I'm going to teach creative writing for the first time this spring. One of the reasons I've never taught it is because I didn't know how to grade poems. You have to be fairly certain, and give students something to aim at when you allot grades. Otherwise, they might get mad. After all, a grade means they can either get into the Nursing program or they can't. It might mean the difference between going to a good graduate school or bagging groceries.
Poetry is human, and poetry is therefore not robotic. Poetry is spontaneous & lyrical, evincing emotion and peculiarity with universality. Every good poem is absolutely new & yet feels like it has always been around.
The Turing Test was a test to see how well computers could mimic language w/o being sussed out as robotic.
(In reverse, Schwarzenegger is a human who has to pass himself off as a robot, and a robot who tries to pass himself off as human in the Terminator Series -- mimicking both kinds of intelligence in an uncanny dance of hybridity.)
Grading poems I look for qualities I consider human -- deep feeling, honesty, oddness (I generally vote for JH in our poetry contests, except when his friend Sally writes. She's better than JH because her poems are more down to earth, since she is a geologist).
Aaron Belz teaches at a Christian University near Los Angeles. He is a Christian but his poetry comes out of an Ashbery-esque tradition that borders on nonsense. Here's what he has to say about grading poems:
"I don't issue grades for creative work per se. The assessment loop takes
place through discussion, self-critique, participation, and final portfolio (which does earn a technical grade). There's no way I can see assigning a
grade letter or number to a creative piece. Whitman's poems seemed like
street debris in their day; now we see them for the beach trash they really
are!" -- AB
Kookamonga AB continues (his is the smaller image up top if you're wondering):
"They're all [students] made in God's image; each one is full of wonder. No sense in
indoctrinating them with New Critical standards that stress "concrete image"
over argument. You might be silencing the next Boris Pasternak. Try to imagine teaching this course in 1910 and basically working with principles
derived from Browning and Tennyson. It's just as bad to reflect modernist
values now. We poetry teachers should leave almost every possibility
available. I mean, I wouldn't even bias a classroom of 3rd and 4th graders.
You just want to give them a blank page and a lot of encouragement. Read
and discuss a variety of canonical examples, too---from multiple centuries.
Reflect passion. Encourage them to imitate."
AB
I objected:
Aaron, my students are young nurses and plumbers who are also taking a
creative writing class. This isn't an MFA class!
I'm so confused. I thought there would be a consensus!
This is not what Tom Hunley said!
Love, Kirby
Here's what Tom Hunley said. Tom Hunley teaches poetry at Western Kentucky University:
"My students and I negotiated a co-authored rubric one semester. Here it
is:
Grading Criteria for Poetry Portfolios
The following 10-point scale will be used to judge your poetry portfolios.
10 points = A+
9.5 points = A
9 points = A-
8.5 points = B
8 points = B-
7.5 points = C
7 points = C-
5-6.5 points = D
Below 5 points = F
1. The primary language of the poem should be English. Certain phrases
that could enhance the poem if in another language could be acceptable.
2. The poems exhibit evidence of considerable revision.
3. The poem is written in complete sentences, using proper grammar and
standard punctuation. Any deviation from standard grammar must come in dialogue
and/or must be clearly done intentionally and for a specific purpose. Grammatical
errors, whether intentional or not, do not make the poem unreadable or distract
from its meaning.
4. Spelling and capitalization must be used appropriately. You are not sending
text messages (unless one of your poems is in the form of a text message, which
might be kind of cool).
5. The poems use images, concrete language, and figures of speech rather
than wallowing in abstractions, generalizations, and various techniques better
suited to analytical prose. Show, don¹t tell.
6. The poet draws on an excellent lexicon and writes as though each word
cost $1,000. Word choice is both precise and fresh.
7. The poet has control of the poetic line. A poem is not simply broken
off prose. Do you use the poem¹s line to modulate the speed of the poem? Are you
choosing your end words for emphasis?
8. The poem should be clear. If there are allusions and references in the
poem, they are either clear in context or readily accessible via the magic of modern
technology (Wikipedia, Google, etc.). Private jokes and ³you-had-to-be-there²
references are absent.
9. The packet includes at least one poem that displays mastery over a
traditional form or meter (portfolio #2) or over a sophisticated type of free verse such as projective verse, thought rhyme, or figures of repetition (portfolio #1).
10. Free verse poems in the packet demonstrate the poet¹s skill with sound
effects including, but not limited to, assonance, consonance, onomatopoeia, internal
rhyme, anaphora, and alliteration."
TO WHICH BELZ REPLIES:
>>>> No, that's bad stuff. You really shouldn't bias your young poets away from
>>>> abstraction, messiness, inexplicable line endings, irrational goofiness or
>>>> maudlin drowsiness, etc. This assumes that a poem is a kind of machine that
>>>> can be designed well. It's a New Critical bias and has its good points,
>>>> don't get me wrong, but more important it represents a danger for the
>>>> budding creative mind. Bad, bad, bad. But if you have trouble helping
>>>> young people think creatively, I can see how this kind of benchmarking
>>>> system might help you cope.
>>>>
>>>> I would recommend instead the use of 19th century surrealist word-games.
>>>> Things like the exquisite corpse are great fun and help people break out of
>>>> their assumptions about how language relates to reality.
>>>>
>>>> Mostly you want students to be *conscious* of what their doing -- not
>>>> indoctrinated with one or another better way of doing it.
>>>>
>>>> AB
Both of these poets are good even famous poets. I read with the two of them once at the St. Louis Museum of Modern Art, but I am the runt of this pack of baby wolves. They both have several books out, and are both tenured profs in poetry. When they talk poetry they mean business:
Tom Hunley writes, "Could you plug my pedagogy books, while you're at it? Identify me as the author of TEACHING POETRY WRITING: A FIVE-CANON APPROACH (Multilingual Matters LTD., 2007, New Writing Viewpoints Series) and THE POETRY GYMNASIUM (forthcoming from McFarland & Co., Inc.)."
Hunley writes against Belz, getting him in a half-nelson, and pushing him across the mat, driving him onto his back, and growling:
"Aaron's got some good ideas, but (a) what "19th century surrealist games"? and (b) "what their doing"? I suppose the differences between the 19th and 20th century and between "their" and "they're" don't matter when you're trying to "break out of assumptions of how language relates to reality." The rubric isn't a be-all end-all, but it helps me dialog with students about their progress. Making them conscious about what they're doing (or not doing) is precisely the point. If rewarding students for using figurative language, concrete imagery, and sound effects, while mastering a form or two, writing clearly, laboring over word choices, and avoiding sloppy spelling/capitalization/grammar = "introctrinating students with one or another better way of doing it," than I'm guilty of "indoctrinating." Students who don't get "indoctrinated" into these basic concepts should get thier [sic] tuition dollars back, in my opinion. "A danger for the budding creative mind," really? Are these little flowers so delicate that they'll wilt if they're told to check their [sic] spelling or how to use a figure of speech or what a sestina is or how to properly break a line and then graded on how well they've done so? I don't think so. "Chance favors only the prepared mind," said Louis Pasteur, and I think Andre Breton felt the same way. If their creative minds are budding, then discipline is the water that makes them grow. With all due respect..."
Hunley continues:
"In my view, (a) there are a lot of concrete things we can teach students that will help them identify and write better poems, such as the things in my rubric; (b) if we don't grade students on their work, they won't take poetry serious as an academic discipline or a real way of looking at the world. They'll revert to thinking of poetry as something trivial, with Hallmark as the hallmark."
