Throughout his academic career, Dr. Scott Pound has made a point of speaking across boundaries, between education and life, scholarship and entertainment, as well as creativity and critical thinking. We agree to meet at a Thunder Bay pub to talk about this and I find him at the bar, wearing a baseball cap as easily as he does his studious rectangular glasses. He is nursing a pint and reading a paperback.

I ask him to begin by describing “The Poetics of Intermediality,” the research proposal for which he is currently seeking funding. “The project bridges literary and media studies,” Pound says. “I’m looking at the way new media influences 20th and 21st Century vanguard writers.” The literary artists he will be studying—Gertrude Stein, William S. Burroughs, Lyn Hejinian, and Christian Bök, among others—have practiced, or do practice, in an “environment of intermediality” in which the boundaries between the written word, spoken word, image, and sound are porous. “Intermediality,” Pound explains, originates from a 1969 essay by poet and performance artist Dick Higgins, who said that “much of the work being produced today seems to fall between media.”

Pound tells me that traditionally, “while literary artists celebrated performative and oral modes, literary theorists disdained them.” His research will attempt to bring literary studies into better alignment with the practice of literary artists, in part by integrating the work of media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, Eric Havelock, and Friedrich Kittler. They showed how the dominance of the printed word has been eroded by the emergence of film and electronic media. “Texts exist in relation to other texts,” says Pound, “But they also exist in relation to other media.”

By way of example, Scott Pound describes the work of Wendy Wasserstein. The songs in her play, “The Heidi Chronicles,” perform an “expository task,” he says, “by providing background information on the story.” At the same time, viewers have their own associations with the music and bring them to their understanding of the play.

Pound does not plan to serve up the findings of his research on the “Poetics of Intermediality” straight-up in a traditional scholarly fashion; rather, in keeping with the spirit of his work, he will employ a variety of media, allowing his research findings to live and inviting interaction with the web-based community through an on-line database, website, DVD documentary, print-based journal articles, conference presentations, and panel discussions.

The cross-pollination—between text, performance, film, and music—that Pound explores in his research also animates his classes. As part of a graduate course in writing and new media, Pound invited Canadian experimental sound poet Christian Bök to Thunder Bay. At the Definitely Superior Artist Run Centre, Bök performed an excerpt from his book Eunoia.

“Eunoia” from the Greek meaning “beautiful thinking,” is the shortest word in English to contain all five vowels. Each chapter in Eunoia is a univocal lipogram, that is, restricted to one vowel only; for instance, Chapter O (“for Yoko Ono”) begins:

“Loops on bold fonts now form lots of words for books. Book form cocoons of comfort – tombs to hold bookworms. Profs from Oxford show frosh who do post-docs how to gloss works of Wordsworth.”

Surrounded by the gallery artwork, the audience responded by engaging Bök in an enthusiastic discussion following the performance.

The Bök event was both poetry and performance, both playful and intellectually rigorous, both within and outside of the academic sphere—fertile ground for a student.

Pound’s experience at the University of Prince Edward Island, where he completed a double major degree in English and Philosophy, fostered his own penchant for integrating theory and creativity. Half of the English faculty members at UPEI were practicing creative writers, and as such brought the perspective of the literary artist into what might otherwise have been detached scholarship.

Similarly, his doctoral work at the State University of New York at Buffalo also allowed him to put the critical and creative side by side. Within the Comparative Literature in the Poetics Program he examined contemporary poetry, poetics, and aspects of performance. His research today is an extension of his doctoral dissertation, entitled “Textualism: Literary Theory and the Depreciation of Poetry.”

At a recent Lakehead University symposium on Critical Thinking in Higher Education, Pound delivered a paper challenging the prevailing notion that critical thinking and expressive writing are mutually exclusive. Rather than teach critical thinking as an exercise in dispassionate judgment, Pound believes it arises out of an intellectual conflict within the student. To illustrate, he uses the analogy of critical thinking as a disease, or “DIS-ease…a disruption in one’s intellectual equilibrium.” He recognizes that the ubiquitous lifestyle marketing of big brands can have an anesthetizing effect on our intelligence. The challenge he describes is to “infect students with a full-blown case of an intellectual disease against which they have been, to a greater or lesser degree, inoculated” by our consumer milieu.

