Final Study Guide for EN 190 -- Summer II 2011

This study guide for the final will begin with F.W. Murnau's 1922 version of Nosferatu, an example of silent film and German Expressionism.  Below are links to YouTube versions of this film:

Here is a link to the YouTube video of the entire movie.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rcyzubFvBsA

This version has a better soundtrack:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UDZURPwzkRg

Below is a picture of the actor Max Schreck who played Nosferatu.

Below is his brief biography.  More rumors than facts are known.

http://www.leninimports.com/max_schreck.html#partone

Here is a biography of director F.W. Murnau who later worked in Hollywood.  His picture is below.

http://www.leninimports.com/murnau_fw.html#partone

Also, here is a link to my Multiply entry on the 1922 Nosferatu, the version that we saw.

http://worldlit2.multiply.com/journal/item/154/Nosferatu_1922

Werner Herzog remade this film in 1979:

http://worldlit2.multiply.com/journal/item/152/Nosferatu_1979

Let's move onto poetry.  As Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl" may be a poem or a short story, we may begin with her piece.  Here is some information about Ms. Kincaid:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/arts/features/womenwriters/kincaid_life.shtml

Here is a little benna for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSbCGGl8aAU

Below are the definitions of the short story and the poem that I included.

A short story is a brief prose work of narrative fiction characterized by a carefully crafted plot and style, complexity in characterization and point of view, and unity of effect.  It is shorter than a novel (50,000 or more words) or a novella (15,000 to 30,000 words).

A poem is a literary composition, written or oral, typically characterized by imagination, emotion, sense impressions, and

 concrete language that invites attention to its own physical features, such as sound or appearance on the page.

I will also include the prose poems we looked at before the midterm:

http://webdelsol.com/tpp/tpp5/tpp5_edson.html

http://webdelsol.com/tpp/tpp5/tpp5_nye.html

Monday we began the unit on poetry by looking at word and image.  Terms covered will include denotation, connotation, and sensory impression.  We will look at word choice in poems.  Monday's poems were Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" and Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Bean Eaters."  Note how short and condensed these poems were--and that Ms. Brooks' poem had rhyme.

Here is a link to the video of Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays" that we listened to.  Note that we are *not* listening to Mr. Hayden's voice.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4RoaNidQZnQ

These links are to Gwendolyn Brooks' "The Bean Eaters":

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anKeKmfRCqc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWUOibkiXUk&feature=related

For more information about Mr. Hayden, see this link:

http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/196

For more information about Ms. Brooks, who was a very influential Chicago poet, see this link:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/gwendolyn-brooks

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson & Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Emily Dickinson's life has intrigued many people over the years.  Why did she withdraw from society, refusing to "cross [her] Father's ground to any House or town"?  Why did she write such strangely compelling poetry?  Who inspired her?

One popular reimagining of ED is William Luce's 1976 play The Belle of Amherst.  (The picture below is from Redmond, Washington's Sound Theater Company's recent production.)


You may also see part of Jennifer Levinson's performance at this video linked below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fz8girAKwJM

Others are intrigued by ED's relationship to her sister-in-law, Sue.



http://santitafarella.wordpress.com/2008/07/15/emily-dickinson-lesbian-her-letter-to-susan-gilbert-in-june-of-1852-might-tell-us-less-than-you-think/

http://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/ed/node/78

Brenda Wineapple has decided to examine ED's friendship with poet, editor, and abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson.  As she points out, often people have wondered just what ED saw in Higginson.  He has been caricatured as the man who tried to regularize ED's poetry.  After all, his poetry tended to be carefully crafted sonnets, and his most well-known poems today are translations of Petrarch, the 14th century Italian poet known for his love poems to Laura, a woman he never actually met.

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#010

http://www.sonnets.org/petrarch.htm#020

Also, take a look at the cover of White Heat above.  How old does she look?  What comes to mind when you look at her?  when you look at her next to the middle-aged man with facial hair and a military uniform?

 
It is one of the few photographs of ED.  True.  It was taken when she was a teenager.  She began to write to TWH when she was thirty.  Without fooling around with her existing photographs (which in itself is trouble and which ED's family did do), we will always have a distorted view of ED (and therefore of her relationship to TWH) if we focus on the photographs.  I don't know what I would have placed on the cover of White Heat, but something less direct and more evocative might have been better.

