THE SPECTATOR Utica College English Department Alumni Newsletter Fall 2013
Interim Co-Editors Dr. Mary Anne Hutchinson Professor of English Prof. Dorothy Obernesser ’97 Assistant Professor of English Suzanne Richardson Assistant Professor of Creative NonFiction
Contributors
Mary Cardinale Suzanne Richardson Gary Leising Bill Kaufmann The Spectator is published bi-annually by the English Department at Utica College Send correspondence regarding The Spectator to: Dorothy Obernesser doberne@utica.edu
Brandy Miller Named Class of 2013 Valedictorian On Sunday, May 19, 2013, Brandy Miller addressed her fellow graduating classmates during the commencement ceremony at the Utica Memorial Auditorium. Brandy received her bachelor’s degree in English with a minor in education. Brandy is a native of Rome, New York. She plans on
continuing her education by earning a master’s in creative writing while substitute teaching in local schools. She is joined by fellow English majors graduating this year: Amanda Bracker, Sara Caraher, Ashley Dunham, Nicole Gazitano, Anthony Gorea, April McHugh,
and Erica Sexton.
Nassar Prize Winner Grotz gives reading. (Page 2)
An Evening Of Poetry with Jennifer Grotz Professor Gary Leising The recipient of the first annual Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, Jennifer Grotz, visited Utica College to meet with students and read on Thursday, April 25. Her visit began with a workshop; she spent two hours commenting on the poems offered by a wonderful group of student poets, reminding them of some key elements of good poetry. She talked about the need for elegant sentences and she pushed students toward finding the right details and imagery by quoting Irish writer James Joyce’s claim that “In the particular is contained the universal.” In the evening, Grotz read to a packed room in DePerno Hall from her prize-winning book, The Needle. Many of the poems in this book take place in Kraków, and Grotz described her love for Polish poetry (so strong, in fact, that she learned Polish to be able to read those poems in their original language). One of the Kraków poems she shared that evening, “Boy Playing a Violin,” reads as an ars poetica. Her description of that boy and other buskers ends letting us know that the town square is populated …by poetry waiting like a beautiful woman
no one at the party will talk to, like the carillon of ice shifting in her glass. In this poem as well as in selections from The Needle about her native Texas and its dirt fields and convenience store parking lots, Grotz, who teaches at the University of Rochester, demonstrated how poetry can be found anywhere. Her poems illustrate the need for attentiveness, for the lush and luminous quality provided by the particular details that, she told our workshop students, give life and meaning to poetry. It was a treat to hear, in addition to poems from the prize winning book, some new work. The reading opener was one of her translations of the French poet, Patrice de La Tour du Pin, and she concluded by reading a few new poems, including the stunning final poem “Cherries.” Here she gave us the sensual experience of eating cherries, engaging every smell, taste, sight, and touch
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language allows. This and other new poems suggest that Grotz’s next book will be one to watch out for and to savor. The Eugene Paul Nassar Poetry Prize, generously funded by alumnus Steven Critelli, is awarded to the best book published in the previous year by an upstate New York poet. Before a reception, the reading concluded with Grotz receiving the award from Mr. Critelli and Professor Emeritus Eugene Paul Nassar. This summer and fall we will be reading for the second award, excited about the possibilities of the poetry between the many books’ covers. That winner will visit campus in the Spring of 2014. In the meantime, please check out Jennifer Grotz’s books —The Needle and Cusp from Houghton Mifflin and her translation of Patrice de La Tour du Pin’s Psalms of All My Days, from Carnegie Mellon.
