Project Challenge

I’m going to spend the next five Saturday mornings teaching a poetry writing workshop to fifteen-year-olds. My university runs the a program for local students in which we bring students to campus faculty teach them something about their discipline. Tomorrow morning, my wife Carole is going to come along and show the students how to [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

Cold

At dawn it was -25Â° though as the sun came up it began to warm slightly. The dogs made quick runs out back, came in & ate their breakfasts & are now sleeping. The high today will be around 0Â°. I’m not going anywhere except for a quick trip to the post office. School begins [...]

Genevieve Taggard on US Immigration Policy

Like many people, I’ve been appalled by the rise of nativist racism in the US in the last couple of years & in particular in the current presidential campaigns. I’ve wanted to write something & have twice sat down to attempt some kind of statement, if not an analysis, of the phenomenon, but both times [...]

Rereading Frankenstein

I’ve been rereading Frankenstein the last couple of days because I’m going to teach it in my Imagining Science course next term. I’ve taught the book before, but never well, I suspect because I never managed to enter into its imaginative universe until now. The book is a bundle of narrativeÂ implausibilities & the science, [...]

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