To accomplish this in the classroom, Dr. Pound employs free writing exercises, assigns collaborative learning activities, and invites interpretive performance of texts on the curriculum. He also provides close reading/listening worksheets for students to use as an entry point into the poetry, drama, and critical theory they are assigned to read. As a result, students come to class primed for discussion. Rather than dispatching information lecture-style, Pound challenges the traditional professor-student dynamic by enabling students to collaborate in their educational experience. “In choosing to become participants rather than spectators,” he says, “students renounce all the comforts of passive learning.” This requires Pound to be intellectually challenging without thwarting students’ efforts.

How infectious is Professor Pound’s critical thinking disease? I browsed through “Rate My Professor,” an independent web forum in which students may freely log praises or complaints about professors at universities from North America to Europe. Academics may or may not find “Rate My Professor” to be constructive, but Dr. Scott Pound peruses the site. His ratings are polarized: some comments imply that students are intimidated by Professor Pound (and, I infer, not up to the critical thinking challenge); other students describe their experience in his classes as transformative, as though they had suddenly discovered a new way of reading and understanding literature and theory.

The chance encounters I had with former students of Professor Pound reinforced the latter sentiment. When I mentioned writing this article to an Anthropology major I know, without skipping a beat she said, “Dr. Pound. He rocks.” I discovered that she had taken his advanced rhetoric class and was piqued by the way he threaded music, identity, technology, poetry, and psychology into their discussions, and how he invited them to challenge the traditional academic approach.

Likewise, when I went to a downtown copy shop to have a draft of this article printed, the attendant, having noticed the file name on my memory stick, said, “Dr. Pound? I had him for English Lit after 1750.” The student went on to confess that because of that class, he now loves poetry.

Another student on “Rate My Professor” remarked, “Dr. Pound has a unique gift for facilitating classroom discussions.” Even at the beginning of his career, Pound deliberately involved his students as a source of knowledge in the classroom and resisted segregating academia from the lived experience. This attitude may have originated in the disillusionment Pound felt after emerging from the intensely theoretical course work of his Master’s degree, in which he studied Romantics at The University of Western Ontario.

After his doctorate, Pound’s first teaching appointment was at Bilkent University in September 2002, a private English-language Institute in Ankara, Turkey. During his two years there, he kept an online diary about the development of his teaching, the students, and the increasing political tensions caused by the U.S.-led war in Iraq. In one diary entry that I found still posted on-line, he had written,

“I’ve made last-minute adjustments to the syllabus…in an attempt to keep focus on both poetry and the war…. I ended class about eight minutes early, but then something very unexpected happened. None of my students got up to leave…. There was a short silence and then another student picked up the discussion again, and we continued talking as if class was still in session.”

From Ankara, Pound moved to Thunder Bay in 2004 where Lakehead University offered him a position as assistant professor in the Department of English. Courses he has taught include an Introduction to Writing and Rhetoric, Writing in a Variety of Modes and Genres, Advanced Rhetoric, Creative Writing, 20th Century Avant-garde Movements, Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, Literary Theory, and American Poetry.

Since moving to Thunder Bay, he has also contributed several articles on the writings of Roland Barthes to The Semiotic Review of Books, published by Dr. Gary Genosko’s Technoculture Lab at Lakehead University. While he is reluctant to be pigeon-holed as a Barthes scholar, he appreciates this theorist/philosopher because, unlike many others, “he has the reader in mind,” Pound says. “He uses hooks and drama to engage.”
 
Scott Pound was born in New Glasgow, PEI, which he describes as “a bucolic little village next to a river big enough to have a general store and a butter factory.”  He grew up in Charlottetown, one of five children. Both his father, who was a carpet layer, and his mother, who gave up a teaching career to stay at home with her children, were readers. If Scott’s working-class background drove him in the other direction—into philosophy and esoteric theory—it also brought him back to the holistic outlook that learning is part of life.

He has several strategies to avoid being cloistered in academia: gardening, long-distance running, cooking, playing scrub hockey with the “Grey Wolves” team, writing poetry, and serving as a board member of the North of Superior Film Association. And bike riding, I notice: When we finish our conversation at the pub, Pound replaces his baseball cap with his bicycle helmet for the ride home.

True, you may find Scott Pound holed up at the Paterson library, but you are just as likely to find him at the Thunder Bay Public Library participating in a community discussion on residential pesticide use. Cerebral yet down-to-earth, versed in the classics yet abreast of the avant-garde, this is one academic who eludes stereotype.

Paula Thiessen is the Recruitment Information Assistant in Lakehead University’s Office of Recruitment. She is also a freelance writer for Bayview Magazine.