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  • S1E6 - Latitudes

    S1E6 - Latitudes

    · Old-School

    Season 1, Episode 6

    Transcript

    Yusef Komunyakaa’s war poem, “Latitudes,” begins with a curious sentence: “If I am not Ulysses, I am/ his dear, ruthless half brother.” Chi and Chad discuss what this poem has to say about the aftermath of wars ancient and modern and the power of the subjunctive.

    Sources and references:

    Yusef Komunyakaa, Warhorses

    Yusef Komunyakaa, Emperor of Water Clocks

    “Latitudes”

    the episode with the sirens appears in Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey

    Penelope’s test of Odysseus appears in Book XXIII of the Odyssey

    Stephen Dobyns, Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry, chapter eight, "Closure”

    Stacey D’Erasmo, The Art of Intimacy

    Kirkland C. Jones, “Folk Idiom in the Literary Expression of Two African American Authors: Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa,” in Language and Literature in the African American Imagination, edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay

    Allen Tate, “Ode to the Confederate Dead”

    Poetry of Hugh Martin

    Further reading:

    a short biography of Yusef Komunyakaa at the Poety Foundation

  • S1E5 - Migratory Habits of the Soul

    S1E5 - Migratory Habits of the Soul

    · Old-School

    Season 1, Episode 5

    Transcript

    Chi and Chad close read Robert Hayden’s “A Plague of Starlings,” a tiny poem about a walk across campus that opens out onto the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Plato’s Phaedo, Aesop’s Fables, and the afterlife.

    Sources and references:

    Fritz Oehlschlaeger, “Robert Hayden’s Meditation on Art: The Final Sequence of Words in the Mourning Time”

    Mary Oliver, “Starlings in Winter”

    Plato, Phaedo

    Hayden’s parting speech for the Library of Congress

    Plato, Republic, Book X

    Aesop’s “The Farmer, His Boy, and the Rooks”

    Robert Hayden reading “Zeus over Redeye”

    Royal Society for the Protection of Birds

    Peter Campion, Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry

    Audre Lorde, “The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches”

    Amber Flora Thomas, “Confessions of a Pseudo-Nature Writer,” p. 779

    Further reading:

    Robert Hayden’s Collected Poems

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  • S1E4 - “I Sit with Shakespeare”

    S1E4 - “I Sit with Shakespeare”

    · Old-School

    Season 1, Episode 4

    Transcript

    Chi attempts to fix a problem she’s been having while teaching W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Shakespeare, a time-traveling dog, and dislike of overalls are all involved. So are the reparative potential of reading the classics and a one-hundred-year-old pedagogical controversy.

    Sources and references:

    W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Book VI “Of the Training of Black Men”

    for more on the Penn School, see the Penn Center’s website

    Rossa Cooley, School Acres, pp. 12 and 22

    The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century

    Mount Pisgah is mentioned in Deuteronomy 34:1

    Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain

    W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Book XIV, “The Sorrow Songs”

    Sonia Sanchez, “Listen to Big Black at s, f, State”

    Desmond Jagmohan, “Making Bricks Without Straw: Booker T. Washington and the Politics of the Disenfranchised,” pp. 8-9

    For the taxonomy of classical references in The Souls of Black Folk, see Carrie Cowherd, “The Wings of Atlanta: Classical References in The Souls of Black Folk” in The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard

    David Withun, Coworkers in the Kingdom of Culture: Classics and Cosmopolitanism in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois

    Keith Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois

  • S1E3 - A Letter to Phillis Wheatley, Part 2

    S1E3 - A Letter to Phillis Wheatley, Part 2

    · Old-School

    Season 1, Episode 3

    Transcript

    Chi and Chad discuss the classical allusions in Wheatley’s poem, “To Maecenas.” Who was Maecenas? Why did Wheatley write a poem to him? And how should we interpret allusions?

