Episode 5: Julia Bloch - At Work (And At Play) In A World Of Words

In this episode, I caught up with Julia Bloch in Philadelphia, where she lives and works as the director of the creative writing program at the University of Pennsylvania. We talked about her life as a teacher, as a poet, as a mother and as a daughter, and found ourselves delighting in how the ever-changing nature of language impacts and enhances our lives. And I learned how poetry, in particular, has a unique power to challenge norms, make unexpected connections and change how we think and move in the world. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:03

Welcome to Andover Alumni Now, the class of 1991. I'm your classmate and host, Mike Miners. This episode, I caught up with Julia Block in Philadelphia, where she lives and works as the director of creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania. We talked about her life as a teacher, as a poet, as a mother, and as a daughter, and found ourselves delighting in how the ever-changing nature of language impacts and enhances our lives. And I learned how poetry in particular has the unique power to challenge norms, make unexpected connections, and change how we think and move in the world. Academia has changed a lot. College has changed a lot. So it's very cool. When you say college has changed a lot, what do you see? What are the changes that you're experiencing?

SPEAKER_02 0:54

So I would say, and just knowing that the framework of this conversation is who we are as a certain generation of, you know, 91 high school grads have having gone straight into college. We went to a college at a time when English and history were still the top majors, you know, at most colleges and universities, or at least many of them, let's say. And over time, you know, STEM has taken over for sure. And what many of us are at with the conversation at this point is maybe it's not so much a matter of what subjects are popular or perceived to be useful or successful, but maybe it's actually just like people are learning differently. People are figuring out that they can do the kinds of thinking they want to do in lots of different areas. There's this cliche meet students where they are, but what does that actually mean? One of the very concrete ways it plays out is what do you know when you're when you come into the classroom? Um, and that can include like, what do you know from your other courses, but also what do you know from your family life? What do you know from the pedagogical approaches that you took in your high school, whether that was a super well-resourced high school like Andover or a very under-resourced high school elsewhere in the country? Um, and also what do you, what do you know about how you know? You know, do you need to hear something out loud before you can make a connection to it? Or are you someone who thinks more on paper? And how can we work together to kind of bring texts alive for you in that way?

SPEAKER_01 2:26

And if you're doing that in a group setting, I would imagine every single person would have a little bit different mix of all of those things.

SPEAKER_02 2:33

Yes. Yeah. So I'm lucky that most of my classes are capped at 15 or 18 or 20 students. But um, yeah, I mean, one of the one of the most foundational ways you I grapple with that is through questions. I'm much more interested in asking questions than answering them. You know, um, and also helping students figure out what's a good question, how do you take a question and keep developing it? There's this writer I love named Banu Koppel who has this book about um unanswerable questions. Like how can a question grow and expand and sort of take on more and more um around meaning and experience and history and life?

SPEAKER_01 3:16

It's a well-worn trope that the more you know in life, the more you recognize you don't know.

SPEAKER_02 3:21

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 3:23

And it just gets more and more like kind of an undoing of knowledge, the more I'm exposed to. And that results in me having more questions. The more deeply I look into things, how much more there is to question.

SPEAKER_02 3:36

And you and the more you ask questions, the more you get to continue having a dialogue. And so I'm much more interested. Like I'm almost at the point, honestly, where like I don't even want to assign papers anymore because I'm much more interested in just having a continuous dialogue with students.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

Yeah. What gets you excited about your field? I mean, you fall into poetry. What is it about poetry that captures you?

SPEAKER_02 3:59

I had always written poetry. I actually was not an English major as an undergraduate student. I was a political philosophy major. But I had always returned to poetry as a reader and then pursue that in across two different graduate degrees. But I think it was because I had a background in these other fields that I was always most drawn to poetry that was doing something on the page, whether you want to call it experimental or innovative or formally, sometimes it's described as formally difficult. So poems that poems that ask you to think differently about shapes and materiality and and language. And I do think, like I said before, I mean, I did write a whole academic book about this. I don't, I don't know, I'm not prepared to say after all these years that there, that poetry is the only thing that can do this, but I do think that there's something specific about poetry that can teach us how to be really suspicious, slash critical, uh, slash questioning about language and not to take language for granted.

unknown 5:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 5:04

So we if you have if you've ever taken a class in which someone asks you to do a form of close reading, you're familiar with the idea that like the closer you look at language, the more it's you sort of peel back at the layers of its meanings, right? Um, and I just think that poetry can teach you how to do that in really powerful ways. Um, it can teach you everything from like the basic difference between what a word means and what it suggests. So that whole like connotation-denotation thing.

