“Rotten Rejections: “Poem” by Sara Haardt (1923)
“The poem I can’t take. We have 200 or 300 bales of poetry stored in Hoboken, in the old Norddeutscher-Lloyd pier. There are 300,000 poets in America.”
Excerpted from: Barnard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
The first record I owned, at the age of ten or eleven, was Pete Seeger Sings Woody Guthrie. My father brought it home for me one day. I loved it from the first time I listened to it, and I still listen to it now. Within a couple of years, I managed to follow Woody Guthrie’s influence to Bob Dylan, whose music I also continue to listen to almost 50 years later. In fact, many of his records, particularly Blood on the Tracks and John Wesley Harding receive almost weekly play here at Mark’s Text Terminal.
To my mind, it’s nearly impossible to underestimate the cultural importance of Bob Dylan’s work. In fact, so much ink has been spelled on it by so many astute critics that I hardly need to belabor the point here. While I know his selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature is controversial, my own opinion is that the man who wrote “Desolation Row” and “Visions of Johanna,” to mention just two of his most brilliant songs, certainly earned his laurels as a writer of lasting worth and importance.
So, last but not least on this May morning, I have two sets of readings and comprehension worksheets on Bob Dylan. The first set is a general biography of Bob Dylan’s musical career and is in some respects anodyne. The second set, which to some extent, by comparison, renders the first set of documents anodyne, is this reading and comprehension worksheet on Bob Dylan’s switch to electric music in 1965 and his legendary (or legendarily disastrous) appearance at the Newport Folk Festival in that year. It’s worth mentioning that Dylan’s appearance at Newport in 1965 is something of a cultural touchstone, both a gotterdammerung moment and an intimation of what was to come in American popular music. It pops up in various places as a reference point to a particular moment in the history of popular music.
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Last but not least this morning, on a lovely spring morning, what’s more appropriate than a reading on Walt Whitman along with its vocabulary-building and comprehension worksheet?
If you find typos in these documents, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Annie Allen: (1949) A book by Gwendolyn Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1950. Its three parts fom a connected sequence about a black girl growing to womanhood. ‘Notes from the Childhood and the Girlhood’ includes eleven poems which provide glimpses of Annie’s birth, her practical and didactic mother, and her response to racism, killing, and death. ‘The Anniad,’ a mock heroic poem in forty-three stanzas, and three ‘Appendix’ poems, reveal Annie’s dreams of a gallant lover who goes off to war, returns home, marries her, leaves her, and returns home to die. The fifteen poems of ‘The Womanhood’ show how Annie looks bravely at a world she would like to reform. By the end, her outlook on life has changed from egoistic romanticism into realistic idealism.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Arna [Wendell] Bontemps: (1902-1973) American writer, librarian, and teacher. Born in Alexandria, Louisiana, Bontemps moved to California at the age of three. After graduating from Pacific Union college in 1923, he moved to Harlem, where he emerged as an award-winning poet during the Harlem Renaissance. His best-known works, however, are his novels, particularly Black Thunder (1936), and historical novel about the abortive slave rebellion led by Gabriel Prosser in the Virginia of 1800. Bontemps’s most enduring legacy was his work as a librarian and historian of African-American culture. During his twenty-two year career as Librarian at Fisk University, he created one of the principal archival sources for study in the field. Among Bontemps’s thirty works are two additional novels, God Sends Sunday (1931) and Drums at Dusk (1939); a major anthology of folklore coedited with Langston Hughes, The Book of Negro Folklore (1958). A collection of memoirs, The Harlem Renaissance Remembered: Essays (1972); and several histories and fictional accounts of black life written for a juvenile audience. He collaborated with Countee Cullen to transform God Sends Sunday into a successful Broadway musical, St. Louis Woman (1945).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Was Countee Cullen male or female? The poet of the Harlem Renaissance was male.
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged black history, poetry, united states history
“Harlem Renaissance: With the largest concentration of African-American, West Indian, and African populations in the U.S., Harlem had become the ‘Negro Capital’ (as it was then called) of America by the early 20th century. After World War I, the flourishing intellectual, artistic, musical and political scene focused on historical recollection and redefinition of the African-American experience. Among the best-known artists are Aaron Douglas, William Johnson, and Jacob Lawrence.”
Excerpted from: Diamond, David G. The Bulfinch Pocket Dictionary of Art Terms. Boston: Little Brown, 1992.
“Refinement’s origin:
The remote north country’s
Rice-planting song.”
Poem (translation by Bernard Lionel Einbond)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged asian-pacific history, poetry
“An old pond—
A frog tumbles in—
The sound of water.”
Poem (translation by Bernard Lionel Einbond)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged asian-pacific history, poetry
“Evelyne Accad: (1943-) Lebanese poet, novelist, and literary critic. Born in Lebanon, she emigrated to France in her twenties. Among her critical works is Sexuality and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (1990), which draws upon her experience of the civil war in Lebanon, feminist and antiwar theory, and an extensive reading of such authors as Tahar Ben Jelloun and Etel Adnan. Accad’s only novel available in English, L’Excisee (1982; tr The Excised Woman, 1989), analyzes ritual clitoridectomy and its effects on young Muslim women, usually ‘female excision’ as a metaphor that includes the suppression of women on a broader, cultural level. Accad has authored five other works of criticism, fiction, and poetry.”
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
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