Whenever I write these days about poetry I express an intense interest in the poem, poem by poem and poetic project by poetic project. Yet what comes through is an even keener concern about collaborative interpretation generally, about our uses and misuses of—and recently our panics over—the technologies that make such collaboration possible at a large scale. Pondering the origins of the interests that have made ModPo—a free, non-credit, open online course—possible, I realize that I am seeking to connect such a social or civic mode of reception with the supposedly difficult, putatively opaque poets and poems I admire and as an educator feel a strong instinct to share (and which I have presented in college classes and open public forums for forty years by now).
Such a connection necessitates a mix of old and new concepts of learner-centered learning that I believe form a precondition for the sort of communitarian interpretive crowdsourcing that is a productive approach to those poems. The poems thus are or have become meta-poetic in that they themselves mark out points or sites of convening, referring to themselves as art objects that need others to receive and respond to them as the co-creators of what they mean. At moments of such convening, the meta-poetic situation just described is always also meta-pedagogical, insofar as the interanimations between writer and reader they require are precisely an ideal model and analogue for the affiliation and convergence—a citizen-like alliance—of teacher and learner.
Within several weeks of launching ModPo in 2012 as a massive open online course, I knew that such a site need not be impersonal if it could somehow invite learners to turn the platform toward the advantage of open discussion and interactive responsiveness. And then I came to know that it was poetry as the choice of subject matter—to be sure, a certain kind of poetry and a certain approach to the technology of archiving recordings of poetry—that created both the rationale and the modal necessity for controverting the impersonal. These poems and these new open technologies were aligned. That is to say, again: a learner-centered learning was akin to reader-centered reading (a poetics). And both the pedagogy and the poetics were in turn made to align with a user-centered use of the then-new robust massive online platform in ways not anticipated—and some senses, not even desired—by the platform’s makers. How does one draw out implications beyond what the designers of such a platform intend?
To answer that question—a matter of Big Tech subversion, really—I want to turn to the problem symbolized by online or “remote” teaching during the recent pandemic, and particularly to a synthesizing point made by Masha Gessen at the end of a July 2020 essay that was published in the New Yorker. Quoting a university president speaking with uncharacteristic conservatism about stern rules that would need to be imposed on students returning to campus while a pernicious disease was easily spreading (months prior to available vaccination, of course), Gessen observed the ideological irony inscribed in the authoritarian rhetoric: “we have the authority to put all kinds of expectations and requirements on our students” and to design “a series of escalations for dealing with misbehavior.” Then, turning slightly toward an exactly contemporaneous situation, one involving many people of college age, Gessen described their research on the responsible and remarkably COVID-safe activities associated with mass anti-racist protests that had been taking place in late spring and all summer in response to a new wave of anti-Black violence and in particular the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Gessen, a veteran of protests with a long history of reporting on them, confessed that they had never seen “this level of detailed, organized, and consistent mutual care,” and quoted a call-and-response chant from the mass demonstrations—“Who keeps us safe? / We keep us safe!”—in such a way as to cause the renewal of antiracist activism, fears of the pandemic’s effects, and frustration over the failures of 21st-century education to seem essentially convergent. Pivoting back to the volatile situation of pandemic-era teaching and learning, they began briefly and tentatively to outline a pedagogy focused on the learner rather than the teacher of teaching institution, one that took its cue from people of the same generation who were making an effort to take the new politics into their own hands—a pedagogy that could begin with the “community [that] students seek [pandemic or no pandemic] when they attend college in person.” Gessen urged those in authority at schools to ask the students themselves, those subject (after all) to the old and suddenly rather outmoded (and, despite the shift to online, largely unchanged) methods of teaching, to create, as it were, a syllabus that included, rather than sidelined, a fresh “rethink[ing of] how colleges are interacting with students who are staying home.”
The tens and thousands of people who have joined me and my Kelly Writers House colleagues for the unpredictably iterative ModPo experience, some of whom have admitted they do not much like poetry, have all along been staying home for a variety of reasons, and the innovative empathy Gessen observed in young people during the summer of 2020, I argue, obtains generally. Just one reason for teaching ourselves to care about those who are staying home, since 2020, has obviously been a deadly infectious disease. But of course, there are other causes and motives, and I deem them to be relevant to these ideas about the reception of “difficult poetry”: no proximate access to a college or university; lifelong learning differences that made traditional classroom learning impossible or irrelevant, or at any rate disheartening and unproductive; poverty in general, including mass student debt in particular; overwhelming domestic responsibilities; chronic illness and other forms and causes of immobility. Still another reason has to do with a re-emergent post-pandemic Connectivist sensibility, which—like the radical, self-creative idea of the Connectivist MOOC (or “cMOOC”) still wandering in the edu-tech wilderness, pushed still further to the edges by the immense rush of “Panic-gogy” toward new Third Spaces in which education was able to become a kind of poesis, a making by imagination—is just what Gessen observed of learners as they became conscious of their right to expect that the learning environments they enter, and indeed help to create, could be built upon detailed, organized, consistent mutual care.
