At Bard College

From so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved. Charles Darwin


I've spent much of August in Annandale-on-Hudson at Bard College teaching in the Language & Thinking Program. This 2 1/2 week session is attended by all incoming Bard freshmen. The intensive reading and writing session immerses students in what Joan Retallack calls the process of productive wonder.

This summer students read Darwin's On Natural Selection, Kafka's Metamorphosis, Sophocles' Antigone and a wide array of other texts, including portions of Lucretius's De Rerum Natura, The Prologue from Hannah Arendt's The Human Condition, Movement and Migrations from Edward Said's Culture & Imperialism, portion's of Aristotle's the Politics, Chapter 6 from Susan Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others, Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," selections from Ludwig Wittgentstein's Philosophical Investigations, Montaigne's essay "On Cannibals," Rosmarie Waldrop's "Alarms & Excursions," Jonathan Skinner's Editor's Statement from Ecopoetics, no. 1, numerous Wallace Stevens poems, Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts," Ovid's Metamorphoses Book VIII, Muriel Rukeyser's poem "Waiting for Icarus," William Carlos Williams' poem "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus," a bit of Christian Bok's Eunoia, Robert Kocik's "Overcoming Fitness," Pablo Neruda's Book of Questions, Rosario Castellanos'poem "El Otro," MISTER dean spade on pronouns and gender, and much more. For more about Language & Thinking, click HERE.

My students wanted a chance to see themselves together, and since I haven't yet made a foray onto Facebook, I include a picture of them here: All engaged and imaginative.