Several thoughts on Aimee's post.
On who is posting or not... I thought about counting up who has posted and how many times and then decided against it. In part because last semester I realized that some people can't handle the blog and doing it makes them tense and then they get mean sometimes. And then I thought several things. 1. It isn't that hard for people to do the blog and so I don't feel bad asking people to do it a few times (and I do think everyone should take some risks in terms of talking to others; it is just the generous and kind thing to go). 2. I don't want to torture people who can't handle doing it regularly so I don't want to mandate regular participation. 3. It is graduate school and everything about graduate school is optional. One has the right to barely engage if one wants to. But also because it is graduate school, everyone has the skills to take back the blog if they don't like how it is going because everyone is an adult. However if anyone feels disempowered, I encourage them to come by my office and talk about it.
Also, I highly encourage students to socially pressure each other to post. And to also switch conversations. I'd love to see a blog takeover.
Why the smirk about Mills community? Is it b/c institutional community is smirk-y and silly, transitional and necessarily complex? Or some other reason?
I think several things about page and stage.
1. My favorite page and stage poets today are: Tracie Morris, Edwin Torres, and Cecilia Vicuna. Tomorrow, who knows who my favorites will be. Of these, Cecilia's work has the most page meaning to me. I haven't seen Tracie Morris do anything with the page that gets at the wonderfulness of her stage. Edwin sometimes gets it on the page; sometimes baffles me. (Which reminds me that I want to put on reserve one of his "essays.")
2. As a critic, I'm interested in issues of the institution and performance/slam/spoken word poetry. Several times at job interviews I've been asked, so what do you do when someone writes a slam poem? I'm fascinated by how this sort of poem is supposed to be an institutional problem. (Also interesting is that when I first went out of on job market the question was, what do you do when someone writes a language poem? how do you help them edit it? and this question seems to have gone away in the last 10 years and be replaced by this slam poem question. Unrelated, once someone asked me what I would do if someone wrote a poem about a cat; a question with an agenda that still puzzles me.)
I'm interested in how a series of articles about the death of poetry came out in the national media (Dana Gioia's book was just one) at the exact same moment that performance/slam/spoken word poetry was thriving in bars across the nation.
I'm interested in how this poetry has had an easier time entering into the secondary schools than into the post-secondary schools. And wondering what that means.
I'm interested in watching it as it slowly enters post-secondary schools and wondering whether it will change the poetics and/or the pedagogies of the colleges and universities as it enters. (Also interesting comparison with language poetry which has fairly recently entered syllabi and english departments and has somewhat changed things and somewhat not.)
I'd love to hear other people's favorite page/stage moments.
On who is posting or not... I thought about counting up who has posted and how many times and then decided against it. In part because last semester I realized that some people can't handle the blog and doing it makes them tense and then they get mean sometimes. And then I thought several things. 1. It isn't that hard for people to do the blog and so I don't feel bad asking people to do it a few times (and I do think everyone should take some risks in terms of talking to others; it is just the generous and kind thing to go). 2. I don't want to torture people who can't handle doing it regularly so I don't want to mandate regular participation. 3. It is graduate school and everything about graduate school is optional. One has the right to barely engage if one wants to. But also because it is graduate school, everyone has the skills to take back the blog if they don't like how it is going because everyone is an adult. However if anyone feels disempowered, I encourage them to come by my office and talk about it.
Also, I highly encourage students to socially pressure each other to post. And to also switch conversations. I'd love to see a blog takeover.
Why the smirk about Mills community? Is it b/c institutional community is smirk-y and silly, transitional and necessarily complex? Or some other reason?
I think several things about page and stage.
1. My favorite page and stage poets today are: Tracie Morris, Edwin Torres, and Cecilia Vicuna. Tomorrow, who knows who my favorites will be. Of these, Cecilia's work has the most page meaning to me. I haven't seen Tracie Morris do anything with the page that gets at the wonderfulness of her stage. Edwin sometimes gets it on the page; sometimes baffles me. (Which reminds me that I want to put on reserve one of his "essays.")
2. As a critic, I'm interested in issues of the institution and performance/slam/spoken word poetry. Several times at job interviews I've been asked, so what do you do when someone writes a slam poem? I'm fascinated by how this sort of poem is supposed to be an institutional problem. (Also interesting is that when I first went out of on job market the question was, what do you do when someone writes a language poem? how do you help them edit it? and this question seems to have gone away in the last 10 years and be replaced by this slam poem question. Unrelated, once someone asked me what I would do if someone wrote a poem about a cat; a question with an agenda that still puzzles me.)
I'm interested in how a series of articles about the death of poetry came out in the national media (Dana Gioia's book was just one) at the exact same moment that performance/slam/spoken word poetry was thriving in bars across the nation.
I'm interested in how this poetry has had an easier time entering into the secondary schools than into the post-secondary schools. And wondering what that means.
I'm interested in watching it as it slowly enters post-secondary schools and wondering whether it will change the poetics and/or the pedagogies of the colleges and universities as it enters. (Also interesting comparison with language poetry which has fairly recently entered syllabi and english departments and has somewhat changed things and somewhat not.)
I'd love to hear other people's favorite page/stage moments.
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