Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

From: Tenney Nathanson
Subject: Close Reading
talkin’ bout my generation, I guess, but: re: close reading, and who unlearns,
supposedly, what they learned as undergraduates, and so on. (I don’t mean to
rant but): after teaching poetry/theory grad courses the last few years, I finally
decided to cash in on a gathering hunch and teach, at the grad level, the kind of
course I sometimes offer at u.g. level and that used to be offered all the time:
"close reading" that is. I’m having a great time (some students are, some
probably aren’t) but so far the results are pretty staggering. We’re doing the
course as a workshop, in which a poem and its explication, xeroxed in advance,
are discussed concurrently. And (to me) it’s just staggering what the generally
bright and able students don’t have a clue about and don’t (yet) by and large
have much knack at all for doing. Just on the very basic level of poem as
speech act or Burkean symbolic action; or when it comes to thinking about
trope as somehow functional in a reasonably sophisticated way: it’s a great big
blank by and large (w/a couple of stunningly smart exceptions). I dunno
whether it was always that way (that is, contra Richards, whether no matter
how many classes everyone takes basically 10% of the people have an ear and
the other 90% can’t buy one) or not, but I suspect that not so much
deconstruction & all as cultural studies is partly responsible. I don’t mean it as
a discipline (or non discipline) so much as how it gets filtered into the
brainpans of the undergraduates who end up applying, at least, to Arizona,
where the students are quite good but it’s obviously not Berkeley, say. Even at
the next level up–reading the essays on poetry that come in to Arizona
Quarterly, say, it’s really just themes themes themes.
So this doesn’t continue to sound like only a dispeptic rant, I guess I’d want to
say that the course is a whole lot of fun (for me anyway), that I intend to offer it
every couple of years, and that I think the old close-reading staple has pretty
much disappeared from the u.g. curriculum and needs re-instating. But it really
is astonishing to me, still, the extent to which grad students in the course write
essays/explications tht have virtually nothing to do w wht I understand reading
poetry to involve. must be time to power down here.