Whenever I discuss with my students William Carlos Williams' poem "the rose is obsolete" (from Spring and All (1923), we begin with our sense of the rose as it is. Is it just a rose? No, the students say, it's become a huge commercialized symbol. WCW wanted a new rose, the rose that is the rose, the non- or pre-symbolic rose, "Sharper, neater, more cutting..." He wanted an infinite, endless rose, a rose that was somehow not really soft--made of "copper" or "steel." A wonderful adult student in one of my all-online versions of English 88 - a businessman who lives in China and does his business all around east Asia - took some time to create the Hallmark Card image of the poem's position. Here it is, above. And here, below, is the opening of the poem:The rose is obsolete
but each petal ends in
an edge, the double facet
cementing the grooved
columns of air--The edge
cuts without cutting
meets--nothing--renews
itself in metal or porcelain--
whither? It ends--
But if it ends
the start is begun
so that to engage roses
becomes a geometry--
"I teach horizontally, meaning that while I might begin with a fixed idea of what I'm going to teach that day, I let it drift rhizomatically way off topic, often pulling it back when it gets too far. I rely on non-fixed materials to teach this way; the whole world is at my fingertips. Should I go off on a tangent about John and Rauschenberg and their love relationship as expressed in Rauschenberg's bed, an image of that bed is always a click away. From there, we can head anywhere into the non-fixed universe, be it film, text or sound. And of course, that always takes us elsewhere. As Cage says, 'We are getting nowhere fast.'" 
that anyone has yet got the imaginative measure of that terrifying day six years ago. Certainly our Tolstoy has not crawled out of the rubble. The closest we have, Don DeLillo, succeeded as an essayist-journalist ("In the Ruins of the Future: Reflections on Terror and Loss in the Shadow of September,” Harper’s, December 2001) but, to my mind, failed as a novelist ("Falling Man"). One reason, perhaps, is that the remembered emotion was instantly buried under a pile of cultural junk.' - Tod Gitlin in his review of Susan Faludi's The Terror Dream (written for 
