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You have, Ken. I think I've been luckier, at a somewhat 'higher' institution, but I do remember thinking that bp would have been very happy at the,not at all best student in the class on innovative Canadian writing who chose the martyrology as her favorite book on the coursre & gave as her reason, 'You could feel the love pouring out of every page.' Yeah, she wasn't into theory, but she was going to stay with that book.... Doug On 12-Aug-09, at 7:55 AM, Kenneth Wolman wrote: > But I got a paper from a young lady, and it shocked me. She had > complained all semester that poetry is draggy and depressing and > filled with loss and death (you think I was going to argue with > truth?). But she took Berrigan's sonnet and it lit her up. She got > to this: > > The cooling > wind keeps blow- > ing and my poems are coming. > Except at night. Then > I walk out in the bleak village and look for you. > > Something ignited this young lady. She developed an intensely > personal non-critical essay and at the end wrote down "I feel like > he was looking for me." > > How could I reply? "Where is the discussion of prosody, the place of > this sonnet in the development of the sonnet?" Or could I say as I > did "He was looking for you and you found him." Ms. K was violating > all the rules of how to write a literary essay. I told her "If you > write like this when you get back to Virginia Commonwealth, they > will crucify you." But she learned something I could not teach her: > to engage with a text at a wholly personal level, how to avoid being > stomped by The Rules, how to make poetry matter to *her*. They don't > teach that at VCU and they probably don't teach it anywhere. Even I > didn't teach it--I just let the ones who were school to write > mechanically do so, and I let the ones like Ms. K dive into risk. > > This young lady was my miracle. She more than compensated for the > "gentleman" back in 1976 who said "What the f--k do I need this for, > I've got my own sandblasting business." I don't expect another > moment like this, but that's okay. I have had my vision, haven't I? > > Ken Douglas Barbour [log in to unmask] http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/ Latest books: Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy) http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664 Wednesdays' http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html There are as many fools in the world as there are people. Sigmund Freud