SEIKILOS EPITAPH

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xERitvFYpAk

Students of English may be interested in some free online courses available via Coursera, based in the US.

You sign up for a course and will be provided with a reading list. You’ll watch videos and take part in online discussions, and perhaps write an assignment.

The following courses may be of particular interest: The Modern and the Postmodern, Greek and Roman Mythology, Modern and Contemporary American Literature, The Fiction of Relationship.

Modern and Contemporary American Poetry with Al Filreis.

The University of London has just joined the project.

On Sunday morning I read poetry at the Union with Wystan Auden. He read a great deal of his own poetry including his poems to Coghill and MacNeice. Both very fine conversation pieces I thought but read in that peculiar sing-song tonelessness colourless way that most poets have. I remember Yeats and Eliot and MacLeish, who read their most evocative poems with such monotony as to stun the brain. Only Dylan could read his own stuff. Auden has a remarkable face and an equally remarkable intelligence but I fancy, though his poetry like all true poetry is all embracingly and astringently universal, his private conceit is monumental. The standing ovation I got with the ‘Boast of Dai’ of D. Jones In Parenthesis left a look on his seamed face, riven with a ghastly smile, that was compact of surprise, malice and envy. Afterwards he said to me ‘How can you, where did you, how did you learn to speak with a Cockney accent?’ In the whole piece of some 300 lines only about 5 are in Cockney. He is not a nice man but then only one poet have I ever met was—Archie Macleish. Dylan was uncomfortable unless he was semi-drunk and ‘on.’ MacNeice was no longer a poet when I got to know him and was permanently drunk. Eliot was clerically cut with a vengeance. The only nice poets I’ve ever met were bad poets and a bad poet is not a poet at all—ergo I’ve never met a nice poet. That may include Macleish. For instance R. S. Thomas is a true minor poet but I’d rather share my journey to the other life with somebody more congenial. I think the last tight smile that he allowed to grimace his features was at the age of six when he realized with delight that death was inevitable. He has consigned his wife to hell for a long time. She will recognize it when she goes there.

Source: The Paris Review, quoting Richard Burton

Learning about poetry (how to read it, write it, and appreciate it) is an integral part of teaching students about all forms of writing. A poem is not just a place to present a student’s grammatical knowledge (in fact, it is often the space to subvert it!). Poetry, more than any other form of writing, trains students to take into account the style of language. This close looking and listening is crucial to writing well in any manner. It would be hard to say that any outstanding essay does not involve meticulous word choice or the ability to persuade a reader through sheer aesthetic prowess. Poetry teaches students how to do this.

Source: The Atlantic.

Ruskin College, founded in central Oxford in 1899, has recently sold its main Walton Street building to Exeter College and has moved to the outskirts of the city at Headington. This has been seen as an opportunity, by some, to ditch the College’s past both literally and metaphorically.

The College was a repository of lived experience of the trade union and labour movement of the twentieth century and its records complemented that. Some see past experience as unrelated to the future. As the college principal, Audrey Mullender has declared in email correspondence, ‘I think we must live by our future’, seeing this almost in contradistinction to the past. Others, particularly historians, tend to see a correlation between these time variables.

Much material from Ruskin’s past has already been physically trashed. This includes admission records of some of the trade union students who attended Ruskin in its first decades. These were activists, sponsored by their unions, who usually went back into the trade union and labour movement as leaders. Such archival matter is like gold dust to labour and social historians enabling a better understanding of the political and cultural life of working class people in the twentieth century. With the huge interest in family and local history it is also the sort of material that descendants find fascinating.

Source:  HistoryWorkshop.

“I think we must live by our future” is one of the most stupid things I’ve read in the last week; and I’ve read an awful lot of stupid stuff, especially from supposedly intelligent people.

You can sign the online petition here.

The Echo Room, the classic poetry magazine from the 1980s and 1990s, edited by poet Brendan Cleary, has now been revived.

Combining the latest generation of poets with those who originally appeared in various issues of the mag in its first incarnation, The Echo Room weighs in at a healthy 80 pages.

Poets featured include Matthew Caley, Simon Armitage, Ann Sansom, Martin Stannard, Jackie Wills, Geoff Hattersley, Helen Mort and yours truly.

You can order online from Pighog Press – www.pighog.co.uk at £5 plus £2.50 p&p.

English Students can now get individual help with their writing skills from Week 4 – Week 9 (starting 18 October, ending 22 November), every Thursday, 2.00 – 4.00 by coming to see me in MC2210.

I shall be available to offer general and specific advice on all aspects of the writing you are required to do at university; everything from coping with spelling and punctuation to matters of grammar, structure and expression.

Sessions will be entirely confidential and on a one-to-one basis. You can some along for a brief chat or for up to an hour if necessary. Just contact me for an appointment beforehand.

Please note this is not a proof-reading service: I will not be correcting your essays for you or giving you advice on essays which I will be marking. At the moment this service is only available to English Literature students.

Michael Blackburn, mblackburn@lincoln.ac.uk, MC2210.