I was disheartened this morning to hear from Gwendolyn Alley that the Spoken Word Salon poetry series at Zoey’s I attended and enjoyed so much last week has been cancelled. As I mentioned on the Ojai Post, Gwendolyn has been hosting this series as part of her English 1A composition class. Apparently a student complained about the series, and the administration decided that it should no longer be part of the class (which means Gwendolyn will be teaching in a classroom setting on the third Thursday of each month and therefore unable to continue hosting the series). These are the facts of the situation as best as I have understood them.
My response is first, of course, that I am sorry for Gwendolyn that something she has put her heart into for the past five years has come to such an abrupt halt. Beyond this, however, I am surprised that on the basis of a student complaint this teaching format has been so unceremoniously scrapped. Ironically, after the reading last week I told Gwendolyn how deeply impressed I was that her Spoken Word Salon seemed to be a such creative way to benefit both students and the community.
And so, I am surprised and a bit disheartened to hear that the administration has decided that exposing students to poetry in this way should not be part of the English 1A curriculum. It seems to me that poetry is often regarded as a either a soft or inaccessible art, suitable for either mushy sing-song verse or Pulitzer Prize winners, but certainly not for ordinary undergraduates still learning to string words, sentences, paragraphs, and pages together into a cohesive line of thought. As far as I’m concerned, the highest aim of learning to write well is actually poetry, and I would have been honored and amazed to be in a class like this one as an undergraduate.
I am sad, too, to hear that poetry has been sidelined in this way as inappropriate to the supposedly more important objectives of prose. Personally, I think the nature of poetry as a sometimes vulnerable, moving and intimate form often threatens people whereas prose does not. And so poetry, if we let it, can be easily dismissed on other grounds as inappropriate. It is, in fact, appropriate to our very humanity.
Most of all, I am sad to know that Gwendolyn has gone out of her way to give a meaningful experience to these students, to foster in them not only syntax but creative expression, and that this seems to have been highly undervalued. I can not help but think of Robin Williams’ character in the by turns maudlin and poignant Dead Poet’s Society, who likewise set out to teach students about something more than just words on a page and was likewise discouraged by academia. I don’t know if her students will stand up on their desks to salute Ms. Alley’s efforts. But I, for one, applaud her and have been inspired by her example.
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4 Comments
Oh, that is a pity. One squeak of a wheel and the whole bus up on blocks. Firefighting management style at its typical.
American education has entered an age of High Instrumentalism. There is a war against subtlety going on, too, along with a profound distrust of unsanitized emotion. And the administrator is an idiot who knows nothing about writing. There is a strong current, even at Clarkson where I teach, that says students aren’t learning to write unless they are learning to write technical reports, or at least Expository Prose. Fortunately, I have tenure & so my freshmen still read poetry. Fortunately for them, I mean.
I don’t claim to know all the details of the situation, but it certainly sounds like a single student complaint may have indeed stopped a positive, creative act of generosity on the part of this outstanding poet and teacher. Education seems to be more and more highly allergic to controversy of any kind these days, and more and more focused on standardized rote approaches. Yet an experience like the reading I heard last week is infinitely more educational and stimulating than a lecture. Inspiration has always lead meaningful learning by awakening the senses to the new. Take the poetry out of language, and there’s nothing left to care about in the mechanical act of learning grammar and structure.
I think the nature of introductory English classes as required for all disciplines makes it the focal point of attacks on subtlety. But to me it seems especially important if a student’s academic exposure to the literary arts is to begin and end in this course that they be given at least the opportunity to catch the inspiration of what writing is all about. The poetry makes it human, and I honestly think that scares some people. Take it out entirely, however, and the impact on society is a far more scary prospect.