SPEAKER_01 5:33

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 5:33

Um to also like, what is a poem? Does this count as a poem? Um, you know, so my own, my own academic training, a lot of my own scholarship starts with um World War II or mid-century modernism, where a lot of writers are playing around with the definition of poetry, what counts as a lyric, what counts as expression, um, and how to how to sort of push the envelope in terms of like, is this still, is this still behaving as a piece of literature or is it something else? Um, and then what you what you get when you sort of swim around in that history of words and language and literature is you get to start to feel um more aware of other kinds of language that surround you. So that could include everything from, you know, forms at the DMV to whatever questionnaire you're filling out for your kids' summer camp to um, you know, so uh uh it's a it's a powerful thing and to me a key part of living in a civil society, living in a nation state, living in a a town, a city, a neighborhood, you know, not taking language for granted.

SPEAKER_01 6:46

Yeah, and it's I've thought a lot recently about language personally, um, because I do a lot with it. I'm a songwriter, I'm an actor, and so I I use language a lot, and Shakespearean acting is my favorite thing.

SPEAKER_02 6:59

Uh yeah, so you go from Shakespeare, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Yeah. Um the incredible complexity of language and the use of form and iambic pentameter, for instance, you know, where you there are quote-unquote rules, but then um, you know, the bard breaks them all the time. And it's the ways in which the rules are broken that reveal uh intention and meaning in really interesting ways. And thinking about Shakespeare in particular, um, how many words were coined um and that are now part of our vernacular. Yeah and that language is such an alive thing that way.

SPEAKER_02 7:37

That's right. Yeah, it really is literally living and it evolves and it changes. And um, I also spent part of my professional life as an editor and a copy editor, and so I still teach a class on editing. And one of the things we discover part way through the class is student we read a bunch of articles about this, and then students inevitably have this kind of epiphany of, oh, standard English is a dialect. It's not neutral. It's it's not somehow separate, more authoritative, more um definitive than other forms of English. We study um a number of poets and novelists working in different dialects of English, and then we come back to standard English, and it's amazing to see students realize that standard English is a choice. Um, I made that jump because it's so it's so important that you bring up Shakespeare and his coinage of new language. And um can I ask you a question? I mean, as a as a performer, how how do you like how does it feel um you know, when you're voicing that that language, something particularly, you know, um thorny in Shakespeare or something with a lot of interesting neologisms or um or coinages? Like, like does it I'm I'm wondering what word you attach you would attach to the experience of learning that language as a performer.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

My favorite part about doing Shakespeare is the deciphering of the text. It's it's a it's foreign to everyday speech, but in a really positive direction. It's it's foreign towards like the exalted and the tremendously deep. And so I love to get this language that doesn't make any sense on first reading, for instance. Like I can read a passage and be like, I have no idea what that means. But then to dig into the grammar of it, um, to find the subject and the direct object, and to figure out what what's the context is and what's being said, and then to go back and to do some research about the particular terms, because you know, there's tremendous scholarship on Shakespeare. And so to dig through the scholarship and to find the likely uh meaning. And I say likely because who knows? No one was in his head, and so it's everyone, all these different opinions, and sometimes you get differing opinion. That stuff is what's fascinating to me. And then the the act of bringing it to life in a scene and the challenge of making this on its face indecipherable language intelligible to someone who hasn't done all of that work, that is really fun for me. And and that's like the that's the big challenge. Like, you know, somebody tries to hit a three-pointer. That's kind of like the three-pointer. If you can get a swish, like the swish is someone totally gets it, even though they don't know the definition of three of the words in the passage that you were, you know, invoking.

