THE OLD COLLEGE TRY
Nathan Heller, in reviewing William Deresiewicz’s book “Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life,” quotes the author as saying, “Revolutions in our tools—the kind that have been wrought by Facebook, Apple, Google, and so forth, the kind so many young people dream of making, as they work on their gadgets and apps—do not necessarily alter the structure of society” (“Poison Ivy,” September 1st). Heller’s arch reply is to ask, “Does lyric poetry?” As a poet and a professor in the English Department of California State University, East Bay, near Silicon Valley, where such “revolutionaries” have been idolized for decades, I’d like to answer Heller’s question with this rejoinder by the poet, novelist, and literary critic Stephen Dobyns.…