However, Higginson was more than "just" a translator and magazine editor, and his relationship with ED was fairly complex.  Wineapple notes its sexual tension.  Today we might consider their relationship to be an emotional affair and even emotional infidelity as TWH was married to a chronically-ill woman at the time.  Wineapple also speculates about what he gained from ED as well as about what she gained from him.  Moreover, as Wineapple points out, ED consciously chose Higginson as her mentor, for she would have been familiar with his work for the Atlantic Monthly as well as his political activism.  This is not to say that ED was politically radical or even engaged with politics.  Some of the tension in her relationship with TWH occurs when she downplays his desire to fight in the Civil War.  (He ultimately trained African-American soldiers in South Carolina.)  She was much more interested in TWH's nature writing, and her family was relatively conservative.


Below is Frederic Edwin Church's painting of Mount Katahdin in Maine, one of the many subjects of TWH's nature writing.

However, TWH tended to examine nature closely.  A more typical topic for him would be the water lily (shown below):


As you'll note from these poems, ED also likes to examine nature closely.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20949

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=180204

http://www.tcnj.edu/~carney/dickinson/poems.html#did_the_harebell



Yet Wineapple is persuasive in her readings of ED's poems with imagery relevant to the Civil War.  See these links for a few of these poems: 

Apologies for any pop-ups!

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/emilydickinson/10548

http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/My_Portion_is_Defeat_%E2%80%94_today_%E2%80%94

Below is a picture of Glory, a 1989 film about the company that Higginson had wanted to command.




ED and TWH's friendship began in 1862 and continued through the rest of her life despite his remarriage to a much younger woman and her intriguing relationship with Judge Otis Lord.  ED & TWH's correspondence periodically slowed, but she would send him her poems, referring to herself as his "Pupil" as late as 1884, the year before her death.  Interestingly, even then, she also toyed with submitting her poems for publication when another of TWH's proteges, Helen Hunt Jackson, contacted her about submitting them to The No Name Series.  ED sent Jackson one poem, "Success is counted sweetest":
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=174990

This poem would be published...anonymously.

After her death, TWH co-edited her poems with Mabel Loomis Todd, the mistress of ED's brother.  Todd, as it turns out, was responsible for the "regularization" of ED's poems.  TWH was more of an advocate, convincing Todd to include particular poems and writing the preface to the collected poems.  Initially, this project was successful, but 19th century readers were not quite ready for Dickinson, and Lavinia Dickinson, ED's sister and heir, soon quarreled with both Todd and TWH. 

Below is a link to a version of TWH's preface that appeared in the October 1891 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.  Beneath the Victorian verbiage, he quotes freely from ED's poems and letters:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/poetry/emilyd/edletter.htm

I'll close with a picture from the garden at the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, MA.  During her lifetime, ED was also known as a gardener.

Study Guide for Final -- Poetry

Above is a picture of the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum in Baltimore.

Poetry –

Poe – canonical writer, wrote poetry, fiction, & criticism; did a lot to shape and promote American literature; poems written for performance – to be read aloud, very rhythmic; internal rhyme; always very dark & mysterious;

Baltimore; poems take place within the imagination

Emily Dickinson – liked to write her masterpieces inside her room, barely left her house, rarely traveled; wrote prolifically but barely published; manuscript poet (circulated within circle of friends and family); loved her dashes; loose—dashes used for any number of purposes (emphasis, pause, reason??); tight—consistent, concise, clear, clarity;

H.W. Longfellow – popular poet of the time -- "My Lost Youth"

Whitman – Leaves of Grass; a lot more life experience & insight on specific things; was a newspaper editor in New Orleans; desire to unify the torn country; response to Lincoln’s assassination (both O Captain & Lilacs); free verse; long lines; self-scrutiny, self-celebration, & observation;  Song of Myself

Midterm Study Guide pt. 3

This study guide will focus on our poets...both Puritans and Colonials.

Let's start with Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), a female poet whose work (The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America) was published at a time when few women and some men were not published.  Have you seen a picture of the title page of the edition published during her lifetime (1650)?