At any rate, I learned a lot from the conversation. First, I learned that there is a variety of ways to grade poems, just as there are a variety of ways to write poems. And I decided to reveal these emails to the students on the first day of class. And here is my solution to the grading problem:
I will tell the students that I'm like a master chef, or a master painter, and they are my apprentices. And they have to trust me when I tell them their work is good or not. I will decide how creative it is. If they're trying and turning everything in, and I see evidence of effort if not genius, that's a C. If I see evidence of effort and some sparks, that's a B. If I see genius and excellent execution, that's an A.
One thing students often want in a grade is an exact answer. They want me to ask whether Helsinki is the capital of Finland or not. If it is, and they got it right, they get an A. A robot could write and grade such answers. But with any real human interaction, when we're deciding relative excellence, like in painting, or poetry, or how nicely a cake came off, or like a political opinion, it's not so neat.
When you're grading a boyfriend or how cute someone looks, it's not like there's a checklist. But a checklist might help. When you're judging a date you might ask: did he comb his hair? Did he pay? Was the meal expensive? Did he brush his teeth? Did he use bad words? Was he polite to the waiter? Did he murder any kittens during the date? Did he stare at another girl? But someone could do all or none of these things and still get a second date, depending on the judgment of the one dated. So you have to trust that this is an art, and will be judged by an artist. If you don't like my calls, or don't trust my opinions, then you drop out of the class and take another class and badmouth me behind my back (to which I'll reply, I'm the published poet!). So what I'll have them do (the ones who stay) is develop a portfolio of seven poems or stories over the semester. If I see no genius but do see effort, that's a C. Etc. Less than excellent effort, that's a D, and if they're not turning stuff in or are just hopeless, then that's an F. Late pieces will lose a grade per day.
So, in a sense, I'm going to do something else. I'm going to grade the students, but I'm going to use how I feel about the poems. I trust my feelings.
Aaron Belz has several books of poems out, including Lovely, Raspberry! (Persea 2010). A review from Midwest Books says, "You can be philosophical without ruining someone's day."
I hope I haven't ruined either Belz's or Hunley's day. Belz already accused me of contacting him just so I could kick him around! I love both of these guys. They both said I could blog their correspondence. These are the only two poetry professors I know personally, and they're also the only two Christian poets I know with books who are younger than me, by decades, so to me they are an inspiration, and I look up to them for guidance! So if one of them decides not to speak to me any longer, I just lost half my friends in that category, and a mentor or two, too. If they both decide to hate me, I lost all my friends and mentors in the Christian university poetry teacher category at other colleges.
Which means I am an idiot. And that would be poetic justice, right?
62 comments:
ha! Tom dealt with the substance of what I said by focusing on my email-misspelling of "they're." :) I guess that's what's called a READ HAIR-RING.
To answer his question about "what games," I answered it in the next paragraph by suggesting the exquisite corpse.
This is a good exchange, Kirby, other than that. Thanks for posting it.
I liked the wide divergence of opinions. Tom misspelled their too, twice, perhaps as a postmodern comment on his critique of your misspelling.
You can never tell with poets!
Postmodern comment? Where I'm from that's called "being a punk." But my response was harsh, so it was called for.
"To answer [Tom's] question about 'what games,' I answered it in the next paragraph by suggesting the exquisite corpse."
I didn't ask the question "what games?" I asked the question "what nineteenth century games"? I was just pointing out that the exquisite corpse and other surrealist games arose in the twentieth century. We do exquisite corpses and other surrealist games from time to time in my classes (Alastair Brotchie's book SURREALIST GAMES is a decent reference) though my students and I generally get more out of the Oulipo games found in OULIPO COMPENDIUM. Also my forthcoming book, THE POETRY GYMNASIUM, consists of ninety-five invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery exercises that instructors and their students can use in class sessions. The surrealist games are invention exercises, though, and are part of a separate discussion from assessment. Aaron said I was using a red herring; he's using an either/or fallacy: either you conduct surrealist invention exercises or you grade your students. Obviously you can do both.
The rubric my students and I came up with arose from a review session of what we happened to cover during the first five weeks of class. Another class could do the same thing at the end of the fifth week or so and come up with a completely different rubric The point is to teach what you know and believe about writing, communicate it clearly, and then, unless you teach at an institution like Evergreen that doesn't require you to assign letter grades, do it in a way that continues the conversation and keeps challenging students to aspire to art. If Aaron has to assign a final grade in the class, I'm curious about what he bases it on: attendance? effort? something else? It's a class on writing, so I think it's important to grade students on writing. In addition to grading the poems, I typically have them write a book review and a formal essay about a poet, and I grade those. As for the grading method you've arrived at, Kirby, I think it encourages student to suck up to the instructor, it's frustratingly-vague for students, and you're not using assessment as an occasion for reinforcing and clarifying what you've taught throughout the term.
NB: the above comment is from Tom Hunley. He doesn't have the kind of account that lets you comment here, and asked me to post this for him. It's a slightly revised version of a previous comment. In this one, he takes me to task for a vague set of assessment criteria.
Kirby--
I haven't taught poetry in nearly a decade (though I plan to again once I get that book thing down [takers anyone? anyone? bueller?]) but when I taught (to advanced middle school students--which were oddly similar to many of my community college classmates. . .) I gave a grade that was essentially four parts:
50% for breathing.
25% for turning the work in (on time, etc.)
10% for doing everything in the assignment correctly (correct Sonnet, etc.)
15% for writing a good poem.
That way any schmo could get a B in my class just by correctly doing the assignments.
Now, for my one advanced class I think I shifted the top 50% to something like 10% for doing it and 20% each for correct and good since I expected more of my students.
"Good" is obviously subjective but so what?
Kirby asked earlier about the grading system where I be at these here days...
It's pretty simple - a few classes are pass/fail (show up, watch a movie, don't curse loudly at random times) and the rest have a broad categorization of unsatisfatory/satisfactory/excellent.
Under that, there's a list of seven areas:
Professional attitude/behavior
Collaboration
Creative Potential
Demonstrated competency
Class participation
Completed assignments
Attendance
For each of those, profs can check exceeds standards, meets standards, or requires improvement... And I guess those sort of 'add up' to ones 'overall' grade of satisfactory or excellent or unsatisfactory.
Being a conservatory, the grading system is sort of just a way to stay accredited, I s'pose, so they can hand out MFA's to justify the tuition costs.
"In December, while the public sector lost 10,000 jobs, the private sector added 113,000 jobs, the 12th consecutive month of private-sector growth"
Could someone please tell me how this does anything but wholly support my statement? Are you being sarcastic?
<--- befuddled
I guess maybe G.M. is technically talking about the fact that the first few months of obama's presidency had the extreme private-sector job-loss leftover from the Bush admin. that was mitigated later by the stimulus package etc., and so technically my statement that 'private sector jobs have increased' may not have been correct, but I could have said that since Obama took office monthly private sector job numbers have improved?
Kirby,
You're filtering comments, supposedly to keep J out. Yet J is here, and I presume through your explicit action, and with a posting that seems an unlikely candidate if the goal is rehabilitation. I'm confused.
Kirb:
You're opening a can of worms here.
There were complex involved discussions about the writing workshop system over at Silliman's blog a couple of years ago. This fellow Seth Abramson--quite a hot head at times--and a former Boston area public defender I believe--actually contracted out to advise applicants to workshop programs around the country, and had very firm and well-informed opinions about the values of workshops for writing students/aspirants. So do I.
I did a blog on the "workshop system" a while back which focused on a former graduate, Lewis Turco. You might look it up. Mr. Turco got very irritated about my using him as a whipping-boy for the problems inherent in the master/apprentice system of art instruction. My post is here:
http://compassrosebooks.blogspot.com/2009/11/in-my-sojourns-around-country-hunting.html
Whatever it is that makes art--or writing--great, can't be taught. I'm not being in the least sarcastic. You can teach method, and you can teach inspiration, but you can't teach art.
