The Presence of Poetry: Response

My journey to British Columbia for this year's NAVSA Conference was a relatively short hop in the general scheme of things, but I boarded the plane at Sacramento carrying the same load of guilt. Air travel for both work and leisure now requires the kind of embarrassed excuse that lighting up a cigarette in company used, for a while, to elicit: I know it's a dirty habit, and it's not good for me or you or anyone else, but I can't seem to stop myself from doing it just yet. In our current climate (literally and otherwise), I keep wondering whether the academic conference is doomed. It is, of course, dangerous to focus our reformist eyes solely upon flying: the necessary path toward sustainable living has to be built from billions of changes to daily behaviors and longer-term choices by individuals, businesses, and nations alike. Nevertheless, air travel looms large both as a devastating source of pollution and as an especially resonant symbol of the global arrogance of the privileged. We do not need to re-read David Lodge's Small World to remind ourselves that the coming together of academics under the aegis of intellectual exchange has always been a potentially self-indulgent affair, but the deleterious effects of one of our favorite professional activities now seem on a different scale altogether. Is it possible to justify the culture of the conference in this day and age?

I do not write these introductory words to prepare the ground for a redemptive, or an exculpatory, narrative in the remainder of my pages here: on the contrary, this is obviously an issue that we need to keep, or start, thinking about, both individually and communally, in order to make significant changes to our habitual practices. Rather I offer the remarks as prelude to, and explanation for, an opening focus upon the following question: under what circumstances is the physical presence of a group of academics crucially constitutive of new and important ideas? Are there some kinds of understanding that cannot occur easily, or at all, through the reading of each other's words in print or on the web, or from our exchanges by email, telephone, or letter? It is not hard to make the case that face-to-face meetings initiate and develop the collegial bonds upon which many of our working practices depend, but are there aspects of the conference experience that work specifically to foster not just enhanced careers and friendships, but an enriched world of scholarly thought and argument? When twenty or so specialists in Victorian poetry are gathered together in a hotel in Victoria, for instance, will they individually or collectively discover a way to read a poem that they could not have discovered on their own?

I pick upon this particular example because of the pleasure and insight I gained from a conference session in British Columbia entitled "Teaching Victorian Poetry and the Body: Forming Affect." One of the special pedagogy forums that are a regular feature in the NAVSA conference program, this seminar was convened with generous virtuosity by Kirstie Blair. In the course of ninety minutes, she led us through poems, or parts of poems, by Augusta Webster, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Michael Field, and Alfred Tennyson and explained the pedagogical principles and academic objectives of a multi-genre course on "Victorian Sensations" that she teaches to undergraduates at the University of Glasgow. A crucial text for Blair here, as in her recent book Victorian Poetry and the Culture of the Heart, was Teresa Brennan's study The Transmission of Affect. Indeed, within that hotel meeting room, quotations from this latter work provided on the session's handout served practically as descriptive commentaries of the processes of exchange and interaction that patterned and promoted our discussion of poems both familiar and less-known.

As Brennan explains it, her use of the term "transmission of affect" captures "a process that is social in origin but biological and physical in effect." She continues:

The origin of transmitted affects is social in that these affects do not only...