humanities

“Three out of four … like a coffin or a door”

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Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss won the Indiana Review 1/2K Prize for prose of 500 words or less. Brief nonfiction, prose poetry, or short-short stories are eligible for the prize. Di’s winning entry is titled “Wal-Mart Parking Lot,” and about it the contest judge wrote: “[It] offers readers an unexpected vision of American culture filtered through consumer culture and 20th century art history.” Di also was a finalist in three prestigious poetry competitions: the Orlando Prize (from A Room of Her Own Foundation); the River Styx Poetry Prize, 2013; and the Able Muse Poetry Prize, 2013. Last fall she was the MacLean Distinguished Visiting Professor in the English department at Colorado College.

New poems of Di’s appear in Unsplendid, Rattle, North American Review, and The Missouri Review. The latter journal featured the four poems in its online Text Box anthology, which includes an introduction to the poems (from which comes the Di Seuss quote that serves as title to this post) as well as questions and writing prompts. Di’s next public readings will occur November 4 (in Mount Pleasant, Mich., as part of the Wellspring Literary Series) and February 6, 2014 (at the University of Michigan, as part of the Zell Visiting Writers Series). Her third collection of poems, Four-Legged Girl, is forthcoming from Graywolf Press in 2015.

K’s David Barclay is a Peripatetic Scholar

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In recent months David Barclay (Margaret and Roger Scholten Professor of International Studies, Department of History) has made a variety of presentations in several different venues. In November 2012 he spoke on “Music and Cold War Politics in West Berlin” at the Max Kade Center for German and European Studies at Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tennessee). While at Vanderbilt Barclay was able to talk with Professor Edward Friedman, one of the world’s most distinguished Cervantes scholars, who taught at K in the 1970s. He also talked with Peter Collins, son of the late Professor David Collins, who taught French at K for many years. Later that month Barclay presented a paper on “Preussen in amerikanischer und europaeischer Sicht” (“European and American Views of Prussia”) at a conference of the Otto von Bismarck Foundation in Potsdam, Germany. In February 2013, in Fort Worth, Texas, he delivered a banquet address on “Myth, Memory, and the Legacies of 1813” at the 42nd annual conference of the Consortium on the Revolutionary Era. In early May he will address the Southwest Michigan Association of Phi Beta Kappa by asking “’Why on Earth Do You Study German History?’ How I Try to Answer That Question.” Barclay also recently signed a contract with Princeton University Press to publish his next book, Cold War City: West Berlin 1948-1994, in 2017.

Barclay recently published an article (“A ’Complicated Contrivance’: West Berlin behind the Wall, 1971-1989”) in a volume titled Walls, Borders, Boundaries: Spatial and Cultural Practices in Europe edited by Marc Silberman, Karen Till, and Janet Ward. It’s just been reviewed in the journal Society and Space — Environment and Planning. The reviewer wrote: “In chapter 6 (’A complicated contrivance’) David Barclay draws together Berlin’s material histories with its alternative aesthetic potentialities. His account revisits Berlin behind the wall as a site of drama and epic personalities–the epicentre of the Cold War–together with the gradual demographic hollowing and cultures of experimentation fostered by the Allied occupation. The ‘oddly dialectical relationship’ between the Allies’ presence and the emergent, ’curious’ socio-political cultures of West Berlin (page 125) hinge upon the immense shadow of the Wall, which, all the same, formed an increasingly invisible backdrop like another ’piece of furniture’ (page 122). Perhaps more than any other chapter Barclay’s essay illuminates how the maintenance of ordinary life can have enduring and unpredictable effects. Against the backdrop of the wall, politically alternative cultures have survived in Berlin like perhaps nowhere else in Europe. These include new kinds of tactical subversion such as squatting and anarchist direct action. Subversion and the reproduction of walls are shown to inflect one another.”

K Senior’s Documentary Poetry Project Cited in “Gay Military Signal”

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English major Gabriella Donofrio ’13 completed what English professor Diane Seuss calls “a remarkable Senior Individualized Project!”

Donofrio wrote a book of documentary poetry about life in the military (before and after the repeal of the “Don’t Ask; Don’t Tell” policy) for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and queer soldiers serving their country. She was on study abroad when the policy was repealed in September, 2011, and didn’t give it too much thought until three months later.