Robots can play chess, but they can't write poetry. What does that tell us about these two functions?
Brett--I thought you were talking about over all of Obama's tenure, which would be untrue.
Stu, I didn't see that. I have had a lot of kids over here and my access to the computer is relatively brief, and I must have just said publish all. I deleted his comment, and will delete all his comments even if they are good ones. He's back to baiting other commenters as Jews over on Althouse's blog.
I'm running around a lot today taking people from place to place.
Curtis--Robots can "play chess" and write poetry in exactly the same way: by being programmed by humans to do so.
The reliable statistical distribution of grades for poetry: Aaron Belz claims it can't be done "reliably" and therefore it shouldn't be done at all.
Tom Hunley on the other hand claims it can be done, and gives us what I consider to be a very specific, detailed, but somewhat unreliable set of criteria by which to do it. That is to say, Hunley's variables seem arbitrary to some degree.
In any group of 24 students (I will have two groups of 24 students) there are bound to be two or three students who are very talented no matter whether I am teaching in a community college or at a big university like The University of Washington.
There will also be two or three students at the bottom who are more or less non-functioning -- either incapacitated by a recent emotional trauma inflicted by a death in the family, or by a breakup, or some other problem.
The bell curve gives us in the middle the great masses. For them, I have proposed two globalistic impressions as the source of my grading:
1. How good is the idea
2. How good is the style
Computers cannot generate ideas. They must be programmed with ideas, and then from there, they do the numbers crunching. If you program it to look at specificity of noun (Stetson as opposed to hat) it may be able to verify a certain concreteness, but I still don't think this will identity a good poem.
What if the poem just is 50 uses of the word "Stetson" and the title is "A WESTERN: IN BLACK AND WHITE"?
Would we call that a poem, or a gimmick? I think I might give it a C+ on the basis that it's coherent, and sorta tricky, but I wouldn't feel proud of having written that poem.
There is no one technique in poetry, and great poetry often begins with a sui generis style and rises as well into unique ideas. Perhaps poetry at some level is no more than a cult of personality -- in which the poet emphasizes their uniqueness with capes and scarves, and a certain style, and by managing to maintain this style for fifty or sixty years until they are virtually imprinted on the imagination.
But there are odd bohemian characters who try this and are yet not accepted as poets, but merely as bohemian characters.
We could think of poetry as something like farming. Results in farming range from the delectable through the putrid. We have to decide which is which. A method that doesn't help us decide is bad because it's of no use. A method that gives us arbitrary results is equally of no use.
So I think the only reliable indicator is an accepted poet. Even then you have poets who will crush any poet who isn't writing as they are, and thus sees all other poets as extensions of themselves.
A good professor will create students who think for themselves and go on to do their own work in their own way.
While it is by no means clear if there is a valid checklist of specific techniques that will lead to an excellent poem, I still think Hunley's method superior to Belz's.
Belz recognizes seemingly only the avant-garde -- and is highly likely to create new species of the avant-garde, while Hunley's criteria are likely to result to a certain conformity with a pre-set criteria.
Somewhere between these two is where I wish to set up shop, so I think they were both EXTREMELY valuable.
I'm certain that Hunley and Belz do not in any way EXHAUST the possibilities of grading poetry, but they do exhaust the poets who do this kind of work who I know well enough to ask, and who probably trust me well enough to bother to respond.
If we look at the validity of their separate parameters we'd have to look at the crop variation among their own students.
I think it is highly likely that studying a number of styles, and reading thousand of pages of contemporary poetry, especially in a group setting, especially with other devoted young poets, will be highly valuable to anyone involved in the experience and will be a leg up on people without such an experience.
Unusual life experiences will also contribute to poetry: deaths, loves, travel experiences, and many others, are highly likely to contribute to the formation of individual good poems, which are in any event statistical anomalies.
All good poets have the experience of writing things that are bad, just as farmers have this experience with crop variation. But with poetry, the likelihood of a good poem resulting from any given attempt at a poem is probably about one in a hundred tries.
Can you make it higher than that?
I imagine even for canonical minor poets such as Sir John Suckling -- the experience of writing poetry was mostly an experience of crop failure.
He himself, while known, for his few funny pieces such as Out Upon It! -- browsing his collected poems and plays one is struck by the lousiness of most of his production, even among that which he chose to keep.
Most of us will be sheer lousiness, and never even have one famous poem. One famous poem in a lifetime of poetry is not bad. Corso's poem Marriage is such a poem. I have argued for the greatness of his oeuvre, in general, but this argument has largely fallen on deaf ears.
In science, one is also faced with changing paradigms. Does it mean that all scientists such as Lamarck were lousy scientists because they were working within a non-Darwinian paradigm? Lamarck was highly placed in his own time.
does it mean that science, as well, cannot reliably describe any given scientist as a good scientist because paradigms rise and fall?
When global warming comes up as a crock, if it does, will it mean all the work of a hundred thousand scientists will henceforth be considered useless?
I think we have to do the best we can do, and realize that we can never proceed with certainty. If we could only proceed with certainty we could not have children, we could not have farming, we could not have love, we could not have dinner.
You can "grade" anything and anyone.
Just make up standards and see where the cards land.
It's true that intelligence differs among individuals, but measuring it is very difficult. How do you separate the cultural from the inherent facility/capacity? It's very difficult.
Poetry is much the same. Some people may have great skill at constructing rhymes and meters and coherent statements or arguments, but none of that insures "art." Art is really beyond formulas and measurement. You can't "graph" what makes a great Shakespearean speech. It simply doesn't work.
We can point and call names, but the ability to combine and synthesize complex ideation into sparkling verse is literally inimitable.
We know a poet when we see one. Lowell, Plath, Jack Gilbert. But trying to define what makes them so is probably beyond possibility.
Kirby,
Does it mean that all scientists such as Lamarck were lousy scientists because they were working within a non-Darwinian paradigm? Lamarck was highly placed in his own time.
Lamarck had a beautiful theory. He was trying to explain the process of adaptation. His theory was that animals acquired characteristics during their lifetimes, and that these characteristics were passed along to their offspring. To give an oft-cited example, the ecological niche of giraffes involves eating leaves from high trees. Lamarck believed that by straining to reach higher leaves, giraffes actually lengthened their necks a bit, and that this lengthening accumulated over generations as it was passed from parent to offspring. This might seem ridiculous given modern knowledge about genetics, etc., but a solid understanding of how genetic information is passed from parents to children wasn't available until Watson-Crick's determination of the structure of DNA in '53. Yes, there were clues (really beginning with Mendel's work, but this was all-but-lost for much of the late 19th century).
Anyway, the difficulty in understanding how characteristics were passed from generation to generation was a fundamental difficulty for both Lamarck and Darwin. It's easy to ignore how similar the two are: both believed in evolution, the idea that species changed as they adapted to particular ecological niches, and the idea that characteristics of the parents were somehow blended in their offspring.
Beauty is relevant in assessing scientific theories, because beauty in science is synonymous with elegance, i.e., simplicity and broad applicability, and by Ockham, these are often winning characteristics.
So I'd say that Lamarck was a very good scientist. He observed the world. He made critical observations about natural life, and tried to explain with simplicity and insight why things are the way they are, and along the way became an early proponent of evolution, and he identified the crucial phenomena of adaptation and ecological niches.
Was his explanation of biological evolution correct? No. Darwin recognized that animal breeders were capable of substantial alteration of animal species by simply selecting animals that had desirable characteristics can combining them. Thus, what was causing the change wasn't characteristics acquired by individuals during their lifetime -- it was really more a matter of which individuals got to reproduce. Their characteristics were passed along, and the characteristics of those that didn't (the genetic losers) were not. Lamarck's theory doesn't explain this, Darwin's does.
