Thank you everyone for attending and participating in today’s class. I enjoyed the discussion around Wyatt’s poem and your input on marking blog entries, etc.
Mr. Reid shared with me at the end of class how much he enjoyed sitting in on it. He said he really enjoyed hearing your thoughts and seeing you wrestle with and interpret this stuff.
I would add my congrats to that. You all are doing really well in dealing with texts and issues that come from 600 or so years ago.
I always am intrigued and sometimes perplexed by the texts they put in the required reading list for this course. Take, for example, today’s poem (”Whoso List to Hunt…”). It is an interesting one, but I find it hard to nail down why, exactly they chose it. I think what it comes down to for me is the reading I did on Wyatt and his times, and the fact that Wyatt was doing something new and radical in writing about his own thoughts and feelings. Isn’t is interesting, though, that Wyatt copied/translated a lot of his work from Petrarch…so he is doing a new thing, with an old text.
Reminds me of the whole musical scene. I was thinking about this on the drive in this morning in the fog, and it is pretty mind blowing when you think of it…groups like the Ataris covering ‘Girls of Summer’ and turning it into quasi-punk, or Moby remixing historical recordings into trance music, or duets like Natalie Cole’s ‘Unforgettable’ with her post-humous father (that one is a little strange when you think about it).
These all seem to speak about our unwillingness to surrender the past, or some need to have a dialog with it or define ourselves as being different than it. There’s my ramble for the day, but I think I will be posting about this on my own blog .
Using something old to say something new…Your thoughts?
