Is That a Rock?

The Teachers & Writers Magazine editorial board selected Jenna Lanzaro’s “Is That a Rock: Erasure as Empowerment in the Middle School Classroom” as the 2023 Bechtel Prize honorable mention. The Bechtel Prize is awarded for an essay describing a creative writing teaching experience, project, or activity that demonstrates innovation in creative writing instruction. 

The Bechtel Prize is named for Louise Seaman Bechtel, who was an editor, author, collector of children’s books, and teacher. She was the first person to head a juvenile book department at an American publishing house. As such, she took children’s literature seriously, helped establish the field, and was a tireless advocate for the importance of literature in kids’ lives.This award honors her legacy. Learn more about the Bechtel Prize here.

My school-wide ask for “written material of any kind” yielded wildly varied results. An elementary teacher gifted me hundreds of pages of Thanksgiving-themed crossword puzzles. The eighth-grade humanities teacher across the hall had extra copies of articles on redlining. I received pages of word problems, essays on genocide, music lyrics, field trip permission forms—enough language to fill a box I hefted onto the table at the front of my creative writing classroom. This chaotic cornucopia, once planted on its altar, seemed to attract all the eyes in the room.

I was nervous. Erasure meant a lot to me. The stakes felt high. Would this practice have the same impact on my middle schoolers as it had on me? I’d been vulnerable and lost; erasure had hoisted me up, dusted me off.

I took a Zoom class on erasure with Robin Coste Lewis in Spring of 2021, when all the novelty of isolation had soured into a stagnant blah. I’d started my MFA at NYU in 2019; creative generation was easy amid the poetry readings and the class discussions and the lively broil of Manhattan. Then, in 2020, that stopped. My laptop screen and apartment walls stared me down, ground down my creative impulse: how could I write new poems when nothing new was happening? Why should I write poems (such trite things) in a world of such doom?

This made erasure a revelation. Erasure is the deliberate deletion of letters, words, or phrases from an existing text to create a new one, rendering, for instance, a poem about self-love from a pamphlet of fascist propaganda. In class, we expanded our definition of erasure to include other forms of textual alteration like collage. Matthea Harvey’s Of Lamb was my favorite class text; a collaboration with artist Amy Jean Porter, it displays the interdisciplinary potential of this form.

I began seeing language everywhere in my apartment: in the poorly translated directions for an IKEA stool; in the scripts of the movies I binged; in the weird apocalypse-y text threads with friends in different states. Erasure made me feel less confined, or, rather, the friction confinement created had now begun to generate sparks. When erasure unstopped my creative block, and in fact recalibrated the way I thought about language altogether, I knew I’d need to incorporate it into my teaching practice.

I’d been vulnerable and lost; erasure had hoisted me up, dusted me off.

A year and a half later the opportunity arrived. I was thrilled to begin teaching middle school creative writing with a curriculum I designed myself. I sought to make intentional decisions based on my core teaching values: writing should be fun, it should be a space for experimentation and play, and above all, it should provide students (specifically those in underserved communities) with opportunities for agency and self-expression otherwise unavailable to them. I felt erasure sat at the intersection of these tenants: a glimmering mass of potential, much like the box of language lording over my room.

We began by reading and discussing Mikko Harvey’s “For M.” Moving through the long, spaghetti-like text of the poem, I instructed my students to try to let go of their impulse to “figure out what it means” (this was the thing that made some of them so resistant to poetry) and instead move somatically through the poem. What lines make you feel something? Is there a section or a line or a word that stands out to you, even if you’re not sure why? The lovely thing about “For M” is that it offers lines of great emotional weight (“Please forget / your scarf / in my / life and / come back / later for / it”), colloquial lines with the potential for more broad applicability (“What / are we / supposed to / do?”), and lines of whimsy (“Maybe / thinking of / a walrus / would help”). This makes it well-suited for an intro to both the study of contemporary poetry and a preliminary erasure activity. What’s more, my encouragement of students to experience first and think/question second offered an accessibility-minded approach to art that many of them hadn’t thought was “allowed.”

Students picked a favorite line and used it as the seed of a new poem. The degree of ownership in this process (you get to pick the line! you get to write about whatever you want!) was exciting to them, and most of my students didn’t need any further guidance before they zoomed off. For those who were stuck, peer and teacher-guided brainstorming yielded fruitful and often surprising results. “It thought / it was / a rock” was, interestingly, a line a lot of my student gamers chose.

“Why did you choose this line?” I asked Diego (names changed for anonymity). Diego shrugged. “I don’t know. It made me think of Minecraft.”

“Describe Minecraft to me.”

“Everything is square.”

“Sort of like rocks?”

“Sort of like rocks,” he agreed.

“Is everything in the world of Minecraft made out of rocks?” I asked.

“No,” Diego said. “There’s a lot of rocks, but even the people are shaped like rocks.”

“What happens,” I asked, “if a player thinks something is a rock, and it’s actually not? Can you think of moments in your life where you’ve thought one thing was something else?”

