Crossing Brooklyn Ferry

From New Hampshire, where I am teaching a seminar on the poetry and prose of Walt Whitman, to Brooklyn for a weekend arts festival on Governor’s Island with L and D. The Figment festivities are a ferry ride away and so, I am indeed crossing (though across to a different island) by ferry and thinking about the good fortune of finding myself here with Whitman muttering in my head. “The crowds of men and women attired in the usual costumes,” how curious they would be to Whitman today, with painted faces and fairy wings. (A write up appears in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.) But of course Whitman was a step ahead, for as he put it, “And you that shall cross from shore to shore years hence are / more to me, and more in my meditations, than you might suppose.”

This coming week we will be reading the “Calamus” and “Children of Adam” poems and thinking together about what Whitman called “fervid comradeship,” the “adhesive love” Whitman contrasts with the “amative love” that he describes (in his 1871 essay “Democratic Vistas” as “the counterbalance and offset of our materialistic and vulgar American democracy, and for the spiritualization therof.” But I am here, on a ferry, and I keep hearing Whitman.

Others will watch the run of the flood-tide,

Others will see the shipping of Manhattan north and west, and
the heights of Brooklyn to the south and east,

Others will see the islands large and small;

Fifty years hence, others will see them as they cross, the sun half
an hour high,

A hundred years hence, or ever so many hundred years hence,
others will see them,

Will enjoy the sunset, the pouring-in of the flood- tide, the falling-
back to the sea of the ebb-tide.

Sure enough, we are watching and seeing.

If only Whitman could wander among the crowds on these rainy June days in 2009. “Not those — but, as I pass, O Manhattan! Your frequent and swift flash of eyes offering me love, / Offering me the response of my own — these repay me.” Indeed.

 

A Keynote Address

It is the end of May and I am up early running in the Virginia woods near the campus of Lynchburg College. It is humid, not too warm, and I’ve found my way to a trail that winds its way beneath a canopy of oak trees. A white tail deer bounds across the trail, two black feral dogs skitter away as I come into view and catch the scent of a rotting carcass, and I stop to admire the intricate orange streaks on two good sized painted turtles in the trail.

I am in Virginia as one of three invited speakers for the conference “3-4  Hour: Conversations on Moving to Four Credit Hour Courses.  The conversations among the faculty and staff teams from a range of institutions are familiar to me. The same questions, problems and concerns, the same sense of excitement and sense that we might indeed be doing things differently, perhaps even better, for our undergraduate students—the kinds of conversations we have been having at Keene State College. The conference appears extremely productive for participants as they weigh the promises and the potential pitfalls of transforming their curricula. One of the strengths of the conference is that the colleges represented are at all stages of the process—from exploring the idea of four-credit hour courses to having already decided to move to four-credit hour courses. In my keynote is to tell the story of Keene State College and to speak from my role as one of the faculty members who worked to create the four-credit English proposal and then helped the campus move toward a predominantly four-credit hour curriculum.

Lynchburg College is a very congenial place—the green grass of the Dell, stately Georgian-style buildings of red brick and white columns, the home of the fighting hornets (“the stingers”). The banners on the Dell say “Above and Beyond,” the marketing tag that captures the Lynchburg brand. Lynchburg, the college brochure says, is a “place to call home,” nestled below the Blue Ridge Mountains. Lynchburg is also the home of Falwell’s Liberty University and the Thomas Rhodes Baptist Church (which we drive by on the way to an Indian dinner on Saturday night)—ground zero of the religious right during the so-called culture wars that flared in the 1980s. Earlier in the twentieth century, Lynchburg was the home of the poet Anne Spencer, who was a friend and contemporary of Langston Hughes, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson and James Weldon Johnson.

 

American Literature and the Enviromental Humanities

Late in May I headed to Boston to present my thoughts at a session on the environmental humanities at the annual American Literature Association conference. My presentation, titled “American Literature, Disciplinarity and the Environmental Humanities, began with a helpful remark by Jonathan Monroe, that “the first discipline of a discipline is, or should be, not to forget that it has not always been a discipline.” I also used Henry Nash Smith’s classic 1957 essay “Can American Studies Develop a Method?” to frame my thoughts on how the study of American culture, as Smith so aptly put it, as a whole “does not coincide with the customary field of operations of any academic discipline” (1). Much the same thing can be said about the environmental humanities, I explained, as the capacious term environment and the contested term humanities are elusive at best. Moroever, in making a case that our work as environmental humanists may move us from the study of literary categories such as American, and the professional identities we cultivate as Americanist scholars, I suggested that among the most productive things we might be doing right now would be conceiving of the environmental humanities as a collaboration across academic disciplines, in Smith’s words, “attempting to widen the boundaries imposed by conventional methods of inquiry” (11). My paper made the case that our definitions of the environmental humanities might therefore need to be somewhat more modest than we might like; at the same time I suggested that definitions of the environmental humanities that arise out of practice in particular intellectual and institutional communities may be more radical and consequential than we might think.

