Course:Encyclopedias
| CRWR 501P 003 |
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| Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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| Important Course Pages |
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When I was a kid, I read the encyclopedia for fun. I got the encyclopedia from my Lolo and Lola for Christmas; it was a DK children’s encyclopedia, and it was hundreds of pages long, the longest book I owned at the time. I had already read, and adored, the children’s dictionary, with its two-page full-color cross-section of a medieval castle.
To read my encyclopedia, I would put it on top of my bookshelf, climb up on a stepstool, and stand there reading for hours. (There’s a very cute picture of my younger brother standing next to me as I do this, his arms wrapped around me, although he’s too short to see the pages.) I was intrigued by the idea that a book could explore, or at least touch on, all human knowledge, and I didn’t understand that reference resources were something most people might consult periodically. I wanted to know everything, so of course hoped the book would deliver on its promise.
There were more encyclopedias to be read: childcraft books, vintage encyclopedia sets, The Way Things Work, and of course Wikipedia. I’m not sure how old I was when I realized that the encyclopedia did not contain the sum total of human knowledge, but I was certainly disappointed.
Once I was in college, I worked in a lot of museums and archives and did a lot of related coursework. We learned (and I saw firsthand) how traditional architectures of information uphold the hegemonic ideals of the societies they spring from, almost by default. My fascination with encyclopedias is also a fascination with the impossibility of neutrality: the way all information is tainted, the way no knowledge or expression of knowledge is truly objective. All informational architectures are forced, incomplete attempts at grappling with our inability to know or understand everything. While poetry’s methods are different, I actually think that it attacks the same problems, not necessarily more effectively. Poetry is also an architecture of information. The difference is that poetry has the capacity to celebrate its own failure.