He began the poem literally, with a player in Minecraft mistaking sheep and trees for rocks (and this would’ve been a perfectly fine first poem!), but then the poem meandered into the territory of the philosophical: he thought about the early days of Covid and how no one really knew which “reality” to believe. He was surprised but immensely proud to have arrived at a place of writing a “real” poem, one his peers lauded as “interesting” and “relatable.”

Erasure felt illicit without actually being illicit, and they relished the process as though they’d cracked some sort of code.

My students’ “For M” tribute poems were, in fact, spectacular, and a true showcase of their interests and preoccupations. By providing them with choice, but also a set of parameters within which to operate, I’d struck a balance that suited both eager, independent writers, and less confident ones. And students from all points along that spectrum wanted to talk about ethics. Was it “okay” to use another writer’s line? What about two lines? We set a boundary here, collectively establishing that one line, along with an acknowledgement of the original poem, was both ethical and honorific. We talked about the ways in which, subconsciously or otherwise, we use outside influences in everything we create. We talked about power dynamics and how erasure could serve as a means of reclaiming appropriated voices. I think this gave them a greater respect for the gravity of plagiarism and also a sense of personal pride in their work. Above all, they had fun. Erasure felt illicit without actually being illicit, and they relished the process as though they’d cracked some sort of code.

We were ready to expand to writing centos, poems entirely composed of found language. I sent out that schoolwide email requesting written material of any kind and received a generous response. It struck me then that erasure was environmentally sound, a means of closing the loop—another plus! Upon gathering a hearty supply of text, I planted the box at the front of my room and told my students: play. Play? They were hung up on “what they were supposed to do.” I distributed scissors, and invited them to sift through the box, but also their own backpacks, their own lockers, their own Google Drives, and to simply start cutting and manipulating text.

They could enter into this activity with intent or without, snipping out words or phrases or letters that, as with “For M,” caught their eye. Their grade for this activity wouldn’t be based on output; I’d simply grade them on their engagement in the activity, their proper use of scissors (you’d think middle schoolers would be able to resist pretend-snipping their hair upon picking up a pair of scissors, but alas . . .) and their community-mindedness. Were they ping-ponging ideas and queries with their desk mates? Were they following threads of curiosity and encouraging others to do the same? This eased their anxiety around producing a “good poem” and allowed them to surrender into the experience of play, which, for a plethora of reasons (traditional grading systems, pandemic-related pressures, the fact that they’re kids!), they so deeply craved.

In humanities class, my students were grappling with a lot of primary sources of deeply racist and bigoted origin, and snipping up these texts was empowering. Melody grit her teeth and grinned as she slashed up a racist zoning decree into the bits for a poem about celebrating female Blackness. Case used that same text to write little epistles: “To my dead soul / I discovered gold in my eyes / I created a new heart.” Liana posed the question: “Ever collaborate with sexist Americans?” which would serve as the title for a poem she’d write with her own words. Marisol, who’s multilingual, printed out and cut up Bad Bunny lyrics: “Nobody is holding you back,” she wrote. “La puerta está abierta.” Watching them, I felt the teachery glow that’s the reason we teach in the first place, the expansive warmth of: this is the future, and they are wonderful, and I am so hopeful and proud.

Erasure acknowledges that the present world and the language representing it aren’t perfect, or even static. Erasure empowers us to be active creators of a world we’d like to see.

Many of my students self-identify as poets now, and while I can’t attribute that entirely to our work with erasure, I do see a strong relationship between the creative and ethical opportunity this practice affords and their burgeoning confidence. Several months later, I organized a poetry slam. Not only did 22 students eagerly sign on and agree to sacrifice several lunch periods to practice, with no promise of any tangible reward—they did it for love of poetry, not a grade, though I did surprise them with donuts and extra credit at the end—but over 100 community members attended the event, and these student poets performed in front of the crowd with astounding poise. At least four of those poems had their origins as centos.

Poetry is one of the most accessible art forms. It’s nearly free (you just need paper and pencil!) and language is everywhere. You can write a poem on your phone in the subway. You can read a poem during your break at work. That it’s not often taught or regarded as an art form for all is a travesty, and one of my ultimate teaching goals is to shift that perception, to present language as worthy of celebration, of reclamation, as daily tokens of play.

There’s rocks and then there’s rocks that aren’t what they seem. Kids want to peer closer at the world around them. They want to question, challenge, transform. It’s our job as educators to create safe, generative spaces for the cultivation of that curiosity and creativity, for the recognition of “the rules” as constructs. Erasure acknowledges that the present world and the language representing it aren’t perfect, or even static. Erasure empowers us to be active creators of a world we’d like to see.

Read the 2023 Bechtel Prize winner: “You Must Change Your Life: Demystifying and Remystifying Poetry in the Classroom” by William Camponovo.

Read the 2023 Bechtel Prize runner up: “Here Papi Catch” by Dani Kopoulos.