Hi Chris and Doug,
Interesting links - I would like to come back to Plato and communication
in a later post, (I'm off to the Outback shortly - lighting spinifex
against the sky) but in relation to education, again from the dusty
past, that hallowed ground of my education, I offer the following from
Larkin:
"...in one sense there is no such thing as a typical poet: they all go
their own ways without reference or resemblance to each other but all
the same every age has its own particular image of poetry and its own
conditions under which poets operate...the most striking change is the
degree to which poetry has become a public event. One might almost say
it has been encouraged to become part of the entertainment world, there
has been so decided a shift towards spoken poetry, towards poetry on the
platform...for the poet this has meant that he must learn new skills; he
must grow used to microphones and television cameras and be prepared to
cultivate his personality as something that mediates between his poem
and the reader.
...not only the entertainment world, the education world also. Poetry
teaching in schools and universities no longer stops at Tennyson or
1914, it carries on up to the present with the implication that today's
poetry is as worthy of study as the poetry of the past. And this again
involves the poet. He is made welcome on the university campus as a
visiting reader or lecturer or even on a longer term basis as a resident
poet or fellow in creative writing. He is having to adapt himself to
the teaching of poetry - his own and other peoples, to finding at least
as many ideas about it as will fill a seminar hour and in addition he
may have to explain to his class how he writes it and even worse, how
they can write it too.
...danger awaits the poet on the campus. If literature is a good thing,
then exegesis and analysis can only demonstrate its goodness, and lead
to fresh and deeper ways of enjoying it. But if the poet engages in
this exegesis and analysis by becoming a university teacher, the danger
is that he will begin to assume unconsciously that the more a poem can
be analysed and therefore the more it needs to be analysed, the better
poem it is, and he may in consequence, again unconsciously, start to
write the kind of poem that is earning him a living.
But a worse danger than this for the campus poet is that by acting like
a critic he may come to think like a critic...that every new poem
somehow incorporates all poems that have gone before it and takes them a
step further...the drawback of such a notion is that it suggests that
poems are born of other poems, rather than from personal non-literary
experience and for a poet this is disastrous. He will become obsessed
with poems that are already in existence, instead of those it his
business to bring into being by externalizing and eternalizing his own
perceptions in unique and original verbal form."
Regards
maria
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