Post-literary poetry, counterperformance, and micropoetries

Maria Damon

pp. 129-147

in: Joan Retallack, Juliana Spahr (eds), Poetry & pedagogy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2006

Abstract

To teach is to create new interlocutors: within the academy at the graduate level, since at least in theory many of our students are training for an academic life; and outside the academy at the undergraduate level, since, at least in the public land-grant institution I"m in, our students are mainly bound for 'secular" lives. If they can carry into those bare survivalist lives a kinetic memory of exultation occasioned by the poetic and by exercising their own apperceptive faculties at large, and if they can find resonant experiences in their intimate, public or professional lives, the revolution in poetic language can claim another victory by stealth, however subtle, diffuse, or invisible to the instrumentalist eye. Guy Debord's dictum "We have to multiply poetic subjects and objects' provides an incisive mandate for the poetry/pedagogy enterprise.⁴

Cited authors

Debord Guy