"Dublin Core:Title","Dublin Core:Subject","Dublin Core:Description","Dublin Core:Creator","Dublin Core:Source","Dublin Core:Publisher","Dublin Core:Date","Dublin Core:Contributor","Dublin Core:Rights","Dublin Core:Relation","Dublin Core:Format","Dublin Core:Language","Dublin Core:Type","Dublin Core:Identifier","Dublin Core:Coverage","Item Type Metadata:Text","Item Type Metadata:Interviewer","Item Type Metadata:Interviewee","Item Type Metadata:Location","Item Type Metadata:Transcription","Item Type Metadata:Local URL","Item Type Metadata:Original Format","Item Type Metadata:Physical Dimensions","Item Type Metadata:Duration","Item Type Metadata:Compression","Item Type Metadata:Producer","Item Type Metadata:Director","Item Type Metadata:Bit Rate/Frequency","Item Type Metadata:Time Summary","Item Type Metadata:Email Body","Item Type Metadata:Subject Line","Item Type Metadata:From","Item Type Metadata:To","Item Type Metadata:CC","Item Type Metadata:BCC","Item Type Metadata:Number of Attachments","Item Type Metadata:Standards","Item Type Metadata:Objectives","Item Type Metadata:Materials","Item Type Metadata:Lesson Plan Text","Item Type Metadata:URL","Item Type Metadata:Event Type","Item Type Metadata:Participants","Item Type Metadata:Birth Date","Item Type Metadata:Birthplace","Item Type Metadata:Death Date","Item Type Metadata:Occupation","Item Type Metadata:Biographical Text","Item Type Metadata:Bibliography","Item Type Metadata:Player","Item Type Metadata:Imported Thumbnail","Item Type Metadata:Referrer",tags,file,itemType,collection,public,featured "P.O.W. Poetry in Code","Borling’s poetry, composed in the most oppressive of conditions, demonstrates how the arts and humanities are essential to the human spirit and give evidence to the shared human impulse to make sense of our lives in words and through creative expression.","
In the Hanoi Hilton, the place where the North Vietnamese imprisoned and often tortured American captives during the Vietnam War, the US prisoners used a tapping code to communicate with one another. But they didn’t just send conversational messages, they tapped out poetry, reciting from memory some of the favorites they remembered from school and composing new poems to lift their spirits. Their captors would not allow them to speak to one another. But they didn’t notice the tapping — or didn’t understand what it was about.
Here’s the code they used. It breaks the alphabet into five lines, each with five letters in it. So any letter (forget about K) can be conveyed through two sets of taps. A is 1, 1; Z is 5, 5 (K is either C or 2, 6). The code’s five lines are:
Captain John Borling was one of those captives, and the poems he composed as a P.O.W. were shared and memorized by his fellow prisoners. And, after Borling returned to the States after the war, his poems were pubished in Taps on the Walls: Poems from the Hanoi Hilton.
Borling’s poetry, composed in the most oppressive of conditions, demonstrates how the arts and humanities are essential to the human spirit and give evidence to the shared human impulse to make sense of our lives in words and through creative expression.
About seven months ago, our son was in a tragic ski accident, and was in a coma for close to a month. And during that really painful time, we didn’t know what was going to happen. Was he ever going to wake up? Was he not going to wake up?
I, myself, couldn’t sleep and I was haunted all the time by thoughts of what might happen to him in the future, and how did this happen, and thinking about the past. And I remember thinking in one of those late-night moments about “The Odyssey” and about the description of the sirens on the banks. Of Odysseus asking to be tied to the mast, and having beeswax in his sailors’ ears, and realizing I had these kind of spirits that were haunting me.
In that context, I remember thinking very directly, “I know what those sirens are. I know what that’s about.” I didn’t know before then what—at least for me—that poem was saying. And at that moment, I realized the sirens were really from the future and from the past, and that in dealing with this situation with our son—the only way to deal with this—was by staying very much in the present.
