“Arriving Again and Again Without Noticing” by Linda Gregg Read by Sarah Wingo
Submitted by Laura Hutelmyer
Laura Hutelmyer is the Electronic Resources and Special Acquisitions coordinator for Falvey Memorial Library.
“Arriving Again and Again Without Noticing” is a poem from Gregg’s poetry collection In the Middle Distance, her 6th book.
If you’re interested in reading more by Gregg, you can check out two of her poem collections here at Falvey Memorial Library: In the Middle Distance Too Bright To See
You can also listen to Gregg speak briefly about her approach to writing and read one of her other poems here.
“Arriving Again and Again Without Noticing”
By Linda Gregg
I remember all the different kinds of years.
Angry, or brokenhearted, or afraid.
I remember feeling like that
walking up a mountain along the dirt path to my broken house on the island.
And long years of waiting in Massachusetts.
The winter walking and hot summer walking.
I finally fell in love with all of it:
dirt, night, rock and far views.
It’s strange that my heart is as full
now as my desire was then.
“Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” by Robert Frost Introduced by Garrison Keillor
Read by Robert Frost
Submitted by Laura Bang
Laura Bang is Falvey Memorial Library’s Digital and Special Collections curatorial assistant, and she submitted “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” perhaps one of Frost’s most well known and beloved poems. It was included in Frost’s collection New Hampshire, published in 1923, for which he won the first of his four Pulitzer Prizes.
The speaker of “Stopping by Woods” is caught in a moment of choosing between the tranquility of nature and the responsibilities of life and society. One well-known interpretation suggests that the poem is a meditation on death and draws the distinction between eternal peace, rather than natural tranquility, and the hustle and bustle of daily life.
With the holiday season upon us it is easy to imagine oneself in the speaker’s shoes and the desire for moments of peacefulness at odds with all of the responsibilities that this time of year brings. If you find yourself feeling as though you have far too many miles to go before you sleep, try to find a few moments throughout the day to stop by your own metaphorical wood and take a few deep breaths to get you through all that lies ahead.
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
By Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Michael Foight is Special Collections and Digital Library coordinator at Falvey Memorial Library and submitted this poem with the comment, “my favorite poem of all time.”
The recording provided is from the Poetry Center Digital Archive* and is Kenneth Rexroth reading many of his poems including “A Sword In A Cloud Of Light,” which is at 29:02. You can also download the recording or listen to it on the Poetry Center Digital Archive’s site.
“A Sword In A Cloud Of Light”
By Kenneth Rexroth
Your hand in mine, we walk out
To watch the Christmas Eve crowds
On Fillmore Street, the Negro
District. The night is thick with
Frost. The people hurry, wreathed
In their smoky breaths. Before
The shop windows the children
Jump up and down with spangled
Eyes. Santa Clauses ring bells.
Cars stall and honk. Street cars clang.
Loud speakers on the lampposts
Sing carols, on juke boxes
In the bars Louis Armstrong
Plays White Christmas. In the joints
The girls strip and grind and bump
To Jingle Bells. Overhead
The neon signs scribble and
Erase and scribble again
Messages of avarice,
Joy, fear, hygiene, and the proud
Names of the middle classes.
The moon beams like a pudding.
We stop at the main corner
And look up, diagonally
Across, at the rising moon,
And the solemn, orderly
Vast winter constellations.
You say, “There’s Orion!”
The most beautiful object
Either of us will ever
Know in the world or in life
Stands in the moonlit empty
Heavens, over the swarming
Men, women, and children, black
And white, joyous and greedy,
Evil and good, buyer and
Seller, master and victim,
Like some immense theorem,
Which, if once solved would forever
Solve the mystery and pain
Under the bells and spangles.
There he is, the man of the
Night Before Christmas, spread out
On the sky like a true god
In whom it would only be
Necessary to believe
A little. I am fifty
And you are five. It would do
No good to say this and it
May do no good to write it.
Believe in Orion. Believe
In the night, the moon, the crowded
Earth. Believe in Christmas and
Birthdays and Easter rabbits.
Believe in all those fugitive
Compounds of nature, all doomed
To waste away and go out.
Always be true to these things.
They are all there is. Never
Give up this savage religion
For the blood-drenched civilized
Abstractions of the rascals
Who live by killing you and me.
*The Poetry Center Digital Archive is a Project of The Poetry Center at San Francisco State University.
