Serendipity35

SCENE ONE

I went to hear Sharon Olds give a poetry reading at Seton Hall University. I have heard her read a number of times. The first time was about 20 years ago and she seemed pretty radical at that time. But the mostly student audience didn't see her that way at all. Olds commented that they were "very polite" as they sat impassively with almost no applause. I'm sure many of them were there because they were required to attend by a professor. There were those scribbling notes and a good number in front of me text-messaging or reading/surfing the Net on their Blackberries.

In 2005, First Lady Laura Bush invited Olds to the National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., but Olds didn't attend.

Instead, she wrote Laura Bush an open letter that was published in the The Nation. Here's part of the letter:

I tried to see my way clear to attend the festival in order to bear witness--as an American who loves her country and its principles and its writing--against this undeclared and devastating war.

But I could not face the idea of breaking bread with you. I knew that if I sat down to eat with you, it would feel to me as if I were condoning what I see to be the wild, highhanded actions of the Bush Administration.

That still seems subversive to me.

If you read some poems by Olds, I don't know if you'll see a poet that was raised as a Calvinist kid in the 1950s, came to poetry in the 60s and didn't publish a book of poetry until she was 38. I commented to Pat sitting next to me that the poems didn't sound radical at all. Who or what changed? Sharon Olds, poetry, the world or me? (I know the answer: all of the above.)

SCENE TWO

After I got home from the reading, I went to my book shelves to find my her books and found nearby an old copy of Teaching As a Subversive Activity by Neil Postman and Charles Weingartner.

That was a fairly new book that was assigned reading for me in one of the first education classes I took as an undergrad at Rutgers back in the early 1970's.

As the title suggests, the book was meant to be subversive. What was so radical about it? They suggested an experimental approach to education where creativity and questioning trumps pouring information into students. It was like the quote on the Albert Einstein poster that has followed me from my dorm to my classroom to several offices including my current one: "Imagination is more important than knowledge."

It was about as radical as Socrates, but it did feel subversive then compared to the educational theories I was getting in the classroom that seemed out of touch even with own hardly-progressive secondary education of the four previous years. My schooling was a Cartesian view of learning: knowledge as a thing; teaching as the transfer of knowledge.

I liked the book and read several other Neil Postman books in later years. Postman wanted high school students to shape their own studies around their interests - back then, that would have meant lots of movies (Of course, I was using actual 16mm movies in my classroom, no VHS yet) and today I guess they would design all Net, videos, DVDs and downloadable content.The authors suggested a five year moratorium on textbooks, no more tests, and the end of requirements. There was also perspectivalism (Remember your Nietzsche?)

I think what impressed me/us thirty years ago was that it asked us to question our purpose as teachers and the methods we would use to teach.

The book now seems rather naive. But the book and Sharon Olds' poetry also still seems subversive to me - and I am feeling pretty old and sort of cynical today.

Sharon Olds introduced this poem as her response at an NEA event to a request for her to read a "patriotic poem."

"Topography"

After we flew across the country we
got in bed, laid our bodies
delicately together, like maps laid
face to face, East to West, my
San Francisco against your New York, your
Fire Island against my Sonoma, my
New Orleans deep in your Texas, your Idaho
bright on my Great Lakes, my Kansas
burning against your Kansas your Kansas
burning against my Kansas, your Eastern
Standard Time pressing into my
Pacific Time, my Mountain Time
beating against your Central Time, your
sun rising swiftly from the right my
sun rising swiftly from the left your
moon rising slowly from the left my
moon rising slowly from the right until
all four bodies of the sky
bum above us, sealing us together ,
all cities twin cities,
all our states united, one
nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.