Professor J's Place

My darling friend Bluebird at Bluebird Blvd. was writing about poetry recently. It's something she often does, bless her heart. It got me thinking, as her posts are wont to do, and I wrote to her about the first poem I memorized. We decided it would be fun for both of us to write about the poems of our childhoods, so that's what we're doing today!   This is the book I grew up with. First published in 1959, The Golden Treasury of Poetry was compiled for an audience of children, but not once did it talk down to its audience. With delightful illustrations by Joan Walsh Anglund and poems that ranged from the ridiculous to the sublime, this book was my introduction to the joy and music in language. When I teach poetry, which I seldom do, I talk about how we are hard wired for poetry. What do children like to read and have read to them? Poetry! It's the heart beat, I think. The rhythm in our blood.   I, like most children was first attracted to poems that rhyme....

Tropic Thunder opened in theaters today. It is a satire of adventure/war movies and self important actors starring Ben Stiller, Jack Black, and Robert Downey Jr. What's not to like? Plenty. This morning, when I was watching Good Morning America and drinking my coffee, Ben Stiller assured me that the frequent repetition of words like "retarded" and "retard" are meant to make fun of actors , not intellectually challenged people. I suppose I'm just too tight assed to "get it," Ben. When you use the word retarded to make fun of people, you are not making fun of actors. Retarded means "slow development." It is comparable to nigger, kike, or faggot when used as an insult. It's not funny. This is very much like the discussion we all had when Don Imus opened his big mouth one too many times. There are many people who are arguing that "political correctness" has robbed us of our sense of humor and made us a nation of uptight maiden ...

I am sitting here while my Composition I students struggle over an in class essay on the wonderful " Everyday Use ," by the glorious Alice Walker . They are having such a hard time. I know they will do their best. I know they will come to an understanding of the different values of the sisters. I know they will love Maggie and her mother. I have yet to have a student really identify with Dee. This surprises me, because I did. I don't mean that I totally disrespected my mother and my sister(s), although the sisters might tell a different tale, but there were times when we spoke a different language. There were also times when I was so full of myself and my grand ideas--so full of my feminist struggle--that I did not give credit to the woman who raised three girls by herself--to the women my sisters had become. I certainly gave them lip service, just as Dee has appreciation for the "folk art" her grandmother had quilted. But I neglected to accept what they we...

I stole this from Lanie Painie who stole it from Grammar Snob. Copy this list and Bold those you’ve read. Italicize books you have started but couldn’t finish. Add an asterisk* to those you have read more than once. Underline those on your To Be Read list. Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell Crime and Punishment Catch-22 One Hundred Years of Solitude Wuthering Heights The Silmarillion Life of Pi: A Novel The Name of the Rose Don Quixote Moby Dick * Ulysses Madame Bovary The Odyssey Pride and Prejudice Jane Eyre A Tale of Two Cities The Brothers Karamazov Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies War and Peace Vanity Fair The Time Traveler’s Wife The Iliad Emma The Blind Assassin The Kite Runner Mrs. Dalloway Great Expectations American Gods A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius Atlas Shrugged Reading Lolita in Tehran Memoirs of a Geisha Middlesex Quicksilver Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West The Canterbury Tales The Historian A Portrait of the...

As you might imagine, I'm agin it (as my mother would say). Pat Conroy wrote a lovely article for the Charleston Gazette in response to the banning of two of his novels at a Charleston school. When I teach World Literature, I have one goal. Of course, it is important to me that the goals of my department are addressed in my class and how it is structured, but I really only want one thing. I want my students to enjoy one thing I teach. I want them to find one book or story or poem that moves them. I desire more than anything that a few of my students will remember an author's name and want to read more. I once made the mistake of voicing that desire in a departmental meeting. The chair of the department looked at me with something like pity, something like disdain, and said, "You really are a romantic, aren't you?" I guess so. But I love to read the words of this one former English student who went on to be a writer. I love his description of the affect g...