today and then swims off. The baby fish look at each other and ask, "What's water?"

So: how to get get poetry students to get out of their navels and into the world? Ah, and how to get them to see the ecology of the history of poetry and still strike out on their own? By that question I really mean to be asking this one: how can we rewrite the first and second points above in relation to culture?