Jeden Sto Szescnaście: My Semester at Jagiellonian University By Frank Bergmann, Professor of English and German I spent the 2013 Spring semester teaching in the Instytut Filologii Angielskiej at Uniwersytet Jagielloński in Kraków, Poland, an institution with which we have had an intermittent faculty exchange for twenty years. I had a wonderful time and am grateful to the late Joseph Furgal for establishing an exchange fund, to the UC administration for sending me, and to JU for accepting me (the Vice Rector’s letter of invitation is one document I’ll keep). In preparation for my assignment, I suggested several course topics to Professor Zygmunt Mazur, the chairman of the English department; we settled on a seminar on Arthur Miller, the great American playwright. On the European pattern, the Institute has its own library, and I received a list of the Miller holdings. Nothing much had been bought in the last thirty years, so I ordered the most important more recent works by and about Miller and sent them ahead, bringing the library’s collection reasonably up to date, courtesy of the Furgal fund. In further preparation, I spoke with three of my colleagues who had been to JU on this exchange, Profs. De Amicis, Johnsen, and Swanson. They all said that it was a great experience but that Polish students had a habit of not coming to class and of not buying textbooks. Prof. Mazur assured me that the students would not miss seminar classes. As for the books, the library had enough reading copies of Miller’s great early plays so that I could keep xerox handouts to a minimum. I arrived in Cracow late on February 14, after an eight hour train ride from Dresden, Germany, where I had spent a week at my brother’s. Prof. Mazur, though he was on sabbatical, met me at the station and took me to the apartment he had found for me. I learned
that the English department, which had been located in central Cracow, the stately Old Town, had been moved to the new campus on the outskirts, on account of a fire. The next day I paid a courtesy call on Renata, the staff member in charge of the exchange; her office is in the imposing Collegium Novum, the university’s main administration building downtown. Then I went to the new campus; the trip took a good twenty minutes by streetcar #18. The English department is tucked away here and there in the social sciences and communications building. Michał, an assistant professor, showed me around and connected me to the university’s web. My office was at the far end of the building, behind the department of applied psychology. I had four office mates, full-time professors all, but rarely saw any of them, as most faculty use their office only on the day or two they teach. Next door was a common office with mailboxes, and a bit farther down an office with two secretaries, but I was advised not to ask them for help. I am not computer-literate, and negotiating Polish computer commands was quite an adventure, but in this and other matters I got help from two other assistant professors, Kasia and Wladek, two department librarians, Monica and Beata, and Prof. Mazur’s American-born Ph.D. candidate Barbara. I was given keys to both offices and surprised some department members by keeping my door wide open during office hour. The practice seemed to be to close all doors and lock them even when leaving the office for just a minute. Similarly, I had to sign out the key to my classroom (first floor, 116—jeden sto szescnaście) and take it back to the central desk on the ground floor; after a while, the lady there recognized me as 3
“Professor Franek.” Nearby was a stand that sold Cracow’s favorite snack, the bagel-like obwarzanek, for a złoty and a half; there was also a small cafeteria where a substantial lunch could be bought for 13 złoty, a little over $4. My first class was on February 28. The course had been listed as an elective for English majors working toward the licentiate (B.A.) and for graduate students in the M.A. track. I had asked to keep enrollment to twenty, but there were twenty-seven on the class list, with one drop-in asking to be added (I said “sorry”). I emphasized that attendance was mandatory; even so, as students were filing out at the end, one young lady asked if they really had to be there every time. I said “yes” and never saw her again. The following week we were down to thirteen, including an Erasmus student from Iceland (Erasmus is a special pan-European study program). Twelve of them were women: Bożena, Giulia, Irina, Kinga, Anna (2), Katarzyna (=Kasia), Iwona, Nadia, Julia, Karolina, and Alicja; Radosław was the lone man. Unfortunately, Julia left school; she had had substantial theater experience, which would have been pertinent to the class. This, then, was a self-selected group; they were smart, and their English ranged from good to excellent. We had lively discussions of All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible. They wrote and presented substantial papers on other works by Miller and did well on their two exams, though I did notice some trouble with syntax and, more frequently, a tendency to omit definite and indefinite articles in front of nouns, surely due to the absence of such articles in Polish. Their pronunciation was mostly British, with an occasional word stress error (almost all Polish words have the stress on the
Bergmann Continued from page 3…