The poems of hers that we read follow:

• The Prologue
•  In Honour of that High and Mighty Princess Queen Elizabeth of Happy Memory
•  An Epitaph on My Dear and Ever-Honoured Mother Mrs Dorothy Dudley Who Deceased December 27 1643 and of Her Age 61
•  To Her Father with Some Verses
• Before the Birth of One of Her Children  
• A Letter to Her Husband Absent upon Public Employment 
• Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House July 10th 1666 Copied Out of a Loose Paper

Note that the titles in purple were not published until after Bradstreet's death.  "The Author to Her Book" is another poem in that category.  Comparing it and "The Prologue" could be worthwhile!

We also looked at John Donne's "A Valediction Forbidding Mourning," a poem written to his wife as he left for a job abroad, and his later Sonnet 14, a poem written as he struggled with a call to the ministry.  The poems are linked below:

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/donne/mourning.php

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20308

Note that John Donne is an English poet and predates Bradstreet.  (He lived from 1572 to 1631, and for him, Shakespeare was a contemporary writer.)  His poems were not published in his lifetime although they did circulate in manuscript among select readers.  Below is a picture of Donne as a young man.



We also read the poems of Edward Taylor (c. 1642 - 1729), a New England poet who was also a minister in Western Massachusetts.  Taylor's poems were not published until 1939.  Not surprisingly, no portrait of him survives, so here is a picture of his gravestone.  It is a great example of a Puritan gravestone!

The poems of Taylor's that we read follow:

• Prologue
•  Meditation 8 (First Series) John 651 I am the Living Bread
• Upon Wedlock and Death of Children

Feel free to compare Taylor's poems with Bradstreet's...or with the poems of George Herbert (1593-1633), another minister who was also a secret poet.  Below is a link to "Love (III)," the poem of his that I read in class.

http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/herbert/love3.htm



Technically, although Phillis Wheatley (1753 - 1784) lived long after Anne Bradstreet and Edward Taylor did, we might also consider her a Puritan poet...or at least a very devout Christian who also wrote poetry.  Many of her poems are also poems of address.  Is she a neo-Classical poet or a pre-Romantic poet?  Is she an American poet or a Colonial poet?  (Note that our editors place her in the section titled "A Literature for a New Nation."  Ironically, her career fizzled out because of the American Revolution.  During a war, people have priorities other than poetry.)

The poems of hers that we read follow (watch for updates!):

• On Being Brought from Africa to America
•  To the University of Cambridge [Harvard] in New England
• A Farewell to America To Mrs SW

Here is a picture of London in 1807!  Thomas Rowlandson's "The Miseries of London" is satirical, but it gives us an idea of the city's hubbub and cleanliness (or lack thereof).  Perhaps William Wordsworth was right about London!  Or was Mary Robinson?  (See the link below for her "London on a Summer Morning":

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=182520




Below is a picture of Mary Robinson who was an actress and celebrity before she was a writer.  The 1781 portrait is by Gainsborough, one of the two most noted portrait painters of Robinson's time.


Here is an example of the other noted portrait painter's work: Sir Joshua Reynolds' portrait of Hester Lynch Piozzi (Mrs. Thrale) and her daughter from her first marriage.

On Chinese poetry (the Book of Songs, Han Shan, Li Bo, and Wang Wei)

Link

For more information about Chinese poetry that may have influenced Jia Zheng's view of nature, see the link above.

Story of the Stone (part two)

In this volume of The Story of the Stone, the cousins are a little more grown up (14 or 15), and they are mad for poetry.  The Crab Flower Club is the name of their club, and many of "their" poems are included in this volume.  Our anthology includes only a few scenes from this section of The Story of the Stone, but I think that it is still well worth reading not only to see what happens to Bao-yu and his family but also to understand a little more about Chinese literature and literary studies as well as their attitudes towards gender.

The picture below is China-Guide's illustration of Dai-yu composing one of her poems.



