Here I am taking my final lap around the American Lit Survey syllabus before I head off to Emeritusville, which means it's my last chance to make something stick in students' brains. If I get it wrong this time, I won't get another chance.
Which is why I'm a little nervous about introducing my students to modernism.
When I ask my survey students what they think modernism might mean, they guess it refers to stuff that's, like, really modern, fresh and new and up-to-date. How disappointing, then, to discover that we'll have to start out by stretching our minds back more than 100 years to touch base with Edgar Lee Masters and Sherwood Anderson, two midwestern men who believed they were forging a brand-new path for American literature.
Today that path looks worn and ragged, hardly suggesting modernity. Years ago I sometimes had students familiar with Masters because in high school they'd read or even acted in a version of Spoon River Anthology, but I can't remember the last time a student expressed any familiarity with either author, even though Anderson, like most of my students, was an Ohio guy. The litany of modernist authors sounds like it belongs in a graveyard: Eliot, Sandburg, cummings, Frost. Williams, Stevens, Hurston, Hughes. Hemingway, Faulkner, Glaspell, O'Neill. They all thought they were doing something really new and different and earth-shaking, and they were! But this is my last chance to make students believe that modernism mattered--and still matters.
On Wednesday I'll get all excited and scribble a bunch of vocab up on the whiteboard--Alienation! Fragmentation! Experimentation! Grotesques!--which my students probably won't dutifully write down, despite my urging. Maybe they'll come up after class and take a picture of the whiteboard mess to file away with all the other pictures of words that belong to a past so distant it seems to be speaking a different language.
When we tackle Wallace Stevens I'll ask them why we need thirteen ways of looking at a blackbird, why we can't look just once and get the whole picture, why a poem wants us to engage in looking instead of memorizing, but I'll be lucky if one student scribbles something about the poem as the act of the mind finding what will suffice. The poem as the act! Of the mind! Finding!
Last chance to make it matter!
As I look down the months before I get put on the shelf, I'm taking refuge in William Carlos Williams's poem "A Sort of a Song":
Let the snake wait under
his weed
and the writing
be of words, slow and quick, sharp
to strike, quiet to wait,
sleepless.
--through metaphor to reconcile
the people and the stones.
Compose. (No ideas
but in things) Invent!
Saxifrage is my flower that splits
the rocks.
Let my teaching lodge the poems in students' minds like the snake waiting under his weed; let me plant a seed that sends roots deep into their rocky minds. Let the snake wait, the seed grow, the words finally strike with a bite that feels like rock splitting. Then they'll know why modernism matters. Then my job here will be done.
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