In this issue:

Interview with Zipporah/”What Are You Reading?”/Faculty Notes/Interview with Kichner/Ongoing Projects: Ricca/Alumni News/Graduate Blog/Evil Conference

Interview with Zena Zipporah (’70)

Zena Zipporah: “As an artist of this Kali Yuga age, balancing on this earth which teeters on the last leg of the table of creation, I am an archivist, a collector of old objects, texts, and images, vanishing languages, customs and religions of all places, celebrating creations, disasters, prayers, religious texts, myths, gods and goddesses, swamis, pandits, religious leaders, shamans, holy men and women, knowers of lost knowledge. My art is copying, inventing, trying to understand what went before me and what is coming after me. I draw, paint, embroider, copy mystical and holy texts in miniature and write my autobiography on eggs, collage ancient icons [and] images on baby and doll dresses, bonnets, socks, on books that are made and found, on stone balls, handmade paper, and eggs of all species. I am trying to make sense of who I am, trying to learn the secrets before they are lost.”

CWRU: You were a writer and poet before you became a visual artist. How did the shift in emphasis come about? You often include language, quotations, words as part of your artwork. Are they more important as design elements or actual text?

Zipporah: I was an English major both at the State University of New York at Buffalo, and for my Master’s at Case Western Reserve University (where my favorite course was Contemporary Poetry with Robert Wallace).  I never gave a thought to anything but writing and perhaps teaching.  Not long after my degree, I took some evening courses at the Cleveland Institute of Art and ended up in Gwen Cooper’s Papermaking course.  The first assignment was to make a book, and somehow art and writing became all mixed up and I started making hybrids, putting a poem on handmade paper with rubber-stamp letters I made.

I wrote a lot after 1975 when I got divorced the first time.  I think I published a little bit and taught at a few schools for the Ohio Arts Council Arts- in -Education program.  I think I wrote until Bob Fox at the Arts Council fired me from the Writing Program because I got a fellowship from the OAC in Visual Art.  It was a few decades before I really started writing again, though I incorporated aspects of language into my art.  For instance, “My Autobiography on Eggs,” in which I wrote out twenty-five or thirty chapters on as many chicken eggs that were blown out. Turns out, they weren’t blown out enough because critters were inside there and they had to go in a vacuum chamber for a few months before they could be displayed at the Akron Museum. “The Dress of Vanishing Languages” actually has text from hundreds of dead and dying languages and took me two years to complete.

In the art world, although many artists employ text, sometimes very artfully, I don’t think many viewers take the time to read and absorb it.  But I am excited by and attached to language and can’t help using it. I think language serves both purposes. It fills the space and conceptually it means something.  Although as I said, many viewers and curators only address the former.

Continue reading Zipporah’s interview here.

“What are You Reading?” Roundtable

Michael Clune: 
In inviting members of the department to share their recent reading with us, we had several goals in mind. First, we wanted to give everyone an opportunity to sample the rich diversity of intellectual and creative projects faculty, students, and lecturers pursue in English at Case. But in addition to sharing our work life, we also hoped to encourage participants to tell us about reading they pursued for reasons unrelated—or unclearly related—to their research. Speaking for myself, I’ve always found promiscuous reading to be a major part of my pleasure in life, and a spur to that most challenging of all intellectual tasks—thinking new thoughts. Everything I’ve written has had its origin in a piece of reading that at the time seemed to have no conceivable relation to my work. I think our panelists did a wonderful job at fulfilling both of these goals. Greg and Megan shared material relevant to their fascinating books-in-progress. Sarah and Gary talked about books with interestingly oblique relations to their ongoing concerns as writers and thinkers. And Thom offered a heartfelt tribute to a poet whose work had informed his sense of vocation in changing ways over a period of many years. Cara presented us with a charming example of the way an unexpected find opens new possibilities and unexpected questions in an ongoing research project. The event was a relaxed and engaging introduction to our revamped colloquium series, and we hope to make it a start-of-the-semester tradition.

Greg Weiss: 
In The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science (2008), Richard Holmes posits that, between approximately 1750 and 1850, many of the most famous scientific, literary, and historical events in England arose from a sense of wonder. His argument takes the form of a series of biographies of figures such as Humphrey Davy and William Herschel (scientists), Mary Shelley (writer), and Mungo Park and Joseph Banks (explorers). Banks, in addition to landing on Tahiti with Captain Cook in 1769, served as President of the Royal Society, the leading scientific institution of the day, from 1778-1820, and his career serves as the book’s unifying thread. In addition to being convincing, Holmes’s emphasis on wonder highlights the extent to which the era’s science, literature, and exploration influenced each other thematically, often through the personal relationships between their leading practitioners.