However, this volume is not as wonky as it seems.    In fact, here, the clouds begin to gather over Bao-yu and his family.  Early on, Jia Zheng, Bao-yu's father, attacks his son, giving him an extremely severe beating because of what he perceives as his dissoluteness.  Keep in mind that Bao-yu hates to study and that he shows especially contempt for what is considered masculine knowledge.  His father, on the other hand, is a Confucian scholar and civil servant.  Almost at the beginning of the book, Golden, a servant to Bao-yu's mother, is dismissed for flirting with the young man.  Later she kills herself.  When Jia Zheng inquires into this young woman's suicide, Jia Huan (his other son by a concubine) informs him that Golden killed herself after Bao-yu had raped her.  (Right now I'm reading Vol. 3, and this lie has not yet been exposed although it is clear to the family that Jia Huan and his mother are troublemakers.)  Jia Zheng leaves the family compound shortly thereafter when the Emperor promotes him to high office.  However, Bao-yu's days in the garden may be limited.  His maid and now "chamber wife," Aroma, advises Bao-yu's mother to be stricter with him, move him into lodgings outside of the garden, and encourage him to be more like his father.  In other words, it is time for Bao-yu to learn to be a man.  (Below is a picture of Confucian scholars from www.cultural-china.com.) 



Dai-yu, Bao-yu's beloved cousin, also faces certain gender strictures.  At one of the meetings of the Crab Flower Club, she quotes lines from Dream of the Western Chamber, a risque novel that Bao-yu has encouraged her to read.  How explicit it is you may see here:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s7134.html
Afterwards, Bao-chai takes her aside to warn her about her reading and even her absorption in literature.  She reminds her that for both girls and boys literature is just a pastime. 

Unfortunately, I can't find a picture of Baochai at work, so here is An Ho's portrait of Wang Xifeng, the relative who runs the household...or shall I say family complex.  Wang Xifeng is perhaps Dai-yu's polar opposite.  She is energetic, practical, manipulative, and illiterate.  She puts a great deal of energy into humoring Grandmother Jia and managing the servants as well as making money for herself.  Let's imagine that Wang Xifeng is sitting listening to reports from the various servants.



However, all is not well for Wang Xifeng either.  Her husband Jia Lian is a philanderer, and in the Crab Flower Club, we will see her attack him and her servant Patience after she overhears his complaining about her to a mistress.

As you might imagine, at this point, the poetry club, though, is a useful diversion, uniting the younger members of the family, a group that becomes even more numerous near the end of this volume.  Even Wang Xifeng is involved as the enforcer of penalties.


Perhaps I will end this entry with another picture of the Grandview Garden in Beijing:

Study Guide for Final (Spring 2009) -- Poetry

The picture above is William Blake's original published version of "Holy Thursday" in The Songs of Experience.  Blake is also known as an artist and printmaker.

We began our poetry unit by reading both versions of William Blake's "Holy Thursday."  One was from The Songs of Experience (1794).  The other was from The Songs of Innocence (1789).  Consider the difference between the way that William Blake portrays these children and that earlier writers like Voltaire and Behn portrayed the poor, servants, and slaves.   Romantic writers were more sympathetic to the poor and children.  (Rousseau--we are born good but are corrupted by society.)


We also looked at William Wordsworth's "She Dwelt Among the Untrodden Ways" and "Simon Lee: The Old Huntsman."  Interestingly, neither were in our anthology.  Both poems are from Lyrical Ballads, the 1798 collection of poems by Wordsworth & S.T. Coleridge.  Our editors seem to prefer Wordsworth's self-scrutiny to his poems of observation.  Note how "Simon Lee" resists narrative yet sounds like a ballad.  (Its rhyme scheme is ababcdce.)
Unfortunately, we did not get to Wordsworth's sonnets, but here is a link to John Green's reading of "Westminster Bridge."  Note that the sonnet was another form that he helped to revive.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wz4v9x3PIZc

Below is an 1897 painting of Westminster Bridge by Frederick Marlett Bell-Smith:



Here are some remarks by William Wordsworth on poetry.  They are from his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800, 1802):

"All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."

Poetry "takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility."

"Poems to which any value can be attached, were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply."

A poet "is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind."

"a large portion of the language of every good poem can in no respect differ from that of good Prose."



Above is a picture of William Wordsworth's home, Dove Cottage, in the Lake District of England.  If you scroll to the links below, you may listen to actor Jeremy Irons reading Wordsworth's "Daffodils."

