During this first week I observed that the women brought in to teach us taught differently than the men.
Bushra Rehman was the first to ask students to read things from the board. She was the first to create an activity that was a true workshop where we worked with each other and created our own poetry-in-translation. Her class was the one that had us all literally buzzing with excitement about what we had created - that's the feeling I want to create in my own classes!
Today, Dr. Frances Pritchett followed in this model by also asking us to read the poetry projected on the board, rather than reading it herself, as all the men teachers have. She also turns the traditional teacher's advantage on its head by maintaining a remarkable website about Persian poetry.
At the beginning of her talk she said "My lecture is not going to be like the others you've been experiencing, because unlike the other lecturers I'm not trying to get you to understand every possible important thing about an area of study that I've spent decades in. That's not my goal."
She went on to explain how in her retirement, her goal has been to create resources for all the material she knows about and taught, on her website dedicated to Urdu Poetry. It is a remarkable feat. There is everything anyone would ever want to know about Persian Poetry on this site, and she maintains and updates it all herself.
Today's study of the ghazal genre also touched on the idea that romantic passion is divine in nature. It is also, interestingly, transgressive. The poet, or rather the speaker, is always transgressing in some way. So, for example, the lover in the poetry is not the poet's wife (!) or the person he is destined to marry. It is a woman or a boy who is not available.
Transgression has been so stamped out of religion - it is about conforming rather than challenging. I suppose some Christians, Quakers included, see their role as challenging power, but so little of that challenge happens at the Meeting level, or the congregational level. We are by and large very well behaved. I say this as a criticism of myself. I think I could certainly be more transgressive with my political voice. Jesus certainly was.
Another thing Dr. Pritchett pointed out about the ghazals that I liked was that because they were so formally constraining, they really allowed a poet to show his or her stuff. When there are no rules, it's hard to say that something is not good. But when there are so many constraints, you really have to know your vocabulary and your poetic tone to succeed.
I also like that in the poetry gatherings, people held their friends accountable - they might say something like "You're not using that idiom right" or "Your rhyme is not as tight there as in the rest of the poem." This kind of criticism is unusual in most writerly circles I know because we are all too friendly. We have to pay an editor big bucks to be mean! I like the idea that friends would value their friends' abilities well enough to push them. I want to do this with students- to warmly demand their best work by pointing out where they have fallen short of what they can produce.
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Did you know that Langston Hughes went to Turkestan?
Zohra Saed, our presenter this afternoon, had put together a slideshow of images from Hughes travels in the USSR in 1932-33. It was pretty remarkable. Apparently Harlem was a point where Soviets recruited communist sympathizers to come to the USSR and see how life could be. Hughes went on one of these trips, but he didn't stay on the mainline tour, which of course skimmed over the difficult truths of communism and looked only at a handful of propped up scenes of happy and productive Soviets.
Hughes literally jumped off a train as it went south and visited the southern bloc countries where he photographed working conditions on the cotton farms (which bore striking resemblance, of course, to cotton plantations of the American south).
Bushra Rehman was the first to ask students to read things from the board. She was the first to create an activity that was a true workshop where we worked with each other and created our own poetry-in-translation. Her class was the one that had us all literally buzzing with excitement about what we had created - that's the feeling I want to create in my own classes!
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| Dr Pritchett |
At the beginning of her talk she said "My lecture is not going to be like the others you've been experiencing, because unlike the other lecturers I'm not trying to get you to understand every possible important thing about an area of study that I've spent decades in. That's not my goal."
She went on to explain how in her retirement, her goal has been to create resources for all the material she knows about and taught, on her website dedicated to Urdu Poetry. It is a remarkable feat. There is everything anyone would ever want to know about Persian Poetry on this site, and she maintains and updates it all herself.
Today's study of the ghazal genre also touched on the idea that romantic passion is divine in nature. It is also, interestingly, transgressive. The poet, or rather the speaker, is always transgressing in some way. So, for example, the lover in the poetry is not the poet's wife (!) or the person he is destined to marry. It is a woman or a boy who is not available.
Transgression has been so stamped out of religion - it is about conforming rather than challenging. I suppose some Christians, Quakers included, see their role as challenging power, but so little of that challenge happens at the Meeting level, or the congregational level. We are by and large very well behaved. I say this as a criticism of myself. I think I could certainly be more transgressive with my political voice. Jesus certainly was.
Another thing Dr. Pritchett pointed out about the ghazals that I liked was that because they were so formally constraining, they really allowed a poet to show his or her stuff. When there are no rules, it's hard to say that something is not good. But when there are so many constraints, you really have to know your vocabulary and your poetic tone to succeed.
I also like that in the poetry gatherings, people held their friends accountable - they might say something like "You're not using that idiom right" or "Your rhyme is not as tight there as in the rest of the poem." This kind of criticism is unusual in most writerly circles I know because we are all too friendly. We have to pay an editor big bucks to be mean! I like the idea that friends would value their friends' abilities well enough to push them. I want to do this with students- to warmly demand their best work by pointing out where they have fallen short of what they can produce.
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Did you know that Langston Hughes went to Turkestan?
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| Hughes with a writer's group in Central Asia |
Hughes literally jumped off a train as it went south and visited the southern bloc countries where he photographed working conditions on the cotton farms (which bore striking resemblance, of course, to cotton plantations of the American south).
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