• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

NEWSof the National Humanities Center A Year to Write the Poems I Am Not Writing: Mary Kinzie at the National Humanities Center SPRING / SUMMER 2006 Mary Kinzie (William C. and Ida Friday Senior Fellow) is the author of A Poet’s Guide From the President and Director. 2 to Poetry and six collections of poetry, including Summers of Vietnam, Autumn Eros, Ghost Ship, and Drift. She teaches in the creative writing program that she founded two decades ago at Northwestern University. During her fellowship at the National CSI: Fall River . 3 Humanities Center she has worked on a series of poems that arose from an exploration Cara Robertson on Lizzie Borden and Other Crimes of the border between poetry and prose called “The Poems I Am Not Writing,” which appeared in Poetry magazine last year. In a recent interview she described the poems she has and hasn’t been writing, her efforts to break the stranglehold of blank verse, Digital “Wizard” Receives . 5 and how, despite taking a year away from her duties at Northwestern, she found her- Lyman Award self leading a poetry seminar for a group of very advanced students. 2006–07 Fellows Named . 6 You have described your essay, “The Where has that led you? Poems I Am Not Writing,” as a “first The lines of these poems emerging Grants Launch Dialog . 7 attempt to negotiate between not writing from “perfected prose” were very long on the Human and writing” following a period in which and that in turn helped me to start you struggled to bring new work to fruition. How are you turning that first writing longer-lined poems. To see how New Trustees Welcomed . 7 attempt into a new collection of poems? a very long line could sustain itself, I am attempting to colonize new because it has to be strong enough material for myself, to identify and for the ideas, feelings, images, and Summer Reading List . 8 explore new ways of thinking about my metaphors to seem necessary in that past and about the imagination. It’s also form, rather than simply a cobbling Revisiting Mount Vernon: . 10 an attempt to appropriate prose for poet- continued on page 14 An Eighteenth-Century Place through ry in my own way. Many other writers Nineteenth-Century Eyes have tried to do this, but I’ve been trying for some time now to escape the stran- Kudos . 11 glehold of blank verse, unrhymed iambic pentameter, which I can do in my sleep. Once there’s too great a facility, there’s Recent Books by Fellows . 12 the danger that one can be saying some- thing without meaning very much. So I’ve tried all kinds of ruses and tricks to In Memoriam . 13 distance myself from blank verse, includ- ing experiments with writing in prose Summer Calendar . 16 first, in perfecting the prose, polishing it, A Full Slate of Education Programs making it as perfect and expressive as it can be within the boundary of acceptable prose—and then seeing what it would take to lift it out of prose into poetry. 1 From the President and Director t the Center as elsewhere, April lunchtime 1978 to the spring of 2006, not one of (as T. S. Eliot wrote) is the cruelest seminar. He them has managed to hit the Director’s Amonth, a time when fellows begin also managed car in the parking lot. to be acutely aware of how little of their fel- to maintain Until now. lowship time remains. This year, April has his prize- Michael, if you are reading this, I want to had an extra little twist of cruelty in the recent winning blog, assure you that your reputation at the Center departures of two of our distinguished visi- "Le Blog Bérubé” www.michaelberube.com, an has not been totaled by this unfortunate inci- tors, Helen Vendler and Michael Bérubé, who ongoing discourse in the form of a reflective dent, and that a kind mention of the Center in were here for one-month visits during March. diary in which all manner of subjects get the acknowledgments pages of your books Funded by the recently endowed Assad taken up. will go a long way towards redemption. Meymandi Fellowship, the Distinguished His residency at the Center became one of If this April is not altogether cruel, some Visitors program was conceived as a way those subjects, to the vast amusement of all of credit must go to the last Meymandi Fellow, to take advantage of special opportunities us, who found ourselves suddenly circulating who arrived as the first two were leaving. This by inviting people who, for one reason or in the blogosphere. He was delighted, Michael is the fellow from Poland, Adam Michnik, the another, could not come for an entire year. said, to be able to read, write, converse, and eminent activist, journalist, and intellectual. As The program is just beginning, so it was drive around unencumbered and free. Which those who know him can attest, Michnik is a exciting to see the very different ways in which he did, until, backing out of his parking space large-souled, generous, and