For Love of Humanities and Arts
In this second of three chapters on love of subject, we explore how students and teachers experience learning in the arts and humanities. The poems raise questions about how to balance analysis, criticism and creativity in the teaching of literature, how
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FOR LOVE OF HUMANITIES AND ARTS
In this second of three chapters on love of subject, we explore how students and teachers experience learning in the arts and humanities. The poems raise questions about how to balance analysis, criticism and creativity in the teaching of literature, how teachers sustain themselves through the piles and piles of student work they must read and comment on, and the limitations of the canon and canonical ways of reading and writing.
155
Chapter 8
JONATHAN BLAKE
Ars Poetica Hibiscus blossoms and the flower Of the moon. Church bells echo Into a village stillness far below. Tonight my students ask, ‘But what is poetry?’ How do I tell them About the quiet in the heart, Wind stirring the trees, My wife and I together On the porch, no words Between us, happy For what grows fragrant In the dark. Previously published in Vermont Literary Review
156
For Love of Humanities and Arts
MYRA SCHNEIDER
Killing Chaucer The professor’s gown hung in jags trailing loose threads, its black crumple cobwebbed with years. The professor’s hair was wool of sheep gone wild but her mind, neither wild nor woolly, was as much to the point as her eyes, two glinting needles embedded above dry-pouch cheeks in a landscape rich with bony peaks. The professor’s voice rapped Wordsworth on the knuckles for barely scraping a degree at University. As for Chaucer – she clamped his complete works to her wooden table and dissected set texts with scalpel precision, nailing meanings, digging out Middle-English variants, cataloguing borrowings from Boccaccio and the Bible till no original line was visible. The professor beamed at her students, satisfied with the morass of pencilled notes her penetration and massive scholarship had produced, but Chaucer who wrote of love with infinite compassion, Chaucer who painted the field of human nature in all its subtle variety, Chaucer who stooped to smile at pink-tipped daisies on his walks, was de-petalled, sliced from his green stalk. Previously published in Insisting on Yellow (Enitharmon Press, 2000)
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Chapter 8
JANET McCANN
No When the visiting scholar tells my class this is what the poem means, I want to say no, it does not mean that. There is nothing unreasonable about his conclusions, but that is what’s wrong: they conclude. I feel doors slamming down the hallway of his voice, and soon he will leave us alone in the clean swept corridor, watching the solemn paired plaques in their frames, and I say no, no, the poem spills out of this hall, over the landscape, scatters over the lawns and cars, resonates in the hedges, and when I leave after the crisp precise voice answers the last question, after the punch and cardboard cookies (students; friends), all that will be left will be poem.
Commentary. I’m kind of an open, 70’s sort of prof; the visiting professor I brought into my class definitely was not. 158
For Love of Humanities and Arts
RONALD J. PELIAS
Lessons Not wanting to bore, I begin: Diction dictates how words should behave, delivered precise, washed crysta
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