Dear Professor Corrigan:

Working on the old schedule, because it hadn’t run out yet, and I hadn’t realized that you had updated it, I didn’t realized that Monday’s post was a prompted one, on blogging in your class. Please allow me to switch the order of this Monday and Wednesday.

Everything about this class is about experiencing literature on a deeper level, seeing it in three dimensions, tasting it, touching it, and understanding it. After reading out loud a poem about an onion that meant so much more, you chopped one up in the middle of class. We saw they papery skin pulled from it, heard its crinkle, as we thought about what it meant in context with the poem, all of us coming with different histories and grasps on words and nuances, and all of us coming to different conclusions, if similar ones.

Blogging about literature has forced us to connect with it, read until we could find something to say. Some nights I cannot wait to get tapping at a keyboard, excited. Some nights I grasp at straws, with no earthly idea what I want to say; feeling unresponsive to a story, or poem, or essay and I reread it and reread it until I feel like I’d do anything to be done with it. And anything, of course, means churn out a blog entry.

I named my blog synesthetic lit because I knew that this is what it would come down to. Synesthesia is an organization of the mind that mixes senses. A synesthete has two or more senses “tied to” each other; Wassily Kandinsky, a famous Russian painter, “saw” sounds, (Golden-yellow, he said, was the sound of a piano’s middle C.) and painted as a way for the rest of the world to see what he saw.

This class and blogging have both been about bringing literature off the page, and into our hands, our minds, our senses, our conversations; to read Whitman in a graveyard and tell everyone else what we’ve felt.