So no, Lamarck wasn't a lousy scientist. He was a very good scientist, with a very beautiful theory. It's just that his theory was superseded by a better theory, i.e., a theory which was able to incorporated new observations in a way that his was not.
The funny thing about this to me is that there's a fundamentalist view that Darwin somehow started the slide into secularism, because he rejected the Bible's notion of more-or-less fixed kinds in favor of a world in which species changed as they adapted. What's funny? This is already explicit in Lamarck's work.
And it's also notable that Lamarck's theory is a good model for explaining cultural evolution in our species, and is the basis of a common argument that the reason for our species' success is that by acquiring intelligence, we were able to make the jump from Darwinian to Lamarckian evolution.
Actually, natural selection doesn't consist of "adaptivity" at all--it's the result of random mutations opportunistically captured by circumstance. Deliberate breeding was practiced before our knowledge of the mechanics of genetic inheritance was discovered, and we're still in the early stages of compiling the thread of data which is transferred at conception.
Nothing we have discovered has had any real effect on what religion tries to accomplish, which is a holistic view of universal applicability. Science incorporates each successive wave of empirical revelation. It enhances our sense of wonder, while providing a platform for the continuing evolution of our knowledge of the way things work.
There's nothing yet been discovered which makes a transcendent view of the universe any less compelling. It's only those trapped in the past, who believe that their little world view is being obsoleted. Pity them.
I quite disagree, of course, with the nuttiness of this dismal remark. Christ is the leader of all the avant-gardes: is now and ever shall be, world without end.
Actually, Kirby, if you understood what I'm saying--do you not?--you'd see that what I'm saying isn't in the least anti-religious at all.
The gist: Science hasn't shaken either the impulse to a divine agency, or the basis of belief itself. If religion tests itself against the progress of science, it's bound up in the same limitations of apprehension upon which all "knowledge" depends. Neither knowledge nor understanding are the foundations of belief.
If you're still trying to reconcile these apparent contradictions, you're living in the 19th Century. Welcome to the 21st.
The tone of your response is unnecessarily condescending. Slow down and smell the roses.
You said I'm living in the 19th century and you're a hundred years or more ahead of me. And I am the one who is condescending?
You arrogate to yourself the position of enlightenment.
On what basis?
This isn't a criticism.
Wouldn't you agree that your positions pre-date most Modernist and post-Modernist philosophical theory?
I should think that's obvious. And nothing derogatory about it whatsoever.
I'd rather be retro than avant any day.
Curtis,
Actually, natural selection doesn't consist of "adaptivity" at all--it's the result of random mutations opportunistically captured by circumstance.
I think you're conflating a few things here. Adaptation refers to the fitness of an individual for its environment. Natural selection works because fitness determines reproductive success, and this in turn influences the distribution of alleles of the descendants.
For natural selection to work, there has to be meaningful phenotypic variation (i.e., the organisms have to differ in their survival response to their environment), and this is typically driven by genotypic variation. Random mutations increase genotypic diversity, but so to do distinct ecological niches exploited by a cosmopolitan species, as well as combinatorial effects like overdominance. But my point is that species are fairly plastic even without random mutations: consider for example Chihuahuas vs. Saint Bernards. They're both dogs (which is to say, they have the same genes, and the same alleles), but certain genes have very different distributions. (Which is to say, for Saint Bernards, all size-determining genes will tend to have "make me big" alleles, whereas Chihuahuas will tend to have "make me small" alleles.) And it is this plasicity (even without introducing random mutations) that breeders take advantage of, and speciation is possible even within a purely distributional framework.
Deliberate breeding was practiced before our knowledge of the mechanics of genetic inheritance was discovered, and we're still in the early stages of compiling the thread of data which is transferred at conception.
Sure, but it wasn't recognized that deliberate breeding was relevant to understanding evolution. This was Darwin's great insight, and this is very clear if you read "Origin of Species." He starts with a long chapter on pigeons :-).
I'm not sure what you're driving at why you say "we're still in the early stages of compiling the thread of data which is transferred at conception." At this point, we have whole-organism genomes for many species, and within important species, we have a good sense of the variations that around the reference genome. I talk regularly to statistical geneticists, and they're routinely handling data sets which include thousands of individuals, multiple gene expression arrays in response to varying stimuli/disease states, and large SNP sets. This doesn't feel like early stages to me.
I don't believe in progress, I think moral ideals are eternal and universal.
Though we've "mapped" the genome sequence in many cases, we still don't understand the "trigger" genes, and how other chemical influences affect the "expression" of traits in clusters of genes. Certain genes are "dormant" while others await a trigger; these triggers are still not well understood. Apparently, lots of people carry traits which are not expressed in development, but which may become "activated" generations later as damaging mutations (disease and malformity).
I was responding to the ethical implications which some have offered regarding natural selection. Religionists have tried to incorporate or reject the assertions of Darwinism. We know that influence and behavior are not inherited; the process doesn't work that way--it happens via successful breeding, which is influenced by which individuals have greater likelihood of successful adaptation prior to and during, mating and rearing the young. Poorly adapted--or inappropriate--mutations are gradually weeded out. If we discourage mating among the mentally challenged, for instance, we might influence selection to prefer intelligence--though the time required to accomplish that is quite long in mere "historical" terms.
New efforts to alter genetic descent are destined to be frustrating. We still don't know how tampering with genetics will effect the distribution of the gene pool down the road--100, 1000 or 10000 years out. Any change must be as gradual as our experiments. Mammals aren't fruit-flies, and our ability to measure results will always seem many times cruder than necessary, in the future (with hindsight).
Kirby:
You're grumpy.
It's like you're holding up a cross and daring anyone to desecrate it.
Not me!
Kirby,
I don't believe in progress, I think moral ideals are eternal and universal.
Is polygamy a good or an evil? The answer varies depending on whom you ask. The patriarchs thought it was good, just like modern Muslims and fundamentalist Mormons.
How about slavery? Patriarchs, some modern Muslims, good. Antebellum southern aristocracy, very good. Abe Lincoln, Fredrick Douglass, bad, very bad.
How about our modern form of democracy, with its checks and balances? And the notion that the legitimacy of a government rests on the consent of the governed? Madison, very good. King George III, and his modern apologists, very bad. Caesar Augustus, unthinkable.
A religiously principled position would be that the morality is defined by God. I accept this. But I reject the hypothesis that God does not change, and with this, the conclusion that moral ideas are eternal and universal. After all, in Jesus, God tried something new.
You're on sounder ground if, by attacking progress, what you really mean is that our moral sense is necessarily superior to that of our forebearers, and that our successors will have an even more developed moral sense than we have. It is easy to find examples of moral regression. Newer doesn't imply better, but neither does it imply worse, since (as the examples above were intended to illustrate) moral progress does happen. It's just not inevitable.
I was at the New York City public library this afternoon when I checked in to see what was going on. They let you have 45 minutes. But in the lobby downstairs they had a big show about how Jewish, Islamic, and Christian religions are really the same thing so we shouldn't be fighting. I found this troubling, but liked looking at the various religious books. They had an Ethiopian Bible from -- goodness knows, and a book from 1425 that had a painted map of Jerusalem in it, and many icons.
Then I went upstairs and they had a show about Marie Curie. She had three husbands, I think the show said. The one whose last name was also Curie got run over by a horse and buggy and the buggy smashed his head open as it drove over his body.
She died of radiation poisoning.
They added two elements to the periodic table -- I think they were radon and something like plutonium.
The NYC public library is really gorgeous inside. It was made in 1911 I think they said so they are having the centennial. The main reading room has a ceiling 53 feet high. It's dizzying to look up.
