Decatur Book Festival – Day 2
Decatur Metro | September 6, 2009My apologies for the lack of updates on the “Live” post, but it seems like the bloggers’ special WiFi connection for the Book Festival has disappeared. Guess we’ll have to do this the ol’ fashioned way!
Spent the early afternoon at the Old Decatur Courthouse attending the “How to Read a Poem” talk with Ed Hirsch and Thomas Lux. t was interesting how the conversation eventually came back to the basic elements of our “teach the classics?” topic. Should poetry be taught so students develop a love of poetry or should they learn the classics and the foundations they provide come hell or high-water?
While the speakers fought with an audience member I thought to myself, “The answer is somewhere in the middle.”
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I attended the Hirsch/Lux talk too, and I was dying to raise my hand and point out that Lux has a poem (in his book “God Particles”) in which the poem takes the view that whoever reaches the age of majority without reading Moby Dick should face the cartoonish punishment of having his eyes scooped out and replaced with hot coals. Now is that educator-frustration venting itself, or what?
Sorry about the wi-fi- didn’t find out it was not working until too late in the day to fix it. Luckily all the bloggers continued blogging the “old fashioned way!”