Tag: criticism

it hit the fan today in poet­ry class, but i do not feel vil­i­fied. what i want­ed was dis­cus­sion and by gum i got it. some few were offend­ed, most dis­cussed what exact­ly i was going for, rang­ing from satire to pri­ma noc­ta rights. some want­ed me to make the end­ing dif­fer­ent to acknowl­edge my under­stand­ing of rape = bad. oth­ers dis­agreed. every­one had some­thing to say. all was well. i suc­cess­ful­ly stirred the pot. then i was allowed to speak. i said that there have been a sig­nif­i­cant amount of rape poems writ­ten in this class by var­i­ous peo­ple and that i have had trou­ble engag­ing with­in them. there is the female vic­tim, which women can iden­ti­fy with, but for men there is only the rapist. i said that i do not feel that i am being addressed by these poems.

there was much dis­agree­ment to this. i was told i was wrong, that i was being addressed. alas, there was no more time for dis­cus­sion, because the pro­fes­sor made us move on. if so i would have respond­ed that if i do not feel like i am being addressed but i am sup­posed to be, then there is a fun­da­men­tal prob­lem with the poet­ry. also, i would have said that even if i did feel addressed, i am still offered no frame of ref­er­ence for how to asso­ciate myself as a non-threat­en­ing male toward a vic­tim­ized female. the dia­logue takes place between the rapist and his vic­tim only.

over­all the class became what i want­ed it to. i am quite pleased.