But is it art? My Avant-Garde Education

When I jumped back on Twitter during the pandemic years before Elon Musk scared off so many brilliant artists and writers, I heard the daily sour plea of much younger-than-me writers making a big fuss over who was and wasn’t getting published, and they made one thing very clear: they pledged in solitude to never ever read dead poets. The dead poets society was apparently a big part of the problem. I was sorry they stopped at that point. 

I would have loved to hear more about this.  But that was it. No published articles, no blog posts, no coherent scholarly articles to support this as a problem, and no organized protests held outside major publishing houses in New York with handmade signs declaring Stop publishing dead poets!  It never works, the passive-aggressive nature of posting a complaint on Twitter and then meeting with your creative writing or literature teacher face-to-face the next day in class as a remedy, because after all she must read your feed, she’s got nothing better to do than spy on her students, and she must know that everyone else in this class feels the same way: stop making us read dead poets! 

A teacher once told me this story. The next day after reading an exceptionally mean mid-semester evaluation and a visit to her teaching mentor for advice, she asked her students to read a dead writer’s poem. She asked her students: What doesn’t work in this poem? Once the discussion started there were loud disagreements, laughing, crying, and a group of lifelong learners spilled out into the hallway when class ended. Not one stink look from any of the students including the one that disliked her class. The teacher gave this student what they wanted: a chance to prove their point, a chance to voice their anger, their confusion, and it turns out, their shame. (Something the conservative right in this country loathes, and I would argue, is destroying our country.) 

It takes work and talent to write well. Writing about what makes good writing or what someone thinks is bad writing takes work and an understanding of the craft as well. This memoir does both. Cooper is a gifted storyteller, but he knows that understanding art changed his way of seeing, thinking, and describing. I would argue the last sentence is the jumping point in this paragraph. It changed the overall value of the total image he created:  

“My awakening to the world of Avant-garde art had taken place ten years earlier in my junior high school library. Diagonal shafts of light slanted through the Venetian Blinds. Rotary fans turned overhead, stirring currents of warm air. Every now and then the librarian shushed talkative children as she silently rolled a cart through the stacks. These details come back readily because, in a lifetime of generally sluggish and imperceptible change, there followed a moment of such abrupt friction between who I was and who I would become, it’s a wonder I didn’t erupt in sparks.” My Avant-Garde Education by Bernard Cooper.

Here’s the book I just quoted from.  I highly recommend it.