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“What Are You Reading?”/Faculty Notes/Steinem on Campus/Alumni News/Ongoing Projects: Kristine Kelly

“What Are You Reading?”

Kristina Collins:
I Kill Giants by Joe Kelly and J.M. Ken Niimura
In this graphic novel, heroine Barbara Thorson stands between two realities: in one, she is a geeky, deviant fifth-grader powerless to stop the pall of terminal illness hanging over her house, but in the other she is a giant killer who wields the warhammer Coveleski with a power that can stop death itself. As Barbara’s family and teachers try to pull her from her fantasy world, she sees the signs of a new enemy coming. Visceral, witty, and defiant, I Kill Giants is an examination of how children metabolize grief, but ultimately it’s a story about how it feels to be a kid: small, scared, and powerful. Read it. This book will knock your socks off.

Kate Dunning:
The Folding Cliffs by W.S. Merwin
Normally the endorsement blurbs on the covers of books are little more than exaggerated marketing. But when Ted Hughes says, of Merwin’s book length narrative, “The Folding Cliffs is a masterpiece—a truly original masterpiece on a very big scale. I could not put it down, and read it with a mixture of amazement and admiration that went on growing to the last page,” the reader understands that there is simply no other way of describing the experience of reading this work. The Folding Cliffs: A Narrative of 19th-Century Hawaii engages complicated questions of cultural exchange, language, illness, spirituality, and relationships with the natural world, among many other things.

The basic premise of the narrative is the encounter between the American government and the natives of Hawaii as the US government seeks to control leprosy  by arresting those with the disease and quarantining them without telling their families when, if ever, they will return. The disease does not affect the non-natives, and yet it is the non-natives’ fear that removes from the hands of the Hawaiians any right to decide the fate of “the lepers.” One of the aspects of the narrative that makes it so compelling is the way that Merwin, through his breathtaking poetic language, intertwines the macro-history of Hawaii, its language, its culture, its struggles, with the micro-experiences of a particular family and its community. I highly recommend The Folding Cliffs as a beautiful and simultaneously engaging experience.

Andrew Field:
John Ashbery: Collected Poems, 1956-1987 
John Ashbery re-describes reality through the ever-changing vivacity of his ideas. His poems are chronicles of what happens when one of the most fertile imaginations of our time creates landscapes of ideas on the page. In order to understand Ashbery, we need to pay attention to the originality of his ideas, the way in which one idea magically and manically (maniacally?) replaces the next, in this ever-shifting quicksand dance of cognition, perception, thought, imagination, memory. What he is doing is creating rooms, gardens, cities, fields of imaginative thought. When we enter these rooms, we need to stay alert, even as the enormity of the poet’s imaginative garden/city does everything within its power to distract us (almost?) into new forms of attention. (“The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully,” wrote Stevens.) Reading Ashbery is therefore a dangerous ecstasy, for it propels us into a terrifyingly shifting world of “snapped off” perceptions, and the poem itself is constantly equilibrating itself, even as its chaos turns (in his best works) into something uncanny, lyrical, somehow ordered and somehow new.

Benjamin Fletcher:
The Man Who Was Thursday by G. K. Chesterton
The Man Who Was Thursday is a book about a Scotland Yard detective living in late eighteenth-century London who infiltrates a ring of anarchists hell-bent on political assassination and social revolution. Taking advantage of the paranoia present in Europe at the time, Chesterton begins with a sharp and humorous, although one-sided, satire of anarchism, which quickly devolves into as much a criticism of overbearing police tactics as anything else. The only constant in this book is that nothing is ever quite as it seems, and in his writing Chesterton perfectly captures the sinister uncertainty of a nightmare. However, even in the face of loss of orientation, The Man Who Was Thursday exudes an appreciation for the very contradictions that make up our experience of the world: “even mere existence, reduced to its most primary limits, was extraordinary enough to be exciting.”

T.K. Fountain:
Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice by Ruth Webb
Ruth Webb’s Ekphrasis, Imagination, and Persuasion in Ancient Rhetorical Theory and Practice explains the role of ekphrasis in Greek and Roman rhetorical education. She starts from the premise that ekphrasis in the classical tradition was not a verbal description of an object or work of art; nor was it easily separable from narrative. Instead, ekphrasis was a use of language intended to turn “listeners into spectators” and to “place before the eyes” the actions, events, and people an orator or writer sought to depict. Through an analysis of rhetorical and literary treatises by Quintilian, Cicero, Longinus and others as well as the extant Progymnasmata (or preliminary exercise manuals), Webb explains how ekphrasis involved enargeia, a quality of vividness that transformed listeners into witnesses by creating phantasia or mental images in the mind’s eye. For an ekphrasis to work, speakers had to feel the enargeia and see the phantasia for themselves. Webb’s book demonstrates how language, in rhetorical theory, was viewed as a force that acted on people, leaving impressions on the body and the mind.

Dave Lucas:
The Big Smoke by Adrian Matejka
What strikes me as remarkable about Adrian Matejka’s poems is his refusal to separate poetic language from everyday experience. Every poet writes about the stars; sometimes I think you can’t get your poet’s union card if you don’t write about the stars.  But only a poet as gifted as Adrian could construct a line like “There are more kinds of stars / in this universe than salt granules on drive-thru fries.”

I wish I’d written that one.  You hear that same skill throughout The Big Smoke, Matejka’s award-winning volume based on the life of Jack Johnson, the first African-American heavyweight champion of the world.  You hear it when Johnson says “The soles/ of my shoes so thin I could step on a dime / & tell whether it was heads or tails.”  “My lungs were a couple / of skillets at breakfast.” “If I felt any better, I’d be afraid of myself.”  Poetry has been self-promotion ever since Walt Whitman started singing of himself, and Matejka’s book, the Jack Johnson that Matejka gives us—would delight Whitman just as much as I think it would delight Muhammad Ali.

I’m especially impressed with Adrian’s skill in rendering Jack Johnson as folk hero, national symbol, and flawed, contradictory individual.  So, we get to see Johnson being refused a ticket on the Titanic and we get to hear a little bit of Leadbelly’s famous song in Matejka’s poems. But we also hear the voices of women whom Johnson loved but mistreated, and even poems that let us see and hear Johnson “shadow boxing” with himself, with a frankness that the public figure could never allow.

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