The Whole Business of Responding in Words.

Have you ever had the experience where you are trying to explain something, but the words all seem to come out wrong? So you give up, throwing up your hands in frustration and say "Well, I know what I mean in my head!"

I had a prof one time who suggested that unless we can put what we think into language, we're not really thinking it. Immediately, I felt that the professor must be mistaken, but the more I thought about it, the more I realised he was likely right. It's one thing to have an impression of something but I believe we can only really know something if we can put it into words and communicate it to others. A couple of students were quite perturbed when I mentioned this the last time I taught the course. After a while though, I believe, we arrived at some consensus about the necessity of being able to articulate thought in words. E.M Forster is often quoted on this issue for asking "How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?"

That's the value for me of doing poetry the way we are doing it. When we first look at a poem we tend to know very little about it (the crickets will vouch for me). However, by the time presenters have shared their theses and we've discussed the questions, we are able to say a number of things about the poems with some certainty. Even identifying aspects of the poems that seem unknowable is a way of getting to know them more intimately. This is where I would urge you to really listen to one another and to respond to each other's blog posts. In the course of doing so, you will find that you come away knowing more about English letters (the highfalutin way of saying "literature"). The cliche comes to mind: minds are like parachutes, they only work when they are open.