College of Arts and Sciences

"When I was writing my first murder mystery, then untitled, I asked the Wednesday Writers Workshop for suggestions for a title. I was in favor of Thesis Interruptis." 1. You're an academic, author of Aspects of the Novelist (1995) and numerous journal articles. How did you come to write mysteries as well? I was pleased with...

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We’ve probably all found ourselves falling into the abyss while explaining a joke. Comedy is hard. Comic theory is harder." 1. Why does comic poetry make people uncomfortable? If someone says comic poetry to me, I think of something like “jest ‘fore Christmas I’m as good as I kin be!”...

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Reader, pass on!—don’t waste your time O’er bad biography and bitter rhyme: For what I am this crumbling clay ensures: And what I was is no affair of yours. (quoted in Kichner 65) 1. When did the first inkling of your subject matter occur to you? In a course with Dr. Athena Vrettos,...

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  "Killing is bad luck/ Without an audience."--from "Going to Hell"   1. Is Love Poems for Cannibals considered a Collected Poems? In the book, there are named sections with time frames attached—1967 to 1968 or 1974 to 2012. Does the chronology refer to when the poems were written or the timetable...

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" Selections include works by Rumi, Omar Khayyam, Bahadur Shah Zafar, Lu Hsun, Rabindranath Tagore, Saadat Hasan Manto, Muhammad Iqbal, Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Alifa Rifaat, Amrita Pritam, and Waseem Barelvi. " 1. At what point in your 36 years of teaching did you begin to think about writing this textbook?...

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"Art . . . is about perception and generating human feelings. You can teach a person many things, but you cannot teach him or her how to feel." 1. Could you talk about how you incorporate personal experience into your work? I’m thinking of poems like “Landscape with Ball, Then...

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