Old-School

S1E6 - Latitudes

Season 1, Episode 6 Transcript [https://www.binst.org/s/Old-School-S1E6.pdf] Yusef Komunyakaa’s war poem, “Latitudes,” begins with a curious sentence: “If I am not Ulysses, I am/ his dear, ruthless half brother.” Chi and Chad discuss what this poem has to say about the aftermath of wars ancient and modern and the power of the subjunctive. Sources and references: Yusef Komunyakaa, Warhorses [https://bookshop.org/p/books/warhorses-yusef-komunyakaa/10399390?ean=9780374531911] Yusef Komunyakaa, Emperor of Water Clocks [https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-emperor-of-water-clocks-poems-yusef-komunyakaa/8485610?ean=9780374536572] “Latitudes” [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/58750/latitudes] the episode with the sirens appears in Book XII of Homer’s Odyssey [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1727/pg1727-images.html#chap12] Penelope’s test of Odysseus appears in Book XXIII of the Odyssey [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1727/pg1727-images.html#chap23] Stephen Dobyns, Next Word, Better Word: The Craft of Writing Poetry, chapter eight, "Closure” [https://bookshop.org/p/books/next-word-better-word-the-craft-of-writing-poetry-stephen-dobyns/12848001?ean=9780230621800] Stacey D’Erasmo, The Art of Intimacy [https://staceyderasmo.com/books/the-art-of-intimacy.html] Kirkland C. Jones, “Folk Idiom in the Literary Expression of Two African American Authors: Rita Dove and Yusef Komunyakaa,” in Language and Literature in the African American Imagination [https://bookshop.org/p/books/language-and-literature-in-the-african-american-imagination-carol-a-blackshire-belay/9027435?ean=9780313278266], edited by Carol Aisha Blackshire-Belay Allen Tate, “Ode to the Confederate Dead” [https://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/tate.html] Poetry of Hugh Martin [https://www.hugh-martin.com/books] Further reading: a short biography of Yusef Komunyakaa at the Poety Foundation [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/yusef-komunyakaa]

S1E5 - Migratory Habits of the Soul

Season 1, Episode 5 Transcript [https://www.binst.org/s/Old-School-S1E5.pdf] Chi and Chad close read Robert Hayden’s “A Plague of Starlings,” a tiny poem about a walk across campus that opens out onto the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights Movement, Plato’s Phaedo, Aesop’s Fables, and the afterlife. Sources and references: Fritz Oehlschlaeger, “Robert Hayden’s Meditation on Art: The Final Sequence of Words in the Mourning Time” [https://www.jstor.org/stable/2904357] Mary Oliver, “Starlings in Winter” [https://www.best-poems.net/mary_oliver/starlings_in_winter.html] Plato, Phaedo [http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/phaedo.html] Hayden’s parting speech for the Library of Congress [https://www.loc.gov/item/91740837/] Plato, Republic, Book X [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/55201/55201-h/55201-h.htm#BookX] Aesop’s “The Farmer, His Boy, and the Rooks” [https://www.gutenberg.org/files/11339/11339-h/11339-h.htm#THE_FARMER_HIS_BOY_AND_THE_ROOKS] Robert Hayden reading “Zeus over Redeye” [https://www.loc.gov/item/94838917] Royal Society for the Protection of Birds [https://www.rspb.org.uk/birds-and-wildlife/wildlife-guides/bird-a-z/starling/] Peter Campion, Radical as Reality: Form and Freedom in American Poetry [https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/R/bo44521278.html] Audre Lorde, “The Brown Menace or Poem to the Survival of Roaches” [https://www.google.com/books/edition/Black_Nature/DV-cp68IXVEC?dq=The%20Brown%20Menace%20or%20Poem%20to%20the%20Survival%20of%20Roaches&gbpv=1&hl=en&pg=PA132&printsec=frontcover] Amber Flora Thomas, “Confessions of a Pseudo-Nature Writer,” p. 779 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/41243171.pdf] Further reading: Robert Hayden’s Collected Poems [https://bookshop.org/p/books/collected-poems-robert-hayden/12774286?ean=9780871406798]

S1E4 - “I Sit with Shakespeare”

