As an English teacher, it's easy to forget about the pleasure of the text -- in fact, a great deal of the difficulties in teaching literature or creative writing is getting students to see that there's much more to a story than the familiar emotional responses we're trained to have by popular culture. Indeed, I try to help students see how emotions are shaped, constructed and, often, manipulated by the author. Analysis, interpretation, literary research and explication all have their own pleasures, of course, but these are intellectual rewards which often come -- students are quick to say -- at the price of "enjoying" stories, poems, etc. The students would prefer to be blissfully entertained.

In the hallway after my most recent class, a student told me he no longer enjoys his favorite band because of me. Mea culpa. I have an exercise early in the term, where I ask students to bring the lyrics of a song they like to sing along with to class. At the same time, they're reading the introduction to Nims' Western Wind -- the class text -- which explains the general criteria that make a poem a poem. Then, in small groups, they share their songs -- but I ask them to discuss whether or not the lyrics are "poetry" or not (or "what makes them poetic?" is the corollary question). Inevitably, the students face the fact that the lyrics of most pop music aren't very well written on the whole. A follow-up exercise I give them asks them to try to revise the lyrics into a poem of their own -- and they find this difficult (in part, because the lyrics are drilled into their brains as following a basic rhyme scheme). But a few begin to "tune in" to the lyrics of their bands all the more closely in the future, reading them -- ideally -- more critically.

I don't intend to ruin poetry or music for them, of course. But I do want them to be better writers than, say, Eminem or Britney Spears. And to resist the opiate of mass entertainment.

In graduate school, I remember many conversations with fellow grads who were discovering the depths of theory but going through crises because they could find no pleasure left in the career they had begun...mostly in order to have a career in something that pleased them. For my part, I learned a lot about theories of pleasure and popular culture that fascinated me. How pleasure reading, for example, has been gendered and framed as anti-intellectual, or how women's pleasures have been silenced by the critical embracing of modernist writers.

I teach these ideas, but I also have been trying to give the pleasure of the "literary" text room in my classes. I've been teaching poetry for a long time, but recently I've been taking pains to give the pleasure of the text its due. After all, poetry is one of the most emotionally resonant and honest genres (and that explains why it can also be the most sentimental). I've always ended the term by doing nothing more than a celebration of their accomplishments by having students give poetry readings. They have to write reflections in their journal, but they get to communally share their work -- and I allow them to read things that I would otherwise ban from the class (I have a lengthy handout of "forbidden forms" that include love poems, goth angst poems, odes to dead pets, etc...). Recently, I have a different student read a poem of their choosing to the class at the opening of every class session (they must bring copies if it's not in our textbook). It gets us in the mood and honors the power and pleasure of the poetic text. We don't comment or critique it -- we just applaud. And only then do I begin and take roll, taking the gloves off, and getting down to the work of close criticism and deep analysis.

I've done performative readings to my classes of my own writing that function in this way (and I'll be doing them again around Halloween). Sometimes I've scheduled "light" rewards like a film viewing during final's week. I've begun wondering if there are other classes in which I can structure a similar "hands off" moment of celebration of the text itself.

The question, of course, then becomes "which text?"

That's why I like the poetry readings at the beginning of the hour -- because the students must choose the poems, and they know better than to pick something too sentimental or too sing-songy or corny. So they often engage in their own research, which pays off in discovery as much as pleasure.

You can ping this entry by using .