SPEAKER_02 10:41

Yeah, the sound can carry meaning. The sound can suggest things to you. I mean, we're having kind of a national conversation about the bad bunny halftime show along those lines, right? Right. Like all these really amazing reaction videos of folks who don't speak Spanish who are taking all this. I mean, it's a cliche, it's it's it's a trend, but I think it's really meaningful. I think it's really powerful.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

Yeah, I do too. And and so much fun. Um, and I and the other thing about just poetry in general that's so cool to me is like a limerick, for instance, like very strict rules, um, a uh haiku, very strict rules, and the opportunities for creativity within those rules. Yeah, and then also the creativity of just throwing the rules out the window and just saying, I'm gonna write my own rules. Um, I'm thinking about like E.E. Cummings, and I and I don't I don't know a whole lot about poetry, so I have a surface level understanding of it, but yeah, where to my mind that's like, oh, this is a whole new way of thinking about language and where words fall on the page and whether you capitalize or not, or whether what the punctuation is, it's all kind of out the window. Yeah, and that becomes fascinating, Tinkage.

SPEAKER_02 11:56

Yeah, and what you what you do when you start reading a poet like Cummings, um, or even some Shakespeare, I think you could probably make this argument is that it makes you realize, wait, why why do we capitalize the first word? Like, why does Microsoft Word want me to capitalize the first letter of each word at the beginning of a totally? Why? What is, you know, what is the function of that? I mean, that that in itself might not be the most profound grammatical rule to push against, but it's a really great place to start, you know. And and when you when you start to realize, like maybe I don't want my my word processing software to make certain compositional decisions for me. Maybe I want, maybe I want to make those decisions. Um, again, it just it just like empowers you.

SPEAKER_01 12:43

Well, it's it's really cool to think about that in the context of like technology right now. The way we text, there's a whole new grammatical structure built around texting. And like you say, capitalization and punctuation are not really big parts of that. If you end it with periods, it means like you're bummed out and pissed off or something like that. You leave the period off if it's just neutral. But if you put a period on, you're you're saying something you know, serious.

SPEAKER_02 13:07

It's so subtle, isn't it? It's it's so wild. How could just a tiny mark like that have so much meaning?

SPEAKER_01 13:14

Yeah, and that it that that grew organically. Nobody made that rule. It I assume like, hey, everybody council of like Jedi.

SPEAKER_02 13:24

Yeah, if you want to be really formal and you're texting, make sure you follow this style sheet. Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

And uh that's one thing I really love about language. It's just kind of this thing that emerges on its own out of tacit agreement. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So cool.

SPEAKER_02 13:41

Yeah, I really enjoy teaching. There are a couple great articles and many, many books on the history of the dictionary. And the more you read, the more you realize the dictionary is just like a it's like a transcript of what why people are using words the way that they do. There's again, there's no authority behind it, although yes, publications have to, you know, they decide to follow the the rules set out in a dictionary around spelling and hyphenation and capitalization. But but but also the dictionary is just, you know, in our, you know, to take one example, like no Webster just decided this is how stuff should be spelled. You know, he just he just kind of made that choice.

SPEAKER_01 14:21

Yes, that is an interesting thing that I've found in Shakespeare as well, is that before Daniel Webster, spelling was an art. Yeah, yeah. And it was considered bad form in some circles to use the same spelling of a word if you used it twice in the same passage.

SPEAKER_02 14:40

That's right. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 14:42

It was like we already saw that spelling. What else do you got?

SPEAKER_02 14:45

That's right. Yeah, yeah. The variant spellings are really important to understand how language used to work and maybe doesn't work now, but maybe should. Yeah. Yeah. In editing, they say that consistent spelling is an aid to the reader. It's it's to make a text, you know, easier to read, more fluid. Reader won't get snagged on those variant spellings, reader understands what you mean by by certain words, but that's some value. That's it, that's a choice that patients started to make. That's not any kind of other kind of rule.

