OFF! PLEASE.

That's what I command the dog when he's taking up too much of the couch. But it's also what I've felt this week about the merry-go-round bullshit that can consume a semester.

Like the student evaluation I recently read, which commented on how the student "knew that the critical focus of the class was on gender and everything, but I wish that we had done more with OTHER points of view like historicism and new criticism." (Aforesaid student neglected to mention that s/he learned such terms as "historicism" and "new criticism" because I TAUGHT THEM and required students to write papers using those critical modes. I sigh.)

And like the student who turned in a "summary" of Aristotle's Poetics that was actually a summary of an obscure 14th c. poem on our syllabus. But who included a sweet note about how "adorable" I look with my emerging bump, and how she has 4 children of her own.

Or the weird laughter in my classes about the Wife of Bath's Tale and its central knot of rape.

Stranger still is the awkwardness in my poetry seminar about race. Race certainly figures in the writing classes I teach, mainly in the form of the authors we read. And we sure as shit discuss performativity and identity in those classes, too, which largely consist of brown and black students. I don't do as much with race in my surveys, mainly because everybody we read is an old white dude and there ain't much I can do about history. So I feel a bit rusty with the overt discussions of race and literature that are popping up in my poetry seminar.

STCU is very urban, of course. And Subtropical City has huge black and Asian and Latin communities. All of whom are strongly represented in my classes. Visually, my students LOOK like all the students I ever taught "up north." But the classroom dynamics of race, here, are totally different.

The poetry seminar is a genre course for majors and we cover the whole gamut of the poetic tradition. Lately, we've come to read poems by black folks like Phyllis Wheatley (who I adore) and anonymous spirituals, etc. I have taught these texts before, in liberal blue states, and they usually elicit all kinds of lively chatter, from students of the brown, black and white persuasion. And in these past classes, it's the black students who do have the very most to say about Wheatley--they are angry with her, and admire her, and they want to talk about it. And yet we have ALL end up talking fruitfully about the concept of "double-speak" in African-American lit.

This current poetry class is evenly split between black, white and brown. But nobody will talk about Wheatley. And when they do, the black students seem to feel the need to represent in some way. They'll talk awkwardly about "personal experience." Or they'll provide some factual information about the spirituals we've read. But they won't participate further. Some have popped out to go to the bathroom, thus absenting themselves completely from the conversation. The white students don't want to participate much either, beyond giving glib generalities. So then I end up giving a mini-lecture about historical context and form or something.

Perhaps the issue at hand is that in my other classes, I situate our discussion around the central idea of "voice" and "authority," which is to say, I ask of the texts we read: "who is speaking, and how did he get the right to speak?" Embedded in this question is the real truth: "who is being silenced, here?" I haven't done that in the poetry class, in part because so much of our critical work has centered around prosody and scansion. And maybe I should, and more forcefully, because it is a question that lies at the very heart of what poetry is and how it works.

But I also wonder if the issue is a Southern one, if here in STC, "race" is frequently understood to be the exclusive purview of black people. And so necessarily, black folks don't want to represent because it's mad boring and tedious, and white folks don't want to step on toes so they just shut up, and the brown folks don't know what the hell is going on with this crazy country anyway. And there I am, the white lady medievalist in goofy glasses at the front of the room who's likely being "rude" by even demanding discussion of this poem in the first place.