",Homer,"The Odyssey",,,"Kevin Guthrie, founder/president, ITHAKA",,,,,,kevin-guthrie-homers-sirens,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Business Leaders,Classical Mythology,Coma,Families,Fathers & Sons,Homer,Illness,Literature,New York, New York,Poetry,Sports Accidents,The Odyssey,Time Perception",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/10/20/odyssey-960x590.jpg,"Moving Image","National Humanities Center Board Members",1,0 "The Golden Line",,"I started learning Latin in seventh grade because I decided it was the most difficult course I could take, and I had something to prove. I was an economically disadvantaged student in a wealthy private school, and all of my classmates knew it. I would never live in their mansions, or wear their expensive clothes, or go on their exotic vacations, so I set about making myself at least academically equal. Like most grade school students who read Latin, the poetry of Catullus was some of the first “real” literature I encountered. After the dry, contrived passages in my textbooks, the sensuous love poems and harsh invectives were a welcome change of pace. Catullus’ writing is the rare combination of accessible and beautiful — a perfect entry to Latin poetry.
I did not love Latin before Catullus. I was proud of my success with learning the language, and I dutifully memorized decks of vocabulary cards and recited declensions, but I worked through it without any real joy. Then, in tenth grade, Catullus’ mini-epic poem 64 seduced me and I never recovered. Catullus uses gorgeous, rich language, stunning imagery, and brilliant humor in all of his poetry, but these were not what initially hooked me. No, I fell in love with, of all things, his grammar, and at the same time Latin as a language. In poem 64, Catullus frequently employs what is called “the golden line,” a five word line usually arranged as adjective adjective verb noun noun. Writers in English cannot do this as our word order is too rigid. The precision of Latin grammar is what allowed him to use this rhetorical device and add another layer of nuance to his poetry. Latin writers were freed by the rules and structure of their language.
My life at the time was chaotic. I was still at the private school, shunned by my classmates. My home life was in turmoil. I had moved twelve times by then. With those golden lines, I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the structure of Latin. The order both comforted and dazzled me. Latin stopped being a course in which I could prove myself and started being a passion. After Catullus, I devoured Horace, Ovid, and Virgil in high school, and went on to get my B.A. in Classics. Five words changed the course of my entire life.
First century Latin poetry may seem like an esoteric subject, especially one far removed from the concerns of a teenage girl in late 20th century America, but my exposure to Catullus and a learned appreciation for the elegance and beauty of Latin poetic grammar helped forge my life’s path — through college and into my career as a research librarian.
Experiencing the power and nuance of expression created through word transpositions in Latin grammar also opened my mind to the possibilities inherent in other languages and cultures, ideas and realms of feeling that were not only new and exciting — but that were nearly impossible to approximate in any other way.
",,"The poetry of Catullus",,,"Brooke Andrade, Director of the Library, National Humanities Center",,,,,,brooke-andrade-catullus-latin-poetry,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Aesthetics,Books & Reading,Catullus,Classical Literature,Comparative Grammar,Horace,Joy,Latin,Librarians,Literature,Ovid,Poetry,Raleigh, North Carolina,Research,Virgil,Vocation",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/26/catullus-960x590.jpg,Text,,1,0 "Writing is My Activism",,"Luis Rodriguez, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2014, explains how his love for books and libraries rescued him from a life of trouble. He notes that through books, he discovered more about people and their lives, which encouraged his interest in writing about injustice and activism.
To celebrate its 40th year anniversary of grant making, programming, and partnerships that connect Californians to each other, California Humanities invited a group of 40 prominent Californians to explore what the humanities mean to them. For more information visit California Humanities: We Are the Humanities.
",,,"California Humanities",,"Luis Rodriguez, Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2014","Standard YouTube License",,,,,luis-rodriguez-writing-activism,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Activism,Books & Reading,Gangs,Immigration,Juvenile Delinquency,Libraries,Literature,Los Angeles, California,Mexico,Multiculturalism,Oral History,Poetry,Poets Laureate,Social Justice,Storytelling,Vocation,Writing",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/5/54/LA_Public_Library.jpg,"Moving Image","California Humanities: “We Are the Humanities”",1,0 "A few lines of poetry might be all we need...","My students were so engaged in this lesson, and I am sure some of these words and images continue to affect them today. I certainly hope my humanities moment enriched their lives and changed the way they thought about our world then and now. ","I remember seeing the images on the television, in newspapers, and in magazines. It was such an epic event. The Berlin Wall was coming down, something I never imagined would happen. As a child in the 50s and 60s, I remember bomb drills during elementary school.
