Whew!
The first week of the semester certainly knocked the wind out of my Bach blogging. I’m pretty sure I’ll be able to resume in the next day or two. I’ve met all three of my classes & each seems fine in its own way. I’m doing three preps for the first time in twenty years [...]
Bach Cello Suites (III)
3/1 — Prelude: This sounds like practicing scales. I return again to the pedagogical nature of these pieces. But what sweet, dramatic teaching / learning. Busy & thoughtful at the beginning, rising energy through the middle but still meditative, then those urgent pauses, trying to think of exactly the next thing to say, in the [...]
Rough Cut: Poets & Poems for Modern American Poetry
Whitman, “One’s Self I Sing,” “I Hear American Singing,” “For You O Democracy,” “*Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” “I Hear It Was Charged Against Me,” “A Glimpse.”
Emily Dickinson, (There is a certain Slant of light), (I felt a Funeral, in my Brain), (After Great pain, a formal feeling comes), (I heard a Fly buzz–when I died), (My [...]
Bach Cello Suites (II)
Note: Suite I here. Jonathan Mayhew’s posts here.
2/I — Prelude: Gorgeous long lines in a low register. Imagine this played on a baritone sax! Speeds up a little as it goes along. This was the first piece of the suites I ever heard, waking to it on a clock radio thirty years ago in Bellingham, [...]
I Love Teaching
This is my twentieth year teaching at Clarkson & my twenty-sixth year teaching, not counting graduate school. Yesterday I met my first classes for the semester, which is going to be a busy one. In going over the syllabus with each class, beginning to lay out the themes we’re going to develop, I felt a [...]
Search Phrases
Looking at the search phrases that brought viewers — I won’t say readers — to one’s blog, little stories suggest themselves. This one, for instance:
Poem Analysis of “dead boy”
The grammar belies a certain — how shall we say? — lack of sophistication that makes one think of a desperate high school student who has been [...]
Why Not a Poll Tax
Or a property requirement? Truth is, the radical right (& that includes the US Supreme Court) would like to keep the franchise as narrow as possible? [See also: this analysis.]
Syllabus for The Literature of American Popular Music
Course Description: The course will examine the interactions between different forms of American popular music and American literature. Music and literature will be considered in historical and cultural context. Students will read works of fiction, poetry, and drama that deal with popular music, as well as sociological discussions of American popular music. A key part [...]
Syllabus for Imagining Science
Course Description: For the last three hundred years, science has been the dominant system of thought in the West. To a great extent, it has determined the ways in which Europeans and Americans have understood the world around them, the world within them, and determined the ways in which reality has been constructed. Since literature [...]
Recognition
When I was much younger, I thought writing poetry would give me a place in the world. I was good at it, after all. Maybe as good at it as a middle level pro athlete is good at his sport. I think that’s an honest claim. But if there’s pro tour for poets in the [...]
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