There was a woman giving a tour while I was trying to listen to email. She said that on the day they opened it a hundred years ago they had a big party, but their party would outdo that one.
I don't really like parties, and can't stand celebrating things.
The weirdest thing in the whole trip was I was in an M & M store getting candies for my kids when Taio Cruz's song Ay O! came on, and all the staff were dressed up as M & M s and started dancing like the place was a disco, and I was supposed to put my hands up in the air like some kind of criminal!
So maybe I just didn't read Curtis' post well enough.
Yes Kirby, I think you didn't read Curtis' post well enough - perhaps you just assumed that he would be adversarial or against your viewpoint? I was quite confused when you talked about Jesus being the avant-garde and that you disagreed " with the nuttiness of this dismal remark." What remark were you referring to? Curtis seemed to be supporting something I wholly believe -
Science deals with the realm of the natural. Belief deals with the realm of the supernatural. If your faithclaims are at odds with science, then chances are your faithclaims are falsely tied to things temporal that can be got to, or disproved, by reason.
You seem to be a proponent of evolution, and all Curtis was saying is that the hullabaloo the creationists raise about how evolution is anti-God is all whack.
Science and religion exist in two separate realms - two kingdoms, if you will. The way our conservative Christians get all defensive and nasty about evolution is a sign of both insecurity and a confusion about the proper objects of faith.
Again, you may be coming from a position where the idea of Christians who vehemently attack evolution is foreign - I, however, spent many years in small groups listening to people pray that teachers would see the light and not teach that evil, soul-destroying theory.
Moral laws are mostly eternal (though as Stu pointed out, even God seems to have progressed throughout the course of human history). But of COURSE human progress in terms of living up to moral laws is possible...
All it takes is the recognition that certain areas of the world are much better off morally than others.
If societies can progress morally in space, they can do so in time - history has shown that many have.
I'd like to take Kirby's question about Lamarck in a somewhat different direction.
Kirby is right to note that modern scientists don't have much use for Lamarck's theories, at least within their original, intended context of trying to explain the diversity of life on earth. It's easy (but mistaken) to read into this a dismissal of Larmarck himself as a scientist, when what is really going on is an dismissal their modern opponents who embrace alternatives to Darwin's theories (e.g., Lamarckian adaptation, or creationism) that do a poorer job of explaining relevant observational data, and which are either less capable of making testable predictions (in the case of creationism), or less successful in the predictions they make (in the case of Lamarck).
The intellectual stance of the sciences essentially abandons the search for truth in favor of a best-hypothesis-yet approach to using observational results (including predictions and critical experiments) to reject more-false hypotheses in favor of less-false hypotheses. Thus, a sufficiently critical scientist might object to a characterization of evolution as "true," preferring a construct along the lines of "the best hypothesis yet." Yet our inability to establish that a theory is absolutely true doesn't come with an inability to establish that some theories are false. All that takes is a failure of a critical experiment. Our same criticial scientist might have no difficulty whatsoever in dismissing creationism or Lamarckianism as "false."
This, by the way, should raise a red flag w.r.t. those global warming deniers who argue that GW, or AGW, or whatever, "hasn't been proven yet." Either they're sloppy thinkers, or they never really wrapped their heads around the scientific method. Science can't "prove" AGW, all it can do is weed out theories that fail to make relevant predictions and theories that predict incorrectly.
Curtis argues that some group is TRAPPED IN THE PAST. That sounds like it's bad. But I'm not sure who the group he's referring to refers to.
Is he talking about scientists? Christians? Muslims?
I assumed he was referring to me but now on rereading it, I'm not certain that I should have taken it personally. But now, I'm not sure what he's talking about there.
Brett, I am not exactly a proponent of evolution. I am on the fence about that, as I am on many things. I have two books from the punctuated equilibrium side, and haven't read them yet.
Not sure about that, or global warming. This is apparently the coldest winter in 50 years.
They had a neat show on Antarctica at the United Nations. I think it said that it could get to 198 below zero in Fahrenheit, and that you'd last less than a minute in that climate.
I'd be for global warming. They also said that there is evidence that there were once giant forests just 400 miles from the South Pole.
There are apparently 192 countries in the United Nations. I asked the guide which countries don't belong and she said just thre: Cook Islands, the Vatican (also called The Holy See, for some reason), and some tiny island (the guide had a heavy accent) which I think was called Niwi or something.
Kirby,
I am not exactly a proponent of evolution. I am on the fence about that, as I am on many things. I have two books from the punctuated equilibrium side, and haven't read them yet.
The Gould-Eldridge punctuated equilibrium theory is a refinement of the theory of evolution. The observational issue here is that species typically appear in the fossil record, remain more-or-less static for essentially all of their existence, occasionally radiating new species that are recognizably both derivative from the original species, but distinguished from it. This is hard to reconcile with slow-but-steady versions of the theory of evolution.
The PE guys argue that adaptation is relatively fast (this accords with the breeder's evidence), and that species become tuned to a particular niche quickly. As long as that niche remains, there's not much scope for phenotypic change. The molecular evolution guys will argue that there is important genotypic change that is not observable at the phenotypic level, and they might even be right.
Not sure about that, or global warming. This is apparently the coldest winter in 50 years.
Not sure where you're hearing that. NASA data that's come out in the past few years claims that 2010 was tied for the hottest year on record. There are also reports of changes in the ocean circulation systems, which might explain some local coolings. I suspect that these are difficult to evaluate because of a lack of suitable proxies to establish a deep history, but I'm really outside of my depth here. Maybe if Sally pops up, she'd know more. Anyway, weather here's been pretty mild. Daytime temps in the low-20's fahrenheit, not a lot of variation. I can remember winter extreme temps of -28° as recently as the mid-80's, but honestly can't recall the last time we've seen 10 below during the day.
They also said that there is evidence that there were once giant forests just 400 miles from the South Pole.
Do you understand the concept of continental drift? Time was that Antarctica was on the equator. I doubt very much that there have ever been forests north or south at more than 75° of latitude. Modern tree lines tend to cluster at around 70°, per wiki, and the northernmost contemporary trees are at 72°31'N. Just for reference, the Greenland Norse settlements that you like to refer to are at about 60°N.
Kirby: "punctuated equilibrium" is an evolutionary theory.
And have you not before been pretty pro-evolution? Or at least not a creationist?
Kirby,
Irving Feldman, a prominent poet whom I admire (one of the best of those Ron the Silencer would call Quietests)used to teach undergraduate Creative Writing (he's now 84, healthy and retired) at SUNY/Buffalo. He had a formula along the lines of submit 30 poems to me and get an A, submit 20 and get a B, etc. (I hope I can be excused if I don't remember the exact numbers). I never actually took his course, but I once was contemplating doing so, and I asked him why he stressed Quantity. "I don't stress quanity," he replied. "But you said, if you write 30 poems you get an A, 20 you get a B, and so on". "Oh, you want an A" he said. He went on to explain that grading a poem is not really possible. [Don't think Irving is not very opinioned!--he's extremely opinionated--and some said far too harsh in his comments towards students--but his formula acknowledged the myraid number of other opinions about poetry.
Could you do this? Do you consider it a cop-out?
The Cook Islands and Niue aren't full members of the UN but they are members and do benefit from UN programs. Their Westminster parliamentary style government is in what is described as "free association" with New Zealand, a status similar to the "compact" that the Federated States of Micronesia has with the United States. They are in effect in the process of becoming independent countries.