Several of my friends had fallout shelters in their homes. I used to be afraid of bombs, of communists, of Khrushchev. I tried to understand how a wall could divide the city of Berlin into two very different places.
And then, in 1989, the unbelievable happened. I had just accepted an interim job teaching Senior English at Mooresville High School, and I wasn’t sure how to deal with such a momentous moment in history. Just a few lines from Stephen Vincent Benet’s John Brown’s Body made everything crystal clear and powerful.
Sometimes there comes a crack in Time itself.
Sometimes the earth is torn by something blind.
Sometimes an image that has stood so long
It seems implanted as the polar star
Is moved against an unfathomed force
That suddenly will not have it any more.
Those six lines provided so much focus for our classroom discussion and reflection... and awe.
My students were so engaged in this lesson, and I am sure some of these words and images continue to affect them today. I certainly hope my humanities moment enriched their lives and changed the way they thought about our world then and now.
The whole of that poem was me. It “affirmed” my lived experience. Poems do that every day. They clarify a feeling, give us a glimpse into ourselves or, if we’re paying attention, into some other person or place. And they can show us how to live.
Hearing poets talk about their work is another experience all together. Clifton was being celebrated by writers like Toni Morrison and Sharon Olds that evening, and hearing that story from this dazzling artist in the company of her peers not only inspired me personally but also helped me remember that in the midst of all the research and interpretative work I do, it’s the art and the community around it that matters. The structure of the poem, with its repeated call to “come celebrate,” reminds me that we have to remain open, regularly invite people to join us.
","Hearing Lucille Clifton’s poem “won’t you celebrate with me” at a celebration of her work is the Humanities Moment that offered both comfort and a model for how to navigate life as a Black academic. I was a new English professor and was unprepared for the isolation I felt in the academy when a senior colleague invited me to the Clifton event. The evening was packed with more dazzling poets than I can remember, and I really couldn’t take it in. I still don’t remember much about it except hearing this poem and the story behind it.
Clifton had been named a distinguished professor of the arts and because she didn’t have all of the right credentials a man in the office next to hers didn’t think she deserved the honor and took time out of his day to tell her so. The poem is her response. The whole of that moment was affirming, not just the poem but the reason it came to me. More than affirming me, it showed me how to live this life of the mind—to do the work with fierce joy and to invite students, colleagues, and my communities to celebrate it with me.
The whole of that poem was me. It “affirmed” my lived experience. Poems do that every day. They clarify a feeling, give us a glimpse into ourselves or, if we’re paying attention, into some other person or place. And they can show us how to live.
Hearing poets talk about their work is another experience all together. Clifton was being celebrated by writers like Toni Morrison and Sharon Olds that evening, and hearing that story from this dazzling artist in the company of her peers not only inspired me personally but also helped me remember that in the midst of all the research and interpretative work I do, it’s the art and the community around it that matters. The structure of the poem, with its repeated call to “come celebrate,” reminds me that we have to remain open, regularly invite people to join us.
","Lucille Clifton","“won’t you celebrate with me” by Lucille Clifton",,"2005 (ish)","Patricia Matthew, 49, English professor living in Brooklyn, New York",,,,,,the-perfect-invitation,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Clifton, Lucille,Community,Literature,Morrison, Toni,Olds, Sharon,Poetry,Professors,Vocation,Women of Color,won't you celebrate with me",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/7/101/poetry-960x590.jpg,Text,#Humanitiesinclass,1,0 "Wabi-Sabi: The Perfectly Imperfect","This new outlook on the meaning of beauty has been part of me since that illuminating course, in conscious and unconscious ways. It helped me come to terms with my own imperfections, value simplicity, and accept the fact that things I have loved ended. It helped me embrace my reality as it is, appreciate it, and see the beauty in it. Since then I always try to smile when I notice some damage or rust in things I own and am attached to. I do not want to quickly throw them away, rather, I pause to appreciate the changes time has imprinted on them. It shaped how I think of beauty and assisted me in undoing some of the unrealistic ideals my western culture had instilled in me. Of course, I’m not quite there yet, but I will always be grateful to that class for showing me the beauty of the real, simple, and natural.","As part of my undergraduate degree in Asian studies, I took a class on Haiku, a traditional form of Japanese poetry. At the time, I knew nothing about Japan beyond its youth’s obsession with Hello Kitty and similar colorful animated characters. In analyzing and understanding the magic of these three-lines poems, we talked a lot about the traditional Japanese aesthetics on which they are based. And it was nothing like Hello Kitty. Traditional Japanese aesthetics–which can be found