What we're doing is a bit unusual. We're satisfying an academic requirement by working within a non-academic milieu: a blog site. We're doing this for a reason.
Read any great criticism of poetry recently? I mean the kind of thing that makes you call your friends up in the middle of the night because you can't sleep for thinking about just how good that last chapter on Eliot's Four Quartets was? Me neither.
I know what you're thinking. Nobody has ever written poetry criticism that keeps you up half the night. Nobody ever will. Poetry criticism isn't cut out for that kind of performance. I wonder, though. Have you ever read, say, Randall Jarrell on Walt Whitman? Or Thom Gunn on anybody? Or Kenneth Rexroth or John Clellon Holmes on the Beats? Very good stuff, even late into the night.
The problem with much literary criticism, crippled by its battery of specialized language, concerns its target audience--other literary critics. While specialized disciplines aren't inherently evil, they are inherently obscure, and obscurity wasn't part of the public trust when the American language gave the American people American poetry. So if we stop writing for an audience that actually knows and uses words like "episteme" and "imaginaries," then we will find ourselves writing criticism that targets another audience--other readers of poetry.
Having made this decision, we will find that our burden is great. We will have to write essays about poems that live and breathe in a world where people either don't have time to read anymore or don't want to read anymore. This is where the blog site is useful. Here, your essays will be read by your classmates, your peers, and maybe a fireman in Grand Rapids or a nurse in Nashville. Keep this in mind as you read these poems and write your essays.
It's difficult to write about poetry as if poetry's health and welfare depended upon what you wrote, but it might well have come to that. It's always good to know what you're up against. The NEA (National Endowment for the Arts) has been surveying the reading habits of Americans for some time now, and they've posted their results online. Before you write a word, you need to look at all three reports, downloadable in pdf: "To Read or Not to Read;" "The Arts and Civic Engagement;" and "Reading at Risk." Thirty-four, heavily graphed and illustrated pages. Not a problem.
With those numbers in mind, I want to know what you have to say about the poems we're reading over the next few months. And I want to see how you're going to say it because how is style, and style is everything.
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