As I Walked Out One Evening, By W.H. Auden Read by Tom Hiddleston
Submitted by Sarah Wingo
“As I Walked Out One Evening” was written in the mid-1930s, early in Auden’s career. In technical terms the poem is a literary ballad with ABCB quatrains and other elements of the lyric poem. The poem deals with love, mortality, and the steady march of time. Although there is melancholy in this poem, one of my favorite take aways from it is that although life is fleeting, and perhaps even more so because it is so fleeting “Life remains a blessing.” My favorite line comes near the end of the poem:
“You shall love your crooked neighbor
With your crooked heart.”
This line acknowledges the deep imperfections of humanity, while at the same time celebrating the human capacity for love.
As we count down to Christmas you will hear my voice and other voices from the library reading some of the poems that have been selected, but to start us off with a little treat I found an audio clip of Tom Hiddleston reading “As I Walked Out One Evening”:
As I Walked out One Evening
by W. H. Auden
As I walked out one evening,
Walking down Bristol Street,
The crowds upon the pavement
Were fields of harvest wheat.
And down by the brimming river
I heard a lover sing
Under an arch of the railway:
‘Love has no ending.
‘I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you
Till China and Africa meet,
And the river jumps over the mountain
And the salmon sing in the street,
‘I’ll love you till the ocean
Is folded and hung up to dry
And the seven stars go squawking
Like geese about the sky.
‘The years shall run like rabbits,
For in my arms I hold
The Flower of the Ages,
And the first love of the world.’
But all the clocks in the city
Began to whirr and chime:
‘O let not Time deceive you,
You cannot conquer Time.
‘In the burrows of the Nightmare
Where Justice naked is,
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
‘In headaches and in worry
Vaguely life leaks away,
And Time will have his fancy
To-morrow or to-day.
‘Into many a green valley
Drifts the appalling snow;
Time breaks the threaded dances
And the diver’s brilliant bow.
‘O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
‘The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the tea-cup opens
A lane to the land of the dead.
‘Where the beggars raffle the banknotes
And the Giant is enchanting to Jack,
And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer,
And Jill goes down on her back.
‘O look, look in the mirror,
O look in your distress:
Life remains a blessing
Although you cannot bless.
‘O stand, stand at the window
As the tears scald and start;
You shall love your crooked neighbour
With your crooked heart.’
It was late, late in the evening,
The lovers they were gone;
The clocks had ceased their chiming,
And the deep river ran on.
Article by Sarah Wingo, team leader- Humanities II, subject librarian for English, literature and theatre.
Advent derives from the Latin word “adventus,” meaning approach or arrival. Advent is a time of expectation, a buildup and preparation for the celebration of the Nativity at Christmas (Christ’s first coming), and a reminder to prepare one’s soul for Christ’s expected return to earth on judgment day.
Advent is celebrated in different ways, but one cherished tradition that our readers in both religious and secular households may have grown up with is that of the Advent Calendar. In the spirit of the holiday season, Falvey Memorial Library has asked its staff to contribute one or two of their favorite poems to a Poetry Advent Calendar, which we will be creating on our blog. During Advent you can check in everyday for a new poem as we count down to Christmas.
Due to the shifting social and economic factors at the turn of the 20th century and the rise of the middle class, more people than ever before, from all levels of society, were literate. The rise in literacy contributed to not only the prolific creation of literature during and after WWI but also to the demand for and consumption of this literature.
Though both professional and amateur authors wrote throughout the period, much of the literature that we think of as World War I literature was written after the war during the 1920s and 30s and often dealt with issues such as shell shock, the difficulty that soldiers had returning to their old lives after the war, and the effect losses from war had on families.
The study of war literature was for a very long time, and still is to an extent, focused largely on male authors. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that the writing of women during and about the War began to receive attention. Catherine Reilly’s 1981 anthology, Scars Upon my Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War, is the first work strictly dedicated to examining women’s poetry and prose from World War I.
World War I also ushered in a new era of literature and heavily influenced literature in the decades following it. The world was faced with a sense of disillusionment that it had never faced in such a way before, and genres such as the hard-boiled detective novels sprung up with war veteran protagonists embittered and changed by their pasts, while authors such as H. P. Lovecraft explored themes of chaos, apathy and despair through a new kind of horror story.
