What Stagnation Holds For Us

      Searching the net for some decent material on the American poet Mark Strand, I came across this rather jaw-dropping page of poetic analysis.  I was comforted, alas when I discovered that this page (and the others tethered to it) were created by eighth-grade students, and then profoundly redisturbed when I realized that I couldn't tell the difference right away from eight-grade literary analysis and that which is generally encouraged to be deemed "acceptable" at the undergraduate levels.  Believe it or not, I see material of this calibre all the time when I'm marking essays; coming from an eight-grader this actually isn't too bad, but that there's so little fundamental progression in the analytical skills of students over the high-school and early undergraduate years is enough to make me think we've started treating even the vast majority of our "brighter" young people as if they were a collect of Lennys from Of Mice And Men.   The majority of undergraduates would probably come to the same conclusion about Strand's "It is true, as someone has said..." that this little lady does-- that Strand is "reminding us that we should live our lives to the fullest because we don’t know what death holds for us."    Oy vey.   It's occurred to me, though, that Strand is a poet that could be taught (however partially) at the early levels.   We really-- and I mean REALLY-- have to do something about the progression of critical and analytical skills over the teenage years.   Before, that is, we've gone whole hog and our adolescents and twenty-somethings start asking us to tell them about the rabbits.

      (By the way, the "someone" referred to in Strand's poem is Wallace Stevens.)

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      ADDENDUM: Discovered this epistle to Strand from the poet Lamar Thomas.   Pretty turgid stuff, methinks. When you're stepping into lines like "I've entered the cities of Rimbaud's hashish dreams" and "I've sought out love in the great harbors of America," you know you're in a kind of poetic cabaret, as if the poet were a Ginsburg-queen impersonating Walt Whitman. Yikes.