Fall Courses

This fall I’m teaching three sections of freshman Composition I, which has a heavy emphasis on rhetoric here a the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). And I’m teaching one section of Introduction to Poetry. That gives me 105-110 students, depending on how the adding and dropping works out by the end of this coming week.

In the composition class I’m using Ways of Reading, which is a text full of difficult readings. For example, I lead off the semester by slowly working through Foucault’s “Panopticism” chapter of Discipline & Punish and Nietzsche’s “On Truth & Lies in a Nonmoral Sense.” I go back and forth on this textbook. After some semesters I swear I’ll never pick it up again, but I’m tempted back by the way challenging readings motivate students to learn a good, solid reading process and how classroom discussion is much better when its driven by a real need to know. And, despite the fact that the texts in Ways of Reading are from the same perspective as those in, say, Rereading America, students tend to react more favorably to them than “softer” cultural criticism pieces.

In the poetry class, I’m using Western Wind. I favor this text because it emphasizes formal interpretation over thematic reading and because it has some good chapters on sound. I think its selection of poems is a bit weak, so I supplement it with a fat dose of more unusual poetry. I use Blackboard to distribute: sound poems by Hugo Ball and Joseph Beueys; visual poetry by a number of people, including Apollinaire, Marinetti, and Schwitters; and prose poems by Stein, Simic, and some others. I also add a few things from the New York School, and I might add some fragments from Sappho later in the course, when we start reading from Harryette Mullen’s Recyclopedia, which we’re reading for two and a half weeks.

Pinksy's American Milton

This morning I read in Slate Pinksly’s “The American John Milton: The Poet and the Power of Extraordinary Speech” with qualified pleasure. In this essay, Pinsky argues for greater appreciation of what I see as the most significant quality of poesis, the ability to make language strange or new. But I’m a bit amused by his choice of vehicle for that: iambic pentameter and inverted or convoluted syntax.

First citing lines of Milton that are indeed powerful, he moves to Ginsberg and to Dickinson, both poets who can be read from some angles, and with blinkers on, as formalists in the sense that neo-formalists would like to apply. He mentions Williams and discuss Pound as poets pushing for a “plain speech” form that betrays the remarkable abilities to make language new.

But the picture is much more complex. Granted, I think Robert Duncan is correct in The HD Book when he suggests that Williams and Pound down-played the strangeness of poetic language in order to appear manly. But both poets wrote verse that was very odd, very much not “plain speech.” I would even argue that the plain speech efforts of Williams like “The Red Wheelbarrow” are in themselves extremely strange:

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens

Even if that were rendered as a single prose sentence, it would still be remarkably odd. But the line breaks make it even more so, make a point about poesis. That “depends / upon” points up the meaning of word depend, to hang down from, as all the other words in that formal slot similarly hang down from the conditions modifying them: a barrow that is red with a wheel, water from rain, chickens that are white—all dependencies in both senses.

Further, as Ron Silliman has recently remarked, this poem occurs in a prose matrix in Spring and All that is at times very strange, but which also offers clear statements contradicting both Williams’s statements about the necessity of the American vernacular to a poet and Pinksy’s generalizations about Williams’s poetry, as for example: “poetry: new form dealt with as reality itself.”

Still, Pinksy’s essay offers a useful corrective to freshman students who bemoan the difficulty or peculiarity of poetic language. But still more I think do these students’ own efforts at poetry belie such concerns, for I often find them pushing their own language toward oddness and eccentricity in an effort to make it clear that they are capable of creating a reality of their own.

Despite what I say, or Pinksy, or even Williams and Pound, the pleasure of language play will remain fundamental to the use of language. And this will always emerge even in the dullest bodies of poetry.

Free (adj./v) Research

The article title almost says it all: “Free Academic Articles Get Read But Don't Generate More Citations” (ScienceDaily). Research has found that a scientific research article made freely available will be read more often than its peers distributed via traditional methods. But it won’t be cited more often. Basically the writers of science research are behaving responsibly with their research; they don’t cite the low-hanging fruit but the best articles for their purpose.

This leads me to wonder when people in the humanities will finally stop killing trees. I have four hard copies of journals staring me in the face as I write this. Of those, three are available online. Though I have the hard copies of these three—all special issues on poets I’m writing about right now—I prefer to use the PDFs I have on my laptop. It’s easier to take notes from them with cut and paste. I can highlight them using the reader software. My computer indexes their contents, so I can search through them if I’ve forgotten the source of a good phrase or citation. But most importantly, they’re always there on my hard drive, and when I work in a coffee shop, at my desk at home, or at my desk at school, I don’t have to worry about not having them.

Yep, I still go to the trouble to dig up the hard-to-find items, but I’m grateful for the electronic copies, and it’s sad that I have to have a university paying for my access to them. Maybe someday that ship will come in.

Another change that I’d like to see: no more of those “books” published for tenure that are a collection of “chapters” that are nothing more than edited versions of articles that have already appeared elsewhere. How, exactly, is that a better use of energy than pursing new writing? Those books are becoming less easy to access than the articles in the journals from which they come.

Maybe instead of acting like a bunch of dinosauria, we could satisfy the publication requirements of tenure based on how often our work is cited, instead of on these collections of recycled journal articles and retreaded dissertations.