Below I have selected a number of titles and web resources to literature written both during and following WWI that deals directly with the war and its impact.
Because not all literature written during the War directly deals with the War, I have also created a timeline depicting a selection of major literary publications alongside a selection of historical events between the years of 1914 and 1922.
Parade’s End by Ford Madox Ford (book and beautiful HBO mini series)
Parade’s End is a tetralogy by the English novelist and poet Ford Madox Ford published between 1924 and 1928. It is set mainly in England and on the Western Front in World War I, where Ford served as an officer in the Welsh Regiment.
Originally published as four individual novels Some Do Not (1924), No More Parades (1925), A Man Could Stand Up (1926), and Last Post (1928) they are now typically combined into one volume as Parade’s End. In 2012 Parade’s End was adapted as a five part miniseries for the BBC/HBO, with script by Tom Stoppard, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Rebecca Hall.
All Quiet on the Western Front, first published in 1929, is a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, a German veteran of World War I. “The book describes the German soldiers’ extreme physical and mental stress during the war, and the detachment from civilian life felt by many of these soldiers upon returning home from the front.”
Made into a film in 1930 only a year after its publication, All Quiet on the Western Front was the first all-talking non-musical film to win the Best Picture Oscar. In 2009 it was announced that there would be a remake, but thus far nothing has come of it.
Scars Upon My Heart is a poetry anthology collected by Catherine Reilly,” and is the first work strictly dedicated to examining women’s poetry and prose from World War I.
This is a contemporary graphic novel by Max Brooks, author of World War Z. It focuses on the 369th infantry, an African American unit that spent more time in combat than any other American unit and returned home to face extreme discrimination from the US government.
Though not directly about the war The Waste Land published in 1922 is clearly a modernist product of a post war world of disillusionment, a theme carried forward in Eliot’s other writings such as his 1925 poem “The Hollow Men.” When the United States entered World War I in 1917, Eliot tried to join the U.S. Navy but was rejected for physical reasons.
Whenever a public figure passes away, I can expect that for the next few days my social media will be abuzz with articles, remembrances and general mentions of said person. So it has come as no surprise that since Maya Angelou’s death on Thursday May 28 my Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr feeds, as well as many other websites and blogs that I frequent, have been brimming with content on the life, works and death of Angelou. However, as I have scrolled through the many posts and tweets in response to Angelou’s life and death over the past few days I have been struck by the genuine outpouring of emotions people are expressing. It felt somehow unique, somehow more personal than the usual “rest in peace” and “they will be missed” messages I usually see.
I was particularly moved by a Facebook post by a good friend of mine who teaches high school English who posted late in the day on the 28th long after all of the initial posts of surprise and sadness had flooded my news feed, she said:
“I spent some time today thinking about what I love so much about Maya Angelou, and I’ve decided it’s the fact that she made me feel powerful, in all the positive connotations of that word.”
Go to Angelou’s Wikipedia page or any site detailing her biography and you can learn that “she published seven autobiographies, three books of essays, and several books of poetry, and was credited with a list of plays, movies and television shows spanning more than 50 years” (Wikipedia). And Angelou’s resume was as varied and interesting as her writing. In her lifetime she was a poet, civil rights activist, dancer, film producer, television producer, playwright, film director, author, actress and professor, just to name a few of the occupations she held in her 86 years of life.
But put all of that aside; remove the titles, labels, accomplishments and honors, and consider a simple sentence: “She made others feel powerful.”
It’s hard to think of a better epitaph for a woman who once said “I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
Dig Deeper: Maya Angelou
If you’re interested in learning more about Maya Angelou, we have some resources to recommend:
Afro-American Writers After 1955: Dramatists and Prose Writers. Ed. Thadious M. Davis and Trudier Harris-Lopez. Dictionary of Literary Biography Vol. 38. Detroit: Gale Research, 1985. p3-12.
As some of our readers may have noticed, the Internet has been exploding with Shakespeare related content over the last few weeks in celebration of the bard’s 450th birthday. Falvey Memorial Library played its part in the celebrations by collaborating with the Department of English on a birthday party held in the Falvey Hall Reading Room. We also held a library-wide scavenger hunt; hunters could win a ShakesDuck by following research-oriented clues leading them to specific hiding places in the Library where they would find a glitter encrusted egg, which they could then present for their ShakesDuck.
