Russians/Poetry/School/José

Used a Tao Lin poem in the English language club I run. The one with the helicopters/lonliness/killing-rampages/hard touching. I used it because I had made the theme poetry and that was the only poem I had read recently that I thought I liked that wasn’t a friend’s. The Russians complained that it wasn’t poetry because it didn’t ‘have real rhythm or rhyme’. I felt frustrated, thought that maybe Russian students are taught too much classic Russian literature as opposed to anything contemporary.

We talked about books we read in school for a while. Apparently everyone has to read War And Peace at 15. That’s probably too young to read that book. I told them we read Crime and Punishment and various Russian short stories like “The Lady with the Dog” by Chekov. They really couldn’t tell me what they had read in English, “maybe a poem by Shakespeare” they said, but they remember not liking it/it being difficult.

Talked to José about Russians and their views on poetry. He sighed. I said that Russians for the most part only seem to know/like classic poetry/photo-realistic art. He said “Soviet Realism”. Then José ate some granola and went to work.