Episode 1197: So This Is What It Feels Like...

Okay, I think now I'm ready to write this essay on Eunoia. I've got ideas that I didn't even have when I first picked Bök's long poem as my subject for discussion, so I'd say that's a good sign. Plus it seems likely that they can be integrated into a coherent, reasonably sophisticated argument concerning the poem that I haven't seen advanced so far in any of the secondary reading that I've done. (Probably because nobody's really writing about this kind of poems, other than the people who write them in the first place.) So this is what it feels like to have an original thought, academically speaking, as opposed to my undergraduate technique of cobbling together quotes from various critics in the service of a thesis that wasn't necessarily novel. Or as novel as one can be when writing about canonical works that have been discussed for decades/centuries. Not that it can't be done, clearly. My fellow students who did pull it off were getting the better Firsts like 89 and 96, whilst my technique of bricolage usually netted a safe but boring low First 74. While it remains to be seen if this essay I'm going to write (eventually) is going to be as great as I think it ought to be, at least I'd be messing up something that I thought up fairly independently this time.