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wren08I had an experience in high school that taught me that what you write is not always what people read. We were supposed to turn in a poem we liked to be analyzed by the class. I totally spaced that homework assignment so I scribbled down something I had recently written and handed it in.
Well, naturally, that was one of the poems my teacher picked for the class to analyze so I got to sit there in my seat, mum as a mouse, and listen while the class, including the teacher, read meaning after meaning into it that I had never put there. I don't remember most of it (which I attribute to acute embarrassment) but I do remember the class deciding that it was an old person, probably a man, looking back over a long life. I remember this so clearly because I was 16 at the time.
I have had a rather jaded view of literary classes ever since.
X-posted from a comment on
cymrullewes journal.
Well, naturally, that was one of the poems my teacher picked for the class to analyze so I got to sit there in my seat, mum as a mouse, and listen while the class, including the teacher, read meaning after meaning into it that I had never put there. I don't remember most of it (which I attribute to acute embarrassment) but I do remember the class deciding that it was an old person, probably a man, looking back over a long life. I remember this so clearly because I was 16 at the time.
I have had a rather jaded view of literary classes ever since.
X-posted from a comment on
cymrullewes journal.