penultimate syllable). I had to get used to the grading scale; it ranges from 5 (A) to 2 (F); there seems to be no D. My last class was June 13; I turned in a final grade of 5 for six students; the lowest grade was 3.5 (once). In addition to holding certain business meetings I was not expected to attend (for one, these were conducted in Polish), the department met once a month in the evening to listen to a paper by a member. A young assistant professor talked about Jonathan Edwards; I was surprised to hear that there is a project afoot to translate Edwards’s major works into contemporary Polish. A professor from Troy State University in Alabama, there on a month’s visit, spoke about the influence of Boethius’s The Consolation of Philosophy on Chaucer’s Troilus. A professor from Mills College, on a lecture tour, talked about artist books. And a theater professor from the City University of New York presented a workshop performance of Thornton Wilder’s evergreen Our Town; two of my students were in the cast, and there was a special twist inas-
much as the dialogue in the part of the play that has the deceased Emily visit home was given in Polish: talk about the alienation effect! Taking my cue from Utica’s Harold Frederic, I lectured on “Writers of the Greater New York from Washington Irving to Walter D. Edmonds.” Cracow’s cultural offerings are extensive. I could have gone to see William Szekspir’s Tragedia Makbeta and Hamlet (not to mention plays by Stoppard, Ibsen, Molier, and Pinter), but I did not want to put my very rudimentary Polish to that kind of a test and therefore passed on them. One Polish poet I have worked into my LIT 206 is Wisława Szymborska; I secretly hoped to attend a reading by that arch-Cracovian, but she died last year and so I had to content myself with a visit to an exhibit on her life and work and a respectful gaze at her Nobel Prize medallion in the university museum in Collegium Maius, the university’s oldest building (and for me the city’s most beautiful one). My good friend Barbara Krajewska, professor of chemistry 4
and twice a visitor at UC, surprised me with a copy of Wisława’s most recent volume, Tutaj (=Here). Being in Poland, I had to miss the award ceremony for the first winner of UC’s Nassar poetry prize, established by English alumnus Steve Critelli. I had heard that the winner, Jennifer Grotz of the University of Rochester, spent summers in Cracow, and sure enough, days before we left for home there was a big announcement of a conversation among poets of whom Jennifer would be one (once again, no luck, as the event was scheduled for after our departure). Nothing remains but to thank all those who made my and my wife’s time in Cracow so memorable. I very much hope that the exchange will flourish (my colleague Prof. Friend of our journalism department was at JU the same time I was, and assistant professor of sociology Katarzyna Zielińska of JU is here at UC this semester) and that it will in time include students. Next year is a special year, as JU will celebrate the 650th anniversary of its founding.
Mary Cardinale Honored at YWCA Mohawk Valley Luncheon Mary Cardinale (’90) was recently honored at the YWCA Mohawk Valley 2013 Salute to Outstanding Women Luncheon for her personal and professional achievements in the field of education. Mary graduated magna cum laude from Utica College with a B.A. in English, then went on to receive her M.A. in English from The College of Saint Rose, and her Ph.D. in rhetoric and composition with an interest in cultural studies from the University of Rhode Island. Not only is Mary a member of the adjunct faculty at Utica College, she is an ACSS (Accommodating Curriculum for Student Success) faculty member striving to improve the learning opportunities for students with learning disabilities. In addition to her work at Utica College, Mary serves on the board of directors at The Children’s Museum in Utica as well as sponsoring an exhibit there. She is the Regent for the Oneida Chapter of the National Society of
Daughters of the American Revolution (NSDAR) and travels to their main offices in Washington D.C. where she is recognized for her work in preserving history, promoting education, and addressing women’s issues and women’s health concerns. Mary attended Utica College as a returning student (once her own children finished high school) and recalled her first encounter with Dr. Mary Anne Hutchinson as they were standing in the hallway in the DePerno Building. During the course of their conversation, Dr. Hutchinson mentioned there was a professor at Utica College who taught a course in fairy tales. Although Dr. Frank Bergmann was not teaching the fairy tale course that fall, Mary did take his American Literature course which ultimately changed her academic path. Especially influential was the unit on Emily Dickinson. Curious as to where Dickinson’s genius came from, Mary began to research the transformational nature of
language. She was interested in how language shaped one’s consciousness, especially as it is portrayed in Emily Dickinson’s writing. As luck would have it, taking Dr. John Cormican’s course, History of the English Language, opened further insights into the connection between language and consciousness. In her own words: My first transformational experience with the power of words came in kindergarten when Mrs. Burhart read The Little Engine That Could, the endearing tale that sows the seeds of inquiry in a child’s mind, confirming literacy as the portal through which children discover who they are and all they can become. Living in the Chicago Inner City at the time, the story gave my five-year-old heart great courage to stand up to all the neighborhood bullies. Language can empower. Later, thanks to my English professors at Utica College, I better understood the transforming nature of words.
