From the sublime to the surreal

Asked to analyze a passage from Allen Ginsberg's "Sunflower Sutra" (read it here), several of my students attributed the poem to Sylvia Plath, which made me wonder how different American poetry would be if Sylvia had spent some time bumming around the railroad tracks with Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, hungover and babbling about "sphincters of dynamos" and "the guts and innards of the weeping coughing car"--what would Sylvia have said when Ginsberg bellowed out, "We're not our skin of grime, we're not dread bleak dusty imageless locomotives, we're golden sunflowers inside, blessed by our own seed & hairy naked accomplishment." If Sylvia had written "under the shadow of the mad locomotive riverbank sunset Frisco hilly tincan evening sitdown vision," would we hear boxcars boxcars boxcars rumbling through her lines? What kind of poetry would  the bastard lovechild of Sylvia Plath and Allen Ginsberg write?

But that was not the most surreal moment evoked by the current crop of final exams. That distinction belongs to the student who wrote a fairly interesting analysis of a passage from Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief without any awareness of the correct spelling of orchid, and so I learned that when Susan Orlean went slogging through the murky, muddy, alligator-infested Fakahatchee Strand, she was seeking not ghost orchids but ghost orcas. Yes: whales in the swamp. How they ever transported the precious beasts to all those orca shows I'll never know.