Preface - Electronic Poetry Center

d’appui). It is easier for students to sidestep it and get rewarded for translating
theory instead (for many younger academics) or (in art history) to do
iconography and annotation and cataloguing (for older academics). There is
resistance to taking time and space for the specifics of a "work" from both
directions (new & old, so to speak). Radical and Subversive is what it may well
be in 1995 to do close, intimate reading.
Call it perhaps "description", description of artworks. "Describe a picture", as
an exercise for students, immediately raises the problems barely sketched
above. It is probably impossible to specify with any precision (the too many
variables in communication processes, Sandra Braman?) how to do this
exercise. Lack of specification is interesting: it allows for students to determine
specifications in the actual occasion of writing. (This kind of work is best
carried out as far as possible from university grade systems, because the
protocols for description are so unspecific).