This is in response to the HarvardEdX on-line course of this title, just finishing up its Whitman module. I’ve put a short “Bod Fellow” review, mainly Best & Worst features, near the top of the Poetry page at www.bodlibrary.com. Given the freedom to engage at one’s own pace & indulge one’s own interests, it’s not possible to go far wrong with such a course when offered free, as this has been. The worst one is likely to do is waste time, which some might say goes hand in hand with poetry to begin with. (Not Yours Crudely, of course.)
It would be mostly pointless to compare specifics with other versions more or less focused on the same content & original landscape, e.g., the course I took on the subject as a Harvard undergrad exactly 50 years ago, or the one in graduate school out west some years later, both of which catered only to those few present. Each reflected its participants (especially its professor), as well as the poetry covered & the setting (class & seminar room).
This version, by contrast, is first & foremost an experiment in fairly large-scale on-line educational transmission. Learning primarily happens from doing, & the course seems designed to encourage active reading (including listening to & appreciating), thinking, discussing, & creative expression. I am personally still responding, still doing each based on interacting with the materials, still discovering value in the various components.
Yesterday was supposedly the 25th birthday of the internet, one generation in, yet world-wide inter-active connectivity is just in its infancy, or barely adolescent, either way rapidly learning & developing. As a quite new medium, we are just imagining, discovering & adapting its repertoire of forms, which in the case of a course like this draws from two rather distinct streams, school & media, with a unique potential for relating not just these two, but individual & mass, a mind-boggling landscape.
Evaluating each of the course-encouraged activities involves at least two comparisons then–one focused on the medium itself (as it relates to its streams), the other on potential within that medium, what might be learned & improved upon. There is no getting around the fact that a more or less guided discussion involving a dozen or two more or less similarly prepared & present parties will be a different animal from an on-line discussion thread open to thousands, yet there can advantages to each. Emerson’s squirrel may not be as grand as a mountain, but the latter may not be so good at cracking nuts.
The best general formula must include variety in its menu of approaches & content, serving the variety of learning styles, interests & development of participants, including the team conducting the experiment. There is no getting away from the fact that a discussion with a dozen or two more or less present participants is bound to be a different animal from a thread open to thousands. Somewhere in between the two, perhaps, may be presentations, performances, & lectures to a few hundred, with their own mass-media cousins.
From a director’s perspective, the two aims–presenting Whitman & encouraging participant responses–are not the same, though each may be enhanced in ways that also encourage the other…. The relationship is dynamic, not simple; though most often reinforcing each other, potentially tripping each other up. By “presenting Whitman,” I don’t mean the biographical information, but the work & life (including biography) as art, whether poems are given voice in concert format or both poems & biography are brought to life in the Chautauqua-style in which the interpreter uses direct address in exchange with the audience. A large amount of information can be transmitted within what everyone recognizes & responds to as an overtly artistic rendering.
The artistic aim & impact may be considered fundamental, first & foremost a matter of the presentation, direct experience of the music or poem, an engagement encouraging developmental response across domains (mind, feeling & body chemistry together, for example). The experience of the artistic embodiment does the first work, in other words, albeit facilitated by informed selection & guidance in approach, useful background information, & examples of the kind of response being encouraged (appreciation, critical thinking, artistic, etc.). A lecture, for example, may transmit these in conjunction with selections from the work, as may more & less guided participant discussion.
Even with its presumably secondary, facilitative & overtly educational role, there is no getting around the fact that the live lecture itself is an art-form. The same may be said for its mass-media translations, whether in print (e.g., e. e. cummings’ 6 non-lectures) or on video. Just as the live lecture can include bits of Socratic exchange, audio-visual & mimetic illustration, etc., the video version radically expands illustrative potential, whether by putting the “lecturer” on location or splitting sound & visual tracks.
This video-lecture potential is particularly well explored in the Whitman video focused on “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” sometimes in the professor’s office, talked to across her desk, sometimes on the ferry, a field trip companion, sometimes looking at the poem on a visualized page, sometimes the words as found in metal-work on location….. Among its other virtues, variety of sensory inputs may reinforce each other &, in educational jargon, appeal to the varied learning modalities. In fact, the working together of visual, auditory, affective & cognitive functions is basic to artistic & educational experience.
[To be continued. Must run for the moment….]