Congratulations to Nikky Finney!

The Sandor Teszler Library congratulates Nikky Finney on her induction into the South Carolina Academy of Authors.

Author Nikky Finney next to an excerpt of her poem "The Thinking Men" on permanent display in Wofford's Old Main building, 2008.

Finney’s 2008 poem “The Thinking Men” celebrates the builders of Wofford’s Old Main.

Click image for larger size.

Finney is the author of several books of poetry and prose, editor of another, and, after 20 years of teaching at the University of Kentucky, will begin in the Fall of 2013 her tenure as the John H. Bennett, Jr. Chair of Creative Writing and Southern Literature at the University of South Carolina (Columbia).

For a biography and full list of publications, visit Finney's website.

Poet Laureate of the Lost Cause



James Ryder Randall

On April 26, 1861, “My Maryland!” was published in the New Orleans Sunday Delta. James Ryder Randall (1839-1908) wrote the poem in response to the death of his friend Francis X Ward, who was one of the civilians killed during the riots that swept through Baltimore as federal troops marched to protect the capital.

My. Maryland!

The despot’s heel is on thy shore,
Maryland!
His torch is at thy temple door,
Maryland!
Avenge the patriotic gore
That flecked the streets of Baltimore,
Maryland! My Maryland!

~ ~ o ~ ~

Hark at an exiled son’s appeal,
Maryland!
For life and death, for woe and weal,
Thy peerless chivalry reveal,
And gird thy beauteous limbs with steel,
Maryland! My Maryland!
Thou wilt not cower in the dust,
Maryland!
Thy beaming sword shall never rust,
Maryland!
Remember Carroll’s sacred trust,
And all thy slumberers with the just,
Maryland! My Maryland!

~~ o ~~

Come, ‘tis the red dawn of the day,
Maryland!
Come with thy panoplied array,
Maryland!
With Ringgold’s spirit for the fray,
With Watson’s blood at Monterey,
With fearless Love and dashing May
Maryland! My Maryland!

~~ o ~~

Dear Mother! burst the tyrant chain,
Maryland!
She meets her sisters on the plain -
Sic Semper! ‘Tis the proud refrain
That baffles minions back amain
Maryland!
Arise, in majesty again,
Maryland! My Maryland!

~~ o ~~

Come, for thy shield is bright and strong,
Maryland!
Come, for thy dalliance does thee wrong,
Maryland!
Come to thine own heroic throng.
Stalking with Liberty along,
And chaunt thy dauntless slogan-song,
Maryland! My Maryland!
I see the blush upon thy cheek,
Maryland!
For thou wast ever bravely meek,
Maryland!
But lo! there surges forth a shriek,
From hill to hill, from creek to creek,
Potomac calls to Chesapeake,
Maryland! My Maryland!
Thou wilt not yield the Naudal toll,
Maryland!
Better the fire upon thee role,
Better the shot, the blade, the bowl,
Than crucifixion of the soul,
Maryland! My Maryland!

~~ o ~~

I hear the distant thunder -hum
Maryland!
The Old Line bugle, fife and drum,
Maryland!
She is not dead, nor deaf, nor dumb -
Huzza! She spurns the Northern scum!
She breathes! She burns! She’ll come! She’ll come!
Maryland! My Maryland!

Written at Pointe Coupee, La, 1861. by
James R. Randall

Two weeks before, on April 12 1861, the newly formed confederacy had bombarded Fort Sumter, starting the American Civil War. In response, President Abraham Lincoln ordered 75,000 troops from the northern states to assemble in Washington, D.C. to suppress the rebellion. Baltimore citizens were determined that Northern troops would not make it through their city. And they knew how to put up a fight. The magnificent city of the colonial period had fallen into the grips of thuggery and violence by the 1850s. In fact, Baltimore had such an unruly reputation that in February 1861 Abraham Lincoln went through the city in disguise in the middle of the night on his way to his inauguration.

So when a Massachusetts regiment marched through the city on the way to the capital, it was attacked by a mob, resulting in the first fatalities of the war. All Washington’s connections to the North normally went through Baltimore, but Baltimore citizens had burned all the railroad bridges, cut telephone wires, and stopped all mail en route to the capital city. Cut off from the north and surrounded by a sea of southern states, Washington was left vulnerable for six days. Across the Potomac, southern troops prepared for an attack, and Maryland was threatening to secede at any moment. Maryland straddled the north and the south and both sides fought to win over its population throughout the Civil War. The state never seceded, but around 30,000 citizens enlisted in the Confederate army.

