Word: poem
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...possible), was the evening's first jewel. As an astute listener remarked, "Dass sie hier gewesen" (That she was here) was ravishing because Goode wove in Upshaw's calm melody among a gently insistent stream of suspended fourths. The last of the five, "Der Musensohn" (The Muses' Son, a poem by Goethe), was a vehicle more for Goode's talent than Upshaw's--his capricious part intimated one of his upcoming Brahms solos. Unfortunately, the lace of technical difficulty left him free to tap his left foot loudly and even to more his lips to the words--Glenn Gould, anyone...
...Close reading. the abbility to make out what a text says or what the author intended it to say. It is true that understanding a poem and understanding a mathematical proof call for different reading skills. Yet I believe that the two sets of skills have much in common, and that someone who is proficient in one is well placed to learn the other. In music and the fine arts, the analogous skills are close listening and close seeing...
...notion that students automatically acquire core intellectual skills and habits by taking courses that emphasize distinctive modes of inquiry is pedagogically unsound: no one who has paid close attention to the way people acquire skills and habits would agree that this is what actually happens. Learning to decode a poem or a proof, to construct a cogent argument and support it with evidence, and to ask fruitful questions, are not skills that most people just pick up along the way. Each of them is nurtured by particular activities...
After calling my editor and telling him to go fornicate with himself, I deciphered why I was so upset. I have issues with censorship. In high school I wanted to recite a poem in a competition. It was a damn good poem ("The Colonel" by Carolyn Forche, if anyone's interested), and a poem that I thought might reach people in a school where poetry meant being taught Robert Frost's "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" every two years. But this poem, otherwise well-behaved, had one word to which they objected; coincidentally, it was exactly the same...
Most of the people I talked to about this suggested I change the word slightly, to something like "fornicate," "screw" or translate it into Spanish, so that I would at least be able to recite the rest of the poem. But the choice of that specific word was important to me, and presumably to the author of the poem, and that choice was made even more important when the word carries enough impact that people are afraid to hear...