Peace

Emily, By Joanna Newsom

The meadowlark and the chim-choo-ree and the sparrow
Set to the sky in a flying spree for the sport over the pharaoh.
A little while later the the Pharisees dragged a comb through meadow.
Do you remember what they called up to you and me in our window?

There is a rusty light on the pines tonight,
Sun pouring wine, lord, or marrow,
Down into the bowns of the birches
And the spires of the churches
Jutting out from the shadows.
The yoke and the axe and the old smokestacks and the bale and the barrow
And everything sloped like it was dragged from a rope
In the mouth of the south below.

We’ve seen those mountains kneeling, felten and gray.
We though our very hearts would up and melt away.
From that snow in the night time
Just going
And going
And the stirring of wind chimes
In the morning
In the morning
Helps me find my way back in
From the place where I have been.

And Emily, I saw you last night, by the river.
I dreamed you were skipping little stones across the surface of the water
Frowning at the angle where they were lost, and slipped under forever
In a mud-cloud, mica-spangled, like the sky’d been breathing on a mirror

Anyhow, I sat by your side, by the water.
You taught me the names of the stars overhead that I wrote down in my ledger.
Though all I knew of the rote universe were those pleiades loosed in december
I promised you I’d set them to verse so I’d always remember

That the meteorite is a source of the light
And the Meteor’s just what we see
And the Meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite’s just what causes the light
And the meteor’s how it’s percieved
And the Meteroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee.

You came and laid a cold compress upon the mess I’m in.
Threw the window wide and cried: Amen! Amen! Amen!
The whole world – stopped – to hear you hollering.
You looked down and saw now what was happening.

The lines are fadin’ in my kingdom
Though I have never known the way to border ‘em in.So the muddy mouths of baboons and sows
and the grouse and the horse and the and the hen
Grope at the gate of the looming lake that was once a tidy pen.
And the mail is late and the great estates are not lit from within.
The talk in town’s becoming downright sickening.

In due time we will see the far butte lit by a flare.
I’ve seen your bravery, and I will follow you there.
And row through the night time,
Gone healthy
Gone healthy all of a sudden,
In search of the midwife
Who Could help me
Who could help me
Help me find my way back in
There are worries where I’ve been.

Say, say, say in the lee of the bay; don’t be bothered.
Leave your troubles here where the tugboats shear the water from the water,
Flanked by furrows curling back, like a match held up to a newspapaer.
Emily they’ll follow your lead by the letter.
And I make this claim and I’m not ashamed to say I know you better.
What they’ve seen is just a beam of your sun that banishes winter.

Let us go! Though we know it’s a hopeless endeavor.
The ties that bind, they are barbed and spined and hold us close forever
Though there is nothing would help me come to grips
With a sky that is gaping and yawning.
There is a song I woke with on my lips
As you sailed your great ship towards the morning.

Come on home, the poppies are all grown knee-deep by now,
Blossoms all have fallen, and the pollen ruins the plow.
Peonies nod in the breeze and while they wetly bow, with
Hydrocephalitic listlessness ants mop up their brow.

And everything with wings is restless, aimless, drunk and dour.
The butterflies and birds collide at hot, ungodly hours.
And my clay colored motherlessness rangily reclines.
Come on home, now! All my bones are dolorous with vines.

Pa pointed out to me, for the hundredth time tonight
The way the ladle leads to a dirt-red bullet of light.
Squint skyward and listen -
Loving him, we move within his borders:
Just asterisms in the stars’ set order

We could stand for a century
Starin’
With our heads cocked
In the broad daylight at this thing
Joy
Landlocked
In bodies that don’t keep
Dumbstruck with the sweetness of being
Till we don’t be
Told; take this
Eat this

Told, the meteorite is the source of the light
And the Meteor’s just what we see
And the Meteoroid is a stone that’s devoid of the fire that propelled it to thee

And the meteorite’s just what causes the light
And the meteor’s how it’s percieved
And the Meteroid’s a bone thrown from the void that lies quiet in offering to thee.

Just a taste:

She was inspiring, and interesting, and wonderful.  It is not everyday that I have the chance to hear a world renown scholar speak, and it is rarer yet that such a scholar will speak about a topic I feel passionate about.  Her lecture about finding the lost content of Atlantis, in this case women’s literary tradition, was inspiring.  And it was also important.  I, and expect many of my generation, take the advances of feminism for granted.  Who really believes that women should not be allowed to vote?  to take part in higher education? (Goshen for one would be about 65% poorer…) or to pursue a vocation in whatever area interests them?  These things seem as natural as breathing to me, and so it is important to step back and remember that this was not always the case.

Gilbert reminded us that only 35 years ago Women’s literature was not studied in any intentional way.  Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar literally wrote edited the book on women’s literature in english.

I sit here trying to type out exactly what it was that made her visit so incredible and words, traitorously enough, fail me.  These are the moments, the times, that make me glad and proud to be an english major.  English provides connection, continuity and creativity for the substance of our existence.  I live in the legacy of giants, one of whom I just had the privilege to meet.

Does analyzing turn a text into this?

Julie Bruneau, (currently my Critical Theory Professor) in a comment for “The Academic Vs. The Purely Edifying”, brought up a question that I have long struggled with in English.  Can you study something without destroying it?  To dissect a frog, it must be dead (or will be soon after you begin).  Does the same process happen when you study a book?  Or a poem?  Or any text, broadly defined, that you analyze?

