Monthly Archives: January 2008

Whew!

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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 this term — being the good soldier for the department — with one small upper-division seminar (Modern Poetry), one medium-sized upper-division survey (Imagining Science), and one huge lower-division survey (The Literature of American Popular Music). I love the material I’m teaching in each class, but the poetry seminar is clearly going to be the sweet spot each week. It’s my only class on Mondays & Wednesdays & so far the students have been both lovely & smart. I’m using a class weblog on which students are required to post three seminar “preparations” over the course of the semester that will serve as the basis for part of our discussion on that day, with everyone commenting on the post. That student then leads part of the class discussion for his or her assigned day. This system will really get up & running next week, but we had our first go at it today & it worked just fine.

In the Modern Poetry class today I spent a good deal of time trying to talk about what we mean by “modernism” & I contrasted it to literary romanticism using Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality. . .” (as well as the famous denunciation of cities from the Preface to Lyrical Ballads) & Whitman’s “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry.” I focused on Wordsworth’s emphasis on the natural world & on childhood versus Whitman’s emphasis on the city and adulthood. We then talked about several of Whitman’s shorter poems. I think I’m going to like using Cary Nelson’s anthology, Modern American Poetry, but I’m not crazy about the Whitman selections. The short poems are fine, but not having several chunks of “Song of Myself” is a handicap; I’d also rather have “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” than “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” which is a great poem, but not as pedagogically useful, for my purposes at least, as the more mystical & philosophical “Cradle.” Fortunately, Wordsworth’s “Ode,” the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” & “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry are available online through Bartleby.

Bach Cello Suites (III)

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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 last moments. I imagine hearing this through an open window on a summer day, someone nearby practicing. And I mean practicing in all the sense of the word. The end feels more like a beginning. I often have the sense of inhabiting a room when I listen to these pieces, or a series of rooms in a large building.

3/2 — Allemande: Delicate steps. A folk tune. A tripping rhythm, skipping hand-in-hand. I hear voices trading parts. William Blake’s Songs of Innocence.

Rough Cut: Poets & Poems for Modern American Poetry

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  1. 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.”
  2. 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 Life had stood–a Loaded Gun).
  3. Edwin Arlington Robinson, “The House on the Hill,” “Richard Cory,” “Mr. Flood’s Party.”
  4. Robert Frost, “Home Burial,” “The Wood Pile,” “Birches,” “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Nothing Gold Can Stay,” “The Gift Outright.”
  5. 5. Carl Sandburg, “Chicago,” “Subway.”
  6. Wallace Stevens, “Sea Surface Full of Clouds,” “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “The Snow Man,” “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” “Sunday Morning,” “The Idea of Order at Key West,” “Of Modern Poetry,” “The Plain Sense of Things,” “Of Mere Being.”
  7. William Carlos Williams, “The Young Housewife,” “Portrait of a Lady,” “Spring and All,” “The Great Figure,” “To Elsie,” “The Red Wheelbarrow,” “Young Sycamore,” “This is Just to Say,” “*To Daphne and Virginia.”
  8. Ezra Pound, “A Pact,” “In a Station of the Metro,” “The River Merchant’s Wife: A Letter,” “*Hugh Selwyn Mauperly.”
  9. Robinson Jeffers, “Shine, Perishing Republic,” “”Hurt Hawks.”
  10. Marianne Moore, “Poetry,” “The Fish,” “The Pangolin,” “The Paper Nautilus.”
  11. T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” “The Waste Land,” “The Hollow Men.”
  12. Genevieve Taggard, “Ode in Time of Crisis,” Mill Town,” “To the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.”
  13. E.E. Cummings, “Buffalo Bill’s,” “Poem, or Beauty Hurts Mr. Vinal,” “next to of course god america i,” “i sing of Olaf glad and big.”
  14. Kenneth Fearing, “Dirge,” “Denouement.”
  15. Langston Hughes, “Negro,” “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” “The Weary Blues,” “Justice,” “Three Songs about Lynching,” “Letter from Spain,” “Harlem.”
  16. Theodore Roethke, “I Knew a Woman,” “*My Papa’s Waltz.”
  17. Elizabeth Bishop, “The Fish,” “Filling Station,” “In the Waiting Room,” “One Art.”
  18. Randall Jarrell, “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner.”
  19. John Berryman, Dream Songs: 1, 4, 14, 29, 40.
  20. Thomas McGrath,
  21. Robert Lowell, “Skunk Hour,” “For the Union Dead.”
  22. Frank O’Hara, “The Day Lady Died,” “Why I Am Not a Painter.”
  23. Robert Creeley, “After Lorca,” “I Know a Man,” “For Love,” “America.”
  24. A.R. Ammons, “Corsons Inlet.”
  25. James Wright, “Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm,” “A Blessing,” “A Centenary Ode.”
  26. John Ashbery, Syringa,” “Daffy Duck in Hollywood,” “Paradoxes and Oxymorons.”
  27. Philip Levine, “Animals are Passing from Our Lives,” “They Feed They Lion.”
  28. Adrienne Rich, “Diving into the Wreck.”
  29. Gary Snyder, “Riprap,” “I Went into the Maverick Bar.”
  30. Etheridge Knight, “Hardrock Returns from the Hospital for the Criminal Insane.”
  31. Yusef Komunyakaa, “To Do Street,” “Prisoners.”
  32. Carolyn Forché, “The Colonel.”
  33. Louise Erdrich, “Indian Boarding School: The Runaways.”
  34. Sherman Alexie, “Indian Boy Love Song,” “Evolution,” “How to Write the Great American Indian Novel.”
  35. Bob Dylan, “*Highway 61 Revisited,” “*Ballad of a Thin Man.”