Although they did not use the term “Third Space,” Gessen was describing nearly exactly what political geographer and spatial theorist Edward Soja identified in his definition of Third Space learning as “a purposefully tentative and flexible term that attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances and meanings.”[1] Elaborating on Soja’s earlier work and that of others, a group of critic-educators including Elizabeth Birr Moje and Katheryn McIntosh Ciechanowski described a Third Space as a site where the “integration of knowledges and discourses” are drawn from difference spaces—the first space of people’s homes or familial community and/or peer networks; the second space saturated with the socializing discourses in formalized institutions such as schools.[2] A situation that was neither home nor classroom, but which extended the keen desire of people to continue improvising formats for learning, drawing from the radical uncertainty of the shut-down pandemic moment, was what excited Gessen and inspired them to write for The New Yorker just then about a pivotal moment in higher education, and caused them to feel a sense of hope for the students, although not for the schools, in the midst of the 2020 crisis. “What might students who have been protesting [in the summer of 2020] try to apply to college life?” Gessen hoped and tentatively proposed that these people, intent on free-style learning, form “affinity groups in a protest movement,” now not only protesting the social and political issues entirely separate from faculty or administration of the university but the very way in which the university’s curriculum seemed irrelevant. Young people in such “pods” would create their own safety protocols to deal outdoors (the sites of protest) with the rapidly spreading virus but, relatedly, an entirely “new approach to the academic schedule.” In fact these self-created, self-populating workshops or forums could “plan a curriculum for a year together” and form intensive course-like studies the length and depth of which would befit the time it took to cover the topic rather than the predetermined semester or quarter. When police (in Ashville, NC) attacked young protestors, they also turned against home-made structures that had been constructed to support the people, destroying a medics’ station that had been set up, slashing water bottles despite the hot temperatures.[3] Soon wagons full of water jugs, wheeled in by additional protestors, improvised a means for people to continue safely. For Gessen, the same improvisational acquisition of know-how, the same self-organizing learned effort, is what could be the basis for major shifts in the way these students engaged with the intellectual life of the university. “Colleges ought to be asking young people like [those who were protesting] how to bring that knowledge, and that sense of care and responsibility, to campus [emphasis added]. Instead, they are treating them alternately as clients and as children, people to be pleased or managed.”
“Let’s reframe the question,” Gessen adds, “by asking not whether colleges should get their tuition dollars by putting their students, faculty, and staff at risk [by calling them back to campus and into classrooms—and instead continuing courses online], but how to insure that the current generation of students will be able to learn in a meaningful way.”[4] When Suzanne Choo applied Third Space theory to literary education, she observed how the socialization of first spaces (home, family, parental prerogative) selected what to know and thus taught through exclusions, while discourse learning in the second spaces (classrooms where books and texts were assigned by teachers and curricular authorities) created an often insurmountable contradiction or self-cancelling unlearning effect, a problem required entry into a new and different space, one that coud not be characterized as like home or school, where what Kris D. Gutiérrez calls “a sociocritical literacy” obtains. “The assumption [in the classroom, the second space] that students can simply immerse themselves in the world of the text and enjoy the experience of reading,” writes Choo, “naively ignores the fact that a particular world of home [the first space] has typically already been chosen for them to vicariously experience and the fact of selection means that other worlds have been excluded.”[5] This theory of learning suggests that the meaning of culture—for Choo, we should note, it is specifically literary culture—is best found and learned elsewhere. When learners occupy a Third Space of some sort—in 2020, as Gessen observed (through their own daughter’s and her peers’ first-hand engagement), this became the interstitial scene of ongoing protest, a co-creative happening, occurring while school continued remotely to be in session—they learn that translation is a form of negotiation. In The Location of Culture, Homi Bhabba writes that the Third Space “is the ‘inter’ – the cutting edge of translation and negotiation, the inbetween space – that carries the burden of the meaning of culture.”[6] Noting the “multiple social spaces with distinctive participation structures” her students were required to translate, Gutiérrez, like Bhabba, investigates the borderlines of those activities, what was later referred to as the “underlife” of the classroom . . . and the remarkable sense-making character of those seemingly unrelated processes, what was called “the ‘script’ and ‘counterscript’ from which Third Spaces emerge.”