emphatic pres- Vendler and Bérubé managed their brief visits. at the Center on March 21, he hit something. ence; he has been witness to and participant Helen used her time to draft versions of the Here I’ll let Michael pick up the story, as he in a great deal of history and has reflected on Mellon Lectures called “Last Looks, Last did in his March 22 post, entitled ”The Fellow it eloquently, particularly in the landmark text Books” that she will be delivering in from Hell”: Letters from Prison. It has been not just a Washington, D.C. this spring (somewhat No, I hadn’t just hit something—I’d hit privilege and a rare pleasure to have him here, moderating the cruelty of April, at least in another car, the car of someone who but a source of assurance as well: an unrepen- Washington). She fulfilled the primary duty was leaving the parking lot at that very tant smoker, Adam is forced by his habit out of fellowship—to have lunch, and to have fun moment. What in the world? In three of his study and into the woods, and so acts doing so—in an exceptionally lively way, weeks here, I’ve never seen another as a one-man perimeter patrol. extending her gift of ready intimacy to both moving vehicle in the NHC parking lot…. With these three, the Distinguished Visitors fellows and staff. And at the March 23 board Yes, well. The driver of the other car just program has gotten off to a brilliant start. No meeting, she delivered an eloquent address happened to be the Director of the matter where they came from, all of them on the “inner form” of several Yeats poems. National Humanities Center, Geoffrey made themselves at home here in their own When she departed on March 24, she left Harpham. That’s right. I hit the ways, and have enriched the lives of their fel- behind a lingering sense of charm, passionate Director’s car. low fellows, who, invigorated by having met scholarly commitment, and brilliance—a fel- This is, I believe, the twenty-eighth year them, can almost face what they otherwise low from heaven. of operations for the National dread even more than April: May. Michael Bérubé took a different approach. Humanities Center. Each year, the Center A distinguished literary and cultural critic, hosts about forty scholars. We’re talking Michael spent his time reading proofs for two about more than a thousand fellows books (including one called What's Liberal over the course of a generation, scholars about the Liberal Arts? ) and working on nationally and internationally another, which he canvassed in a stimulating renowned—and yet, from the fall of 2 CSI: Fall River Cara Robertson on Lizzie Borden and Other Crimes If Cara Robertson knows whether you whether she did it or not,” she law reflects society, but it also helps Lizzie Borden really took that axe and says with a laugh. create the context in which these norms gave her mother forty whacks, she is not In researching the Borden trial, are enforced. I am interested in the inter- saying, at least not until the publication Robertson has gathered any number section of law, literature, and history of her book The Trial of Lizzie Borden of amusing anecdotes about the Borden because people often understand their (under contract with Random House). myth and the people who remain fasci- experiences based at least in part on What she will say is that she has been a nated with it. Along the way she has stories that help explain the otherwise guest at the Borden house, now a bed- made an appointment with a realtor to incomprehensible.” and-breakfast, on the anniversary of the tour the house into which Lizzie and her In Lizzie Borden’s case, what was murders of Lizzie’s father and stepmoth- sister moved after the trial—vastly over- incomprehensible was that the daughter er. There she met a freelance medium priced, she reports—and has even played of the victims might be the killer. and some others claiming special knowl- the role of Lizzie’s sister in a reenactment “Especially,” Robertson notes, “when the edge of the case. “I am sure they can tell of the trial whose cast included two daughter in question is the leading light Supreme Court justices. Drawing upon of the Ladies Fruit and Flower Mission her interdisciplinary training in history, and the secretary-treasurer of the local literature, and the law—she has degrees Christian Endeavor Society, and seems from Harvard College, Oxford Univer- to be unexceptional in every other sity, and the Stanford Law School, and respect.” Late nineteenth-century views has served as a Supreme Court law of criminality, derived from European clerk—she is attracted to cases through models, recognized criminal types and a which she can explore how the law both biologically determined view of feminin- shapes and is shaped by culture, and ity that allowed for periodic bouts of how people construct narratives that insanity in the criminally predisposed.

Load more

  16

Copy Link