Episodes
-
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
-
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
-
Missing episodes?
-
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
-
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
-
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 ὡραῖος
2 Corinthians 6:2
“Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” is from Philippians 2:12
-
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”
-
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
-
Chi and Chad introduce you to the Old-School podcast.
Transcript