The Cook Islands has fifteen inhabited islands and only about 20,000 people, half of whom live on one island. Many of the outer islands are coral atolls with less than five hundred inhabitants. Niue was originally part of the Cook Islands, but opted out, in much the same way that Palau opted out when given the opportunity to be the fifth Federated State of Micronesia. Niue is much closer to Tonga and Samoa, both culturally and geographically. Cook Islanders play host to about 100,000 tourists every year.
Cook Island rugby teams have been known to handily defeat teams representing countries like the United States, Canada and Japan in international competitions. The main island has nine villages. Each village has its own rugby team. The village of Tupapa usually wins the national title, giving them the right to challenge national teams from all over the world. I was there in 1990 when Scotland got thumped by Tupapa. The Cook Islanders may have recalled a few of their players from New Zealand for the occasion.
Most Cook Islanders between the ages of twenty and fifty live and work abroad, usually in New Zealand or Australia, so the village of Tupapa consists primarily of two or three hundred school children and their retired grandparents. Their best rugby players are either attending university in New Zealand on rugby scholarships or competing for a spot on the roster of New Zealand's All Blacks. Their girls have won world titles in netball. The country has sent lawn bowlers to compete at the Olympic Games.
The school day begins with a short assembly, girls on one side of the assembly hall's central aisle, boys on the other, followed by about forty minutes of acapella polyharmonic singing. New Zealand Maoris consider the Cook Islands their ancestral homeland.
I read Typee while I was there. It's set in the Society Islands of French Polynesia on the island of Nuku Hiva, the same type of high island as Rarotonga in the English speaking Cooks. Nobody has come anywhere close to improving on Melville's description. The first Christian missionaries came to Rarotonga from Pape'ete in Tahiti, which is substantially larger than the Cooks, but officially a French territory, so not eligible for UN membership.
I think it would be interesting if the NFL would replace the Pro Bowl with a game pitting players with Tongan or Samoan birth or ancestry against the players selected by merit for the Pro Bowl. They could call it the Jim Thorpe Bowl.
Brett and Stu, I'm not very familiar with all the various positions in terms of evolution and creationism. I doubt if I am going to have any time to get up to speed on these hypotheses any time this week.
Suffice it to say that they don't impact my thinking directly, but at this juncture I imagine that evolution is probably the better theory (fits more facts). I thought there was a theory that there is change WITHIN a species and that that was punctuated equilibrium.
I'll try to get up to speed on these terms.
I have two books on creationism at my house, but because I don't know much in that area, I'd have to read ten books or more to get much of a clue. I did read Darwin's Dangerous Idea by Dennett (which I thought was sloppily written and ended with a completely nonsensical statement that said that the whole of the universe was sacred, not just angels, which meant to my mind that he thought the HIV virus should have a halo).
I thought this was ridiculous.
It's just another attempt to have your cake and still eat it.
If cannibal ants are sacred, then what's the point of calling anything sacred?
What I like about Christian values is that they rise above the level of survival of the fittest and ask us to behave in other ways. I think what's odd is that some people are actually capable of doing this on a 9-5 basis like Mom Theresa.
Basic economics has a model of humanity that we are all o the take and looking for good deals all day long. That we're just birdbrains, in other words.
Not sure that that's true.
At any rate, I'm sitting on the fence, but sidling toward evolution. I just haven't dissed creationism yet because I like odd positions, and enjoy arguing them. I just don't have enough in my quiver to make much of a defense of that position at this juncture.
Stephen,
I think Feldman's viewpoint (didn't he just die?) is a copout, as it means all he had to do as a teacher is count pages.
I think it's important to make a judgment of a poem or a story.
That's what I intend to do. I think students have the right to an up or down vote, with reasons.
An article in Science News argues that it was AT THE SOUTH POLE or 400 miles from it, and it was an EXTENSIVE forest. I'm surprised you've never heard of this, Stu.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_v129/ai_4164401/
It wasn't continental drift. It's just that about 3 million years ago, the pole warmed way up!
Probably automobile traffic.
Kirby,
Let me recommend a book: "Scientists Confront Creationism," edited by Laurie R. Godfrey, 1983. It's a collection of essays most of which are accessible. Another book worth considering is "Creationism on Trial: Evolution and God at Little Rock," by Langdon Gilkey, a Baptist theologian. Gilkey was a prof at the UC Div School. I can't say I ever met him, but I'd have liked to.
Separately, I've been in the position of grading creative essays. For about a dozen years, I taught a course in math/stats/cs targeted at UC humanities and social science students. I was very fortunate to have two TAs, both of whom were St. John's graduates, albeit different campuses. The final for my quarter was a paper, drawn from a half-dozen prompts. I wanted to play to their strengths, and give them something to do where they could feel that they'd creatively engaged the subject matter. Most students wrote on mathematical aesthetics, drawing from G. H. Hardy's "A Mathematician's Apology." Anyway, the three of us would divvy up the papers, and each would read (and assess) 2/3rds of the total, so each paper was read twice. We then got together, and hashed out grades. It was rare for the two readers to differ by more than a 1/3 of a grade, e.g., B vs. B+. And almost always a discrepancy was resolved by one of the readers agreeing with the other's position. "Splitting the difference" essentially never happened. Anyway, we condensed this experience into a little sound bite: Grading essays is subjective, but not arbitrary.
So my suggestion is pretty straightforward. Go with your gut. Don't be afraid to make assessments, and don't feel as though you have to whip up some point-based rubric as a shield against accusations of capricious grading. If you like, set up an appeals process that works like this: students who disagree with a grade can come in and argue for another grade. You'll either give them the grade they've argued for, or they'll keep the grade you gave them. None of this namby-pamby splitting the difference. And if you're still worried, keep copies of the poems. If you get into trouble, ask your dean to have a neutral third party grade them. I'm expecting a very high correlation between your grades and theirs.
Yo Kirby - Righty conservative talking heads often make false claims based upon earlier false viewpoints.
It's "Global Warming," and contrary to some rightist's tendencies, 'America' is not the world.
The globe as a Whole has warmed, and ...what are the exact figures...9 of the top 10 'hottest world years' have taken place in the past decade. The other one was 1998.
Sometimes people argue so far from reality that their arguments have so many logical leaps to go through that they somehow withstand easy criticism.
"Lots of snow in 'merica means global warming is a lie."
Which is doubly wrong, and therefore more impervious to attack - Increased precipitation IS a predicted outcome of global warming, AND it's also wrong in that America is not the world.
Anyone who says the globe Isn't warming is either a liar, misinformed, or stupid.
People might try to argue that the globe Is warming, but non-anthropogenically. Which is an argument that it's possible to have. But what I love is this idea that the SCIENTISTS have an agenda to push a false theory, but the oil-loving Repubs and the massive companies that produce oil somehow don't?
And when you talk about evolution within a species, that's micro-evolution - Which creationists tend to actually believe in. (members of a species will exhibit traits that are adaptive to their environment, yet not change to such a degree that they jump species).
It's macro-evolution (evolution from one species into another) that is the supposedly-contentious issue.
What I find weird about all of this (and which points back to the issue that Curtis was talking about) is that creationists place so much emphasis on Life as somehow 'proof' of God's existence. And that if Evolution occurred, that somehow lessens ones belief in God. That's like 'believing' in gravity takes people away from God.
It's like they think that matter, energy, gravity, planets, stars, rocks, water, etc.etc. existed without God, and then God only intervened to add the juice for life.
Within the framework of our universe, life exists. The question isn't whether God created the some thing within the framework - the question is whether God created the framework.
If you believe God did, you're pointing to something (necessarily) that is outside of the framework of the natural world...Thus, outside the realm of science.
So why feel intimidated by it?
Because you're arguing that a scientific principle causing change within the frame would somehow be evidence against God.
And because you place your faith in a literal interpretation of the Bible and the men who wrote it (Genesis, in this case), when your faith should be in God.