in their well-known gardens, teahouses, and architecture at large–not only produces well-designed artifacts and surroundings, but also promotes an acceptance of reality. Japanese aesthetics is based on a few principles that highlight the beauty in the impermanent, imperfect, and incomplete (of which wabi-sabi are the more known terms to a western audience). These concepts create a realistic understanding of beauty. Taken as a whole, these aesthetic elements unveil the splendor of temporality, constant change, simplicity, imperfections, and even aging. Or, in other words, they embrace and laud life and nature for what they really are. Growing up in a western culture, consuming beauty ideals straight from Hollywood movies, this class opened my eyes to a whole different understanding of beauty. Initially, it seemed foreign and odd, but as the course went on and I had the chance to internalize these ideas they started to make more sense than the ones I have known all my life. This new outlook on the meaning of beauty has been part of me since that illuminating course, in conscious and unconscious ways. It helped me come to terms with my own imperfections, value simplicity, and accept the fact that things I have loved ended. It helped me embrace my reality as it is, appreciate it, and see the beauty in it. Since then I always try to smile when I notice some damage or rust in things I own and am attached to. I do not want to quickly throw them away, rather, I pause to appreciate the changes time has imprinted on them. It shaped how I think of beauty and assisted me in undoing some of the unrealistic ideals my western culture had instilled in me. Of course, I’m not quite there yet, but I will always be grateful to that class for showing me the beauty of the real, simple, and natural.",,,,2006,"Yael Lazar, PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Duke University and a curator for the Humanities Moments Project",,,,,,perfectly-imperfect,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Aesthetics,Beauty,Haiku,Japanese Aesthetics,Poetry,Students,Teachers & Teaching,Tel Aviv, Israel,Wabi-Sabi",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/116/Wabi_Sabi.jpg,Text,,1,0 "Here I Am",,"This might be a total Millennial generation kind of humanities moment, so readers be warned. One day, I was scrolling through social media when I came across a post from a wonderful calligraphy artist. It read, ""and here you are living despite it all."" The post reminded me of the many times in my life when I was so hurt and so devastated over something that had occurred that sometimes I didn't feel like I would survive them. There were arguments with my mom, break ups, and bad grades, and they all took their toll. So when I casually came across that post, I took a moment and realized just how far I had come and just how much I have accomplished despite those seemingly possible to overcome parts of my life. It was one of the few times I was genuinely proud of myself, my strength. Something as simple as scrolling through social media became my ""aha!"" moment that made me realize I'm stronger than I give myself credit for. I should be proud of who I've become, and I need to stop being so hard on myself. Something so simple became my humanities moment.",,"A social media post from a calligraphy artist ",,"January 2018","Sydney, 21, student",,,,,,here-i-am,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Calligraphy,College Station, Texas,Emotional Experience,Kaur, Rupi,Millennial Generation,Poetry,Social Media,Students,The Sun and Her Flowers",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/135/living-despite-all.jpg,Text,,1,0 "For the First Time It Felt Like Someone Was Writing About Me",,"English teacher Justin Parmenter describes how his encounters with essays by Thoreau and Emerson, and later with the poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,” helped him to understand how literature can provide both an escape from the troubles of life and a connection to others who’ve seen and felt the same things though they may have lived centuries before. By seeing himself in the transformative literature of Wordsworth, Thoreau, and Emerson, Parmenter felt like he had “the power to make changes” in his own life. Wordsworth’s Romantic vision and Thoreau’s and Emerson’s Transcendentalist philosophy jointly endowed Parmenter’s worldview with a greater meaning. As a teacher, he strives to cultivate a sense of personal connection between his individual students and works of literature.",,"The works of William Wordsworth, Henry David Thoreau, and Ralph Waldo Emerson",,,"Justin Parmenter, Charlotte Mecklenburg School District, NC",,,,,,thoreau-emerson-wordsworth,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"American Renaissance,Books & Reading,Emerson, Ralph Waldo,Essay (Literary Form),Inspiration,Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey,Literature,Nature & Civilization,Poetry,Teachers & Teaching,Thoreau, Henry David,Tintern, Wales,Transcendentalism,Walden, Or, Life in the Woods,Wordsworth, William",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/4/144/Tintern_Abbey.jpg,"Moving Image",Educators,1,0 "A Lifetime of Humanities Moments",,"Some years ago, I was asked to give a lecture to students enrolled in a small university’s humanities program describing the personal epiphany I experienced which led to my passion for the humanities. Try as I might, I could not think of an isolated, single experience but rather a series of moments that stretch back to my childhood and have “stuck to my ribs” over a lifetime.