Emphasizing the supernatural rather than ordinary individuals who lived in the country, Wordsworth's friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge took a different approach to poetry in his fragment, "Kubla Khan" and his "Rime of the Ancient Mariner."  (Coleridge, by the way, lived for a time in Germany.)  If you scroll to the links at the bottom, you may listen to Sean Barrett reading from "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Blake (1757-1827), Wordsworth (1770-1850), and Coleridge (1772-1834) belong to the first generation of Romantics.  These men lived through the French Revolution as adults.  With John Keats (1795-1821) and his narrative poem, "The Eve of St. Agnes," we move on to the second generation of the Romantics.  Note how Keats handles the supernatural in his narrative.  Note how Porphyro takes advantage of Madeleine's belief that she will dream of her husband-to-be on the Eve of St. Agnes. 

Below is an image of Pre-Raphaelite painter William Holman Hunt's painting "The Eve of St. Agnes."  By the time Hunt created this painting (1847-1857), Keats' reputation had risen.  During his lifetime, critics attacked his work, in part because of his social standing and perhaps their assumptions about his politics.  (Keats was an apprentice to a surgeon at a time when doctors' social standing was not as high as it is today.  Early nineteenth-century England was conservative politically and culturally, perhaps in response to the upheaval of the French Revolution.)

We then moved on from the British Romantics to some other 19th century poets from Vol. E.  We began with Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), a controversial poet and the author of Les Fleurs du Mal (The Flowers of Evil).   The poem of his that we read (in French and its English translation) was "The Albatross."

http://fleursdumal.org/poem/200

Below is a photo of an albatross.

We also read the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario (1867-1916) 's "Walt Whitman" and "In Autumn,"
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)'s "I heard a Fly buzz," and
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)'s "I Hear America Singing" and "O Captain! My Captain."  With these poets (including Baudelaire), modern poetry begins.  Latin American critics, in fact, call Dario the father of Modernismo.  Emily Dickinson, by the way, published very few poems during her lifetime, and Walt Whitman self published his book, Leaves of Grass.  This was not too hard as he was a printer by trade.

Below is a picture of Emily Dickinson's room at home.  Can you imagine the fly buzzing?  The house where she lived and wrote her poetry is now part of a museum run by Amherst College.


We moved into the 20th century with Ezra Pound (1885-1972) ("A Pact," "In a Station of the Metro," and "The River Merchant's Wife," his translation of a translation of Li Bo's poem).  Although Pound knew many other languages and was an instructor of modern languages at Indiana's Wabash College, he did not know Chinese.  Although he did not know Chinese, he brought much attention to that culture's poetry and used it to change English-language poetry, making it more stripped-down and focused, exchanging the metronome for the phrase, making it new, to cite his famous command. 

With T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), we were able to listen to his recording of the first part of "The Waste Land," an immensely influential and erudite poem in five parts and many languages from Italian and German to the closing Sanskrit.  This poem, however, takes place in London, the city where Eliot, an American, had chosen to live.  (By the way, Ezra Pound helped edit "The Waste Land.")  We also read Eliot's earlier poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," which he wrote when he was 22.  Does Prufrock ever leave his room?

Here is a link to the recording of Eliot's reading that we listened to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tqK5zQlCDQ

How does Eliot's London compare to Blake's or Wordsworth's?

Below is a picture dating from World War One.  It is from the British Postal Museum and Archive's website.


We also looked at two poems by the Irish poet W.B. Yeats (1865-1939):  "The Second Coming" (the poem where Chinua Achebe derived the title, Things Fall Apart) and "Easter 1916" (a poem about the aftermath of the Irish declaration of a republic -- Ireland was then a British colony).  Both poems were published by 1921, after World War One had ended but before Ireland became independent.  Here you may listen to Yeats' reading his poems:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u2FT4_UUa4I

Below is a picture of the General Post Office that served as the Irish rebels' fort in 1916:

Here you may listen to an Irish-American rock band Black 47 play its song "James Connolly."  Connolly was one of the leaders of the rebellion.  Yeats did not mention him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwEv2YCrSoY

We finished our unit on poetry with the work of Australian aborigine political activist and poet Oodgeroo of the tribe Noonuccal (1920-1993) 's "We Are Going," Laguna/Sioux poet and scholar Paula Gunn Allen (1939-2008)'s "Taking a Visitor to See the Ruins," Laguna Pueblo poet and novelist Leslie Marmon Silko (1948-)'s "Toe'osh" and "Franz Boas' Visit."  Paula Gunn Allen's visitor, by the way, was Abenaki poet Joseph Bruchac.  Ironically, the Franz Boas that Leslie Marmon Silko refers to was a pioneering, progressive anthropologist who not only developed scientific method in anthropology but also encouraged his students to be more tolerant to the groups they studied.

