Best academic advice ever

From the graduate student who is serving as an administrator for the NEH Poetry seminar I am attending.  Each of us is writing a long paper (15-20 pages) involving the close reading of two or three poems by a pre-20th century poet as well as some reference to critical sources on those poems or poet.  As it has been a LONG time since many of us have written anything so formal, we are in various stages of freaking out.
Our graduate student had recounted this story to me earlier, and I'm so glad she wrote it down so I could copy and paste it, maintaining her wit:

Dear stalwart band of literary adventurers,


I am writing with an email I hope will be the e-pistolary equivalent of Henry
V's "St. Crispin's Day" speech.  The message is simple: DON'T PANIC ABOUT THE
PAPER.  Also: fun, fun paper FAQs answered below!


Allow me to begin this hortatory masterwork with an anecdote starring my
favorite Shakespearean, Stephen Greenblatt.  Two years ago, I was employed as
an amanuensis to the University's Task Force on the Arts.  One of the topics
discussed by the group was whether or not at least one art-making course should
be required of each undergraduate.  Some people felt that requiring students,
who might not be naturally or historically artistically inclined, to make art
would result in poor art.  Stephen Greenblatt, who was chairing the committee,
said this:


"It is astonishingly difficult to make a significant and lasting contribution to
the study of Shakespeare.  It takes a lifetime of dedicated and relentless study
to do it, and even then, it doesn't always happen.  And yet, we don't hesitate
to have students write papers in their English classes.  We don't hesitate to
have students complete problem sets in physics."


His rhetorical point was made in the service of another issue, but I share it
with you because it seems totally applicable to the paper many of you are
writing for this class.  This paper is an opportunity for you to explore an
author and sit with a couple poems long enough to feel like you've gotten
inside them; it's not a demand that you produce a work of criticism instantly
publishable and from which generations of poetry students will learn.  To take
a sudden and perhaps surprising turn through CS Lewis (a great literary critic,
btw), writing this paper is like prayer: it's supposed to change you, not God
(or, in this case, the academy).

How wonderful to no longer be in graduate school, where our worries WERE about creating something original and brilliant enough always to be instantly publishable and to make an important contribution to our tiny fields.

Poetry Lessons

Just come from class, preceded by an hour in the Woodberry Poetry Room listening to recordings of everyone from Tennyson (the first recording of a poet EVER) to Frank O'Hara.  As I was hearing tales of Amy Lowell leaving her cigars to the library and Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop corresponding about things they had read and written there, I was feeling jealous that I am not a poet and do not live this life.
Then in class the youngest member asked our venerated professor whether she, too, is a poet.  There followed a really interesting tale in which she told how she did write poetry, between the ages of 6 and 26; it was "adequate," she said, with all the figures of thought and figures of speech, with rhyme and meter and structure, because she "knew how to do that sort of thing," but it was never really poetry.  And then when she was 26, in graduate school at Harvard, she was at a party with-- and here she wasn't certain, but thought it was Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Elizabeth Bishop-- and she gave them a similar answer when they asked if she was a poet.  She confessed to feeling that her lack of success writing poetry was a failure, a fault; that if she had tried harder, been less lazy, she might have been able to be a poet.
They laughed, she said, and said something about how if she were a poet, she would not be ABLE to stop; she would suffer all kinds of ailments if she did not write poetry.  "The muse will not let her own go," they said; there is terrible fallout if you dam up the creative force of whatEVER it is you are supposed to do.  She is not a poet because she CAN'T be a poet.
Poets, she said (echoing Coleridge), inhabit the imaginative plane, such that when they are called back to this world of reality, they experience it as a disruption.
She does not inhabit that plane, but the analytical one, and that is where she has made her way, and done so loving poetry all the time.  It is nothing to feel guilty about, she insists-- remember that terrible fallout. 
Excellent food for thought as I consider teaching Creative Writing next year, and wonder what right I have to do so, when I am not myself a writer.  But my gift is also analysis, reading the patterns cast on the screen, and that I can use to read, to critique, to give feedback, to find and help patch holes and gaps.

