Beat Not the Poor Desk:

...His history of rationalism and the imagination in the eighteenth century will be published this year by Methuen...

...Finally, however, we are learning that it is possible to re-order our priorities in this matter: that the act of composing can allow for the life, the vivacity, the distinctive energy, of the individual mind and spirit...

...generation upon generation - limp away from their encounters with the enemy, and determine to make every effort to avoid any recurrence of such humiliating confrontation...

...asked an Irish poet...

...And "To accept the use of a rule" says the philosopher, Rees, "is a way of saying that I am convinced...

...Not the least of its many virtues is that it is a great book to disagree with: it enters vividly into one's mind, and its voices irresistibly provoke attention: but I find its main virtue to be this: that it takes the life of the mind seriously and embraces all the demanding consequences of such a recognition: it is a very good deed in a naughty world.n a naughty world...

...Josephine Miles put the matter well, as she is indeed wont to do, when she observed that the shaping of a text 'gives shape and stability to valued materials of life, in order that they be stressed, attended, preserved.' At such levels in the terms of our crucial appeals, a reverence for life is precisely a reverence for the individual life and for its language...

...One does not have to be a Marxist to see most of this sorry business as a form of alienation...

...Geeffrey Summerfield THE history of composition-teaching in the English-speaking world over the past 200 years or so looks from here like a battlefield: injured, maimed, bleeding demoralized young combatants...

...As in most human enterprises we find a delicate and generative tension between the energies of the psyche and the social patterns of making sense for others...

...Acceptable service, of course, involves conformity to a book of rules, which have to be memorized and obeyed.'The 'forms of life' - to use Wittgenstein's term - have precious little to do with the real life of the spirit, with delight, tentativeness, expressiveness, or the true voice of feeling...

...and we all know, don't we, that the most efficient way to deal with an incompetent writer is to send her to a 'writing-lab.' (I confess I never ventured inside one: do they pour their ink into test-tubes and heat it over a bunsen-burner...

...For too long now, our schools and colleges have involved young beginners in a variety of false options, in activities with their pens that are wrong-headed and counter-productive, in forms of mere slavishness, serving the needs of some obscure and ineffable power usually named as Correctness...

...And at the same time respect the constraints that we must internalize if we are to avoid mere anarchy:"How do I make a poem...

...On closer examination, my metaphor has a limited usefulness: yet, even so, it is not so very far-fetched: 'word-attack' is a not uncommon term among readingteachers...

...In the jading derivative world of composition-teaching, where most minds seem to live routinely unexamined lives, Ponsot and Deen have produced a strong affirmative statement, one that could precisely not have been produced by a committee: and anyone, in whatever sphere of activity or of inactivity, who is at all tempted to give writing a try or another last chance should simply take this book, to be re-animated by its bracing freshness, its vigor, its power to enable...

...the making of meaning...

...In this respect, there is a tonic note of certainty in the subtitle and text of Beat Not: 'Writing: What to teach, How to teach it and Why.' The criterial strength and virtue of the book is to be found in that 'Why' and in the fact that they earn the right to have us listen very carefully, very attentively, to their explicit rationale...

...GEOFFREY SUMMERFIELD teaches at New York University...

...I load myself with chains, and then struggle free...

...The larger sub-text, the implicit value system underlying the teaching of composition, had to do with forms of neatly socialized conformist unquestioning behavior...

...There have, of course, been voices that spoke sanely in such matters: but by and large they remained unheard, for they spoke against the banausic deeper intentions of a culture committed to more or less 'benign' forms of exploitation: one thinks, for example of the way in which mere clerical skills - clerical in the secular sense - dominated the curriculum for a century of burgeoning commerce...

...It is from the acknowledgment of such teasing and productive paradox that we are learning to help young writers to find a variety of joys and satisfactions, provoking rigors and gratifying serendipities in DAN HERR is the chairman of The Thomas More Association of Chicago and was for many years publisher of The Critic magazine MARGARET O'BRIEN STEINFELS is executive editor of Christianity and Crisis...