Unlearn Me

I was all set to write a blog that discussed the first rule to remix: start with rich source material, end with a rich resulting project. Funkhouser however, was good enough to address my concerns at the end of a fifty page discussion that focuses on randomly generated syntax and all but ignores the presence of human generated diction. Thankfully he acknowledges this problem of "randomly" generated textual quality that seems obvious when comparing poems composed with Kafka's language and poems whose words were created by combining random syllables.

Obviously the Kafka poems are much better if approached from a purely literary standpoint, which Funkhouser would advise me not to do. I found myself asking, then how am I supposed to approach the work if not from the standpoint of a poet? Of course this confusion explains our circular debate in class over linearity and nonlinearity, and our fruitless though desperate attempts to ground analyses of digital writing theory in metaphors related to already existing art forms. Here is another analogy that is very Boulder-esque. When I was a snowboard instructor (yes I was) it was much more difficult to teach students who had been teaching themselves for a few days than students who had zero experience with the sport to begin with. With the the three day students, we embarked down a pedagogical road of unlearning and unteaching that proved over and over again to be more frustrating than learning and teaching. The same could be said about teaching literature but especially poetry to undergrads here at the University of Colorado. In the paraphrased words of my own teacher, Noah Eli Gordon "they have been taught that poetry is a secret code in which we the teachers have the decoder ring." I spend an immense amount of time teaching students to approach language as a material used to constuct an artform that can be "solved" but should also be experienced, the way a painting or a roller coaster (Joshua Clover's favorite comparison) is experienced. Anyway, I think the analogy is clear: I believe studying digital poetics would be easier if a) one had little or no experience in reading poetry/literature or b) as we talked about last week, poetics when it comes after digital needs to be redefined and thought of, as Funkhouser seems to believe, as something completely other than poetry. So the question I am left with at the close of Funkhouser's chapter 1 is, and excuse the Carrie Bradshaw ending but, how do we unlearn?