A very early memory: perhaps at the age of six or seven, I became mesmerized by Schubert’s “Unfinished Symphony” and repeatedly played it on the phonograph (several 78 discs), deeply affected by the contrast between the brooding, dark and the happier, lighter themes.
Quite obviously, I was drawn to classical music. Some five or six years later, I had my heart set to hear Rudolph Serkin perform Beethoven’s “Emperor” Piano Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy. An ear infection, quite painful, almost prevented the experience. Against doctor’s orders, my aunt took me. I clearly recall how thrilled I was by the crescendo-decrescendo passage in the last movement—leaving the concert hall pain-free with the infection gone!
During these early years, I was somewhat of a bookworm, transported to different times and places by books which provided delight, wonderment and a number of deeply poignant moments. Initially, adventure stories such as James Fennimore Cooper’s The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans, Alexander Dumas’ The Three Musketeers and Jules Verne’s The Mysterious Island were my fare, followed by Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc and Willa Cather’s evocative novels My Antonia and O Pioneers!
I also had the good fortune of being taken to theater in my pre-adolescent years, thrilling to the performances of Ethel Barrymore in How Green Was My Valley, Walter Hampton in The Patriots and a bit later, José Ferrer in Edmond Rostand’s romantic masterpiece, Cyrano de Bergerac. In my later adolescence, I experienced unforgettable performances of Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in back-to-back performances of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra and George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra. I was bowled over by Vivien Leigh playing Cleopatra as the young, adoring female in awe of Julius Caesar in the Shaw play and her brilliantly played, contrasting characterization as a mature and majestic woman facing her demise in Shakespeare.
A life of theater-going has followed. Naturally, the works of the Bard—Henry V, Macbeth, Hamlet, Merchant of Venice, Midsummer Night’s Dream, Othello and King Lear—have been at the core. Perhaps one of my most memorable nights of theater-going was a performance by the great husband-wife team of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s The Visit—a dramatization of greed, revenge and the power of money among people of rectitude.
The visual arts, particularly painting, was an important part of my childhood, which continues to be nurtured by museum-going in my own city and around the world. Collecting has also been a joyous endeavor, centered on prints with a focus on Ukiyo-e. Two most memorable moments were encountering Goya’s paintings and prints in the Prado Museum in Madrid. These works riveted me, and I spent a whole day with them alone. Some years apart on a visit to the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna, I found myself in a small gallery, just five paintings by Rembrandt—four self-portraits and one of his mother. I was overcome and could not contain tears—they spoke so deeply of the human condition.
Coming back to adolescent years and literature, Dickens, Thackeray, Melville, O’Henry, Herman Hesse, again Twain, were sources of adventure and insights to the human condition and heart. College years introduced me to Homer, the Greek playwrights, and the Roman poets, particularly Virgil, Horace and Catullus. A lifetime of reading followed—English and American novelists and essayists, German, Italian, French, Japanese and Russian authors, particularly Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. Pages and pages of humanities moments!!
Did he appear because I fell asleep thinking of him? If only I’d known I was dreaming, I’d never have wakened. |
I thought to pick the flower of forgetting for myself, but I found it already growing in his heart. |
Philosophy I came to in college through the suggestion of my father. What better introduction than Plato’s Apology and Phaedo? Socrates’ acceptance of the Athenian Assembly’s death sentence and later his refusal to delay drinking the hemlock spoke to me of transcendent self-possession and wisdom.