Below is a picture of Laguna Pueblo (NM) from 1902:



These are links to the videos that we watched on review day (Monday):

Sean Barrett reads from "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_E9crjEp0_A

The words to "Bonnie St. Johnstone" are here:
http://www.richardthompson-music.com/song_o_matic.asp?id=586

Here is a link to Richard Thompson's performance of this song:
http://www.last.fm/music/Richard+Thompson/_/Bonnie+St.+Johnstone

Jeremy Irons reads "Daffodills" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL7ysgRNAT0

William Blake's "London" is transformed into a song and music video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PkGi_XAhtPc

Here "London" is read: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIDUf6V8OLM

To see the poem itself, go to this link: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15818

T.S. Eliot reads "The Waste Land" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tqK5zQlCDQ

Elizabeth Bishop's "One Art" is read here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KblU3g32l5g

For more information about the ballad, see these links:

http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/ballad.html

http://www.csufresno.edu/folklore/BalladSearch.html

http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/ballads/early_child/#what

http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/ballads.html

Bettina Judd's Reading 9/17 at MC

 I thought I'd blow off some of this blog's dust today and write about Bettina Judd's reading at MC.  It's been good to read poems from other times and places ("The Ballad of Mulan" and so on), but I've always liked going to readings to hear what other people are writing NOW.

Bettina Judd's poetry fits in nicely with last week's readings...Robert Hayden's "Middle Passage," Muriel Ruykeser's "Absolom," and even Seamus Heaney's "The Tollund Man" and "The Bog Queen."  Research is a significant part of Ms. Judd's writing process since many of her poems are about historical figures or individuals who are in the news.  The first few poems that she read were from a project that she is doing on gynecological experimentation and its impact on Black women's bodies.  Several were from the point of view of Joyce Heth, a slave whom P.T. Barnum had bought and exhibited as George Washington's nurse in 1835 and 1836.  Barnum claimed that she was 160; Ms. Heth was actually in her 70s.  (Below is a picture from a play, "The Exploitation of Joyce Heth," that was performed in New York.)

Another picture is one of Barnum's advertisements:

For more about Ms. Heth's story, see this link from George Mason University:

http://chnm.gmu.edu/courses/jackson/5pts/museum/heth.html

Bettina Judd also read poems about more contemporary women.  One was the girl, Latasha Harlins, who was shot in the back of the head by a Korean-American store owner in 1991.  The relatively light sentence that the store owner received was one of the causes of the L.A. riots in 1992.  Having grown up in L.A. and its suburbs, Ms. Judd recalled the impact of Harlins' murder.  She added that at the time she had seen tapes of the shooting on TV.  Another startling poem was about a woman who was tortured and killed by her ex-lover.  A third was about a woman who lay dying and ignored in a NYC emergency ward.

As you can see, Ms. Judd's work is about the violence of history, especially as it affects Black women.  These poems are not for everyone.  Curiously, she read her poems in a soft, quiet voice, swallowing her words.  However, these were not poems for shouting and declaiming.  I would be interested in hearing her read in a different venue...but I was glad to see how packed the room was.

Oh yes...and Ms. Judd talked about *her* approach to writing poetry.  She discussed the projects that she works on.  The poems about gynecological experimentation actually came out of a series of watercolors that she had been working on.  She tries to write a poem a day, not worrying about whether that poem is good or bad.  It is "just" a draft, and she will continue to work on it.  This appears to be an approach that she has taken from the Cave Canem Poets.  Here is a link to their site!  (Caution:  This link has been broken some of the time, so...beware!)

http://cavecanempoets.org/

Here are some links to poems by Bettina Judd.  The first is "A Conversation After Teeth." 

http://penzitspronouncedpants.blogspot.com/2008/08/guest-pnz-conversation-after-teeth.html

Another is her poem, "Sankofa: Gender Bend."

http://www.torchpoetry.org/Fall%2007/bettinajudd.htm

Here is her MySpace page where you may listen to her read some poems, including "Sankofa."

http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendID=199530233

And here is a link to her blog:

http://www.ablackgirl.com/wordpress/


Next up...the Poetry at Noon for World Peace Day on 9/22!