(For clarity, the pronoun 'you' is here most often referring to creationists).
Kirby,
An article in Science News argues that it was AT THE SOUTH POLE or 400 miles from it, and it was an EXTENSIVE forest. I'm surprised you've never heard of this, Stu.
Interesting. I'd question "EXTENSIVE." Even the word "forest" seems like hyperbole. The actual description is "a shrublike beach forest," i.e., woody plants, but not full-blown trees. I can't say that I've every called shrub lands "forest," can you? I'm thinking of the kind of biome that we see above the tree lines: tundra.
Continental drift is certainly not an explanation. The contemporary drift rate for Antarctica is 2.05 cm/yr, which amounts to about 40 miles over 3 million years. This is obviously not enough to drive latitude-based changes in climate.
One point that the paper raised is that this antarctic forest was discovered on the Transantarctic Mountains, and moreover there is evidence that these mountains are much younger and so rose much more quickly than expected. This immediately raises in my mind the possibility of localized geothermal heating, and with it a microclimate that supports woody plants. If so, they should find evidence pretty quickly.
But at a broader level, there's a good deal of evidence for past climates that were both considerably warmer and considerably colder than today's. The concerns of the AGW folks are that the rate of change we're now experiencing is unprecedented, not that we're about to exceed the gamut of historical climates. That said, what we do know is that there have been a variety of long-term stable points, and we don't know if what we're seeking is the beginning of a shift to a stable point very different from where we're at now. That's the scary scenario.
Suffice it to say that I'd prefer that God created life, and each living thing, and then stuff started to morph -- grow teeth and tails and spiky helmets after the Fall. It would just make more sense to me.
I like the whole lions lying down with the lambs world peace thing but I don't think that's part of our capacity unless God is somewhere in the picture.
If we were really meant to be survival of the fittest and we're just the toughest war-machine to come out of the mix and establish a Pax Romana of sorts, then I don't think there's any hope for humanity, or for the world.
The article's headline said EXTENSIVE, and specifically said 1300 kilometers in length.
That's about 700 miles, or from NYC to Chicago.
It didn't say how wide the forest was, but mentioned the fjords. Perhaps it was in some kind of lava flow, or some kind of giant steam bath type climate. It wasn't clear, but that's an interesting guess as to why it existed.
Kirby - God created earth the way he created the sun, or rocks, or gravity, or the space-time-continuum.
The line between God 'creating' life, and then that life 'changing' seems weirdly arbitrary.
Many on the left think that they can create life and that it is just a cybernetic thing. This fits with the LANGUAGE school of poetry, who think that our language is more or less our programming, and that if they can reprogram us according to their pogrom or program, then they will redo the human world.
I find that viewpoint dangerous, although it is laughable.
I don't think you can program a person.
I also don't think there is any program by which you can program poetry.
Which isn't to say that there can't be poetry programs.
The idea of poetry is similar to something that Bateson once described in his one excellent book whose name I can't now recall. They were doing research with dolphins and rewarding them not for performing any particular trick, but for performing a movement that had never been seen before. The dolphins actually grokked the notion of an "unprecedented move" and started to think -- what hasn't been done before that can be done now?
Poetry has to have that quality. This means you have to read a ton of it before you get a sense that the woman's face was like a rose isn't too hot, and poems about death are harder and harder to pull off -- emotion isn't enough, but there has to be emotion.
At any rate, this somehow goes back to our beliefs in what nature is -- is it a cybernetic machine, or set of machines, as many in the left believe, or is it a question of a soul wrestling with its own nature, and trying to do good against a dark force that seeks to seduce the flesh.
What poetry is comes out of our metaphysics to a degree.
I think spontaneity is a plus, as is lyricism, but it has to equal something new, too: it has to be an unprecedented move.
I'm not sure the LANGUAGE movement believed in originality. They wanted instead to program the reader to believe as they did, and to proceed according to the program they were laying into your mind as the software for which you were to live your life henceforward.
I found everything about that to be icky.
"Didn't he just die?"
Irving Feldman is alive and well (unless, g-d forbid, he died today, since there's been nothing in the Buffalo News (it would be on the first page, I'd imagine, like the very recent death of acclaimed photographer Milton Rogovin at age 101. I did nervously check the Internet however.
Like I say, he WAS judgmental about student poems (and about canonical poets; he is rather a curmudgeon about a lot of 20th century poetry). He just was not enthusiastic about giving grades, and didn't think students should be obsessed with them either ("oh, you want an A").
There's an interesting story about Feldman and your man Corso--Corso crashed a party I.F. gave, and remarked "Irving Feldman, what kind of name is that for a poet?" Feldman writes about the incident in a poem to be found in the book _The Life and Letters_ (or his Collected Poems).
Yeah, langpo is kinda icky. I find most any sort of conceptual poetry icky - A poem that is about how it was created as opposed to what it actually is simply doesn't appeal to me (and I think it's an emperor-with-no-cattle self-referential spiral of vom).
I think what happened is that langpo did away with any sense of story...But humans are hardwired to love stories, and care about them - So the story ends up being found in the creation of the art, and how it fits into the context of other art, as opposed to having a story within itself.
That's why Ron is so concerned with competing groups. Instead of having conflict and characters and stories in his poetry, he has to create it in the 'world of poetry,' because otherwise any sort of art is just plain unengaging (and most definitely ephemeral).
"The story of this poem is about how it is a retyping of the New York Times." This ?comments? on the nature of art, but only has any story-value if you know how it was created and know the details of the cultural phenoms it's relating to."
Film school is interesting - what we learn is a constant push/pull between art and commerce. One professor wrote Cool Hand Luke, the other The Wedding Planner. (the former said something I liked a lot: "Screenwriting is the hardest kind of writing, except of course for actual, honest-to-God poetry.")
Any art that doesn't care about characters and stories in one way or another is doomed for irrelevancy.
And poets these days wonder why nobody gives a flyin' fark...
The thing with grades is, you have to realize that they might Actually matter to students for legit reasons - if you're in undergrad, and you want to go to grad. school, your g.p.a. matters...
If you're at a community college, and you want to go to undergrad, your g.p.a. matters.
So maybe think about it not only in terms of the quality of the work or the quantity but also in terms of 'does this student exhibit to me qualities that make me think they deserve a grade that would help them achieve their next goals.'
You know your situation and demographic better than I, but it is something to take into consideration I do declare...
Another thing I think it is important to ask yourself is: would I like to reward this student's work ethic or lack thereof? If I reward it, they will probably take another course with me. Would I be satisfied to see this student again working at the level that they did?
If yes, then I am happy to give them a B or an A.
If no, if they dragged the class down, or just didn't do anything much in the class, I can't reward them for it.
I do think that grades are generally fair. At the UW there were some teachers giving out grades for ideological reasons. If you agreed with their perspective, they would reward you with an A whether you had to work hard or not. If you didn't agree with their perspective, you were creamed no matter what you did.
Students figured this out fairly easily and if you took a course with such a person you just mimicked their viewpoint. Soon enough, they would only get people who were yes men and yes women to them, a fairly easy thing to be or do. Those students never amounted to anything of course, and became birdbrains. Some got hired because they mimicked the thinking of a committee somewhere, which was a riot. But they always turn out to be dead wood.
I want students to do their own thinking and to do their own work, and use me as feedback. Every person has a responsibility to do their own thinking as an adult.
Grades are fascinating, almost like money.
What we reward becomes a longterm algorhythm of sorts. You can turn a class into robots that just turn out LANGUAGE poetry, or just turn out virtually anything you want them to, while you silence all others.
That eventually creates a very tight cadre, more or less like the leadership of the Soviet Union under Stalin.