These stoic strains were fully developed over the ensuing five hundred years and come full-blown with the appearance of the stoic philosophers—Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius. How can one forget the admonishment in the Enchiridion of Epictetus to behave in private as one would want to be seen in public, and later the Roman Emperor Aurelius in his Meditations advising, “No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.” These words speak deeply to such as myself who has been so greatly privileged. I went on to major in philosophy and have continued my interest over a lifetime, initially with special focus on Spinoza and Schopenhauer, and in later life centered on political and moral questions.
As can be surmised, music—orchestral, chamber, vocal and opera—has been my greatest passion. As I entered my adolescent years, my musical horizons were expanding, particularly with my introduction to Baroque music—J.S. Bach, Handel, Vivaldi, Corelli and Telemann. Handel’s Messiah was an early favorite, and the joy I felt on hearing the aria and chorus “O thou that tellest good tidings to Zion” is indescribable. This lead to Bach cantatas, his Passions, the Mass in B minor and the Christmas Oratorio with its joyful and triumphant opening chorus. No Christmas is complete without that ringing in my ears, and who cannot be moved by the opening aria, “Ich habe Genug” from the Cantata of the same name.
Then came opera, with a proliferation of humanities moments:
Finally, in my more adult years, I am blessed to hear and play (violin) chamber music—string quartets, piano trios, various combinations of strings, winds and keyboard. The list of profound and touching moments is endless. I have only to mention Mozart’s Viola Quintets K.415 & 416, Beethoven’s late string quartets Op. 127-135; and Schubert’s quintessential Cello Quintet in C major as examples.
How fortunate am I to have lived, from earliest memory to present old age, a life filled with such a richness of Humanities Moments!
",,,,,"Peter A. Benoliel, Chairman Emeritus, Quaker Chemical Corporation",,,,,,benoliel-lifetime-humanities-moments,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court,Antony and Cleopatra,Aurelius, Marcus,Bach, Johann Sebastian,Beethoven, Ludwig van,Books & Reading,Business Leaders,Caesar and Cleopatra,Cather, Willa,Classical Music,Cooper, James Fenimore,Corelli, Arcangelo,Cyrano de Bergerac,Dickens, Charles,Dostoyevsky, Fyodor,Drama,Dumas, Alexandre,Dürrenmatt, Freidrich,Eliot, George,Epictetus,Film,Goya, Francisco,Handel, George Frideric,Hesse, Herman,Homer, Virgil,Horace, Catullus,How Green Was My Valley,In Search of Lost Time,Literature,Melville, Herman,Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life,Modern Painting,Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus,Mrs. Dalloway,Murasaki, Shikibu,My Ántonia,O Pioneers!,Performing Arts,Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte,Philosophy,Piano Concerto no. 5,Plato,Poetry,Proust, Marcel,Schubert, Franz Peter,Shakespeare, William,Shaw, George Bernard,Socrates,Symphony no. 8 in B Minor,Telemann, Georg Philipp,Thackeray, William Makepeace,The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,The Deerslayer, or the First War-path,The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757,The Mysterious Island,The Patriots,The Tale of Genji,The Three Musketeers,The Visit,To the Lighthouse,Tolstoy, Leo,Twain, Mark,Verne, Jules,Vivaldi, Antonio Lucio,Woolf, Virginia",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/10/165/virginia-woolf.jpg,Text,"National Humanities Center Board Members",1,0 "Hamilton and the Performance of Poetry",,"Thomas Scherer describes two related encounters which speak to the power of hearing poetry performed aloud. The first is an explanatory talk and poetry reading by the great literary scholar M. H. Abrams at the National Humanities Center; the second is hearing Lin-Manuel Miranda discuss his award-winning rap musical, Hamilton.
Across generations, cultural divides, venues, and artistic voices, the power of lyric poetry to capture and convey powerful feeling is undeniable. And when poetry is performed and embodied, “brought to life” if you will, its capacity to create change is palpable.
