Oh look, it's Dietrich

I'm preparing an intro to lit syllabus for college freshmen, and I'm wondering whether to include this. After all, it's in the reader. Question is, will they get it? Will they be insulted? And do I care? :)


JOHN & MARY
by Stephen Dunn

John and Mary had never met. They were like two
hummingbirds who also had never met.
-from a freshman's short story

They were like gazelles who occupied different
grassy plains, running in opposite directions
from different lions. They were like postal clerks
in different zip codes, with different vacation time,
their bosses adamant and clock-driven.
How could they get together?
They were like two people who couldn't get together.
John was a Sufi with a love of the dervish,
Mary of course a Christian with a curfew.
They were like two dolphins in the immensity
of the Atlantic, one playful,
the other stuck in a tuna net --
two absolutely different childhoods!
There was simply no hope for them.
They would never speak in person.
When they ran across that windswept field
toward each other, they were like two freight trains,
one having left Seattle at 6:36 p.m.
at an unknown speed, the other delayed
in Topeka for repairs.
The math indicated that they'd embrace
in another world, if at all, like parallel lines.
Or merely appear kindred and close, like stars.

Current university as consumer haven.

Some highlights:

How I feel in class every day:
"Too often now the pedagogical challenge is to make a lot from a little. Teaching Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey," you ask for comments. No one responds. So you call on Stephen. Stephen: "The sound, this poem really flows." You: "Stephen seems interested in the music of the poem. We might extend his comment to ask if the poem's music coheres with its argument. Are they consistent? Or is there an emotional pain submerged here that's contrary to the poem's appealing melody?" All right, it's not usually that bad. But close. One friend describes it as rebound teaching: they proffer a weightless comment, you hit it back for all you're worth, then it comes dribbling out again. Occasionally, a professor will try to explain away this intellectual timidity by describing the students as perpetrators of postmodern irony, a highly sophisticated mode. Everything's a slick counterfeit, a simulacrum, so by no means should any phenomenon be taken seriously. But the students don't have the urbane, Oscar Wilde-type demeanor that should go with this view. Oscar was cheerful, funny, confident, strange. (Wilde, mortally ill, living in a Paris flophouse: "My wallpaper and I are fighting a duel to the death. One or the other of us has to go.") This generation's style is considerate, easy to please, and a touch depressed."

The value of genius:
"A world uninterested in genius is a despondent place, whose sad denizens drift from coffee bar to Prozac dispensary, unfired by ideals, by the glowing image of the self that one might become. As Northrop Frye says in a beautiful and now dramatically unfashionable sentence, "The artist who uses the same energy and genius that Homer and Isaiah had will find that he not only lives in the same palace of art as Homer and Isaiah, but lives in it at the same time." We ought not to deny the existence of such a place simply because we, or those we care for, find the demands it makes intimidating, the rent too high."

Today's teaching was a lot more inspiring. For whatever reason, the kids in the first class were engaged and ready to work. They summarized, they analyzed, they inferred. Look! I almost said to them. You just thought critically! It's a great feeling when you're writing on the board and they just keep throwing up suggestions for what the purpose of Cisneros' essay might be. It's even more thrilling when they start disagreeing with each other, then seeing how they might all be right.

My second class wasn't as great - they're all afternoon-tired at 2:30 and need to be really impressed in order to participate - but I was riding the wave from the first class, and managed to make my way through this one, and by the middle of it, they were saying interesting things too.

Not to mention that I feel scads better today. I'm all energetic and shit. It's weird. I wonder what I'm allergic to!