"As for elitism, poetry is about the least "elitist" artistic pursuit around: it requires no special equipment, no great monetary investment, and no special training that one can't provide oneself if one is disciplined and determined. It just demands the ability and willingness to read and write seriously and intensively and to think about what one reads and what one writes."
-------------------------------------------------------------Reginald Sheppard
7 comments:
Yep. That's why it has become one of the most elitist arts around - no artificial barriers, so the infinite insecurity of a totally open and highly subjective form drives its most competitive & fearful practitioners to erect vast artificial boundaries and cliques - called movements, sensibilities and schools.
What I noted in my stint in University is that the Faculties of the "softer sciences" erected the most elaborate walls of justification in an attempt at achieving respectability vis a vis the "hard sciences". The more subjective a field of academic pursuit is, the more elitist it is prone to become. It's called the law of exclusionism - methinks. ;-)
The face of my student adviser when I told her I wanted to transfer out of the Electrical Engineering & Computer Science double major at Berkeley (second then only to MIT), during the height of the dot-com era, having won both the Regents and Alumni scholarships, met the Chancelor, and been assigned my own personal faculty adviser in Engineering - because I wanted to study English Literature - said it all. Thank God she didn't know my specialty was later to become poetry, and specifically sonnets. She might have had a heart attack on the spot.
A definitive moment - wish I coud see the look on her face or that I had a pic of my dad's face when (after graduating with a Bachelor of Arts from McGill University) I told him that I would not be considering going on to law school (his dream not mine) but that I would continue my graduate studies in Sociology at Concordia University.
Roads diverged in a wood.
"I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference."
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