","M. H. Abrams, Lin-Manuel Miranda","Lin-Manuel Miranda's musical Hamilton; M.H. Abrams' The Mirror and the Lamp",,,"Thomas Scherer, Consultant, Spencer Capital Holdings",,,,,,thomas-scherer-abrams-hamilton-poetry,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,,"Abrams, M.H.,Chernow, Ron,Drama,Hamilton, Alexander,Hamilton: An American Musical,Hip-Hop,History,Literature,Miranda, Lin-Manuel,Music,New York, New York,Performing Arts,Poetry,Politics,Popular Culture,Storytelling,The Mirror and the Lamp,United States History",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/10/166/hamilton-marquee.jpg,"Moving Image","National Humanities Center Board Members",1,0 """Three Mountain Pass"" - Connecting to Vietnam",,"For teenagers, the world they live in is often described as “normal” and everything else is “weird.” One of my goals as a history teacher is to help my students recognize difference, but also to feel connected to people who lived in a much different place and time than them. Ho Xuan Huong’s poem, “Three Mountain Pass“ provoked in me admiration of her artistic talent, curiosity (“Who is this woman who can write such clearly sexual poems in 18th century Vietnam?”) and a sense that we had a shared experience of love and passion that shortened the distance between us. “Three Mountain Pass” helped me understand the extremely high value Vietnamese culture places on poetic imagery - such that transgressive poetry could flourish because of its beauty. It also made me think deeply about the space Ho Xuan Huong carved out to express herself (and challenged the notion, propagated by American media, of Vietnamese women as passive objects, rather than educated artists with agency.) I am grateful to John Balaban for helping to bring these poems to me and to an American audience more generally, and that I was able to first feel a deep connection to Vietnam through this poem. ""Three Mountain Pass"": https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/three-mountain-pass/ ",,"""Three Mountain Pass"" by Hồ Xuân Hương ",,,"Lindsey Graham, 27, history teacher",,,,,,three-mountain-pass,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"Andy Mink","Hồ, Xuân Hương,Poetry,Teachers & Teaching,Three Mountain Pass,Vietnam",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/13/196/Ho_Xuan_Huong.gif,Text,"Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia, 1945–75",1,0 "Discovering Contested Territory Through Vietnamese Folk Poetry",,"Until this summer institute, I had never heard of the Vietnamese folk poetry known as ca dao. To be honest, I had never even thought of Vietnamese people having a poetic tradition at all. I, like so many other Americans, had relegated Vietnam to an inert location on a map or a tidy historical category. I could barely conceive of a Vietnam beyond the context of American military intervention. Even as we learned about the legacies of European colonialism in the initial seminars, I still saw Vietnam as an almost passive landscape trodden over by successive waves of foreign invaders. In effect, I had made Vietnam a victim in its own story. That changed for me when I heard professor and poet John Balaban talk about his experience collecting and publishing for the first time the oral poetry of Vietnamese farmers. Balaban spoke of an ancient people, full of history, full of passion, and full of pride, inundated by the monsoons that swept away the architectural vestiges of power that we in the “West” have come to rely on so heavily for our historical identity. What was left was a long, beautiful tradition of oral history preserved in the daily life of simple farmers. As Balaban eloquently writes in Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry, poetry flourished “in villages where the lone singer can hear his or her voice against the drone of crickets, the slap of water, or the rustling of banana leaves in the wind (p. 2). This line jolted me out of my facile characterization of Vietnam and its people. Long before the French cast their colonizing net over the people of Vietnam, long before the Americans stumbled into their disastrous war, long before there even was a place called Vietnam, a lone singer could hear her voice “against the drone of crickets, the slap of water, or the rustling of banana leaves in the wind.” The theme of our institute was “Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia.” At first glance, I assumed that we would be discussing America’s involvement in the so-called Vietnam War of the twentieth century; after two weeks of intense study, I have realized that I fundamentally misread the title of this institute. To study contested territory is not to examine how America and the Viet Cong fought bitterly over this hill or that, but rather to place America in the context of an ancient regional story that is crowded with diversity and life. “America’s Role in Southeast Asia” says nothing of dominance or destiny – it was my enculturation as an American that read into it such a teleological narrative. Contested territory, like so much else, starts, and perhaps ends, in the mind.",,"Ca Dao Vietnam: Vietnamese Folk Poetry by John Balaban",,"Wednesday, July 18th, 2018","Kevin Shuford",,,,,,discovering-contested-territory-through-vietnamese-folk-poetry,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"The National Humanities Center","Colonialism,History,Oral Tradition,Poetry,Vietnam,Vietnam War (1961-1975)",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/13/213/the-mother-1505000_960_720.jpg,Text,"Contested Territory: America’s Role in Southeast Asia, 1945–75",1,0 "A Poem Remembered, a World Created",,"During the past several weeks I've been drafting some thoughts I've had for a number of years regarding the way we learn from nature and from other people's thoughts and writing. My Humanities Moment is a poetic description of a memory I had that was prompted by a poem from Alfred Tennyson -- ""Flower in the crannied wall."" The moment when this poem, this memory, and this essay came together is an example of the boundless and unpredictable infectiousness that operates between the minds of people and the objects and symbols of the natural world. I explain how the little flower in Tennyson's poem prompts my own memory of a little tree resiliently hanging onto its life in a canyon wall. While writing, this tree acquired more meaning for me when I addressed it in a personal way, almost as if to both a teacher and interlocutor. Prompted by Tennyson, I came to see in this tree the meaning and expression of human life and the nature of our struggle in defying the forces that oppose us and bring us to despair. I wrote this essay resembling the form of free verse, as I thought that was the best way to convey the tone and intimacy of my humanities moment. My moment is about the multi-lateral connection that is preserved by words and memory between the past and the present, between the natural world and the human world, and between human minds separated by the centuries.I could do several Humanities Hours out of Humanities Moments – there are so many passages and ideas that have animated my imagination. I first find myself drawn to the heart-wrenching climax of Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote, but to describe that would be to reveal the ending, which I would feel queasy doing.