Recent Faculty/Students Events On April 16th, the English Department held its annual high tea, in celebration of our students’ achievements. The guest speaker was Deborah Mylinski, a Utica College graduate who recently retired from Rome Catholic School in Rome, New York, where she taught English and French. This year’s induction ceremony welcomed Courtney Foll, Brandon Klossner, and Meagan VandenBosch into Sigma Tau Delta, the interna-
tional English Honor Society. The English Department also congratulated the winners of this year’s Joseph Vogel Awards, given in recognition of outstanding Student Creative Writing. In poetry, 1st place went to Jennifer Strife for “Blood in the Grout,” and second place went to April McHugh for “Can We See What is Right in Front of Us?” For fiction, first place went to Rose Zaloom for “Loading:Incoming Message,” and second place went to 5
Brandy Miller for “Frozen.” Copies of their work can be found in the 2013 edition of The Ampersand, the Utica College literary magazine. Also, in May, Suzanne Richardson hosted a reading at the Carbone Center for the Vogel winners to read aloud their selections, and the event included contributions from Open Moments, a campus organization that is dedicated poetry as a live form of creativity.
Favorite Reads From the Utica College English Faculty Lisa Orr Ph.D Professor of English
Mary Anne Hutchinson Ph.D Professor of English
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice Betty Smith: A Tree Grows in Brooklyn Mary Antin: The Promise Land
Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre
Discovering Jane Austen in my early teens, starting with Pride and Prejudice, I first realized that reading could be fun because of the way the sentences were put together, just as much as because of the plot. I finally saw the point of diagramming sentences: I saw that sentences were constructed, like furniture. I could take out the drawers and rearrange them, and I’d have an entirely new piece. Also in my teens, my father introduced me to one of his favorite books from childhood, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn. I appreciated that it reflected life as I knew it, but I still thought of that kind of book as something separate from literature. I didn’t learn until college, where I was introduced to multiculturalism, that in Tillie Olsen’s words, “literature can be made out of the lives of despised people.” I could love James and Wharton without having to write about their class; I could write about the kind of people I came from. A favorite quote of mine dates from a book I read at that time, Mary Antin’s autobiography, The Promised Land: “The tongue am I of those who lived before me, as those that are to come will be the voice of my unspoken thoughts. And so who shall be applauded if the song be sweet, if the prophecy be true?” That is why each of my novels derives from stories and suppositions about my ancestors, who did not have my opportunities.
I read it first probably in ninth grade and was impressed that someone “small and plain” could assert, “I am a free human being with an independent will” and also get her man. As I revisit the novel every few years, I have come to realize (starting with my reading of Gilbert and Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic) that to be that “free human being” that Jane claims to be comes only at the destruction of the part of her nature that cannot break out of her prison. Yes, Bertha is mad, but her father, her brother, and her husband have made her so, and once they can no longer control her need to lock her away. Bertha burns down Thornfield Hall but has to destroy herself so that Jane can become the woman she mistakenly thinks she is earlier. I have stopped seeing only triumph in Jane’s declaration, “Reader, I married him,” and found that triumph comes at the expense of another’s tragedy. James M. Scannell Ph.D Associate Professor of English George Eliot : Middlemarch Charles Dickens: Bleak House/A Tale of Two Cities Henry James: The Portrait of a Lady I had long been an avid reader, but until my sophomore year in college when I was introduced to some of the great Victorian novels, I had always thought of literary works in terms of character -people and their 6
psyches - and, of course, stories and their revelations. I had not thought about literature as a site for moral feeling. Then I discovered George Eliot’s Middlemarch, in particular the scene where Dorothea Brooke comforts Rosamund Vincy or the scene in which Mrs. Bulstrode must come to terms with her changed social status after her husband’s reputation is shattered. It was an amazing high, those waves of feeling, a high I sought to experience again and again over the next two summers: in Dicken’s Bleak House, Esther Summerson’s feverish recognition that she belongs to a community like a bead to a necklace though she hopes vainly that the string will snap and release her, or Isabelle Archer’s agonized decision to return to her villainous husband in Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. (There were, of course, the bad trips as well: Sidney Carton’s self-sacrifice at the end of A Tale of Two Cities.) Realizing that one of literature’s goals (for me, its primary goal) was to exercise and expand the capacity for moral feeling made my career path clear: I wanted to read and talk about books for a living. It informed my political awakening, producing a leftist at a time when Ronald Reagan was winning re-election by a landslide. Though I still haven’t figured out a way to design a course around or even talk to students effectively about this power that literature has, I am certain that the more I can get students to read, the more I can offer them opportunities to experience what I think lies at the heart of the best fiction, poetry, and drama.