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*Not in Nelson’s Modern American Poetry anthology.

Bach Cello Suites (II)

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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, in a little room overlooking the bay. What kind of jazz is this? I asked myself — that actual sentence in my mind & I still remember the words. In structure this Prelude is pretty simply, though not as symmetrical as many parts of the Cello Sutes. It seems to be finished about two-thirds of the way through, then there is a pause & an afterthought, a reflection not in the sense that symmetries are reflections, but in the sense of introspection. We don’t think of Bach as an introspective artist — what a mathematician, we cry! — but in these suites he often seems to look inward, listening to voices he then shapes into these moving lines.

2/II — Allemande: More chords on the cello in this one? More multi-string playing? The least dance-like of the movements I’ve listened to so far. I love that almost grinding low chord about a third of the way into the movement, the music then rising to a few sweet, higher notes before returning to the exploration of the middle range. I keep coming back to the sense that all these movements are exercises in the loftiest sense — or perhaps explorations, experiments — in which the artist is primarily interested in finding out what the materials can do.

2/III — Courante: A snappy little ho-down! I was telling a colleague the other day I think Sherman Alexie is one of the very few American novelists who can “do joy.” Bach “does joy” here. Not exultation, but joy, built on the basis of what the old song lyric calls “satisfied mind.”

2/IV — Sarabande: Symmetrical to the point of being nearly stationary. And yet I think this is my favorite movement so far. Lyrical & studied at the same time, somehow. On some of the low notes you can hear the cello bow pushing across the strings & it’s almost percussive.

2/V — Menuett : 1. A gently rocking rhythm. Perhaps because I’m listening with headphones, I’m really hearing the percussive quality of the bow on the strings. Decisive steps, a bit of swagger, boldness. 2. This one is more delicate & makes me think of flowers. A formal garden, evening. Fluent but entirely proper.

2/VI — Gigue: Begins with a bounce & picks up speed. A dancer would be pressed to keep this looking graceful. Masculine in contrast to the femininity of the menuett.  Yes those terms are slippery — for us in ways they may not have been for Bach. But throughout all  the suites there are men & women dancing, at least in theory, at least potential dancers like those potential subatomic particles physicists tell us onlycome fulling into existence when we observe them. Listening is a form of observation.

I Love Teaching

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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 rising excitement, a sense of renewal. Yesterday, I met my upper division Imagining Science course & my survey, The Literature of American Popular Music. I don’t want to come across like a motivational speaker here & I’m sure I’m going to have days when I come home cursing, but when I was done yesterday I was happy. I’m good at what I do, which makes me happy; but the realization that I get to spend the next sixteen weeks talking about things I love — that makes me happy. Selfish? Sure, but the best moments yesterday were when I posed a couple of questions & got a couple of responses, even on the first day. Those responses give one a tentative sense of the particular class & its possibilities. These initial impressions will no doubt be revised as the semester progresses (& of course the students are constantly revising & reevaluating their impressions of the teacher), but I was very happy yesterday, driving home. Now I just have to finish getting the course weblogs organized this weekend & finish writing the syllabus for my third class, Modern American Poetry, which meets Mondays & Wednesdays. Yes, for the first time in twenty years, I have three preps. It may kill me, since I am also serving on a Middle States Self-Study subcommittee as well as substituting on the Faculty Senate (an old stomping ground) for a colleague on leave.