Poetry: The Monster in my Closet and A Criticism of Curriculum

Many people would probably agree with the statement that poetry is like food for the soul. Many people would also agree with the statement: excessively writing or reading poetry for a prolonged period of time can make you want to hit your head against a brick wall until you pass out in a pool of your own blood. It's definitely surprising that most undergraduate English classes, at all grade levels from freshman to senior, spend roughly the first month of the academic semester covering poetry. This wouldn't be an issue if they also weren't covering pretty much the same poets and the same poems every semester. When a student majors in English they expect that by the time they graduate they would have read a variety of texts in all types of genres. Wouldn't it be wonderful if that were true. Upon entering the English program at Pierce College as a sophomore I was pleasantly surprised at the variety of subject matter I was covering: world literature, feminist literature, American literature, Civil War period literature, etc. It was the most exciting thing, to be learning exactly what I wanted i.e. how to think and write critically about a variety of literature. It wasn't that the curriculum was always stimulating or interesting, but it was always different. My first semester at California State University Northridge I was still pleasantly surprised when I was barely a junior and I was taking African American Literature and Critical Theory my first semester. 

          That excitement was short lived. The rest of the English program to follow was and still is particularly dull and most of the students in the program don't care to make it any more exciting because who cares if something is challenging. The attitude is as follows: "just give me the work, I'll turn it in, give me the grade, I want to graduate." The teachers don't seem to really put much work into the curriculum either. How is it possible that I'm a senior English major and I'm covering the exact same poets I've been covering for 3 years and 4 out of 5 classes are covering poetry at the same time? I have 3 papers due this week and they're all on poetry analysis. It's come to the point in my education where I absolutely hate myself for choosing English as a major. There's no progress. It's the same exact work for four years in a row. You read the same supposedly influential authors and writers. You write the same MLA style papers you've been writing since high school, except they're technically supposed to be more profound and interesting. Then every once in a while you get a level 400 class where the teacher spends the entire first month covering how to write an essay.

           Which brings me to the conclusion that English is a terrible major and I heard if from the monster in my closet while reading so much poetry my soul became a bulimic and began to throw it up. The English subject matter curriculum needs to be reformatted in a way that gives more depth and variety to the major and the topic. That or someone needs to tell me that it's a horrible major and I picked it for all the wrong reasons.