zone defense

Aug 10 2008 Published by under posts

“…it preserves a small zone for the playful, the useless, and the unauthorized.”

–Matt Greenfield, writing in The Valve about Ramsey Scott’s “Even the Hardy Boys Need Friends: An Epistolary Essay on Boredom.”

The quote above refers to Wayne Koestenbaum’s practice of assigning his grad students a two-page “lyric essay” each week in lieu of a final paper. This was common practice in my own graduate program at New School University, where I studied under people like David Lehman, Laurie Sheck, David Trinidad, and Susan Wheeler.  I remember that one of the “essays” took the form of a collage about Wordsworth poem.

But I fear it was my own common practice through my whole education, even when more traditional essays were warranted.  For better or worse, I could never figure out how to obey without also resisting.

No responses yet