TextSpace

I missed responding last week, but I’ll respond to both here as I believe Enzensberger and Auden are related.

Enzensberger didn’t use the word, but I am always taken that literary theory often ‘interrogates’ a text, which is the concept he had me thinking throughout. And although he doesn’t offer any solutions to allowing students to choose their poetry versus academic measure (and after thinking about the class discussion), I don‘t expect any solutions.

In a personal context, an “extreme reader response” (Sherwood) is fine--people can agree to disagree (or fight it out) and walk away. But in an educational context, the relationship between teacher and student requires an assessment/grade, and I can’t think of a way around this necessary evil; interpreting poetry seems to be such a personal act which ideally should be above judgment.

This “freedom” to interpret can be brought through Auden as the freedom to express (I think the writing bug is more about expression than creation). Why writing? It’s typically is low tech (pencil, paper), copying is relatively cheap (to a point, if distributing is a goal), and one high tech step (computer and internet) gets around print copy and distribution entirely. On this last one, it is incredible the amount of writing that occurs online: the amount of time people spend contributing to blogs (us), personal websites, Amazon reviews, in-depth product reviews, Wikipedia entries, etc (and anything where an opinion is requested). Combine writing with poetry as perhaps the most personal form of expression (especially ambiguous works), along with it being elitist (or perceived as such, like appreciaters of classical music) and often subversive or at least challenging (a catch-22 may be that poetry as a more popular, lucrative field would destroy its power; and the ratio of co-opted poetry would be larger), and I can see why Auden would hold poets as relatively pure (and difficult to manage).

Also on Auden, I liked the connection between the illiterate peasant and the poet, and although they may have similar reservations about authority, the perspective may be different (not that Auden implies the following): suspicions may develop from not enough knowledge of a system, the other from too much knowledge of system (and the middle having just enough knowledge and apathy to participate successfully); regretfully, my immediate thought was that it would be the poet who would have too much knowledge (assuming here a keen eye), but a poet may be as naïve to a situation as the “peasant” is wise.

These were two of my favorite readings; very nice to end on.

I’ll miss reading the blog entries. Take care everyone!

Tino