October 17, 2012

Interesting Tuesday past. It is my longest day. I was at school from 7:30 AM to 8:30 PM. One student was angry because we were wasting time he had paid good money for by straying frivolously off task. I’d never see a display like that. I didn’t know whether to laugh or to rebuke. Whatever this noble generation is learning, it does not include the notion that personal impulse should be curbed or moderated for the sake of the whole. Students in the creative autobiography class spent time holding up for discussion what I would have called, simply, bad poems. The poems’ strategy is to assemble a range of sometimes interesting, sometimes not, more or less random observations, and then to depend on the reader to make sense of them. No two independent interpretations could possibly be alike, and it was fascinating to watch the class discussion make of the pieces what they were not on their own. The students seemed happy with this procedure, and I have to admit it did redeem works that were otherwise not worth their ink. Their skill at making sense out of what did not have sense on its own was remarkable to me, even if it ran counter to my notion that a poem must take a stand, have a perspective, provide wisdom or insight, or at least pleasure, and not merely lie there in a jumble waiting for meaning-hungry souls to put them together in order they couldn’t bother to attain for themselves. I think of a poem as insight to work from rather than a puzzle to be put together. This is not to say that their comments were not often soaringly insightful; it’s just that the poems were not legitimate cause for their insight. We discussed slam poetry, too, without noting that what had just happened in the classroom and slam poetry are directly opposing forces, one seeking to make poetry public and accessible, the other sinking back into unshare-able hermeneutics that would make Eliot blush.