[7] For Choo and others this scriptedness can be a poem or other literary text, a point of translation and negotiation for teacher and student. A third form makes itself apparent when a sense of equity characterizes what a teacher does in the act of presenting the poem for learning and discussion, for collaborative interpretation, such that the teacher and students are to the text just as the poet and the reader are. Learning becomes a matter of convening, of intersecting, to use Gutiérrez’s term: “where teacher and student scripts—the formal and informal, the official and unofficial spaces of the learning environment—intersect, creating the potential for authentic interaction and a shift in the social organization of learning and what counts as knowledge.”[8]
How exactly do people enter and occupy this sort of “house of poetics”? What can be done to support the impulse people outside the academy feel when they seek learning from a site that is not a classroom and indeed doesn’t resemble one? Third Space theorizing arose partly, it seems, in order to explore alternative sites of learning where the things to know and learn are simultaneously being made. The notion of a Third Space derived in part as a result the rise of a middle class as it stimulated the distribution of an education for adults beyond school age in acceptable social manners and habits of taste, to promote at least some further social rising. Literary education in particular gained new wide currency outside the academy with coffee houses, cheap editions of canonical works such as those of Shakespeare, Longfellow, Byron, accessible literary periodicals reachable on street stands and in stores, summarizing guidebooks on literary opinion presented in plain language, etc. As Suzanne Choo describes the derivation of Third Space theorizing, the critique of such “civilizing” aims was not meant to oppose the inhabiting of non-academic spaces for literary learning, but focused its criticism on the Arnoldian immersion in high culture which supposedly created an informed citizenry that had been taught the “best that is known and thought in the world.” Third Space theory does not repress or forget that the acquisition of taste also provided a bulwark against hyper-utilitarian influences of an industrial age.[9] In other words, Third Space as a critique of these effects did not intend for literary education to be driven back into bona fide schools, although Third Space theories in the field of education do, to be sure, focus their energies on what happens in the contemporary classroom. The idea of the Third Space overall, however, has added to the radical potential of nontraditional gatherings: self-organized tutorials, nonsystematic writing conferences, comprehension circles, teatro del orpimico (theater of the oppressed), readings and performances in what attendees think of as common social spaces, open fee-free Zoom forums, and the like. Poetry critics, especially during and immediately after the ascendancy of New Criticism with its fetishization of instructor-led close reading, seemed to assume that home and family were increasingly failing our children by deferring to professionalization and specialization of reading and assumed that texts brought into the classroom provided for the main encounter. The effort to locate or build a Third Space, Choo argues, came in response to the sort of thinking as that of Harold Bloom who argued that literary criticism “always will be an elitist phenomenon” and advocated reading a poem as a poem with “a stubborn resistance whose single aim is to preserve poetry as fully and purely as possible.”[10] Such preservation as Bloom and others advocated ipso facto required the classroom. Coffee houses and bookstores and public parks and self-organized learner-led readings made full and pure preservation of poetry difficult if not impossible and so higher learning did not typically venture there.
The poetry-infused space that has interested me since the mid-1990s—the fixed and unfixed sites poet Edwin Torres seeks to occupy as a self-described “lingualisualist” who came of age poetically in urban Third Spaces, sites of difficult, chaotic creativity that are descendants of Emily Dickinson’s house of possibility and the underside of Walt Whitman’s bootsoles—is where three main areas of concern converge. The first is the vast interpretive community that convenes around the poetic because it provides the rationale for improvising conversations about pretty much everything else, such that poetry offers and guides a mode of open-ness and responsiveness. The second is a revised definition of learners and learning. This concern can be focused on the poem at a time of history when it has been in various ways released from the constraints of the book and the page—and thus from a certain kind of assumed author-centered authority. I have been arguing that there is a connection between, on one hand, such radical diffusion or redistribution—for instance, of a poem as audio (or video) recording—and, on the other hand, the open-ness with which learner-readers receive it; and a connection, analogously, between the implicit potential anti-authoritarian qualities of pagelessness and the prospective democratic aspects of the gathered vast community.
