Members of the SUNY New Paltz English Department enjoy the finale/hootenanny of the Graduate Symposium, Coordinated by Distinguished Professor H.R. Stoneback.
This year’s annual Graduate Symposium was held on April 12 in the College Terrace, and featured student paper presentations, two keynote speakers, and a slew of guest and mystery performers. The theme, “Poems, Ballads, Songs” has long been a teaching topic of Dr. Stoneback’s; in fact, a version of his lecture on the subject is given every Fall semester as the finale for the one-credit Understanding Poetry course he conceptualized more than twenty years ago.
Understanding Poetry (ENG399) is now my course. But, as Stoney always sings “this course is your course,” too. I’ve had the pleasure of coordinating it in recent years after my fantastic colleague-poets Dennis Doherty and Bob Singleton (the latter is now retired, but writing poems all the time). Each semester, I’m charged with inviting other faculty members to give a lecture or poetry reading for a full or partial session, and to keep the content fresh, engaging, and writing-focused, even though the course is not listed under creative writing. Still, it’s useful for us to not only talk and think about poetry–why it makes so many of us shudder or feel annoyed, confused by its ambiguities and inverted syntax, its beguiling sonic schemes that stick in our memories, its supposed profundity or nonsensical noise–but to try our hands at it. Songs seem closer to us, seeping in through our earbuds, reverberating from the radio, bouncing off satellites in space to speak to us daily.
It’s easy to feel the distance between songs and poems, though, since there are numerous and varying kinds of each, and we tend to think of particular poems from our past, either seemingly simplistic and childish, or those we conjure as academic, impossible to unpack. Who has the time for poetry let alone poetry analysis? Since our primary schooling, once we mastered the ABCs, poems have been work: something to crack, a riddle, an idea that only the author and her muse might have access to, along with a handful of obsessive English teachers whose vocation it is to understand and break down the components of those mystifying lines and stanzas. Songs are things to be enjoyed, to reflect emotion, to musically sweep us away to a beat. But we forget that the science of songs is that of poetry, as well.
{post in progress; more to come soon…}