Monthly Archives: January 2010

The Limitations of Cerebral Teaching

By Robin Bates | Published: January 19, 2010

The new semester begins today.  Margaret Edson’s play W;t is a useful reminder of where I should put my priorities as I begin teaching. When my career started out, I had a number of things in common with Vivian Bearing, the English professor and Donne scholar in W;t. I too reveled in the complexity of texts, […]

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Life before Health Benefits: A Jungle

By Robin Bates | Published: January 18, 2010

The Chicago Stockyards  In honor of Martin Luther King’s birthday, I am going to write about a cause that would have been very close to King’s heart and that America’s first black president has embraced: universal health care.  Like many I believe that, if we don’t pass universal health care this year, we probably will […]

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The Tolling Bell Says You’re Not Alone

By Robin Bates | Published: January 15, 2010

I talked yesterday about the poet being like one blundering around in the dark, making utterances that some, in their suffering, find consoling.  The poet doesn’t know which poems will reach which readers.  To make another analogy, he or she is like Queequeg, carefully constructing a coffin that then, after he is dead and in […]

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Responding to Unspeakable Horror

By Robin Bates | Published: January 14, 2010

No work of literature can begin to address the trauma that Haitians are currently experiencing in the wake of their devastating earthquake. But then, literature can never do justice to human tragedy. In the face of such inexpressible suffering, the poet gropes around in the dark, occasionally making utterances that some, in their agony, find […]

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On Mark McGwire and Fallen Idols

By Robin Bates | Published: January 13, 2010

Robert Redford in The Natural      I take a momentary break from Margaret Edson’s W;t to address Mark McGwire’s confession yesterday to having used steroids.  The man whose homerun race with Sammy Sosa “saved baseball” and who then refused to “speak about the past” in a Congressional hearing is finally opening up.  Or at least opening […]

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Doctors, Bad Bedside Manners, and Poetry

By Robin Bates | Published: January 12, 2010

Margaret Edson        In Margaret Edson’s W;t there is a doctor, Jason, who has taken her 17th century poetry class as a challenge.  As he puts it, You can’t get into medical school unless you’re well-rounded.  And I made a bet with myself that I could get an A in the three hardest courses on campus. […]

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Runaway Bunny Sing Thee to Thy Rest

By Robin Bates | Published: January 11, 2010

 In her dying moments, the Donne scholar in Margaret Edson’s W;t rejects Donne in favor of Margaret Wise Brown’s The Runaway Bunny.  What does this say about the usefulness of both Donne and Brown when we are pushed to the edge? Runaway Bunny is about “a little bunny who wanted to run away.”  But each […]

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Wit Won’t Cushion Us against Death

By Robin Bates | Published: January 8, 2010

Will John Donne’s “Death Be Not Proud” help one handle the fact that one has cancer? It is significant that the cancer victim and Donne scholar in Margaret Edson’s W;t is rejecting her poet by the end of the play. I’m actually not sure whether this particular poem would help any cancer patient. There’s a […]

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Arguing over Life, Death, and a Semicolon

By Robin Bates | Published: January 7, 2010

John Donne          Cancer has gone from being a word to being a reality for me as two close friends have been struck.  Alan Paskow, whose progress I’ve been reporting on, had an operation before Christmas that removed three tumors from his right lung (one the size of a grapefruit).  And Beth Reynolds had a tumor […]

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