Son Number 1: Did you just wipe old milk on your pants?Son Number 2: It wasn't old milk.
Sigh.
And now, onward and upward. I am excited to tell you about a gift that has fallen into my lap. Autumn House Press has, out of the blue, invited me to edit an anthology of writings about poetry: not contorted critical theory but real literature--Plato, Horace, Wordsworth, Shelley, Pater . . . in short, the work I love and believe in. About two-thirds of the book will be older, classic works about poetry; the last third will be more contemporary, including, I hope, writers such as Nabokov and Woolf and Adrienne Rich. The intended audience will be undergraduate and graduate writing and English classes, but the publisher and I have some hopes that it will also be useful for high-achieving high school students.
If you have thoughts about essays, interviews, or even ars poetica poems that have influenced you or your students, please do share them with me. I would love to expand my list of Asian, African, Latino, native and black American, feminist, and gay/lesbian/transgender sources. But I'm not necessarily looking for brand-new voices, though I'm happy to consider them for inclusion. Part of the point of this book will be to introduce students (and, I'm sorry to say, their teachers) to the wealth of the past. And I must admit that it's thrilling to have suddenly been offered a project that gives me a tiny bit of pedagogical power. "Yes, kids, you do have to read all of Shelley's 'Defence of Poetry' by this time next week because it's in the textbook so it must be important." Hah!
8 comments:
Removed previous post due a huge typo!!! Here it is again without the boo-boo.
Not to be picky or overly sensitive here, but why are "native" and "black" in lower case? Native and Black are not adjectives of description here but are designations of race. Just sayin'
Various style manuals go back and forth about this issue, Carol, as do the various presses for which I have worked. On the whole, most prefer "black" lowercased, as a parallel to "white Americans." "Native Americans" is capitalized more often, yet many grammatical opinionators continue to dislike capitalizing the adjective. Because I tend to prefer "black" as a lowercased term, I also lowercased "native" because it was yoked adjectivally with "black" in my sentence. If I had been writing "native American" alone, I would very likely have used "Native." There are similar disclarities in, for instance, the use of "deaf" versus "Deaf": lowercased, the term is a simple description of a condition; capped it implies a cultural bond. As you can imagine, delineating the line between the two is difficult.
Congratulations, Dawn. I'm sure it will be a terrific anthology. It's wonderful you're thinking of its utility in AP/IB English classes, too.
Yeah, right on all counts, however the cultural bond is my point as well as avoidance of cultural feather-ruffling (no pun intended in regards my own Native culture reference). These kinds of choices scream out to me (and others) from every page.
Oh and I totally forgot to congratulate you on the editing gig.
BTW, your boys sure do provide you with tons of humorous anecdotal possibilities! Isn't parenting grand? LOL
I'm sure they do, and I understand the frustrations--witness the age-old "he/she" conundrum. English is missing an indefinite singular pronoun: therefore, historically, every nonspecified woman has been subsumed under "he," and to this point we still have no satisfactory solution to the problem.
I go back and forth on the issue of capitalization, perhaps because I personally detest being called "White." To me, the capital letter looks like visual screaming; and I neither want to scream about my race nor be screamed at about it. (Whether I ought to be screamed at about it is, of course, a different story; and I'd be glad to share the essay I wrote on the subject.) There is also a strong tendency among conservative editors (stylistically, not politically) to avoid rampant capitalization on the grounds of both ease of readability and typographical aesthetics.
None of this rationalization of tradition is any comfort to anyone who's been injured by the smug cruelties of words. But I think formal written language is inherently behind the times, which can be either a strength or a weakness, depending on our moment of engagement with it. Anyway, I'm glad you brought up the subject because it's important.
Poem by BJ Ward "Upon Being Told There are No Rhymes for Certain Words" is one of my favorites; it's wry, fun, and elementally amazing. It's in Gravedigger's Birthday.
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