We had a great range of interest with participants majoring in everything from English to chemistry and economics. So far, five of our clever hunters (four of them are pictured here) have shown up to claim their ShakesDucks. If you found an egg and haven’t yet had time to pick up your ShakesDuck, don’t forget to stop by English and Theatre Librarian Sarah Wingo’s office in Falvey (room 232) to claim your prize!
Several winners, pictured top to bottom: Jonathan Grecco, Katharine McLellan, Chris Tamaninie, Lisa Dixon.
Special Collections at Falvey Memorial Library offers a wide array of fascinating collections from the early printed works of Saint Augustine to Dime Novels, and many of these collections can be discovered on the Special Collections website and through the Digital Library.
However, many library users may not be fully aware of everything Special Collections has to offer or that they are free to make appointments to use the collections in person. As the library liaison for the departments of English and theatre, I would like to introduce you, the library user, to two related collections, housed in Special Collections, that may be of particular interest to theatre faculty and dramaturgy students.
The DiOrio Theater Ephemera Collection, donated by Villanova alumni Eugene L. DiOrio, spans almost 60 years of theatrical history from 1946 to 2012. The collection consists of music and theatre programs for plays, musical theatre productions, musical performances and opera productions in the Philadelphia and New York metropolitan areas. Playbills form the bulk of this collection, but it also includes many subscription advertising brochures and other musical and theatrical ephemera. Film ephemera is also featured; on the left you will see the playbill and production stills from the Astor Theatre’s showing of the 1936 film Romeo and Juliet directed by George Cukor and starring Norma Shearer, Leslie Howard and John Barrymore.
In addition to the materials donated by Mr. DiOrio, other materials have been added to the collection from James Kerr, spanning 1931-2012, that focus mostly on New York City productions. Like DiOrio’s original contribution to the collection, these materials are primarily playbills but also include news clippings about performances and obituaries for actors. On the right are two playbills from The Savoy Company. The first theatre company in the U.S. to fully produce the works of Gilbert and Sullivan without altering them to avoid copyright issues, The Savoy now claims to be the oldest amateur theater company in the world dedicated solely to the production of the works of Gilbert and Sullivan.
The Le Theatre collection may also be of interest to Villanova’s theatre department. This collection consists of issues of the late 19th-/early 20th-century French periodical Le Theatre. While the periodical itself is mostly in French, the issues contain stunning images of costumes and set design from turn of the century French theatre. This sample, on the left, illustrates the kinds of images to be found in this collection.
If you’re interested in viewing such items, please visit the Special Collection’s website, check for hours of availability, and make an appointment. Special Collections librarians encourage visitors to make appointments even if they intend to come during normal opening hours. Advance notice will ensure that the items are available and ready for use at the time of your visit.
Special thanks to Laura Bang, digital and special collections curatorial assistant, for informing me of these collections and providing me with background information about them.
Article by Sarah Wingo, team leader- Humanities II, subject librarian for English, literature and theatre.
A friend recently asked me if I could recommend any “good and accessible” books about Shakespeare as he was interested in learning more on the subject. Shortly thereafter one of my colleagues mentioned that such a topic might make a nice blog post for those in search of holiday gifts for the Shakespeare fan in their life, and thus this post was born.
Just to provide a little of my own background on this subject area: Prior to earning my library-science degree, I completed my M.A. in English at the University of Birmingham’s Shakespeare Institute in Stratford upon Avon. This by no means makes me an expert; in fact, the further I go in my education the more I realize there is to be learned. That said, I have had a fair bit of experience with the subject matter, and so with your indulgence I will offer up some of my personal favorites.
These recommendations, books I have read and enjoyed, I believe will delight the Shakespeare aficionado in your life.
Taking a look at his life and legacy, this is a lovely book by one of the foremost Shakespeare scholars in the world.
Is It True What They Say About Shakespeare? By Stanley Wells
For something a bit lighter, this fun little book takes a look at many common assumptions and myths about Shakespeare, in quick and easy to read entries.
The Rough Guide to Shakespeare, by Andrew Dickson
Containing synopses, scene breakdowns, reviews and criticism of Shakespeare’s plays and poems, this is a great resource for any fan of the bard.
If you or someone you know is interested in how books were printed and sold in Shakespeare’s day, and you’re up for a slightly more challenging read, this is a great book.
Sarah Wingo is the team leader for the Humanities II team and the subject librarian for English and theater.
