Dark Night Without Armour of the Soul

It's finally happened. One of my students wrote a proposal for her class presentation on a poem by Jewel.

And academic elitist that I am, I said no, you cannot present that dreck to your classmates. I said it in a nicer way, and forced myself to read the poem before deciding, but still--these are not the moments we go into teaching for.

But it's weird to realize that I've been gleefully bashing Jewel's poetry for years without ever having read any of it. I've always thought of her as a decent lyricist, at least for a KISS108 type singer, and yet I bought into the assumption that she shouldn't be writing poetry books. Why? Because she's a celebrity waltzing into the field and selling more books than several poet laureates put together? I guess it's obvious where the resentment comes from, but all that would be irrelevant if the work was good.

But I think there's also more than pettiness at work in the sense that books like these can be a problem. They affect everyone because they change the ambient definitions of what poetry is, can be, and should do. Popular poems that are easy, that aren't rigorous, weaken the already ailing cultural idea that rewarding art requires patience.

As someone with seriously compromised patience myself, I think that it, and concentration, and care, and investment, are habits that need to be cultivated and tended, and that that can be difficult when the more and the less rewarding forms of art get mixed up together. At the same time, even though I told my student not to present on Jewel, I think railing against or trying to exclude "popular" stuff gets us nowhere, and that what people who make patience-requiring art need to do is to stick to what we do, not compromise, and try to expand the audience additively, not by drawing lines in the sand.

Just in case anyone was wondering.