SPEAKER_01 15:15

Yeah, and it's it's funny um to find rising up in me sometimes a resistance to changes and things that I'm familiar with in language. And find myself going, like, wait a minute, that's not how you're supposed to say that. You know, don't like, don't end a sentence with a preposition. Yeah. That that one is one I've always bristled at.

SPEAKER_02 15:38

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 15:40

Because it feels much more natural for me to say bristle that. Yeah, for sure. At which I bristle, seems yeah, harder to do. And it seems like most people in casual speech have no problem ending sentences and prepositions these days. Um, but it's fun to talk to, like my wife, for instance, really loves that rule. And so it's fun talking to her and watching her go through the gymnastics of making sure she doesn't she doesn't do it. And I always often laugh when she does it.

SPEAKER_02 16:11

And why do you think she loves it so much? Like what what is it that is important?

SPEAKER_01 16:15

That's a great question. Uh, maybe some comfort in consistency. Yeah, I imagine.

SPEAKER_02 16:23

Um I think that's what it is. That's what a lot of gram grammatical rules are for a lot of people. It's the comfort of consistency. This is how I learned it, this is how I shall continue to use it. Um and I uh yeah, it's it's just sort of endlessly interesting to me to push at those assumptions, like what's actually driving the assumption around.

SPEAKER_01 16:48

I think it's probably also a um like a little tongue-in-cheek, like funny thing for her, too.

SPEAKER_02 16:54

For sure.

SPEAKER_01 16:54

Yeah, I don't think it's super serious for her. I think it's just like I'm gonna see if I can pull this off. And it does sound weird, you know, when she does it. And I think, you know, in so in certain contexts, yeah, like that sounds very, very formal.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

And so there's like a twinkle in her eye when she does it, you know, and people will laugh and be like, yeah, I grew up in a household where we were really like my parents would get would be really hard on us if we answered the phone and said, um, rather than anything other than this is she or this is he. Yeah. And it was like I would just groan, groan, like, oh my God, it's so embarrassing. Nobody says that, you know. Um, but rules like that, yeah, not now that I'm like a million years old, I I'm a little more curious about what is it about that rule? Is it when you think about the rule, does it lead you to be more precise with your language, even if you're not following the rule? You know, what is it about this is she? Um and a long ago I decided I'm just gonna circumvent that rule and just say this is Julia.

SPEAKER_01 17:56

Ah, there you go. Just use the name. That still follows the rules.

SPEAKER_02 18:00

Yeah, because I don't want to sound pretentious uh by saying this is she. Yeah, and I don't want to break the rule. Um I now I can't even think of what the other thing would be, but yeah, anyway. I just decided to circumvent.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

It's just such a fun thing to me, the the fluid nature of it. I like that language changes. And right now, I've got a lot of Gen Z people in my life, you know, like younger um kind of millennials Z who are in with the the really thick Gen Z slang. Oh, yeah. I mean, and it's it's really a completely different dialect. Yeah. It's wild. Like you can have a conversation or or overhear a conversation of Gen Z ears and have no idea what they're talking about. I I have that experience.

SPEAKER_02 18:46

Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_01 18:47

I find that really cool.

SPEAKER_02 18:49

Yeah, when I hear that language or I read about it, or my students use it, or um friends' kids are using it. I'm always curious about literally what does it mean, but also like what was what was missing from the language that you started to use. That's a good question. How was our dialect insufficient? So the folks who came after had to figure something else out, you know, it was responding to culture and what's going on in music or or whatnot. Um and then I've also heard that some dialect is coming back. I can't think of any examples right now, but but I am interested in um when terms come back when they circle back after generation. Yeah, boss.

SPEAKER_01 19:37

Boss is a word it's like from the 50s that's now being used.

SPEAKER_02 19:41

Yeah, which I find fascinating. So, yeah, and I I had a kid, you know, a little later than a lot of folks my age. So my my kid is six. And so watching my now six-year-old go through a lot of language act acquisition has also been super interesting.