This reformist association—we can call lit “alt-poetry / alt-pedagogy”—requires attention to the third of these concerns: a careful consideration of aspects of the sort of text that is not textual in the historically accepted sense—not part of the visuality of language, not part of that which has been seen (with readers’ eyes) in the long primacy of alphabetism, a poem that more readily enables the sort of a readers’ and writers’ Third Space of listening and producing meaningful sounds, respectively, that (in spatial theorist Edward Soja’s terms) “attempts to capture what is actually a constantly shifting and changing milieu of ideas, events, appearances and meanings.”[11] From my experience with ModPo, I would argue that any step toward a post-academic citizen poetics is necessitated by a productive confrontation with the possibilities of sounds made and recorded, and then shared as portable files, in/from such a space. The lifting off from the page that will be required for the establishment of a wide, diverse, international, and intergenerational sociocritical citizenship is going to crucially involve sound. That might seem like an odd or overstated claim. The most skeptical form of this doubt reads this way: What could possibly be the connection between intellectual community and audio file formats? Why does sound often better inhabit the Third Space than the written text? Why does a formal out-loud reading of a poem, for instance, affiliate with and connect with—and, actually, imitate—the sort of off-hand conversations among friends and strangers that many people intensely desire and deem an enhancement of the aesthetic? In search of a Third aesthetic-ethical (or, to cite poet Joan Retallack, poethical) Space made possible—though, sadly, not technologically required or even incentivized—by open online platforms such as that used by MOOCs, the initial problem is to identify and name the conservatism inherent in a phrase like This here is what it means. Although he was not writing about teaching, the Language poet Bruce Andrews was imagining a specific practice when he expressed the hope “for a revived radicalism of constructivist noise or anthemic ‘informal music’” in sites of poetry and poetics. Aligned with the spirit of this, I have been wondering if the space where people gather to understand a poem together might be filled with such noise. Noise, really? For much of my long career as a teacher, I had not been hearing enough of it. Such noise is rarely made in a formal classroom, in any case, so we tend to look elsewhere.
These ruminations about the origins of ideas about teaching and learning as they might sustain an open, free, non-curricular massive gathering for citizen poetics have led to an exceedingly basic question: When teachers gather with learners, how well and closely can we listen to the informal communal noise—distractions, digressions, disharmonies, seemingly counterproductive whisperings, interruptions, the positive “underlife” of the Third Space valued by many theorists of education[12]—and yet still serve in some version of the role of convener?
Notes:
[1] E. W. Soja, “Thirdspace: toward a new consciousness of space and spatiality,” in K. Ikas and G. Wagner (eds.) Communicating in the Third Space (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 50.
[2] Elizabeth Birr Moje, Kathryn McIntosh Ciechanowski, Katherine Kramer, Lindsay Ellis, Rosario Carillo, Tehani Collazo, “Working toward third space in content area literary,” Reading Research Quarterly 39, 1 (January/February/March 2004), p. 41.
[3] “Asheville protests: Mayor Manheimer wants explanation of police destruction of medical station,” Citizen Times (Ashville NC), June 4, 2020.
[4] Masha Gessen, “What Do College Students Think of Their Schools’ Reopening Plans?” The New Yorker, July 11, 2020: https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-do-college-students-think-of-their-schools-reopening-plans
[5] Susanne S. Choo, “Expanding the Imagination: Mediating the Aesthetic-Political Divide through the Third Space of Ethics in Literature Education,” British Journal of Educational Studies, 2020, p. 10.
[6] Homi K. Babbha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 56.
[7] Kris D. Gutiérrez, “Developing a Sociocritical Literacy in the Third Space,” Reading Research Quarterly 43 (2), p. 152.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Choo, “Expanding the Imagination,” p. 2.
[10] Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Penguin, 1994), pp. 16-17.
[11] E. W. Soja, “Thirdspace: toward a new consciousness of space and spatiality,” in K. Ikas and G. Wagner (eds.) Communicating in the Third Space (New York, Routledge, 2009), p. 50.
[12] Kris Gutiérrez, “Developing a Sociocritical Literacy in the Third Space,” p. 152.
Al Filreis is Kelly Professor of English, Faculty Director of the Kelly Writers House, Director of the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, Co-Director of PennSound, Publisher of Jacket2 magazine—all at the University of Pennsylvania, where he has been a member of the faculty and administrator since 1985. He has published many essays on modern and contemporary American poetry, on the literary history of the 1930s and 1950s, on the literary politics of the Cold War, on the end of the lecture, and on digital humanities pedagogy. His newest books are 1960: When Art and Literature Confronted the Memory of World War II and Remade the Modern (Columbia, 2021) and The Difference Is Spreading: Fifty Contemporary Poets on Fifty Poems, edited with Anna Strong Safford (Pennsylvania, 2022). Among his previous books are Modernism from Right to Left, Wallace Stevens and the Actual World, and Counter-Revolution of the Word: The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945-60. He produces and hosts a monthly podcast/radio program, “PoemTalk.” He has hosted three eminent writers for residencies each spring through the Kelly Writers House Fellows Program since 1999. The open online course he created and co-convenes, “ModPo,” has a current enrollment of 72,000 people in 179 countries.