Ellen Bryant Voigt, a poet who has been nominated for the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, among others, read her work and lectured on the poetry of Randall Jarrell last Wednesday and Thursday as part of the Visiting Writers program. Her work includes “Kyrie,” “The...
As a freshman, Emily Goodling approached Associate Professor of German Fred Yaniga at the freshman dessert to tell him that she, not satisfied with the English translation, wanted to read Thomas Mann in the original German. “It’s kind of that sense of never being completely satisfied that really describes Emily,” Yaniga said. “She always wanted...
Take two people born at opposite ends of the same century, build a bond between them, and let the world rotate and rot around them. That is how Ali Smith constructs her novel “Autumn,” which came out a year ago. The next installation, “Winter,” releases today in the UK, right as the first frost kills...
“Meter” may just be another word associated with poems and “syntax” a similarly obscure term, but reading Ellen Bryant Voigt’s latest poems gives these words a fuller understanding, if not a new meaning. As this semester’s second visiting writer through the English department, Voigt will be delivering a lecture entitled, “Lost and Found: On Randall...
Johann Sebastian Bach starts each of his hundreds of fugues the same way: The master composer beckons forth a simple strain of melody before he recapitulates the original tune. From there, he introduces a countermelody, piles on new textures and styles, and reverses the original order of the notes. It all culminates in glorious counterpoint...