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Poetic circuitry
I just had tea with the lovely poet, person, and letterpress publisher Emily Hancock of St. Brigid Press. She’s planning an ecopoetry event at Stone Soup Books in Waynesboro, Virginia on September 13th, and I’ll be part of it, with Jeanne Larsen, Sarah Ann Winn, and, we hope, a relative of Karenne Wood to discuss…
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Flagging
In the screenshot above, a racist organization celebrates my university president. It’s been quite a week. Backstory: in August 2017, as neo-Nazis rallied in Charlottesville, W&L’s then-new president set up a Commission on Institutional History and Community to study how we teach and represent our history here. “Here” is Washington and Lee, a highly selective…
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Our Declaration and our declaration
An interesting coincidence: after an intense conversation about the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, my department commissioned a group of volunteers to draft a public statement. I was among the group of, at various times, six to eight people crafting the text collaboratively over Labor Day weekend. The brief we received from other professors…
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Putting my poet’s shoulder to the wheel
Cities are supposed to be overwhelming, at least in contrast to small-town slowness, but over the last week or two, I’ve felt the opposite. For our family-vacation-ending-in-a-modernism-conference, we rented a flat on a particularly lovely Amsterdam street–Bosboom Toussaintstraat–and all the museums, good food, and friendliness were nourishing. (I wondered, as I strolled through islands of…