So I’m going with Dylan Thomas’s poem “Fern Hill” instead. Its lyricism conjures the innocence of youth that cannot imagine its own end. That’s kind of what innocence is: a brilliantly perfect inability to envision its own conclusion.
Thomas’s second stanza begins,
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means
We are “young once only” and we play and are golden. We all see this in the delight of children and also in the mesmerizing natural panoramas that remind me of a summer evening on a hilltop in Maine. It’s summer vacation all the time. It evokes the feeling that I think that character from Friday Night Lights has in mind when he says, “My heart is full.”
In a way, the ending of “Fern Hill” brings me to what I love so much about Don Quixote and the scene I mentioned a minute ago. Here I am, a middle-aged guy spending every day with teenagers, hoping to share and discuss with them truths about the human condition and our relationships and tragedy and beauty while they, children who are “green and golden” in their “heedless ways,” in their Eden of hope and vigor, start to gain insight about how Time holds them. They are looking toward college and work and beyond, and often they worry and fear, and although for many the curiosity of youth is sputtering, its flame is not out.
Thomas:
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that Time would take me
Up to the swallow-thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
Whenever I read “Fern Hill,” and whenever I think of Don Quixote, I do so from the Experience side of the divide between innocence and experience. I peer longingly over at innocence, and I wish for it…and I feel it as if it were still here. It is the wonder of the poem, and of art, that in its presence we can be both green and dying.
",,"""Fern Hill,"" a poem by Dylan Thomas",,"I can trace it to several instances, including my original interaction with the poem, but the photo I use was taken in July 2012.","Carl Rosin, 51, teacher",,,,,,fern-hill,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"I am a member of the NHC's Teacher Advisory Council for 2018-19","Books & Reading,Casco, Maine,de Cervantes, Miguel,Don Quixote,Experience,Fern Hill,Innocence,Literature,Poetry,Teachers & Teaching,Thomas, Dylan,Wonder",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/9/252/hackers-hill-casco-maine-july2012.jpg,Text,"Teacher Advisory Council",1,0 "Poetry in Silence",,"Grace Momberger describes how the story of one woman’s ability to make poetry without sound altered the way she perceived the very meaning of communication. ",,,,,"Grace Momberger, speech-language pathologist",,,,,,poetry-in-silence,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,"",,"Heidi Camp","Communication,Creativity,Poetry,Speech Pathologists,Vocation",https://humanitiesmoments.org/files/original/275/flower-3876195_960_720.jpg,"Moving Image",,1,0 "The Beauty of Love and Human Connection",,"I could go on and on regarding literature or art that has altered my perspective on life. I was tempted to write about watching beautiful sunsets that show that even the worst day can have a happy ending. However, I had to choose a passage from Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey which taught me that instead of filling our lives with worry, we should focus on spreading love. The passage reads: most importantly love like it’s the only thing you know how at the end of the day all of this means nothing this page where you’re sitting your degree your job your money nothing even matters except love and human connection who you loved and how deeply you loved them how you touched the people around you and how much you gave them