Seamus Heaney

  Watch this space for an entry on Seamus Heaney & his poetry.

A Few Poems to Start With

Since our books may or may not be in by the time our semester starts, I thought that I'd post a few readings up here to begin with.  These poems will respond to the prompts I've posted on the discussion board.  In these poems, poets will introduce themselves, recall their first memories of language, and pay homage to earlier poets.  This homage may not be as elaborate as John Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, but there are many ways to honor the past.

I will post links to seven poems.  Feel free to comment on any or all of them.  Some will be older than the poems in our anthology.  Others may be newer.

Let's start with Emily Dickinson's "I'm nobody.  Who are you?"

http://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poem/2619.html

The picture below is from a site where you may listen to two of her poems set to music by Nancy Robinson.

http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/user/ngal/z-dickinson.htm

In Langston Hughes' "Theme for English B," the speaker might be introducing himself to a professor in his writing class at Columbia University.

http://www.eecs.harvard.edu/~keith/poems/English_B.html

Below is a picture of Hughes a year or so after he left Columbia.  (He would eventually graduate from Lincoln University.)

Here is a link to "I am the woman," a poem by one of my former teachers, Joan Dobbie.  (I was in her workshop in Eugene, OR.)  The link contains the text version of the poem and a YouTube video of her reading her poem.  (By the way, you might notice that this poem really fits one of the prompts for our writing practice. Joan's poem was the one that gave me the idea for it!  Thanks, Joan!)

http://iamthewoman.blogspot.com/

Now I'd like to change the mood a little and move onto a poem about an unusual name.  How many of you remember reading Shel Silverstein's poetry?  One of the poems he wrote was "A Boy Named Sue."

http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/shel_silverstein/poems/14827

You may also know it as a song that Johnny Cash sang.  This YouTube video is of his performance at San Quentin Prison in California:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M89c3hWx3RQ

FYAmuse, here is a small picture of the cover of Shel Silverstein's album A Boy Named Sue.


Cheryl Savageau's "Looking for Indians" is kind of about language and kind of about one's name.  I thought that you might like to read it.

http://www.curbstone.org/bookexcerpt.cfm?BookID=69

Here is a little more information about the Abenaki.

http://www.native-languages.org/abenaki.htm

http://www.abenakination.org/

The Nicaraguan poet Ruben Dario wrote this tribute to Walt Whitman in 1887, when Whitman was still alive.  I'm afraid that I don't know the name of the translator.

http://falcon.tamucc.edu/~stalley/2335Resources/DarioWhitman.htm

Here is the original poem in Spanish:

http://www.poemas-del-alma.com/walt-whitman.htm

Interestingly, in English at least, the translation of Dario's blast against Theodore Roosevelt is more available than his homage to Whitman.

The poem below, Philip Levine's "M. Degas Teaches Art and Science at Durfee Intermediate School -- Detroit 1942," is not an homage to an earlier poet, but I thought that you would like it.  Moreover, this site includes an audio file of the poet reading his work.

http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/poems/levine/m._degas_teaches_art_and_science_at_durfee_intermediate_school--detroit1942.php

In case you are not familiar with Edgar Degas' work, here is an example below:


Feel free to post your own responses to these poems at our discussion board or here.  Here are some questions, though, to start with.

-- Which of these poems are you reading for the first time?  What is your first impression of each poem and poet?

-- Which of these poems are you re-reading?  When did you first read this poem?  What jumped out at you then?  What jumps out at you now?

-- If you read Spanish, what jumped out at you as you read Ruben Dario's "Walt Whitman" in its original language?

-- What does Ruben Dario admire about Walt Whitman?  If you've read Whitman's work or know of him, how is Dario's Whitman different from yours?  How are they the same?

-- What kind of a teacher does M. Degas seem to be?  Which poet, painter, or musician would you imagine teaching at MC?  Why?

I'm looking forward to seeing what you have to say!