The last couple of years I taught comp — lo, these many years ago — the program's focus changed to "Writing Across the Curriculum" with the laudable goal of providing our students with the rhetorical skills they needed to write papers in their business, econ, education, history, biology or whatever classes. Practically, it meant we were to assign our students writing tasks which we ourselves understood only poorly. We were, after all, graduate students in English, most of us with BAs in English, and we were there because we liked litrachure. Few of us had any formal rhetorical training, and even fewer had ever written a policy proposal or a business case or a lab report beyond the few as possible we'd written in the course of getting those BAs. And the one subject we were explicitly told not to assign was literary criticism, the one subject almost all of us did understand. After all, how could we expect students from terrible high schools (and aren't they always terrible?) to do something as difficult and demanding as that? God knows we knew it took years of study to be able to say anything consequential about Coleridge, or even Anne Sexton.
It was unconscionable arrogance and stupidity, and one of the reasons I left ABD.
Of course, we all do the same thing to some degree. We're naturally more inclined to tolerate (if we're even able to recognize) ordinary work in fields where we're not alive to history and nuance and skill. Less charitably, perhaps we know how hard we worked to get the skills and knowledge we have, whether it's iambic pentameter or cabinet-making, but we don't try very hard to imagine the work other people have done. I'm lucky to have lived long and fecklessly enough to have acquired at least the rudiments of skill in widely disparate fields: tool-and-die-making, speaking and briefly teaching a second language, residential renovation, playing fretted instruments (except the 5-string banjo!), programming, and making poems. It's taught me humility concerning those things about which I know little or nothing, and a generous respect for the intelligence and ability of nearly everyone I've worked with.
It's one of the reasons I get seriously annoyed when poets or other artists attribute their lack of audience to the nature of the people in that potential audience, whether the claim is that they're doped with religion and sex and TV or that they're ignorant or stupid or that they're being kept ignorant by powerful forces inimical to art — that's all horse-hockey. Artists reach or create an audience through respect for that audience and through hard work, through going a lot more than halfway, especially if the artist has not yet earned a reputation for good work, and most especially if the work in question is new or difficult.
I don't mind at all when poets frankly create work intended for a specific audience. But the self-styled avant garde is no different from the cowboy poets, except I've never heard a cowboy poet complain about not being published in The New Yorker.
8:48:03 PM 
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