Finding Our Bearings with Art

Finding Our Bearings with Art Nowadays people believe that scientists exist to instruct them, poets and musicians to delight them. That these have something to teach them does not occur to them. – Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen We have come some way from the days when a stone torso fixed a poet and lead him to speak of its gaze, one that saw, even read him head to toe. For many if not most, it is now the reader or viewer or listener that sets the terms of such encounters, a...

Empowering Poetic Defiance

Empowering Poetic Defiance: Baudelaire, Kant and Poetic Agency in the Classroom Many strategies for incorporating poetry into non-poetry classes, especially outside of English and associated disciplines, appear to make poetry subservient and secondary in relation to the prose content of the course. The poet under consideration becomes a kind of involuntary servant to one or more prose authors, forced to "speak only when spoken to," and effectively prevented from challenging the ideas of the...