Thursday, October 01, 2020

Links between my selves at 9, 19, and now: From Schiller to Ashbery

At the end of "Poetry and Uselessness", Robert Archambeau links John Ashbery's poetry to Friedrich Schiller's "Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man". For me, this connected my daily Ashbery reading between 2017 and 2020 to my fascination with Schiller in my sophomore year in college, and I sensed that my teaching has always been implicitly informed by him. Shortly after this linking of my youthful and present selves, my third-grade teacher told me she'd recently imagined me at nine, with my hands on my hips and "a petulant glint" in my eye. All this made the parts of my life a whole, in an exhilarating fulfillment of my aesthetic education. (Andrew Shields, #111words, 1 October)

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