Where Do We Go From Here?

Anyone who knows Andrew Lloyd Webber's Evita knows that this isn't where we intended to be. Or at least, it's not for me. I spent the past year maintaining this blog for a directed reading in education policy I did at the University of Georgia. In theory, I was learning about queer theory and attempting to transform a theoretical perspective into an actionable poetry pedagogy for secondary students. That was shortly before a semester in which I realized that designing curricula is something best left to professionals--read: people who do things like write the Common Core Standards Curriculum. Then I started doing what I do best: writing about poetry, with only limited treatment of how to teach poetry (I'm starting to wonder if Billy Collin's wasn't right when he suggested that a poem should be a sensory experience beyond reduction to what it "means.")

Whatever my views about reforms to be made to the reading and teaching of literature, I found that I missed writing about what I read. I also found that the blog was a wonderful way to express my engagement with my personal favorite artistic medium: literature. I know what you're thinking, and you're right! I read! Serious contemporary fiction! On public transportation!

Since I live alone in a basement in Georgetown (don't worry, folks, it has windows), there's no one to talk to about what I'm reading. Instead, I'm throwing my thoughts to the unadulterated font of unsolicited and un-reviewed wisdom--the internet. So here's to an undoubtedly fruitful summer reading great books and trying not to sit too close to the homeless guy on the metro!

PS: For those interested in the outcome of my paper, it actually turned out wonderfully. I didn't use many of the poems on this list, though Dickinson and Whitman did show up (A Narrow Fellow in the Grass (because the typically female Dickinson speaker adopts transgenders herself) and Song of Myself (the creepy scene with the bathers and the woman getting off to them)). My main point? The same thing it's always been: without culturally relevant curricula, students don't care--but augmented to reflect my conclusion that queer theory offers a way of destabilizing traditional perspectives and revamping the way students think about "the other" in literature.