Category Archives: Ethnicity
2014 Conference
April 12, 2014 All these things that I didn’t know before the conference: Daniel Venegas’ Don Chiopote, the Creole folklore collected in Louisiana by the Federal Writers’ Project, and (I’m ashamed to say) Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, writing the story … Continue reading
Animals in Chicago
November 6, 2013 It seems right that the theme this year for the Chicago Humanities Festival should be “Animals: What Makes us Human.” This city, after all, used to be called (and maybe is still called) hog butcher for … Continue reading
Robert Pinsky, Ginza Samba
July 24, 2013 For years I hadn’t gone much beyond his translation of the Inferno. I’d noticed a couple of things I didn’t like (might even have gone looking for them), and just stopped there, his own poetry getting all … Continue reading
Langston Hughes’s Children Literature
May 31, 2013 My class, “Regional, National, Global,” has no special focus on children’s literature, but it does seem to come up a lot. I think it’s because of Langston Hughes — the uncertain borders of his poetry, holding a … Continue reading
Brazil: Karen Tei Yamashita, Elizabeth Bishop
April 24, 2013 Both write about human efforts that come to nothing. Bishop’s Manuelzinho begins bravely, planting gardens that ravish the eye: beds of cabbages edged with red carnations, lettuces with alyssum. But then “silver umbrella ants arrive,/ or it … Continue reading
Linda Hogan, Herman Melville: People of the Whale
April 10, 2013 The Native Americans have always been there, of course. The very name of the ship brings up their ghostly presence, for “Pequod, you will no doubt remember, was the name of a celebrated tribe of Massachusetts … Continue reading
Michelle Cliff, Adrienne Rich: Animal Sound
April 3, 2013 It’s surprisingly difficult to find a photo of the two of them. In fact I found only one. Yet they’ve been together since 1976, a companionship of almost 40 years. Maybe photos aren’t the point? … Continue reading
Adrienne Rich, June Jordan: bracketing war
March 27, 2013 Adrienne Rich wrote the intro to the collected poems, June Jordan’s, talking mostly about meter, sound patterns, vernacular riffs. Of “March Song,” she writes: “Here she breaks what is actually a dactylic metrical line so that the … Continue reading
Samuel Delany, Marilyn Hacker?
March 20, 2013 He met her on the first day, Bronx High School of Science, September 1956. They got married five years later (in Detroit — Michigan was one of the two states where interracial marriage was not illegal). … Continue reading