SPEAKER_01 19:59

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 20:00

Noticing the weird, um, I mean, he's already coming home with some very hilarious slang. Like first day of kindergarten, he came home with six, seven. I was like, oh my God, it's in my household. It's not even too little for that. I was totally delighted because I'm fascinated by that particular term and how it circulates and how it means everything and nothing, and uh the hand gesture and the debate over whether it's appropriate of rap culture. And I just I love all of it. I love the whole conversation around it. Um, but I'm also interested in watching him figure out when to attach an ing to a verb, what um, how he like kind of butchers the past tense of verbs, but in a way that totally makes sense, you know. Um really fun. Um he likes to say, um, that's the one that I that I that got to. Which is like it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, there are way too many letters in that word. Those are not necessary, you know. Um it's like took and taken and take. Um and it's it's but I love it, right? And I'm a poet, so of course I'm harvesting all this language and figuring out how to do how to make poems out of it, and that's really fun.

SPEAKER_00 21:14

Oh, so have you done that? Have you used a word that you got from your son?

SPEAKER_02 21:18

I have, yeah, I've used some words, I've used some really surreal sentences. Like I put on a new necklace the other day, and he said, Mama, you're wearing a smile, which was very, you know, that's like very cute because I'm so cute. Smiling, my necklace is smiling. Um, he yeah, comes up with really great stuff. And there's a long tradition of poets write writing their kids into their poetry. And so I'm trying to do it in a respectful way. And you know, he gets to be his own person and have his own language, and I don't want to just take it all and for my purposes, but but it's pretty fun.

SPEAKER_01 21:53

Yeah, he likes it. Tell me more about your poetry.

SPEAKER_02 21:58

So I um I would say, well, I'll just I'll just start by saying the first book I published um is a series of epistolary poems dedicated to Kelly Clarkson.

SPEAKER_01 22:12

So Well, help me out with what epistolary means.

SPEAKER_02 22:15

So epistolary is letter related to the letter. So there's a long history of poems that are written as letters to Okay, got it.

SPEAKER_01 22:24

Okay, epistolary poems to Kelly Clarkson.

SPEAKER_02 22:27

Yeah. So the story behind that is after college, I was living in San Francisco. I was working a very boring admin nonprofit job. And I joined a writing group. I wanted to get back into my writing. I didn't have a TV, but everybody else in the writing group had one, and they were all watching this show called American Idol. It was the first season. And I started watching it and I was totally transfixed. And I had never really, I'd always been sort of pop culture curious, but I had never really written about pop culture. But I just um on a whim started writing these epistolary poems addressed to Kelly Clarkson, who was the inaugural winner of that show. And it just became this like very durable writing prompt. And and I just kept writing these poems and then they accumulated into what became my first book.

SPEAKER_01 23:20

And um the entirety of the book is these is poems to Kelly Clarkson.

SPEAKER_02 23:25

That's right. And they're both like, I mean, they're kind of about Kelly Clarkson. Of course, they're not really truly about Kelly Clarkson. She's like, you know, she's a she's a metaphor, she's a stand-in, she's a conceit. Um, I was living in LA for a couple of years, and a friend of a friend said, you know, I actually have a connection to Kelly Clarkson. Do you want, do you want me to figure out how to get a copy of the book to her? And I thought about it and I said, you know, it would, I would be really heartbroken if she thought I wrote the book as a way to mock her or make fun of her. That's not my intention at all. And so my my concern is that it would come off that way because I wouldn't be able to control the the framing of it. And so my friend said, well, let's hold off for a second then. Let's just like figure out how to deliver it in the right way. So maybe we'll have that conversation again. And I don't know if she's seen the book, but um, but it won some awards and it it like did well for an experimental poetry book on an indie press with a small print run. Um and I've published a couple books since then. And um, and both of them, all three of the books are, I guess, in a general way, kind of interested in um playing with prose. So poems that look like prose but don't quite behave like prose. So they might be written in prose blocks, but they're not really telling a story. They don't really have a beginning, middle, and end. They're doing something else with language. And I really enjoy playing in that space.

SPEAKER_01 24:49

What are the titles of these books?