She wanted her SIP to be a book of poetry, and based hers on Mark Nowak’s collection of documentary poetry titled Coal Mountain Elementary. “I first interviewed several military members about their experiences of being gay in the military,” wrote Donofrio. “I then transcribed the interviews and framed poems around the stories that seemed most poignant to me.

The result is a collection of pieces in the voices of seven members of the LGBTQ+ military movement.” Her SIP includes some 75 pieces, some of which were published with a story about Donofrio and her project in the monthly web publication Gay Military Signal.

K Undergraduate Poet is Up and Going

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Winter term 2013 finds sophomore Kate Belew working as an intern at the Poet’s House in lower Manhattan. Another stop on the creative journey of this English major. As a first-year student Kate received the Nature in Words Fellowship at Pierce Cedar Creek Institute for Environmental Education (Hastings, Mich.).

“It is an extraordinarily competitive fellowship,” says Kate’s mentor and Kalamazoo College’s Writer-in-Residence Diane Seuss. “And Kate made the most of the opportunity with her project, ’Voicing the Natural.’” According to Kate, the project sought to speak through the plants and animals she encountered during summer at the institute. “I planned to create the project using persona poems, inspired by Conrad Hilberry’s collection of poems, The Fingernail of Luck,” says Kate. “As I wrote, the project shaped itself into sections, and finally into a collection of poems that I named But That Was In A Different Life.” The poems are threaded together by Wild Woman, a voice of nature within a female human. Explains Kate: “I walked the trails, read books of poems, took notes, worked with Di, and took the time to witness what was happening in the natural world.”

Kate has also published poems in national magazines: “Prairie” in Outrageous Fortune; “Spoon Out Indigo” in Cliterature (on online magazine founded and edited by K graduate Lynn Brewer ’05); and “Yarrow” in the print magazine Straylight.

Renowned Professor and Public Servant To Speak at Kalamazoo College

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Kenneth Marcus, the Lillie and Nathan Ackerman Chair in Equality and Justice in America at Baruch College of the City University of New York, will deliver a lecture titled “The Conundrum of Race: Civil Rights, Law, and Jewish Identity,” on Tuesday, January 29, at 7:30 P.M. in the Mandelle Hall Olmsted Room. The event is free and open to the public.

Marcus is a former staff director of the United States Commission on Civil Rights and was last month named to the “Forward 50,” the Jewish Daily Forward’s listing of the American Jews who made the most significant impact on the news last year. Marcus is the founder, president, and chief counsel of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights, which combats the resurgence of anti-Semitism in American higher education. He is the author of the award-winning book, Jewish Identity and Civil Rights in America (Cambridge University Press, 2010).

Marcus’s lecture is sponsored by K’s Jewish Studies Program and the Department of Political Science.

Kalamazoo College Well Represented in the Third Annual Kalamazoo New Play Festival

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The thing’s the plays
In which we see the work of Ks!

“Ks” refers to the Kalamazoo College alumni, student, and occasional professor (and Summer Common Reading author) whose work is part of the Theatre Kalamazoo New Play Festival that will be held January 25 and 26 at the Epic Theatre in downtown Kalamazoo. Dana Robinson ’11 and Rebecca Staudenmaier ’11 are the authors of 10-minute plays that are part of the festival–Outdoors and The House of South, respectively. Outdoors will play at 4 PM on Saturday, January 26; The House of South is part of the 8 PM group of plays on the same day. Current senior Megan Rosenberg is directing the play Bringing Home the Bones by Bonnie Jo Campbell, who was the College’s Summer Common Reading author (Once Upon a River) in Fall 2012. Campbell also is an adjunct professor in the English department. Sponsoring theatres are Farmers Alley Theatre (Outdoors), Fancy Pants Theatre (The House of South), and Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College (Bringing Home the Bones). The Festival is free; no reservations are necessary. For more information please, and to learn the other plays featured in the Festival, please call any participating theatre or log on to the Theatre Kalamazoo website.