Season 1, Episode 4 Transcript [https://www.binst.org/s/Old-School-S1E4.pdf] Chi attempts to fix a problem she’s been having while teaching W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Shakespeare, a time-traveling dog, and dislike of overalls are all involved. So are the reparative potential of reading the classics and a one-hundred-year-old pedagogical controversy. Sources and references: W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Book VI “Of the Training of Black Men” [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/408/pg408-images.html#chap06] for more on the Penn School, see the Penn Center’s website [https://penncenter.com] Rossa Cooley, School Acres, pp. 12 and 22 [https://archive.org/details/schoolacresadven0000cool/page/174/mode/2up] The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois: A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-autobiography-of-w-e-b-du-bois-the-oxford-w-e-b-du-bois-9780199387052?cc=us&lang=en] Mount Pisgah is mentioned in Deuteronomy 34:1 [https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Deuteronomy%2034%3A1-4&version=NIV] Zora Neale Hurston, Moses, Man of the Mountain [https://bookshop.org/p/books/moses-man-of-the-mountain-zora-neale-hurston/8991178?ean=9780061695148] W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, Book XIV, “The Sorrow Songs” [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/408/pg408-images.html#chap14] Sonia Sanchez, “Listen to Big Black at s, f, State” [https://cat-rust-w4m4.squarespace.com/oldschool/%E2%80%9Chttps://folkways.si.edu/sonia-sanchez/listen-to-big-black-at-s-f-state/african-american-spoken-islamica-poetry/track/smithsonian] Desmond Jagmohan, “Making Bricks Without Straw: Booker T. Washington and the Politics of the Disenfranchised,” pp. 8-9 [https://ecommons.cornell.edu/handle/1813/39321] For the taxonomy of classical references in The Souls of Black Folk, see Carrie Cowherd, “The Wings of Atlanta: Classical References in The Souls of Black Folk” in The Souls of Black Folk: One Hundred Years Later, edited by Dolan Hubbard David Withun, Coworkers in the Kingdom of Culture: Classics and Cosmopolitanism in the Thought of W.E.B. Du Bois [https://academic.oup.com/book/38793?login=false] Keith Byerman, Seizing the Word: History, Art, and Self in the Work of W. E. B. Du Bois [https://ugapress.org/book/9780820337753/seizing-the-word/]

S1E3 - A Letter to Phillis Wheatley, Part 2

Season 1, Episode 3 Transcript [https://www.binst.org/s/Old-School-S1E3.pdf] Chi and Chad discuss the classical allusions in Wheatley’s poem, “To Maecenas.” Who was Maecenas? Why did Wheatley write a poem to him? And how should we interpret allusions? Sources and references: M. H. Abrams, A Glossary of Literary Terms, “Allusion” “To Maecenas” [https://viva.pressbooks.pub/amlit1/chapter/to-maecenas-phillis-wheatley/] “Niobe in Distress for Her Children, Slain by Apollo” [https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/409/pg409-images.html#link2H_4_0038] “On Being Brought from Africa to America” [https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45465/on-being-brought-from-africa-to-america] “On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield” Horace, “To Maecenas” [https://www.loebclassics.com/view/horace-epistles/1926/pb_LCL194.249.xml] Alexander Pope, The Second Epistle of the Second Book of Horace [https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/004809322.0001.000/1:2?rgn=div1%3Bview%3Dfulltext] Homer, Iliad, Book XVI [http://classics.mit.edu/Homer/iliad.16.xvi.html] Mather Byles, “Written in Paradise Lost” [https://www.poemist.com/mather-byles/written-in-miltons-paradise-lost] William Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3 [https://www.folger.edu/explore/shakespeares-works/henry-vi-part-3/read/3/2/#line-3.2.184] Paula Bennett, “Phillis Wheatley's Vocation and the Paradox of the ‘Afric Muse’” [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/pmla/article/abs/phillis-wheatleys-vocation-and-the-paradox-of-the-afric-muse/E8476A922D7ACE68E4DD5A75AE291C4A] William K. Wimsatt and Monroe C. Beardsley, “The Intentional Fallacy,” p. 477 [https://www.jstor.org/stable/27537676] Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism [https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-signifying-monkey-9780195136470?cc=us&lang=en]

Sidebar: “An Evening Thought”

Transcript [https://www.binst.org/s/Old-School-S1E21.pdf] In this sidebar episode, Chad tells Chi about his close reading of Jupiter Hammon’s first published poem, “An Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ Alone” and what it has to do with the name of a gate in the second Jewish Temple. Sources and references: The Collected Works of Jupiter Hammon, ed. Cedric May [https://utpress.org/title/the-collected-works-of-jupiter-hammon/] Acts Chapter 3 [https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Acts-Chapter-3/] Acts Chapter 4 [https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Acts-Chapter-4/] Strong’s definition of ὡραῖος [https://biblehub.com/greek/5611.htm] 2 Corinthians 6:2 [https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/2-Corinthians-Chapter-6/] “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling” is from Philippians 2:12 [https://www.kingjamesbibleonline.org/Philippians-2-12/]