This worries me because I love stories and uses of the English language in about equal measure; I love taking these things apart to find out how they work and why.  I can’t quite figure out how to reconcile these impulses in myself, because the deeper I analyze the text, the further I get from why I liked it in the first place.  Rarely does it make me dislike something that I liked before, but often I simply get sick of it, and don’t have the time or energy to revisit the whole that I liked so much to begin with.

Or does it turn it into something more like this?

However, as unsubstantiated and impossible to prove as this is, I think the solution is passion.  Caring about what you are analyzing or the ways in which you are considering a text will change your feelings toward it.  A text that I can’t help but care about may temporarily disgust me when I have its innards all over me, but invariably I come to love it again.  The reason this is hard to figure out or experience, is that much of the reading we do, especially as students, is not necessarily stuff we love.  We read what is assigned, and so nothing brings us back to them.  And the considerations we bring to texts for class are not usually the perspectives we care most deeply about.

But these are necessary for getting better at a craft.  We need to practice different critical approaches to different texts of different periods so as to understand how these things work.  This may not be comfortable or fun at the time, but, it may, with patience, enrich rather than destroy what we love.

For More Pictures of sweet book art, pictured right, check out http://packergallery.com/dettmer3/index.php

She will be giving a lecture titled “Finding Atlantis: Thirty Years of Discovering Women’s Literary Traditions” this Tuesday at 7 p.m. in the Newcomer Center 19.  The event is free and open to the public, so any and all are welcome.

Below is one of her Poems

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.

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The New Tree

knows the pain of inching into life:
its new buds seem to swell like nubs of blood
on the arms of the Y of sticks that stand so light
and all alone in a flattened-out black plot.
Not a speck of green in the three-foot-wide surround
of soil James the gardener hacked and raked –
it’s too soon, even here, for weedy ground,
just time for these twigs of plum to trickle red
into little spots of blossom — then the pink
innocuous petals ruffling in the yard,
pastel baby banners of a spring
of purple leaves that haven’t happened yet,
though somewhere in, or under, the flayed thin
skin of the new tree they wait and plan.

I have the pleasure of noting that these works can now be read online at http://www.goshen.edu/english/Home/Broadside.

From the album Murmur

Scratch the scandals in the twilight
Trying to shock, but instead
Idle hands all orient to her
Pass a magic pill under head

It’s so much more attractive
Inside the moral kiosk
Inside, cold, dark, fire, twilight
Inside, cold, dark, fire, twilight

Scratch the scandals in the twilight
She was laughing like a Horae
Put that Knee into our landslide
Take the steps to dash a roving eye

It’s so much more attractive
Inside the moral kiosk
Inside, cold, dark, fire, twilight
Inside, cold, dark, fire, twilight

Scratch the scandals in the twilight
Trying to shock, but instead
Idle hands all orient to her
Pass a magic pill under head

It’s so much more attractive
Inside the moral kiosk
Inside, cold, dark, fire, twilight
Inside, cold, dark, fire, twilight

Inside, cold, dark, fire, twilight
Inside, cold, dark, fire, twilight

Thanks to Kyle Schlabach for this suggestion.

This brain can now hop on two paths rather than one

Now that the English department is offering the English writing major, I think it’s worth stopping to think about the applications for this, as well as the traditional English major.

I’ve written before about the applications of an English major for both job prospects, and for having an impact on the world.  Writing is, I think, about as valuable a skill as one can have.  It prepares people for a multitude of jobs, and can change hearts and minds in ways that many other skills cannot.  Further, the more experience with Critical Theory I get, the more I see English as practice for flexible thinking.  Wrapping minds around approaching the same text from an number of direction teaches people how to think creatively from many perspectives.

And so I see the English writing major as allowing people to choose more specifically which of these important skills they wish to specialize in.  The writing major enables a honing of writing skills that the English major can only passively encourage.  However, the flip side is that the English writing major will likely only passively create the kind of flexible, critical thinking that an English major fosters so well.  That is while one may learn how to write in many different styles, genres or voices, it may not as directly teach the many critical styles and movements that a more traditional course would take.  Critical writing for English classes requires thinking from foreign points of view (feminism for men, Marxism in a capitalist society, etc.)  And even if these don’t inspire passion, they do help to see the world in challenging new ways.  Writing from different points of views, in different styles and forms will likely expand people’s critical thinking skills, but not so directly as writing analysis papers from many different perspectives does.  Trying to write from different points of view can expand perceptions, but in that may be a chosen path within writing, rather than a requirement the way it is in critical theory and other traditional English classes.

While ideally both of these skills would be nurtured in equal measure, the reality is that only so much learning can happen in (give or take) four short years of study.  Given the limits of time, money and energy, the ability to choose which of these vital paths one will take is surely a valuable improvement.

Image by “lapolab” via flickr.

So, here are a list of the changes that are coming.

The biggest change is:

The English Writing Major!!: In its continuing efforts to promote the craft and practice of writing, the English department will soon offer a major dedicated to honing the art of writing in its many forms (expository, creative, play writing, non-fiction etc.)  This major will have at it’s core foundational English writing courses such as Expository Writing, The English Language, and others.  From this base, English Writing majors will then be able to build their own course path from classes like Poetry, Fiction, and Creative Non-Fiction.

This major will expand the offerings for students who love language and writing, but do not feel fully served or interested by a focused Literature Studies curriculum.

For the English Major: English majors will now be required to take only two literature survey classes rather than three (one in British lit. and one in American lit.)  And, in place of the third literature survey class, students will now take World Literature to reflect more fully Goshen College’s commitment to global citizenship.

For TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages): TESOL will similarly now include a World lit. requirement to add exposure to literary models for teaching language in a global context.

For the English Minor: The minor now has fewer required courses, allowing people to create their own, more flexible plan of study.