You need to reward intellectual diversity if you value it, and want to learn new things, too.
Some people don't want to learn anything new.
I avoided teachers with a Stalinist reputation who would use terror tactics to make everyone think alike.
I am hoping to see moves I've never seen before. This is part of why I can't give a list of criteria in advance for what I'm looking for. But I still think that Hunley's right -- some moves are too opaque --
We should write about what we know, and be concrete about it, and so on. But there's still no formula for great art or even a readable poem. IF there were, the Stalinists would have already written it.
They do have some things they want to force the rest of us to say: the basis of PC lies in that. And one of the things I like about Aaron's aesthetic is that it denies anything that isn't always already outside the box.
But that can get to be a little bit too much like dressing like a punk: who always already look identical, as if they were wearing a uniform, complete with the same opinions.
Kirby, you might have to be wary of your own prejudices.
I wasn't always a very dedicated student, but I was a good one - smart, affable, talkative but not too much....
And
I knew how to give the professors what they wanted, what they liked (this actually was easier to do in essays than in poetry).
Rambling, rhythmic, half-sensical prose for the beat professor, tight, austere, clean prose for the old-school dude.
If I were writing for you, I'd read up on Corso and your own work, and probably push out something that was a combination of the two.
You couldn't help but love me.
Here's what I would do - start out with short poems that have a lot of small lines and are sincere, about a moment but also pointing to something bigger, though they would have just a slightly subversive edge.
THEN
All of a sudden I'd write a five-page epic with an involved internal rhyme-scheme that I developed...generally a formal, yet not derivative, approach.
THEN
I'd write a caustic, anti-establishment, two-line ditty.
And finish up with a poem that was longer than the first ones, but kept the short lines,
and contained some of the subversion of the two-line poem and some of the narrative drive of the longer'n.
You'd write that I explored lots of different avenues and used them to create my own unique, though relatable and palatable, voice.
A+
I would probably love all the people that come here as students, except for J. I would throw J out of the class.
I decided to look up "grading poems" using google, and the first thing that came up was my own post on Lutheran Surrealism. But there was also this fairly useful rubric, which I found wonderful:
http://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?sp=true&code=J2359B&
Also, there was a Wikipedia page about the Ern Malley affair, in which a couple of avant-garde poets in Sydney australia in 1945 invented a poet named Ern Malley who had been an insurance exec or salesman who had died young, and left a remarkable body of verse.
The poems they wrote for Malley were all tossed off in an afternoon, but it has become a kind of standard of modernism.
This is all somewhat reminiscent of the Sokal Hoax in which a physicist pretended that he thought that gravity was a social construct, and got it published in a big postmodern journal. Then he said he was just seeing how far the journal would go toward nonsense.
Nonsense and modernism are never too far apart, and that's where Aaron Belz seems to go. John Ashbery, who taught at Brooklyn College for years, said that he can't stand grading poems, and often gave students the Ern Malley poems versus another good and accepted recent poet and asked students to identify which was the better poetry and why.
About half of them choose the Ern Malley poems.
But I think this rubric is still pretty good. Among other things, it is much simpler than Tom Hunley's much more complicated rubric:
http://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?sp=true&code=J2359B&
Kirby,
Hmm. I looked at the rubric, and wasn't wildly impressed. Recognizing that I'm out of my depth here...
I think the category "sensory details" is too narrow, and represents a non-poetic constraint on the content of poetry. I'd like to tentatively suggest "evocative" as a substitute category header, with a gloss that the poem should engage the reader, and draw them into the poem's constructed world. This is need not be a sensory-based world.
The form category is problematic unless a form is specified.
What do you do with a poem that introduces grammatical/spelling errors as an intentional poetic device?
I ain't no poet
I's got no style
But don' cha' know it
I rhymes a while
:-)
Well, I'm sure there are misonomic aspects of any grading system, but this one approaches what I'm doing fairly well, I think, so I think it will be of use to students (the rubric).
It will still remain within the realm of taste, and subjectivity, but it allows an objective description of that taste insofar as that is even possible.
I woiuld definitely remove the reference to Pablo Neruda (and have) but other than that, it's fine.
Here's the rubric again in case anyone missed it:
http://www.rcampus.com/rubricshowc.cfm?sp=true&code=J2359B&
One of the things that I find is that so many Americans have given up on standards, boundaries, even standing for something, or standing for anything, because it might mean getting knocked down. So now many of us have abandoned the very notion that we could ever say anything without at least three qualifiers.
That leads to John Ashbery, a poet who means absolutely nothing to me, but who expresses contemporary anomia misnomic numinousness to the would-be patricians.
I still think we have to see poetry as saying something about monetary policy and the borders, and other crucial issues, or else there's a good reason that nobody is reading it.
Kirby,
misonomic
? I don't know this word, and I can't find a gloss. Help?!
I woiuld definitely remove the reference to Pablo Neruda (and have) but other than that, it's fine.
No doubt. Is it because you don't like his politics (communist), because you don't like his poetry, or because you don't want his poetic style to be normative?
I still think we have to see poetry as saying something about monetary policy and the borders, and other crucial issues, or else there's a good reason that nobody is reading it.
Couldn't resist...
'dem gringos got the gold,
'least dat's what we been told,
so show some common sense
an' hop dat border fence,
we's got to feed our belly,
so let's all get to Dehli!
Stu, all three with regard to Neruda.
Misonomy is a word I picked up reading a book on statistics called something like A Lady Tasting Tea. It means misnamed. The writer was quite funny because he used it on every page throughout the first hundred pages, seemingly obsessed with the idea that nothing is correctly named. I found this amusing.
As for your poem: kinda fun. I think in some way there's another barometer that I consult having to do with how serious something is: which means, can I take it seriously?
Your poem of course was meant to be light banter but had some fun in it, which flirted with possible seriousness.
Here's some things I don't take seriously at all:
Communism
Religions except for Judaism, Catholicism and Lutheranism
Scientists when they talk about anything other than science
Poets when they talk about anything other than poetry
Models
Actors
Anyone who lived in the 19th century
Swedish surrealists
Anyone who lives south of the Rio Grande
Anyone who lives north of the USA
Russians
Germans
Spanish
Italians
Red China
North Korea
Romance novelists
Governors
Senators
Dogs
People who fold their tissues instead of crumpling before wiping
The Book of Esther
Swedish speaking Finns
Finns from Somalia
People who drink soda
People who drink beer in public
Clowns
People who write letters to the editor
Happy people
Calm people
Rabbits living in suburban areas
Squirrels
Chipmunks
Moose
Deer
People with Lyme's Disease
White clouds w/o darkness
The notion of paradise
People who show their bellies
People with lots of jewelry
People who have had plastic surgery
Anybody who appears on MSNBC
Anything that appears in the NYT
People who look like other people who are trying to be individualist (punks, hippies, feminists with short hair and angry looks)
Very fat people
Happy Hour
Peanut dishes at bars
Yogurt pretzels
Clothes salesmen
Gift shoppes
Mexican restaurants
Scandinavian food (unless it is made by my wife's mom)
Motorcycles with sidecars (unless they're driven by Nazis in WWII movies)
Station wagons
Answers that appear to be complete
No. 3 pencils
Red pens
Orange pens
People whose pant length is either inadequate or too long
Men with long hair who have to shake it out of their face in order to accomplish something
Any professional whose profession is to be angry about the state of their identity group
The "Indian" Ocean
"Indiana"
Pakistan
Kuwait
Iraq
The Taliban
Billionaires
Consultants
Psychotherapists
Anarchists
Libertarians
Swedish people after about the 11th century
Romans
Canaanites
Egyptians
Algerians
Tunisians
Curling
Pink combs
Clothes with brand names printed on them
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