Imaginary Syllabi

Been excited about this project since hearing about it when I first met Jane at Bard College in 2008. Now out is the Sprague/Palm Press ed. anthology, Imaginary Syllabi. As one who regularly teaches a course on radical pedagogy, poetry, & politics, this will certainly be on my, ahem, syllabus next time around. And as one who is often confused by the rhetoric around the (to me) unnecessary--or imaginary--divide between academics who write poetry and those who work in other fields, I think this series of complications will help clarify (in a non-discursive way) the structural, systematic, i.e., impersonal crisis of American education, that cleft between the simple and conservative cost-benefit economics of the corporate university and the yet-to-exist radical potential of the critical pedagogical environment (so, by "academic" I don't mean the tenured power-wielding asshole, the department chair, the staid game player, the complicit manager, but--as is usually the case--the contingent or otherwise power-less faculty, every bit as contingent and often as alienated as those outside the university). Yet I think this will be a book important for anyone invested in the social-political potential of writing and writing pedagogy, those who are paid faculty and those who are "teachers" or "co-learners" in a different, perhaps more generative sense--since what I just described I take to be one aspect, or set of concerns, among myriad others covered here.