Ah, it’s a good time of the semester. The first creative work came in from my students, and I have high hopes. There’s a lot of raw potential in this group. The beginning of the semester is a great renewal; there are so many unknowns and so many opportunities.

I ask students each semester to bring in an exemplary poem, an assignment I stole from a friend. It is fascinating and revealing in ways that I’m not sure they realize. It’s difficult sometimes to tell how honest the exemplary poems are, because you wonder if there’s a certain amount of posturing for the sake of the students’ perceptions of the instructors wants. I have no want other than honesty. I think, by and large, I got a very honest batch of poems. I’d never read three of the poems, which was a nice treat, and I’d never even heard of one of the poets. If you’ve heard of John Duvernoy, holler at me in the comments. Googling him turned up a title, Razor Love, but I wasn’t even fully convinced that it’s a book. I’d love to know more about him.

I surprised myself somewhat with a comment in class, and I don’t feel I handled the situation as well as I might have. But basically, here’s the gist: “art for the sake of art” (art devoid of a message or meaning from the artist) is rarely great art, and if gains any traction, it owes to its status as a sociological and ethnographic curiosity rather than to its merit as art. And I’m uninterested in helping students create such a product. How’s that for being completely dismissive of whole movements and swaths of culture?