Poetry & Other Arts

I am taking a course on "Introduction to Literature" and it seems that poetry and many other arts are really two distinct and separate things: the object of art as created by the artist, and that object as observed and interpreted by the viewer.

The poet / artist may not be conscious of all that is going into her/his creation. They put in what feels right to them. There is not always conscious analysis of every detail.

The viewer now looks at this object (or listens in the case of music) and tries to interpret every nuance, jot and tittle. I cannot help but think that this object acts as a mirror, and what the viewer sees reflects more about the viewer than the artist. A Rorschach test may be a better analogy, as the blots are designed to be meaningless in themselves. Everything we see is from within ourselves.

We are doing a paper analyzing a poet of our choice and I worry that I am reading too much into this. We will be graded not so much on getting the "right" ideas, but on getting "some" ideas and being able to justify those ideas with quotes from the poetry. In a sense, everything is true if you can make a case for it. If we ask what the poet meant, we don't know -- we only have the poem to work with.

Last semester I took "Critical Thinking" and my instructor would get furious at the idea that everything was true. (He had other issues as well.) I see his point but here we have a different concept of what is truth means. In my mind I capitalize Truth when I use it in certain ways.

Well, back to William Carlos Williams. Have a good day!

I am Disappointed in Generation e.

Or perhaps, I am disappointed in my young fellow students and the college I attend - Cape Fear Community College (CFCC). They seem, in some ways, computer illiterate . Perhaps they are just computer averse. In any case I am disappointed.

I have been led, mostly by media and anecdotal evidence, to believe that young folks are computer wizards. How many times have I heard stories of children programming g'pa or g'ma's DVD player, etc.? It seems like most students I pass on campus have a cellphone to their ear or are texting on some phone-like device. Surely they use computers!

A word on the student population: the local 4-year university campus considers its freshman sophomore students "pipeline". These are those that fit the standard mold - high school graduates moving on to a 4-year program. CFCC students are not pipeline students. They don't fit that mold for some reason. They may have worked after high school and are returning to school. They may be here for vocational programs such as nursing or truck driving.

Given that these are non-standard students they may be non-standard Gen-E members as well. They may not have had the opportunities to become comfortable with computers that the pipeline students have had. But still, I would expect a lot, if not a majority, to be comfortable with computers. The school provides Campus Cruiser, a tool with email, forums for class members, online announcements, etc. but I am amazed at the number of students that do not USE these. If a teacher cancels a class and announces it on Campus Cruiser, many students will still show up.

(Or perhaps they are like I was the first time in college - more interested in my social life than in school.) I am still disappointed.