In the case of Classroom v. Chatroom, everybody wins!

Lisa Russ Spaar writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the divide between writers inside and outside the academy. This divide, she says, is acutely felt by those on each side. From the point of view of the academic:

Those “inside” tend to be acutely conscious of poets teaching at other institutions, many of whom were our former teachers, classmates, or students. We teach one another’s books, invite each other to give readings, await one another’s new publications with an interconnected anxiety and eagerness. Our professional publications and conferences feature, print, and advertise the work being published by university presses and by colleagues in the nation’s plethora of writing programs.

But Spaar doesn’t want to simply repeat the same old arguments about the university and the proliferation of MFA programs. Instead, she wants to point out how the internet, and poetry blogs in particular, offer new ways of reading that depart from normalized academic models. And because these sites are on the relatively neutral net, they have the potential to fuzzy-up that ol’ inside/outside division, and the corresponding methods of reading that such a division allows:

Perhaps what’s most exciting about these sites that blur distinctions between writers in and outside of academic settings is the way they encourage us to read. Long ago, when I graduated from college, I thought, “at last I can read, really read, the way I want to read: not just what’s assigned to me, but in a way that allows the authors I encounter to lead me to new texts. If Ai read Plath, I would read Plath. Plath read Dickinson: I would read her; Dickinson read Emily Brontë, and so I’d read her next. And this might bring me round to Agha Shahid Ali, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout, and so forth, backward and forward in time, across sensibilities and cultures. I am grateful for the ways these virtual sites invite this kind of exchange by providing a wider, more various, vital, world- and mind-opening lens into poetry and poetics than I might be able to find on my own.