Experiencing English Across the Curriculum The Creative Writing and Creative Nonfiction courses appeal to English majors as an opportunity to express their voices in a variety of genres. However, non-English majors also find a voice in the creative process for a variety of reasons. All English courses, whether writing courses or literature course or linguistic courses, offer an opportunity for students of all disciplines to enjoy the reading and writing experience. In the Spring 2013 semester, Suzanne Richardson taught Introduction to Creative Writing and two different kinds of non-English major students offered a bit of their background information and an offering of some of their work. Non-traditional as well as traditional students understand the value of the writing experience. Joanne Powers is a 45 year old student who was born in Utica, New York and was raised in New Hartford, New York. She is a Liberal Arts major with a minor in Early Education. She plans to study Special Education for her master’s degree. Joanne returned to college after a successful retail career to pursue her dream of becoming an elementary school teacher. She loves art and being creative. Joanne writes, “Writing is very important to me. It is my way of expressing feelings and thoughts that need to be put on paper. Whether I am writing fiction, non-fiction
or poetry, I like to be creative and mysterious when I create something. I am always surprised when someone has enjoyed what I have put on paper and it only makes me want to share more of my thoughts.” Vasiliki (Vikki) Feggulis is a 20-year-old junior at Utica College from South River, New Jersey. Her major is in Public Relations, and her minor is in writing. In her spare time, she enjoys spending time with her big fat Greek family, eating mass quantities of chocolate and running half marathons. She will run her first full marathon, the New Jersey Marathon, in May of 2014. Vikki writes, “Writing is incredibly important to me. As a public relations major, professional writing comprises almost the entirety of the core curriculum of my studies. After becoming a writing minor and taking more creative courses, I realized what a rich benefit that writing will have, not only towards my career, but towards my personal life as well. Writing is a means of communication that can communicate not only outward to the world, but also inward to yourself. I know that I always have an outlet and a way to sort out my thoughts, if need be, and that is a wonderful asset for anyone in any profession to have.”
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Shattered Glass Joanne Powers The words hit, like a favorite wine glass crashing to the floor You once held close, flaunted around the room The shattered pieces, heartbreak Shards, sparkle warm memories. Conversations, fall deep inside someone The tiny pieces cut deep A loss tears the heart Precious glass can’t be replaced A comforting lover Long to be restored The floor has no mercy You will choose another Interior Design at 16 Vasiliki Feggulis I rose up; saw the owl, dying, starved for attention. Swiftly, I acted and fell violently into you. Enamored. Colossal red flags suffocating us, I pulled in the rest of the forest to save the animal. While the fight raged on, I daydreamed about how we stayed up for hours, meticulously planning the layout of the bathroom we would share someday: jungle themed. A joke, but still somehow the most serious thing in my life.
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A Recent Speaker at Utica College The following excerpt was taken from a February 15, 2013 article in The American Conservative at www. theamericanconservative.com titled “The Utica Club” by Bill Kauffman. He includes his experience speaking at a presentation at Utica College’s Ethnic Heritage Studies Center. “This fall I had the good luck to revisit the literary capital of the Mohawk Valley twice in a matter of weeks. First I spoke at Utica College, under the aegis of the school’s Ethnic Heritage Studies Center and the Alexander Hamilton Institute, in a celebration of Utica and her faith-
ful literary son, Eugene Paul Nassar. Upstate New York literature maven Frank Bergmann and Hamilton College history professor Bob Paquette arranged the event, which afforded me the great pleasure of meeting Gene Nassar. (As a biographer of the Anti-Federalist Luther Martin, who despised the nationalist Hamilton and defended his murderer Aaron Burr, I got a real kick out of the Alexander Hamilton imprimatur.) My other Utica venture was to pay homage at the Forest Hill Cemetery to Harold Frederic, novelist and bigamist, whose story “The Cop-
perhead” I adapted for a film to be released this spring. Details—and Oscars, surely—to follow. Every small American city deserves a Gene Nassar. Mr. Nassar grew up among the Lebanese Christians of East Utica. As an adult, he established himself as a noted scholar of such poets as Wallace Stevens and Ezra Pound while remaining rooted in the old neighborhood as a professor at Utica College and historian of his city, which he loves, sins and blemishes too, with the ardor of a native son.”