SPEAKER_02 24:51

So the second book is called Valley Fever, which is the name of a um a lung condition that's endemic to um a few different parts of the country, including the Central Valley of California, where I had my first teaching job. Okay. Um, so it's um it's a disease that's linked to environmental pollution and uh the sort of um emissions that are generated by oil drilling and um, you know, so so all these sort of um vectors and and sources of industry and development um that also make it turn these places into very difficult places to live. Um and so the the book is about that place. A lot of the poems take place in different towns and cities around that region. And then the third book is called The Sacramento of Desire. So also linked to a place similar or a place in that region. I I grew up in Davis, which is a smaller city outside Sacramento. Um, so it's a book about growing up there, but also having moved far away. I mean, first went away to boarding school and then and sort of never returned. I went to school, lots of other places in the country. Um, but it's also a book about trying to have a kid and trying to become a parent and that desire. And the the title is a twist on a book of poetry by a poet named Linda Gregg called The Sacrament of Desire, which happens to be a book about Catholic faith. I'm I'm not a Catholic and I don't really have any relationship to the sacrament, but I enjoyed playing around with the term, like what is a sacrament? What is desire? Um, and I would say her poems are doing something pretty different, but there's like this resonance that I was interested in between them. Nice. And I just like a pun, I like a corny pun. So I think you know I like the idea that Sacramento, um, which if you've ever been there, you know, is a complicated place, a kind of flat place. Okay, and so I enjoyed playing around with the term.

SPEAKER_01 27:02

Awesome. And what's the title of the first book? Letters to Kelly Clexon. Letters to Kelly Clexon. Got it.

SPEAKER_02 27:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 27:09

Oh man. Good to know.

SPEAKER_02 27:11

Yeah. And then um my most recent book is a book of scholarship called Lyric Trade. So it's it came out of my PhD, PhD dissertation, but it's sort of a study of uh race and gender in very long poems in the 20th century, later 20th century in North America. Awesome.

SPEAKER_01 27:32

That's great. And what's coming down the pike for you?

SPEAKER_02 27:36

So I have a new book project that I'm working on. Actually, just read a few poems from it last night at a reading at an event here in Philly. And I think that it's starting to coalesce around the history of my father and my grandfather, who were both musicians and composers in Chicago. And my dad passed away just a couple of years ago. And you can't see it, but in the corner of my office are six file boxes full of archives from his house that we couldn't figure out what to do with. A lot of his stuff went to university archives because he was a university professor. A lot of my grandmother's archives went to a library in Chicago. Um, but I wound up with a bunch of miscellaneous stuff, and I don't really know what lies before me in these boxes because I haven't had a chance to open them yet, but it's gonna be a lot of photographs. I know because I packed them. It's photographs and musical scores and concert programs and letters and journals. And my idea is to try to make something out of out of it. So I've started to write towards it. So the poems that I have so far are kind of like about cleaning out my dad's house and finding all these archives, and they were really fascinating, but also really overwhelming and um and learning a history that, you know, I've I I was close to my dad, but it turns out your parents don't always tell you some of the most interesting things about their lives. So I'm finding I'm finding out a lot of it from these archives.

unknown 29:03

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_01 29:03

What a fascinating way to discover your father. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. To add more stuff to what you already know about him. And then to work it into your passion in that way. That's gotta be an incredible experience.

SPEAKER_02 29:16

Yeah, I'm trying, I'm glad I have this kind of frame, I guess. You know?

SPEAKER_01 29:20

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:21

Um, it's it feels like, oh, I can I could do something with with these boxes. I could do something with this life.

SPEAKER_01 29:28

Awesome. That's been really great to catch up with you.

SPEAKER_02 29:32

It's really great to catch up with you too. Yeah. Thanks for doing this. This is really fun.

SPEAKER_01 29:37

Thank you for being a part of it.

SPEAKER_02 29:39

Yeah, thanks for having me. It's great to talk.

SPEAKER_01 29:41

Really loved our conversation.

SPEAKER_02 29:42

Likewise, like that.

SPEAKER_01 29:44

Well, I'll see you soon.

SPEAKER_02 29:45

All right, take care.

SPEAKER_01 29:50

Alumni and loved ones, join us June 5th through 7th for our 35th reunion. We'll see you on campus.