 

On Writing about Questions

This semester I am once again immersed in Emerson. My students are reading and thinking about his language in my introduction to the major course, English 200. Too, Emerson’s thinking, and his use of language, offered a space to think about being named the 2009 Distinguished Scholar at Keene State College and the keynote address I would be giving to faculty, students and their families at the annual Keene State College Academic Excellence Conference.

While I am skeptical of the discourse of excellence–as anyone who has read Bill Reading’s book or the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu should be–I am an enthusiastic supporter of the goals of the annual event:  to give undergraduate te students the opportunity to share their intellectual work with a broad audience and to work closely with students beyond the classroom. In any given year over 350  students and family members, faculty, staff, community members, area legislatures and university trustees attend the gathering. As I was trying to figure out what to say to such a diverse audience, and how I might approach the occasion, I found in Emerson’s essay “The Poet” a formulation that proved to be useful in organizing the second part of what turned out to be a three-part essay. Emerson says, “We know that the secret of the world is profound, but who or what shall be our interpreter, we know not. A mountain ramble, a new style of face, a new person, may put the key into our hands.” It was the mountain ramble part that helped.

And so I was thinking: where questions come from, why we take them up, how they move us from where we are to someplace new. My talk began by asserting that whatever the academic field, most research and scholarship can be traced back to a question. However my interest was really how intellectual work is motivated by questions that transcend academic fields, professional identities, the very idea of academic excellence. As a humanist, I explained to my audience, I am preoccupied with these deeper questions. But, as I went on to say, any certainty that I might have had about where questions come from had been unraveling since late February when I was skiing across a frozen lake with my five-year-old friend Ben and he asked, “What is more importanter, living or being loved?”

Another significant moment in mywriting process was discovering something unexpected in a familiar poem by Mary Oliver.  Her poem offered a beautiful way of describing the scholarly process. It also helped me find my way to the three parts to the essay I was trying to write. The gist of it all, she says, is that we keep looking, one question leads to another question, we think again. (That “we,” it turned out, also resonated with me.) If you are interested, here is what I ended up saying to the hundreds of people gathered for lunch in a talk I titled “The Trouble with Scholarship.“

 

What are English Majors Saying about Thinking and Writing?

In the first part of our two-course introductory sequence to the English major I ask students to write an essay about their experiences with academic writing. Their five-page essays allow me to see how students think about writing; and their thinking provides the occasion for an extended discussion about motivations for doing intellectual work in English. Their essays also make visible some impressions of our new first-year course, Thinking and Writing (ITW).

Not surprisingly, thirty-four of the forty essays on academic writing I’ve read this year mention the ITW course. The students who mention ITW confess that the opportunity to write about something that mattered to them is both exciting and terrifying. They express uncertainty about completing a 15-20 page essay. They describe hours of work in the library and their surprise that in fact others have thought about their areas of interest. And they point out how skeptical they are that the area they are writing about is interesting enough for a semester-long project.

If anything, we can count on students coming out of ITW with a vocabulary to talk about thinking and writing as a process. (More so than the students who completed our essay writing course.) Writing in a substantive intellectual context, they tell me, has taught them that good thinking takes time. Moreover, they understand that persuasion requires curiosity and careful reading of, in the memorable words of one student, “interesting people with different views on a topic.” Another student is able to say it this way:  ”The most effective essays are written by those who truly believe what they are saying, have a well rounded knowledge of the subject, and have put a lot of thought into how to address opposing claims.”

In addition to understanding writing as a process these students have experienced the challenge of being asked to think about something. Again and again, they point to the unexpected freedom of being asked to write about something they care about. Describing her experience with the semester-long essay, one student excitedly describes developing a “tone of authority combined with credibility, a strong format and use of language.” Another student confesses that he now goes into an argumentative essay believing that he will come out of the process “with a whole new perspective.” And yet another student, writing about encountering adulthood, comments that she was able to “share her experiences with love, death, happiness, and sorrow, and connect it all back to show how these experiences helped me grow and mature.” And in doing so, she concludes, “I learned a lot about myself as a person, and was able to explore “my beliefs, my opinions, and my biases.”

In listening to these testimonials we begin to hear the kinds of changes that take place as students navigate the difficult transition to college-level writing. These changes-as longitudinal studies of student writers confirm time after time-do not necessarily appear on the page. Rather the changes take place in the writer. The most lasting of these changes, it follows, are those that involve the experience of being challenged to think on one’s own as well as receiving support to meet those challenges. One student writes, “I put an extreme amount of effort into this essay, and the final product was a huge success.” Another student, however, says something that has stayed with me. “At the end I did not get a really good grade. But I was interested in learning. And I found out a lot about the modern world.”

Such comments may speak to the dedication of those who of us teach the thinking and writing course. But these  student, more importantly, make visible the kinds of changes students experience in their first college-level writing course. One question is whether a curriculum that takes thinking and writing to be one of the primary pathways across the four years is a curriculum will measure up to the more ambitious goals our students may now be setting for themselves. The question is whether we are ready to meet them where they are.