The 2nd Last Class of Quarter + Split This Rock Festival

Last week marked my second "end of the quarter," because the graduate schools' classes run an extra week, so after saying goodbye to my class of senior undergrads a week ago, I unfortunately had to reprise this on Wednesday with my smart and talented group of graduate fiction students.  This quarter I tried to loosely structure the readings along a trajectory that ran from very short (we began with microfictional stories by Melanie Rae Thon and Amy Hempel) to near-novella-length (our final story was Haruki Murakami's "Honey Pie"), and from realism (cf. Thon and Hempel above) to works that included elements of or were outright SFF (Nalo Hopkinson's long story "Under Glass" represented the culmination of this). For the last two weeks of the quarter I like to have the students read either a novel or a theoretical book, so this year I returned to James Wood's excellent though somewhat prescriptive treatise How Fiction Works (FSG, 2008), which, from what I could tell, the students found beneficial.  Throughout all my classes this quarter I taught the work of a number of authors I've never tried before, and they appeared to go over well. These include Jason Epstein, Percival Everett, Amy Hempel, Cristina Henríquez, Fanny Howe, George Saunders, Muriel Spark, Melanie Rae Thon, and Wells Tower.  Of course teaching new texts equals added work, but part of the joy of assigning new materials is that doing so requires that I must also read and think about different authors, styles, texts, than I've become used to. One of the other benefits of these new works is hearing the students' thoughts on them. The undergraduates' and graduate students' in-class commentary, critical papers and annotations, and creative responses, all served to illuminate these works in new ways for me.  Next quarter I'll be teaching works by authors I haven't before introduced into the classroom, including Vito Acconci, John Cage, Don Delillo, M. NourbeSe Philip, Nathalie Stephens/Nathanël, and Andy Warhol, among others, so I'm looking forward to seeing how it goes over.

I do wish our break was longer, though, because it represents the only time that my mind gets a breather, and I'll have opportunity not only to read a bit for pleasure and leisure, and rejuvenation, but for my own work as well. Writing while teaching multiple fiction classes is always tough, and the abrupt return in January was even tougher than the usual post-summer transition. But such is the teaching life.

***

I returned early this morning from my short visit to Washington to attend the Split This Rock Poetry Festival: Poems of Provocation of Witness 2010, and I'm very glad I was invited to participate and able to attend.  The festival, first conveived in 2003 by poets opposing the Iraq War, and held for the first time as a full event in 2008, spanned 4 days and included readings, panels and workshops, a book fair, film screenings, and performances, and took place at venues throughout DC's U Street Corridor, including Busboys and Poets bookstore; the Thurgood Marshall Center; and the True Reformer Building; and in the Columbia Heights & Mount Pleasant neighborhoods, including Marx Café, Bell Multicultural High School, and the Dance Institute of Washington.  It even included a public cento, read aloud on Thursday at Upper Senate Park, to call attention to the misuse of public funds for war instead of for public education, health care for all, jobs, and other socially vital uses, that began with lines quoted from Adrienne Rich's  poem, "An Atlas of the Difficult World," from that eponymous collection. One of the things I loved about this conference was its atmosphere of political and social commitment, its very different cross-section of attendees from other poetry conferences (like AWP, for example), and the community-based venues. Also, with the focus not on networking or job-hunting but on social activism, people here (as at Adfempo, for example) related to each other on a very different, more relaxed basis.

My main contribution was contributing to a panel discussion that Reggie H. organized on the theme of Black LGBTQ Literary History and its relation to social activism. Other panel participants included poets Lenelle Moïse and Jericho Brown; Cheryl Clarke, one of the most important black lesbian poets of the last 30 years, was scheduled to join us but wasn't able to make it.  The panel tackled a number of issues, including the politics of our work and our work as political art; the ways in which we saw ourselves engaging in social activism; the question of non-traditional aesthetics and Black/queer literary canons; and dialoguing across boundaries. As part of my commentary, I drafted remarks towards a paper on "Translation as Activism," which I hope to complete and publish somewhere, and in the process of conducting research for it, I learned about the Translation and Activism: First International Conference, which occurred in 2007, at the University of Granada, Spain, and from which came a very important document, the Granada Declaration, concerning the necessity and importance of engaged, ethical, global translation and interpretation practice.

Poem: Nancy Morejón

(finally posted)
Nancy Morejón (1944-) is a name anyone familiar with contemporary Cuban literature knows well: she is one of Cuba's major poets, translators and critics, and a leading voice in Spanish-language and African Diasporic literature. In 2001, she won Cuba's highest poetry prize. I don't know if I'll have an opportunity to meet with Sra. Morejón when I'm in Havana, but I can say that her poetry has lived within me for a long time. I even featured her poem "Impressions" ("Impresiones") back in 2005, pairing it with a poem by another poet I adore, Thylias Moss. Sisters in conversation.

Since I don't have access to my books right now, I'm culling the Net for poems and links, and I came across this fine, concise discussion of Morejón's work on Brett's "The Shapes You Need Blog." I'm reposting the translation he features of Morejón's "Un patio de la Habana." (I'm not sure who the translator is, but when I find out, I'll post that.) Enjoy.

A HAVANA PATIO

A Havana patio,
as Machado requested,
is dear to memory.
Without tall walls,
without that intrepid glow
of the rainbow,
without the Andalusian flower
grandmother so much demanded
in the flower vases . . .

A Havana patio
preserves the bones of the dead
for they are ample treasures,
a farmer's old seeds.

A patio, ay, from where
so many stars twinkle.

Copyright © 2008, Nancy Morejón. All rights reserved.

And, Nancy Morejón reading her work, in Spanish!