Pedestrian Theophany

I learned a new big word today: THEOPHANY, which refers to a disclosure from God, or the appearance of a deity to a human. 
This came up in a discussion of Keats' "To Autumn," a poem of which my professor says literally every word should be analyzed; she has threatened to teach an entire semester-long seminar on this one poem.  It is an ode to the season, and a hymn to (and perhaps elegy for) Ceres / Demeter, goddesses of Autumn and Harvest. 
The professor contrasted this kind of theophany with one in a poem by Walt Whitman, "Song of the Exposition," in which the Muse has decamped from Parnassus and "She's here, install'd amid the kitchen ware!"
Going over my notes tonight I found written, next to this citation, "pedestrian theophany."
And that's how I know I'm playing with the big boys here at Harvard. ;)

Traumatized

SR, who grew up white and well-off in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era, says that she occasionally has flashbacks to seeing black people walking down the street in her town, clothing mismatched, eyes on the ground, looking, she now realizes, traumatized.  She was surrounded by traumatized people there, although she had no words for it and no way even to frame the concept.
Now about to retire and spend at least winters in Sarasota, FL, she says she saw the same look in the eyes of the people at the MCC Church (serving the LGBT community) there.  Add to that that the MCC theology feels pretty rigid-- the bible is not "myth and symbol," as her "Freshman Bible" professor said-- and it's not a church she wants to attend.  The people look traumatized, she said-- at least the ones her age.

Three things:

1.  Look at how life as an outsider can affect the expectations, the very ways of being, of people who are trying to participate in the traditions of those on the inside.  Dominant-culture Christianity is at best a minefield, and sometimes a battlefield, for gay people.  When they gather together and try to worship the same god the Evangelicals worship, there is always an element of reaction to that dominant culture, where they are not only unwelcome but reviled.  Of course they are traumatized.

2.  How much has the experience of living through the AIDS epidemic affected the generalized trauma older gay people suffer?  And how different is the experience of a gay person now in his/her twenties from one in his/her 40s, 50s, 60s?  See the Kaiser Family Foundation's Timeline of the Global HIV/AIDS Epidemic, and this wonderful Oral History Project by ACTUP-- dozens of interviews with activists for AIDS research, funding, etc.  SR pointed out that as difficult and life-changing as it was for lesbians to see so many friends dying so, so terribly, we did not also have the fear that men had that it would happen to us.  It must have felt like Russian Roulette, and surely those who lived experienced survivor's guilt.

3.  "Traumatized" is way too strong a word, but is on the far end of the spectrum of how, I realize, I am interacting with life.  When it comes to getting married, for example, or being out at school, or even going to church, I am stepping into situations expecting negative reactions (parents won't want their children in my classes because I'm gay; no one will take our marriage seriously because we're two women, etc.).  Meanwhile, other friends who are my age and just as gay are legally married (albeit only in one state) and legally adopting a child in the state where they live.

I could certainly start stepping into the world in terms of what is possible, rather than what I fear.  It's not 1986 anymore.

SIN

The next time I say I don't really get the concept of sin, remind me of this:

From the Washington Post's photo slide show of images of wildlife affected by the oil geyser in the gulf.

When we know better, we do better?  Certainly we know better.  We could do better.  Wind, sun, water power.  But we haven't done better.  We have done worse.

And THAT is sin.

Why?

So for some reason tonight I went to my friend E's Episcopal Church, to their weekly Healing Service. It put me in mind of Susan Howatch's Starbridge novels, or the ones that focus on Nick's healing ministry. The priest at E's church was fine, but probably not the kind of mystic who might cry out, "who has touched the hem of my garment?!" as Nick (essentially) did.
I felt like going to this service; I don't know why. I didn't go forward to be anointed or to have anyone pray for me. I *did* hear the priest's message about people who get stuck in their dis-ease, out of fear or perhaps comfort in the known.
What I want healing for is my relationship with God.
AM I stuck in some kind of fearful place, the position about which Dr. Phil would surely ask, "How's that workin' for ya?"-- implying that there must be SOMETHING I like, want or need in the position where I'm stuck, or else I would grow out of it?
Thinking about marrying my partner A... we have decided on October, even though there are lots of questions still out there. I feel like it's stepping off a cliff, but in a very good way. I have trouble being the center of loving attention; don't trust it, want to run from it, fear it'll end one day, just as I have come to rely on it. Is THAT the dis-ease with which I have become too comfortable?

Oh joy. A committee.

The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia hedged on recognizing same-sex unions Saturday, instead voting to form a committee to set standards for church-sanctioned blessings of such unions once they are approved by the entire 2-million-member Episcopal Church.

You can keep your blessing.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2010/feb/22/virginia-episcopalians-backpedal-on-gay-unions/