Category: Faculty Doings
Robert Frost, Langston Hughes, Rumi, Walt Whitman and Liberal Arts Professor Lin Haire-Sargeant!
On Friday and Saturday, November 22 and 23 at 8 pm, choreographer Beth Soll will present her Beth Soll & Company, an ensemble of dancers and musicians, in Dances of Passion and Peace, A Concert of New Dance, Music, and Poetry.
Poems by Robert Frost, Lin Haire-Sargeant, Langston Hughes, Rumi, and Walt Whitman will be recited in English, French, Catalan, German, French, and American Sign Language.Lighting Designer James Kolditz will illuminate the events.
Lin Haire-Sargeant’s poem. Old Heat, appears below.
Old Heat
Lin Haire-Sargeant
Back then, in the summer,
The world was closer to the sun.
It blazed deep into black earth
It rasped our clover lawns to brown
It crisped the backs of our necks and the tops of our ears.
Even deep in cottonwood groves, the hot shade glowed.
Indoors, the heat settled in dense blocks
Unbudging behind sullen drawn blinds.
Our fleshly bodies sagged beneath the weight.
In summer, then, we didn’t have a fan
On the third straight one hundred-topping day
My mother called us in and ran cold water
Until it turned her testing finger numb.
Then she soaked clean sheets in the tub,
Smoothed them sopping on the linoleum floor.
We stretched out in our nylon slips
Otherwise worn unseen under Sunday dresses.
My mother read soothing icy books out loud–
The Snow Queen, The Long Winter, until
The air above us seemed to swirl with snow.
As the slick cold spread through my skin
And the wet sheets lapped against my sides
I could almost remember being a whale in the Arctic
Sliding my flank along a huge blue wall of under-ocean ice.
That night, through the window black above my bed
I saw the trembling mystery of the heat
make dull flashes. I knew the world would end.
When lightning finally ripped, the rain
felt like a last chance to those left on earth.
Live again, it said, but know
that heat is all, and the source of all,
And will return.
Commencement 2019
Liberal Arts Professor Robert Gerst and Provost Kymberly Pinder leading the MassArt class of 2019 to commencement.
“What Did You Do on Your Summer Vacation?”
In A Greensick Eye
Writes Professor Carol Dine:
At first, I didn’t see a comparison in the two images in that the greens, which immediately drew me in, seemed of such different tones. And the women, of contrasting eras and statures. Then I looked again at the faded sunflowers — aha — on the green curtain.
This poem from my book, Van Gogh in Poems, is written as if in Vincent Van Gogh’s voice. It’s meant to reflect his last day.
“Constant Readers” Read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain
Write Lin Haire-Sargeant and Robert Gerst:
Above, Lin Haire-Sargeant and Carol McCarthy enjoy a moment with (the spirit of) Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann, whose magisterial novel The Magic Mountain the Liberal Arts reading and discussion group Constant Readers have been reading this spring semester. Leon Steinmetz led the Mann discussions.
What’s Constant Readers?
Constant Readers are Mass Art people who gather together to read fiction, poems, and prose for the joy of reading. No oaths of allegiance! No dues! Just people who share a conviction that novelist William Faulkner expresses in his 1949 Nobel Prize acceptance speech. The writer’s privilege, Faulkner proclaims, is “to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
In Fall 2018, Debra San led a discussion of sustained contradiction as a literary mode, Robert Gerst led the readers in considering the state of academic freedom in contemporary American higher education, Louise Myers led the readers through James Joyce’s The Dead, and Paul Bempechat led the readers in considering musical settings of great poems created by great composers.
Starting September 2019, there’ll be more. Lin Haire-Sargeant will be leading the readers into the world of twentieth century novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s Under the Net and The Sea, The Sea. And then a play by Beckett or Chekhov? A history of the turbulent twentieth century?
Email Lin Haire-Sargeant to join our email list, to hear about dates and times of forthcoming gatherings, to read what we’re reading, to pitch a book or a writer you’d love to talk about with people who love to talk about books.
May 8, 2019
Academe’s Extreme Extinction Event…or Adjuncting in America
Whatever happened to teaching literature?
Robert Gerst: O Beautiful River!
From 35,000 feet it’s hard to see what’s on the ground and nobody on this airplane is looking. We are heading back to Chicago and I am remembering that Carl Sandberg poem about the train rushing to Omaha. “I met a man on a train and asked him where he was going and he said, ‘Omaha.’”
I flew from Boston to El Paso via Chicago on Sunday and the scene on the plane then was a little different but essentially it was the same.
On the first leg of the flight, from Boston to Chicago, though it was summer and dawn, everyone drew down the shades over the cabin windows and took out their handhelds and fell into them so that there seemed to be no world outside, no world around us. There was nothing but the rows of seats facing in one direction and slumped heads and the glow of tiny screens, a constellation of little screens that glowed but bore no starlight.
In the airport in Chicago, men in shorts and women in halters streamed down the corridor in a ceaseless stream heading God knows where while the voices on the TV monitors inveighed and indicted and then we filed again onto the airplane.
On the second leg of the flight, morning now, from Chicago to El Paso, the shades on the windows were already drawn and no one thought to open one. The handhelds emerged. We were a congregation of dreamers looking nowhere but inward. We landed in El Paso.
So I flew across a continent on a sugar day of summer nullifying America. Where birds are hatching and people live and love, I saw nothing.
But when you stand with your legs on the ground and behold what’s before you, the world shimmers with beauty. This photo shows me (that’s my shoulder intruding into the lower right of the image) standing at the bank of the Rio Grande River near Las Cruces, New Mexico. In reality, a glorious mountain rises where this photo shows merely a pale white sky. It’s hardly a photo. It’s all I could capture while I held my laptop in my hands and snapped a shot as the glare from the sun made the screen invisible to me. It’s an intimation of what is.
O beautiful river!
Summer Reading, Jen Cole: “I’m Reading A Heaping PIle of Things…”
Writes Jen Cole: I’m reading a heaping pile of things, and my reading style is to have several books going at once, picking up at any given time what I’m in the mood for. Here are a few select books and excerpts:
EARTH’S NATURAL RESOURCES (John Walther)
Beryllium is primarily used as a hardening agent in alloys, in particular beryllium copper (BeCu). BeCu is a weldable, machinable, nonoxidizing, acid resistant, ductile copper alloy. It is therefore, employed in high-tech applications even though it is relatively expensive. Other items that incorporate beryllium are golf clubs, wheel chairs, and dental appliances.
THE DRUNKARD’S WALK: HOW RANDOMNESS RULES OUR LIVES (Mlodinow)
We also make Bayesian judgments in our daily lives. A film tells the story of an attorney who has a great job, a charming wife, and a wonderful family. He loves his wife and daughter but still he feels that something is missing in his life. On night he returns home on the train he spots a beautiful woman gazing with a pensive expression out the window of a dance studio. He looks for her again the next night and the night after that. Each night as his train passes her studio, he falls under her spell. Finally one evening he impulsively rushes of the train and signs up for dance lessons, hoping to meet the woman. He finds that her haunting attraction withers once his gaze from afar gives way to face-to-face encounters. He does fall in love, however, not with her but with dancing.
WATER FOR ELEPHANTS (Gruen)
But there’s nothing to be done about it. All I can do is put in time waiting for the inevitable, observing as the ghosts of my past rattle around my vacuous present. They crash and bang and make themselves at home, mostly because there’s no competition. I’ve stopped fighting them. They’re crashing and banging around in there now. Make yourselves at home, boys. Stay awhile. Oh, sorry – I see you already have. Damn ghosts.