Sarah Gridley: 
The book I shared for the “What Are You Reading?” colloquium is David Esterly’s The Lost Carving: a Journey to the Heart of Making. I am always looking for discussions of creative work in other fields that might refresh my ways of thinking about my own craft (writing poetry). Esterly carves lime wood (in America, linden wood) in the traditional “subtractive” method. The lost carving of his title references a Hampton Court carving made by17^th century carver, Grinling Gibbons. Esterly was the only American permitted to join the restoration/conservation team following the fire there in 1986. He had fallen in love with Gibbon’s style of carving—cascading flowers and fruits—fifteen years earlier, when he had encountered one in St. James Church, Piccadilly. From that point onward he apprenticed himself, as he puts it, “to a phantom.” Born in Akron, Ohio, Esterly had a Fulbright to Cambridge in the 1970s, where he wrote a dissertation on Yeats and Plotinus. His own writing is vividly descriptive, and he shares a number of helpful insights on topics such as emulation, failure, and mimesis.

Megan Jewell: 
My book is  Lyn Hejinian’s My Life, revised edition published by Sun & Moon in 1987. (An earlier version was published by Burning Deck in 1980.)

I am working on a book that focuses on how Language and Language-oriented poets address in their works major modes of writing instruction currently taught in university classrooms. The poets in my study demonstrate a sustained critical exploration of fundamental writing elements that they present in terms strikingly conversant with composition theories ranging from those of the mid-century to the very recent. Most major composition textbooks consistently provide instruction on the following elements: the writing process, including generating ideas, drafting and revision; the research process; developing arguments; and citing sources.  The poets I focus on here not only demonstrate sustained critical attention to these writing concepts in their works, but submit a fully historicized reconceptualization of them that is significant in terms of current teaching practices.

My as of yet unfinished chapter focuses on Lyn Hejinian’s hybrid memoir/long prose poem My Life. Published around the same time as the other works, and, incidentally, the best selling “Language” poetry volume of all time, My Life contains 45 prose poems or chapters, each composed of 45 lines, each representing a year in the poet’s life at the time of writing.  I feel that students of composition have much to learn from what is Hejinian’s “de-personalized/personal” memoir as well as the ways in which she manipulates the conventions of genre.  Further, her work, engaging in what Lisa Samuels calls “motivated proceduralism” also calls attention to the complex ways in which both form and formlessness are useful for writers, and how the personal can be de-personalized (and vice versa) not only with pronouns, but inherently in the use of a specific form.

Gary Stonum: 
Over the summer I’ve been rereading Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit, in light of Agamben and Kant’s third critique.

No, I haven’t. I have been reading ambitious genre fiction, including China Miéville’s The City and the City. A clever fusion of several formulaic genres, one without panting aspirations to the litfic genre, the novel respects the formulae and takes maximum advantage of their virtues and limits. Three genres combine:

1. the noir-ish police procedural complete with down-at-the heels detective;
2. fantasy with its construction of a coherent, self-contained and invented world;
3. postmodern stories of paranoia and surveillance, in which a secret order is revealed to be watching and manipulating us.

They combine via the novel’s central conceit, two cities, each in a different country, with different languages and customs but geographically superimposed on one another and requiring citizens of each city to unsee all persons and places in the other.

Cara Byrne: 
In 2001, Zora Neale Hurston’s 1927 manuscript Every Tongue Got to Confess: Negro Folk-Tales From the Gulf States was published for the first time, after Hurston’s anthropological notes spent 30 years in a university basement and 20 more at the Smithsonian in storage. Beginning in 2004, the Zora Neale Hurston Trust and publisher HarperCollins teamed up with renowned African American artists and authors, including Joyce Carol Thomas and Brian Collier, to publish a series of children’s books based on the stories and phrases found in Every Tongue

During the colloquium, I shared one of these picture books: What’s the Hurry, Fox? And Other Animal Stories. As there is little evidence that Hurston ever wrote fiction or nonfiction explicitly for or about children, these adaptations for young children represent a clear and distinct departure from her existing body of creative work, directly associating her name, reputation and biography to the stories she collected from women, men and children along the Gulf coast. I briefly explored the issues of authorship, adaptation, and genre that this deceptively simple picture book brings to light.

Thom Dawkins: 
When poets greet one another, it’s often with the question, “Who do you read?” No matter who asks the question, I always start with Seamus Heaney. It’s my way of first proving that I know well-crafted, gorgeous verse. It’s my way of saying that poetry can be politically motivated without losing any personality or seriousness. And it’s my way of saying that poetry can be formed from the dirt below our feet. Heaney’s Ireland with its peat rows and bogs gave me permission to dig into my own past, into all the places that made me, into all the relationships that shaped me, for good or ill.

Seamus Heaney died the morning of the colloquium, and since the moment I flipped on the radio and heard the news, it’s been impossible for me to think about anything else.

Please contact Megan Jewell, msj18@case.edu, if you are a department member interested in taking part in the spring semester version of “What Are You Reading?”

Other department members, alums, and friends can send their version of “What Are You Reading?” for publication on our Facebook page to sxd290@case.edu.

Faculty Notes

The new issue of the journal Nonsite features a group of leading experts on science and the humanities responding to English professor Michael W. Clune’s recent book,Writing Against Time (Stanford University Press, 2013).