Hunger Artists

DISCUSSION

Don’t pump yourself
up with faux notions
and expectations for
Discussion in the
Classroom.

Ben Feinberg advised
us in our First Year
Seminar seminar
Tuesday.

I can’t remember details
of his critique, but they
made good sense to me
even as I felt my own
pedagogical principles
shrivel as if jumping
into an artic pool with
the last polar bear
protected species not
with standing how it is
the globe is warming
& I’m a shrinking man.

We have Dreams of
Discussion In College
Classrooms where big
ideas clash: wonderful
wars of worlds & words
and shared edification.
It doesn’t happen.

Don’t be naïve and
irresponsible. Put them
devilish notions behind
you. Get real. Students
aren’t in your class
room to learn in that
old way.

It’s true.

I talk as if they are,
all of us: starving liberal
artists embarrassed by
hunger. Me: covering it
over in my tuxedo..

In those days, I learned what great conversation
was, where you didn’t know what you thought
until you said it, and somebody was going to add
that missing piece that was going to be the jigsaw
puzzle piece that they found on the floor under
your chair, and they just handed it to you, and,
whoa, there it is: the Oregon Trail, right before
your very eyes. Verandah Porche