Yesterday a good friend died. Her name was Maurine Holbert Hogaboom and she was 98. If you want to read about her amazing life—how she journeyed to New York from rural Texas as a member of a burlesque troupe, how she found a living in the theatre, how she was called up before the House […]
Tag Archives: death and dying
Maurine Holbert Hogaboom Exits Stage Left
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Add new tag, Homer, Maurine Holbert Hogaboom, Odyssey | Comments closed
Rolled Round with Rocks, Stones and Trees
William Wordsworth One day Robinson Crusoe, the next William Blake, the next William Wordsworth. Thanks to four or five classes cancelled due to snow, my Introduction to Literature class is careening through the 18th and early 19th centuries. But we still had time to stop and contemplate Wordsworth’s wondrous lyric “A slumber did my spirit […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "poem in praise of menstruation", "Slumber did my spirit seal", Lucille Clifton, teaching poetry, Williams Wordsworth | Comments closed
Invading the Afterlife
My wife Julia and I visited the National Geographic Museum to see the Terracotta Warriors this past Friday. Even though only a few statues and artifacts from the vast archaeological digs in China were on display, we saw enough to be very impressed. Qin Shi Huang, the first emperor of China, started constructing statues for […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Ozymandias", Percy Shelley, politics, Qin Shi Huang, Walter Benjamin | Comments closed
Should Death Be Proud or Not?
John Donne Last December, in writing on Margaret Edson’s play W;t, I noted that I didn’t think John Donne’s famous sonnet “Death Be Not Proud” would be very useful in helping someone handle death. (The dying Donne scholar in W;t doesn’t turn to it.) Since then, a friend pointed out that John Gunther’s 1949 book […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged "Death Be Not Proud", Adonais, death of a child, John Donne, John Gunther, Percy Shelley, Sonnet 10 | Comments closed
The Kafkaesque World of Cancer
Tony Perkins in Welles’ The Trial I ran into my friend Alan in the gym on Monday. As I have reported in a number of past posts, Alan has been battling tumors in both lungs that continue to baffle doctors. At least one doctor predicted that he would be dead a […]
Gripped by a Mind of Winter
Snow is pounding us for the third time in two weeks and classes once again have been canceled. Significantly enough, I have been forced once again to postpone Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Where are the songs of spring? Ay, where are they?” queries Keats (although he’s asking from the vantage point of autumn, not that of […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Wallace Stevens, Winter | Comments closed
The Limitations of Cerebral Teaching
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, […]
The Tolling Bell Says You’re Not Alone
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 […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged John Donne, Loss of a child, Margaret Edson, Meditation 17, W;t | Comments closed
Doctors, Bad Bedside Manners, and Poetry
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. […]
Posted in Uncategorized | Also tagged Doctors, John Donne, Margaret Edson, Medical Care, W;t | Comments closed