 

K Writer-in-Residence Publishes Multiple Works

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Writer In Residence Diane Seuss has been hard at work, and the result is a prolific fall and winter. Her poem “Either everything is sexual or nothing is, take this flock of poppies,” appears in the 2013 edition of the Pushcart Prize anthology, which is hot off the presses. And her poem “Oh four-legged girl, it’s either you or the ossuary” is in the fall/winter issue of Black Warrior Review. The poem won the Summer Literary Seminar’s Poetry Prize. “Hub,” a lyric essay, won Wag’s Revue’s winter contest (To access all of the essay’s pages, click on the arrow on the right margin). “I emptied my little wishing well of its emptiness” won Mid-American Review’s Fineline Competition and appears in its fall/winter issue. Two poems, “I’m moved by her, that big-nippled girl,” and “The ghosts down in North-of-the-South aren’t see-through” will appear in Ecotone’s “Abnormal” issue. The poem “Hindenburg” will appear in a forthcoming issue of Devil’s Lake. In other news, poet Adrian Blevins wrote a review of Di’s most recent collection of poems that appears in “On the Seawall: Ron Slate’s Website.” Just reading/hearing the titles of Di’s poems is a rewarding poetic experience!

Four K Faculty Present at East Asian Studies Conference

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Rose Bundy, Japanese, was chair and organizer of a panel discussion at the Japan Study 50th Anniversary Conference: The Future of East Asian Studies at Liberal Arts Colleges. The conference took place at Earlham College in early October. The name of the panel presentation was “Passages to Asia: The Japanese Studies Curriculum–From Intro to Senior Seminar.” In addition to Bundy the panel included her fellow K professors Dennis Frost, history; Yue Hong, Chinese; and Noriko Sugimori, Japanese.

Kalamazoo College To Stage Shakespeare’s TITUS ANDRONICUS

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Stefano Cagnato, Rudi Goddard and Manuel Garcia rehearse for "Titus Andronicus"
Stefano Cagnato, Rudi Goddard, and Manuel Garcia in the Festival Playhouse production of Shakespeare’s TITUS ANDRONICUS

The Festival Playhouse of Kalamazoo College’s production of William Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus opens on Thursday November 1, in the Nelda K. Balch Playhouse on the Kalamazoo College campus and continues Nov. 2, 3, and 4. Thursday’s performance begins at 7:30 P.M.; Friday and Saturday’s performances begin at 8 P.M.; Sunday’s is 2 P.M. matinee. Thursday night is “pay what you want.” Tickets for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday are $15 (adults), $10 (seniors), and $5 (students with ID). The box office will open one hour prior to each performance for ticket purchase; seating is first-come-first-served. Titus Andronicus has undergone a complete transformation in terms of popularity and critical opinion. Once regarded as one of Shakespeare’s worst plays – to the point where some historians believed that Shakespeare couldn’t possibly have written it – it now enjoys a reputation of Shakespeare at his most theatrical, shocking, and violent. Contemporary directors from Peter Brook to Julie Taymor have staged Titus Andronicus to great acclaim, and this production will certainly add to the that tradition. Directed by guest artist Kevin Dodd, the Festival Playhouse production  focuses on the cycle of violence perpetuated in societies, especially when soldiers return from war. One of Dodd’s many innovations in the production has been to add a “Chorus of Collateral Damage.” Student actors in the Chorus have studied particular historical periods and have written their own monologues from the point of view of those who continue the cycle of violence and those who suffer from it. “As a nation, we export violence,” Dodd notes. “Our production asks the question: when they all come home, what happens then?” For more information visit the Festival Playhouse website or call (269) 337-7333.

K Graduate Wins Poetry Contest

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Genevieve Leet ’11 is the winner of the poetry category in the 3rd Annual Terrain.org Contests in Poetry, Fiction, and Nonfiction. Her poem set was titled “[when I died they found a nest of snakes in my intestines, their backs]” and “Somewhere beyond the curve of the earth, there is a ceremonial bamboo boat.”

The poet Suzanne Frischkorn served as the contest judge and wrote about the poems’ “terrible beauty;” their complex layers of sound, language, and meaning; and the slow and sequential opening of the poems so deeply rewarding to the reader.

Leet wrote to her friends and mentors at K, “I am so proud and excited! Thank you to all of you who have supported my poetry journey with your kind words, by coming to readings, and by giving critiques.” The poems will be published in January at Terrain.org.