“My Maryland!” serves as Randall’s plea to his home state to secede from the Union and join the Confederacy. The poem refers to the Revolutionary and Mexican-American wars and Maryland military heroes (most of which are now obscure).  Randall was a poet, journalist, and professor at Poydras College in Pointe Coupee, Louisiana, and “My Maryland!” won him the title “Poet Laureate of the Lost Cause.” Jennie Carrie set the poem to the tune of “Lauriger Horatius” (O'Tannenbaum), and it became popular across Maryland and the South. CSA bands played the song after they crossed into Maryland during the Maryland Campaign of 1862. Robert E. Lee reportedly ordered troops to sing the song as they entered Frederick, Maryland, where the caroling soldiers were met with a cold audience of Unionists. At least one CSA regimental band played the song as Lee’s troops retreated across the Potomac after the Battle of Antietam.

“My Maryland!” was adopted as the official state song of Maryland on April 29, 1939. Since then, citizens of Maryland have occasionally attempted to replace the song because of the its history with the Confederacy and the fact that the lyrics refer to Lincoln as a “tyrant,” “despot,” and “vandal” and the Union as “Northern scum.” “My Maryland!” remains the official state song.



--Hannah Jarrett '12



Works consulted:
Frank B. Marcotte, Six Days in April: Lincoln and the Union in Peril, New York: Algora Pub., 2005.

http://www.msa.md.gov/msa/mdmanual/01glance/html/symbols/song.html

New Books: Controversy in Poetry, Football, and a Historical City

Planisphere- New Poems by John Ashbery. (New York, 2009)

Ashbery is known as one of America’s leading post-modern poets. He has published over two dozen volumes of poetry and won nearly every major literary award. Simultaneously dense and funny.

The New York Times book review:

John Ashbery’s new collection, dedicated to his partner, David Kermani, draws its exotic title — “Planisphere” — from Andrew Marvell’s poem “The Definition of Love,” [...] Ashbery also juggles the infinite possibilities of genre, his mind running through many exhausted topics at once, trying for one that still has life in it[....] Some of the games “prove out” exhilaratingly for the reader, some are perhaps too private, some too abstruse, some too silly (there are a couple of Steinish collages that don’t earn their keep, one of them made from the titles of movies). But when the Ashberian associative complex works (as in the cases cited above) the mind is delighted by its unexpectedness. Conversation is nearly always the pretext, as in the poet’s shorthand summary of life in old age: “This is how my days, / my nights are spent, in a crowded vacuum / overlooking last year’s sinkhole.” Ashbery, the master of sinuous syntax (see his “Three Poems” or “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”) has performed surgery on his poems here, often bringing them into the wry epigrammatic domain of Dickinson[....] But several poems, notably ­“Planisphere” and “Pernilla,” belong to Ashbery’s ambitious longer lyric mode. I quote, for readers longing for the lyric Ashbery, the conclusion of the love poem “Alcove,” which opens this volume with a wondering joy at the return of spring and ends with a vista of love, despite its inevitable separateness, surviving the worst days of old age:

We indeed

looked out for others as though they mattered, and they,
catching the spirit, came home with us, spent the night
in an alcove from which their breathing could be heard clearly.
But it’s not over yet. Terrible incidents happen
daily. That’s how we get around obstacles.

In his rendering of American speech, slang, cliché, Ashbery has surpassed most of his contemporaries. His “small museum / of tints” has provided ambiguous prophecies, curdled recollections, menacing prospects, emergencies, landscapes and puzzles; it has no less provided memories of youth, intimacies of love, the comedy of the ephemeral, the ­transhistorical speech of painting, and the ­literary in its quoted quintessence. The poet’s last look here is a “glimpse of / the books in the carrel, sweet in their stamped bindings”; one of these days, the carrel will hold his “Collected Poems.”

Bowled Over: Big-Time College Football from the Sixties to the BCS Era by Michael Oriard. (Chapel Hill, 2009)

Why does a college football coach make more money than a college president? Bowled Over attempts to answer this question and others like it by explaining the development of university football programs and the conflicts surrounding their growth into powerhouses that dominate academics.

The Oxford Journals book review:

I begin this review by misquoting Otto von Bismarck, “College football is like sausages; it is better not to see them being made.” The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football (and basketball) is a mass of contradiction and hypocrisy. Only the most naïve would believe otherwise.

Author Michael Oriard offers a unique perspective on big-time college football: He played football for Notre Dame University and for the Kansas City Chiefs in the National Football League in the late sixties and early seventies before becoming a professor of English at Oregon State University.

