A Reflection on “Winesburg, Ohio”

I’ve always been attracted to the works of the American Realist and Modernism periods. In fiction, that meant Willa Cather, Edith Wharton, Jack London, and Theodore Dreiser, and moving into Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and William Faulkner, among others. In poetry, that meant Edgar Lee Masters, Sara Teadsale, Vachel Lindsay, and T.S. Eliot, among quite a few others.  

This attraction likely relates to my middle school and high school English teachers, almost all of whom graduated from college in the 1940s and 1950s. They would have defined the Realist and early Modernism writers as the ones they were most influenced by, and they tended to wax eloquent on these particular writers and poets in particular. As a high school junior, taking American literature, I read Wharton’s Ethan Frome, Cather’s My Antonia, T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and The Waste Land, and Masters’ Spoon River Anthology. It was a challenging year for all my subjects, but what I read in English was wonderful.

 

What I don’t recall reading at all was anything by Sherwood Anderson (1876-1941), not even a short story. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Photograph: Sherwood Anderson in 1898, about the time he enlisted int he army to fight in the Spanish-American War.

The Teacher in the Turban: The Year I Discovered the Realists

My junior year in high school (1967-68) was, perhaps like all years, a crazy time to be 16 years old. Those nine months included starvation in the Biafran region of Nigeria; the deaths of three astronauts in a test launch at Cape Kennedy; the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; and the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. We went to see movies like “The Graduate,” “Bonnie and Clyde,” and “In the Heat of the Night,” and the Beatles were upended their own music and rock music in general with “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.”

This was the high school year for American history and American literature. American history included a mandatory six-week section on communism; the required text was Masters of Deceit by J. Edgar Hoover. My history teacher was a maverick; rather than read what others said communism was, somehow she got grudging approval for my class to read a large chunk of Das Kapital by Karl Marx. It was actually a brilliant move; we learned that, if Marx was any indication, communism was flat-out boring. Who wanted that?

It was junior English that left the most lasting mark on me. Our teacher, Mrs. Prince, was new to the school, an all-boys public high school. She was tall and rather broad-shouldered and wore her hair in a beehive. And she was a presence. She had a loud voice and talked as much with her hands and arms as she did with her mouth. She wore bright colors, including the occasional turban. 

The first day of class, she announced that the greatest work in American literature was Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann, published the year before. Now, we may have been 16-year-old boys, but even we knew that was something of a ridiculous statement.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Literary Life.

Painting: New York, oil on canvas by George Bellows (1911).

Poets and Poems: Hart Crane, “The Bridge” and Me

Time’s rendings, time’s blendings they construe

As final reckonings of fire and snow…

  (from “The River” in The Bridge)

Hart Crane (1899-1932) was born on Cleveland, Ohio, the son of a well-to-do chocolate manufacturer who expected his son to follow his footsteps into the family business. That didn’t happen; Crane had no intention of that happening. Instead, he turned his attention to what he was most interested in – writing, and especially poetry.

His most well-known work is The Bridge, a series of poems on the American experience. In a sense, he was trying to write the Great American Poem, much like his novelist peers were trying to write the Great American Novel, which might have already been written (Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1885) (I realize that a parenthetical statement like that may cause controversy). Critics immediately found fault with The Bridge, for all kinds of reasons. They still do.

I had never read the entire work until recently. In high school, our junior English class read a few excerpts from the volume, which includes short poems on Rip Van Winkle, the Brooklyn Bridge (a kind of homage to Walt Whitman), Powhatan’s daughter, the Mississippi River, Cape Hatteras and a number of other subjects. As The Poetry Foundation’s entry on Crane points out, it was perhaps inevitable that the Great American Poem would fall short of its goals.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Hart Crane, with the Brooklyn Bridge in the background.

Poetry: The Teachers Who Teach Us

Whenever we return to my hometown of New Orleans, we inevitably drive all over to see friends, visit the French Quarter, see my older brother, and hit the local grocery store for food items you can only buy in the region. Just as inevitably and by necessity, we travel streets that pass right by my junior high and high schools. Those were the two places where my ideas and understanding of poetry were formed and took root.

Teachers can have an enormous impact, for good and for ill. It was my good fortune to have invariably good literature and English teachers, from eighth grade through high school graduation. Most of these teachers were of the same generation – they had all been teaching for 10 to 15 years, except for one whose tenure was approaching 40 years.

To continue reading, please see my post today at TweetSpeak Poetry.

Photograph: East Jefferson High School, Metairie, Louisiana.