One day after a Pew poll showed only 38 percent of Germans

view Russia as a threat to its neighbors (other than Ukraine), news has broken that Russia hacked the Bundestag.

Objective reality doesn’t go away even if we close our eyes and hide under the sofa.

Writers are, first and foremost, readers. They read a lot and as a result know what has been done so many times that doing it once again would be a horrible cliché.

To give just an example, a contemporary writer starts a famous novel as follows. The main character’s mother died when he was an infant. So there was nobody to “raise him in tenderness” and he grew up wild. Because all women are tender, obviously. And without their civilizing presence men remain wild. But that’s OK because the character had a special talent he discovered at the age of 7. And now let me cover thousands of pages with words to tell you all the details of that special talent.

Without even starting on the artistic qualities, just the plot premise itself is excruciatingly boring. “Orphaned and wild” has been done so many times that one begins to wish for an orphaned and domesticated character just to relieve the tedium. The special gift one discovers all of a sudden serves as a foundation for every TV show featuring children or adolescents.

Everything turns to a parody of itself with repeated use. Wild motherless orphans made sense in the early 19th century. The need for women to civilize men by applying their “softer” influence to them was all the rage in the 1500s. Golden locks and rosebud mouths sounded just fine in the 17th century. Eos of the rosy fingers worked out fantastic for Homer but you just can’t do this shit without a trace of irony in the postmodern era and still be a writer.

This is not to say that the cheap pop psych of dead mothers, softening women, and sudden talents can’t be entertaining as hell. Just like an occasional meal at Wendy’s might be fun and delicious. Yet a person who sees no difference between a dish prepared by a Michelin-star chef and an outing at Applebee’s is missing many exciting experiences that constitute culinary education. And in the same way, the person who believes that literature is Hunger Games and 50 Shades has had an impoverished range of intellectual and artistic experiences.

What I’m expressing here is a point of view that is hugely unpopular in North American academia. We are all so terrified of rating or ranking and so into the idea of total equality that we spent months last year at my department  interviewing people for a job they were not even remotely qualified to do just because it would be unfair not to interview everybody who NEEDED a job.

But hey, when did I care what anybody else thought? The literary canon was created to prop up the nation-state. And now that the nation-state is tottering, preserving the idea of Great Books might offer some support to the nation-state. 

I just discovered that I’m not at all bad at analyzing poetry. If the enjoyment of the activity is any sort of an indicator (and with me it usually is), then I might actually be quite good.

I always thought I’d suck at poetry, so I never tried it. But a book titled Literature of the Crisis would look freaky if it pointedly excluded poetry just because I’m scared of it.

So I started analyzing a poem, and it turns out I have a lot to say about it. And I recognize the poems this poet makes use of because it turns out I have read quite a lot of poetry and am not as unprepared as I thought I was to analyze it. 

I blame my teachers for this terror of poetry that I used to feel. They made me believe that analyzing poetry was too hard and too useless and not to be attempted. It turns out, however, that if you really love a poem (and have had training in literary analysis), you will be able to say quite a lot about it. 

This whole awakening to poetry is a result of my interactions with one of my students. He’s been analyzing poetry in every essay he ever handed in to me and was doing a kick-ass job. And as I was discussing his work with him, I kind of got into the whole thing and decided to continue it on my own. I’m just happy that I didn’t turn out to be one of those professors who imbue students with the fear of poetry. I mean, I almost did but this student resisted me. And I’m very happy he did.

OK, I’ll stop gushing now and go analyze me some more poetry.