He opens his book by recognizing college football's potentially contradictory pulls of marketing and educating, a contradiction recognized by observers almost at the inception of the college game. College presidents and coaches debated whether it was better for alumni to support individual athletes or for universities to provide scholarships.

While he does not state this quite as baldly, collegiate football, similar to the professional brand, depends upon older men (and, in a few cases, women) exploiting younger men. While collegiate football players pass through the system within four or five years, the older men—coaches, athletics directors, and college presidents—remain to dictate the rules.
[...] Oriard believes that such outrageous behavior as sporting sideburns (no one, apparently, was suspended for wearing bellbottom pants) led coaches to seek greater control over their players. He believes that the one-year scholarship rule passed in 1973, whereby scholarships were renewed at coaches’ discretion, was at least partly a response to the players’ rebellion. Indeed, his thesis is found on page 5: “that this mostly forgotten reinvention of the athletic scholarship marks a crucial turning point for big-time college football. … The one-year scholarship, backed by the mindset that it represents, exposed so-called student-athletes to the mounting pressures of an increasingly commercialized sports while denying them a share in its new bounty [of television money].”
[...] Oriard's discussion of the events that occurred during his playing career is another strength of his book. Indeed, had he focused even more on autobiographical detail and explored in greater detail the milieu in which he played rather than dwell on a lengthy discussion of reform, the book would have been shorter but more powerful.

[...] Many of the readers of this review are academics, whose schools are facing severe budget cutbacks. For academics working for schools in the Bowl Championship Series (the infamous BCS), the specter of ever-growing expenditures on football programs may well remind them of Groucho Marx's prescient comment in the movieHorsefeathers. When Groucho is told that Huxley has a college and a football team, he quips, “Well we can't afford both. Tomorrow we start tearing down the college.” [...] Oriard, too, is bemused by the “arms race” in building ridiculously lavish facilities for football teams.

[...] Oriard's book should appeal to the general reader. Those researchers who have already investigated the seamy world of collegiate athletics may not find much new information in this well-written book.

Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams by Charles King. (New York, 2011)

Odessa offers the compelling and fascinating history of a key Ukrainian city in such a way that it is appealing to any reader. King focuses on the controversies sparked in the city due to violent anti-Semitism and the radical movements that grew out of the city’s population of artists, authors, great thinkers.

The New Republic book review:

[...] Charles King has written a crisp, reliable account of the town culled from a wide range of sources, most impressively from archival material on Odessa’s wartime experiences under the Romanians. It is a history clearly intended for the general reader, but the book tells a complex story. King appreciates the poignancy of an urban tale of a visually attractive melting pot that was, and not infrequently, the site of fierce inter-ethnic brutality. More Jews were slaughtered in the Odessa pogrom of 1905 than were killed anywhere else in Russia at the time. And although Odessa’s most beloved post-war celebrities—the film star Mark Bernes, and Russia’s Sinatra, Leonid Utesov—were both Jews, its municipal authorities were known in the 1950s and ’60s as among the most overtly anti-Semitic in Russia.

[...] King tracks Odessa’s history with the use of biographical snippets and quick forays into the rich body of imaginative literature. The book is something of a blend between a general history and a guided tour with often quite splendid descriptions. Here King recreates the smells, the feel of the mid-nineteenth-century city, as many hundreds of wagons filled with wheat and pulled by animals bound for Odessa’s slaughterhouses packed the streets—the streets, constructed of highly porous limestone, that filled the lungs of Odessa’s populace especially on windy days.

[...] The story ends, as King tells it, not in Odessa itself but in Brighton Beach. (Packed already in the 1970s with Odessa Jews, some estimate that three-quarters of Brighton Beach's population come from Odessa and from Black Sea towns nearby.) King acknowledges that Odessa, still beautiful (if faded) in its center, has by now lost much of what it was that made it a source of nostalgia, of tender longing for quite nearly as long as it has existed. Still, its imprint remains palpable.

-Becky Heiser '11

"A terrible beauty is born"

Easter, 1916


I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse -
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.


-W.B. Yeats, 1916

In observance of St. Patrick's Day, here are some links to resources provided by the National Library of Ireland.

The 1916 Rising: Personalities and Perspectives

Yeats: The Life and Works of William Butler Yeats




Above: James Joyce reading from Finnegan's Wake.

And of course Joyce's Ulysses in 18 animated .gifs: Ulysses for Dummies. (It's a lot funnier if you've read the book - I'd recommend taking the time someday.)