    Sources and references:

    M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, “Allusion”

    “To Maecenas”

    “Niobe in Distress for Her Children, Slain by Apollo”

    “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

    “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield”

    Horace, “To Maecenas”

    Alexander Pope, The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace

    Homer, Iliad, Book XVI

    Mather Byles, “Written in Paradise Lost”

    William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3

    Paula Bennett, “Phillis Wheatley's Vocation and the Paradox of the ‘Afric Muse’”

    William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” p. 477

    Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism

  • Sidebar: “An Evening Thought”

    Sidebar: “An Evening Thought”

    · Old-School

    Transcript

    In this sidebar episode, Chad tells Chi about his close reading of Jupiter Hammon’s first published poem, “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ Alone” and what it has to do with the name of a gate in the second Jewish Temple.

    Sources and references:

    The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon, ed. Cedric May

    Acts Chapter 3

    Acts Chapter 4

    Strong’s definition of áœĄÏÎ±áż–ÎżÏ‚

    2 Corinthians 6:2

    “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” is from Philippians 2:12

  • S1E2 - “Bibleistic”: The Poetry of Jupiter Hammon

    S1E2 - “Bibleistic”: The Poetry of Jupiter Hammon

    · Old-School

    Season 1, Episode 2

    Transcript

    Chad takes a tour through the Joseph Lloyd Manor where Jupiter Hammon, the first published African American poet, was enslaved for much of his life and where he wrote his first poem. The guides, Lauren Brincat and Andrew Tharler of Long Island Preservation, discuss Hammon’s life, poetry, and education.

    The title for this episode borrows from Paul Laurence Dunbar’s persona poem, “An Ante-Bellum Sermon.” The poem’s speaker is an enslaved preacher who uses Bible stories to talk about the promise of emancipation but keeps reminding his enslaved parishioners in this utterly tongue-in-cheek way not to think that these stories have anything to do with their contemporary situation. He explains, with a wink, that he’s talking about freedom “in a Bibleistic way.” In Hammon’s life and poetry the Bible and preaching come together in similarly artful ways.

    Sources and references:

    Jonathan Edwards, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”

    Jupiter Hammon, “An Essay on Slavery” (with an introduction by Prof. Cedric May and Julie McCown, who discovered the poem)

    Jupiter Hammon Project at Long Island Preservation

    The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon, edited by Cedric May

    For Oscar Wegelin’s remarks about the repetitiveness of Hammon’s poetry, see p. 29 of the "Biographical Sketch," in America's First Negro Poet: The Complete Works of Jupiter Hammon of Long Island. (Elsewhere Wegelin also writes about the effectiveness of repetition in Jupiter Hammon’s poetry; see his comments on “An Evening Thought” on page 38.) For Wegelin’s remarks on the religious nature of Hammon’s poetry, see p. 30.

    The injunction for slaves to obey their masters appears twice in the New Testament: Ephesians 6:5 and Colossians 3:22.

    Jupiter Hammon, “An Address to Negroes of the State of New York”

    Jupiter Hammon, “The Kind Master and Dutiful Servant”

    Jupiter Hammon, “An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatley”

    Jupiter Hammon’s “An Essay on Slavery” interpreted by Malik Work

    Jupiter Hammon, “An Evening Thought”

    James Weldon Johnson, “O Black and Unknown Bards”

  • S1E1 - A Letter to Phillis Wheatley, Part 1

    S1E1 - A Letter to Phillis Wheatley, Part 1

    · Old-School

    Season 1, Episode 1

    Transcript

    Phillis Wheatley was both the first African American woman to publish poetry and a poet deeply engaged with the classical works of antiquity. Chi and Chad discuss how writers and readers have dealt with that complex legacy through Robert Hayden’s 1976 poem, “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley, London 1773.”

    Sources and references:

    Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral

    “On Being Brought from Africa to America”

    “Niobe in Distress for Her Children, Slain by Apollo”

    “Ode to Neptune”

    “On Recollection”

    Robert Hayden, “A Letter from Phillis Wheatley, London 1773”

    Robert Hayden’s reading of the poem in the Library of Congress

    Honorée Fanonne Jeffers, The Age of Phillis

    Phillis Wheatley Hall, UMass Boston

    SS Phyllis Wheatley

    Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query XIV

    Tara Bynum, “Chasing Phillis Wheatley”

    Further Reading:

    David Waldstreicher, The Odyssey of Phillis Wheatley

  • Introducing the Old-School Podcast

    Introducing the Old-School Podcast

    · Old-School

    Chi and Chad introduce you to the Old-School podcast.

    Transcript