by Eric Morder
by some miracle
the professors I had
for my MA
were remarkably good
in a real sense
which was not the case
when I went for my phd.
I had three to start with,
and they were all I was to have
in my short lived
career there.
one professor showed us
pictures
of all the places
James Joyce
frequented
during his lifetime,
including his home,
as well as the rivers in his
town
and so on and so forth,
sure,
we talked of Joyce’s writings,
mainly that Joyce was a fantastically
intelligent man,
and of the ways it comes in handy
to earnestly point
such a novelty out.
the first question
we were to answer
in an essay
was, “is Conrad a racist for using the ‘n’ word?”
I responded that
the question was inappropriate
because one cannot judge out of context
unless there’s some bull shit afoot
and one senses the familiar pressure of manipulation
for honestly no damn good reason
but the question was also
offensive
as though we didn’t know
how inappropriate the question was.
I got an ‘F.’
in another class, the professor told me
Tolkien
was childish
and not serious literature.
he also did not like Monty Python
for the same reason.
my last dear prof
told me we can learn from reading
Shakespeare’s “Taming of the Shrew”
that all women can learn from the noble shrew,
but failed to emphasize that no one in the play
would call her noble and that therefore Willy
is setting up for a future reader
the availability of adopting a cynicism
for those who doubted the noble shrew
as though we might sigh and say,
”those were the dark times when
people just didn’t know any better
and were heartless mean dicks!”
there, that could be a doctoral thesis!
so I dropped out and work at an ice cream shop and write poems.
this one’s my resubmission for all my ‘F’s.
About Eric Morder
