Lindsay Turner, Walt Hunter, Willard Spiegelman, Gary Mann, Harriet Mann, Michael Mann. Friday, April 14th, 2023.
Gertrude Mann was an alumna of Cleveland Heights High School, attended Miami University of Ohio, and earned her Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees in education at Case Western Reserve University (FSM ‘51, GRS ‘72). She was an inspiring teacher in many secular and Jewish venues, including the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage. She developed and taught workshops on memoir writing throughout Cleveland and loved helping others “find their voices.” This lecture celebrates Gertrude’s legacy of student and community engagement, and it is generously supported by the Gertrude Mann Visiting Writers Fund.
“Pattern Mapping a Life: The Convergence of Form and Fragmentary Memory”
The Gertrude Mann Lecture by Airea D. Matthews
Friday, March 22nd, 2024
Senior Classroom, Tinkham Veale University Center
3:15 to 4:30 p.m. Livestream at www.case.edu/livestream/s2
“Whoever managed to survive must have the strength to remember.”
-Aleksandr Herzen, “Western European Arabesques I, The Dream,” My Past and Thoughts
Most of memory is an abbreviated echo of reality. Writers are left with fragmentary memories that must serve to illumine some truth of their lives or the truth of life itself. Form enters as a critical craft device in the proper delivery of memory’s disordered parcels. In this talk, based on the poems in Bread and Circus, we will explore the importance of form and pattern mapping in creating a cogent personal narrative from disparate intertextual sources and shared remembrances.
Airea D. Matthews’ first collection of poems is the critically acclaimed Simulacra, which received the prestigious 2016 Yale Series of Younger Poets Award. Matthews is also the author of Bread and Circus, a memoir-in-verse that combines poetry, prose, and imagery to explore the realities of economic necessity, marginal poverty, and commodification, through a personal lens. Matthews received a 2020 Pew Fellowship, a 2016 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and was awarded the Louis Untermeyer Scholarship in Poetry from the 2016 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Matthews earned her MFA from the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan. From 2022-2023 she served as Philadelphia’s Poet Laureate. She is an assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College where she directs the poetry program.
“Becoming a Poet: The Case of Amy Clampitt”
A Lecture by Willard Spiegelman
Friday, April 12th, 2023
Clark 206
3:15 to 4:15 p.m.
Amy Clampitt (1920-1994) was born into a family of Quaker farmers in Iowa. She was graduated from Grinnell College, and made a bee-line for New York, where she lived in total obscurity for almost four decades before bursting onto the literary scene in 1978, when The New Yorker published her first poems. Alfred A. Knopf published five volumes of them between 1983 to 1994. She rose like a comet, winning accolades and attention, before dying of ovarian cancer while still at the height of her creative power. From childhood on she was always writing, but as a young woman in Manhattan, living in a Greenwich Village studio apartment, she had tried—and failed—to become a novelist, before turning to poetry, where her truest gifts lay. How she became a poet is a fascinating story of personal choice, hard work, good luck, and genius.
Willard Spiegelman taught for many years at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, where he also served as editor-in-chief of The Southwest Review. A frequent contributor to the Arts & Leisure pages of the Wall Street Journal, he is the author of many books of literary criticism and personal essays, and the editor of Love, Amy: The Selected Letters of Amy Clampitt.