Re allen's:
>i suspect this begins to be about what group of people are being educated
>or what is education? who is it and where are they? in a position after
>'A' levels or after GCSE or is it later than that? is this already too
>late? how old were you when you got excited by poetry and how did that
>happen? were you at the university interview for Enlish Lit and had
>never read a poem you weren't asked to?
One of the reasons i wanted to say that i 'was re-educated at Highgate
School and then self-educated' was out of a sense of differing intiatives
regarding
education in one lives. How there are the state impositions, the family and
peer constructions and conventions, the traumatic events, the personal
initiatives. All differing and all embracing divergent trajectories. This
is a brief personal blast by way of illustration.
I got the usual run of "O" and "A" level writing stuff (given to me as
poetry, prose and journalism - distinctions which make little sense, i
call it writing) - Chaucer (Canterbury Tales), Shakespeare (King
Lear,Richard and Henry Plays with heavy emphasis on character of Falstaff),
Wordsworth, Keats, Manley Hopkins, promotional school reading visits from
Ted Hughes, John Betjamin and Dannie Abse. Bits of twentieth century came
as Auden, Macniece, Larkin, Plath.
Leaving school at 16 meant lingering long in the bookshops, combing the
shelves. Pulling out every title and carding its syntactical textures -
getting drawn into Shelley (then Trelawny), via Thomas Love Peacock to de
Nerval and then Lautreamont, Jarry, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Hans Arp.
Curious to relate it was at the Polytechnic of Central London Conferences
in October 1974 - the second of the two, (seeing Bunting read with
MacDiarmid alongside Ken Smith, Andrew Crozier, Thomas A Clark, Paul Evans,
Jim Burns, Lee Harwood, Harry Guest, Mike Shayer, John James, Gael
Turnbull, John Hall and Paul Brown for the record - male bait or what!)
and then an Arvon Foundation thing (now Hughes had figured a thing or thwo
about education), run by Eric Mottram and Jeff Nuttall with Bill Griffiths
as a guest reader, when i was nineteen, that i first made contact with a
British community that excited me. I was lucky, you might argue with this,
in being invited to the Tuesday workshops at the Poetry Society run by Bob
Cobbing where i met PC Fencott, Lawrence Upton, Allen Fisher, Sean O
Huigin, Steve Clews, Paula Claire, Jeremy Adler (yet more) and many others.
The rest as they say should have been don't give up the day job, but i did
and here i am.
Point is, points of entry need to be made available. In my experience the
most useful was personal contact - workshops, readings, conferences,
courses - above books. The books almost came as momentos of the people.
Now there's a can of worms. But it's true for me. Knowing that i was
meeting up to swap poems with others who i respected the coming week or
whatever, spurred me to write. They were forms of exchange, objects of
discourse, gifts, foci for social behaviour, loci of communication going
beyond the gaze of the spoken.
Institutions present other difficulties of reification. They are places for
the sharpening of critique and abreaction. They are there to be engaged
with and opposed as bastions of the power structure. Just as any politician
has been corrupted by the conventions of power in even accepting to stand
for the sham of our gauze called democracy in this country, so any
educational institution (and yes, i do teach in some as well) survives
because it has been co-opted into the edifice of imposing constraint onto
people at moments of their most open inducements and vulnerable foraging.
What continues to bug me is the lack of defiance, of obstruction, of
opposition, of obfuscation, of outright curiosity in too many of the
students in those places where i do teach - i can't speak for elsewhere.
The job of teaching is to render yourself redundant.
love and love
cris
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