pedagogy

Women’s Writing as Domestic Arts Assemblage

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crafted hat rack with painted book bindings and attached objects
Carlynn Crosby, Women’s Writing Hat Rack

Today I wrapped my graduate seminar Women’s Writing & Pedagogy with a reveal of students’ Domestic Arts Assemblage projects, crafted from discarded items at our community’s creative reuse center, The Repurpose Project. This is a debut DIY assignment I designed specifically for this course, which combines a seminar on 20th/21st century women’s literature with a practical workshop on assignment mock-ups students design for courses they might teach in future.

Over the past 3.5 months we’ve read women’s writing in various forms: novels, experimental prose, poems, and image-texts. Our writers/makers: Sylvia Plath, Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, Stevie Smith, Gwendolyn Brooks, Angela Carter, Alison Bechdel, Rita Dove, Margaret Atwood, and Ange Mlinko. We also explored our library’s archive of Kalliope: A Journal of Women’s Literature and Art. Keyed to this range of women’s literary writing in English, the series of assignment mock-ups focused on: City, Domesticity, Literary Magazine, Myth. Students also did other short assignments, including a conference paper proposal about teaching and a draft syllabus that featured women’s writing.

The Domestic Arts Assemblage is the outlier assignment. My rules were loose, resourceful, and communal:

plastic bottle with crinkled sheets green paper and pages of writing
Zuzu Tadeushuk, Writer’s Block 2024

(1) Make a Domestic Arts Assemblage with items from The Repurpose Project. MB will give you $8.00 to use for your project. At least one of our syllabus texts or a mock-up assignment should be a source of inspiration.
(2) Submit a photo of your Domestic Arts Assemblage + a 250-300 word Maker Statement.

By doing a creative-critical assignment, students could curate syllabus materials alongside everyday objects to reflect on our semester’s discussions and generate ideas for future work.

The resulting assemblages were stunning, as you can see from the writing-themed examples I’m sharing here (with students’ permission). Viewing the projects as a gallery and discussing them with their makers in today’s class, I was struck by how they reassembled our syllabus and discussions in analytical and inventive fashion. This teacher became the student, learning new pedagogies. Here are some of my takeaways:

  • Women’s writing can be laden with everyday objects, bringing texture and heft to the words.
  • Domestic Arts Assemblage makes us question why we label some work as domestic, and some work as art.
  • The domesticity in women’s writing covers some things while revealing others.
  • In women’s writing, the women characters can succumb to and liberate themselves from the cycles of time.
  • In women’s writing, domestic objects can signify burdens and rebirth, fragmentation and integration, restriction and possibility.
  • The household objects we donate or otherwise discard are inanimate narrators of our everyday lives. – MB
Wall clock surrounded by a collage of objects
Hyunjung Kim, Fragmented Writing in Domestic Time

 

Punk DIY as Sustainable Pedagogy

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Student DIY project: punk t-shirt
Caged Heart, by Roy Udeh-Ubaka.
materials: black t-shirt, nails, safety pins, corks, zippers, rainbow pin, glue

I’m wrapping my PostPunk Cultures courses on the British 1980s this week. And I’m wrapping my head around

student DIY project for punk earrings
Anti-Domesticated Earrings, by Chandler Mordecai.
materials: metal hoop earrings, bread clips, keys, dog tag, measuring cup, buttons, bulldog clip, thread spool, sewing thread, zipper, safety pin, hairpin, can tab

the amazing work my students did for their DIY craft projects. Our syllabus sampled fiction, poetry, film, TV, and popular music. We also read cultural analyses of subcultural style, song lyrics, historical revivalism, Black Britishness, and queerness. We watched The Slits smash a car in Derek Jarman’s film Jubilee, and we watched Vyvyan smash all manner of things in The Young Ones. We parsed the disconsolate punk in Michael Hofmann’s poem “Body Heat,” considered the object relations in Julian Barnes’s Metroland, plumbed the depths of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s “Bass Culture,” felt the frisson of Angela Carter’s Bloody Chamber stories. We also attended the 20th anniversary of The FEST, Gainesville’s punk and underground music weekend.

DIY punk shoulder pads with nails
Don’t Lean on Me Shoulder Pads, by Vix Gutierrez.
materials: vintage shoulder pads, nails, ribbons, glue.

To link the course directly to the music festival and to punk’s DIY aesthetic, I designed an assignment in which students made body art they could wear to FEST 20. I wanted the DIY project to tap the bricolage aspect of punk that Dick Hebdige discusses. He notes how “the appropriated objects reassembled” by punk and other subcultural bricoleurs could turn everyday items into symbolic warfare. Punks transformed the domestic diaper pin into edgy facial fashion. One of my students sutured a ripped t-shirt with safety pins, repairing identities torn asunder by mainstream culture.

A student-turned-bricoleur deconstructed domesticity by freighting earrings with tiny household items that reflected traditional “women’s work.” Turning women’s shoulder pads inside-out, another student punked an 80s symbol of hard, corporate femininity into spiked outer-wear that would repel shoulder sobbers. Punk frontwoman Poly Styrene made a plastic bag into a musical rebuke to consumer culture. In parallel fashion, a student assembled an outer “anti-bra” from corporate lanyard ribbons.

student DIY project for a punk outer bra
The Anti-Bra, by Kayla Conde.
materials: corporate lanyards, keychains, playing cards, pin, VIP pass.

Since the punk’s battle cry was “No future!”–and climate change has us worried about our planet’s future–I wanted to build sustainability into my DIY assignment. And so I partnered with The Repurpose Project, a creative reuse center that diverts trash from local landfills. After consulting with Repurpose staff about a price point that would give students a fairly wide choice of materials, I gave each student $7.00 to purchase items for their body art. (This was my creative way of donating to Repurpose this semester.)

Repurpose staff also suggested that I give students an additional constraint: requiring at least 2 items from the Candy Shoppe section, which displays “trash-treasure” items that usually end up in the landfill. Many of these items are plastic. My assignment allowed students the option of combining Repurpose items with materials they already had on hand. For example, they might ‘punkify’ a vest, or a glove, or pair of shoes. After assembling their body art, students submitted photos + a 250-350 word Maker Statement. Some students chose to wear their body art to FEST 20.

In our informal feedback session in class, students found my DIY Body Art assignment as much of an outlier as I did. This is not the kind of thing students expect to do in an English Department class. They enjoyed making something with their hands instead of on their screens for a change. My students agreed that doing punk gave them a fuller sense of the texts we were studying. The project also got them out into our community, and it got them thinking about repurposing as a way to reduce waste. Some found that the DIY project brought a material sense to their writing process that was proving useful. These projects helped me to see how punk can be a sustainable and resourceful practice that we can take into our classrooms–and into our future. – MB

Containers full of small discarded items at The Repurpose Project
Assorted items at the Repurpose Project’s Candy Shoppe section, which rescues “trash-treasures” that usually end up in landfills.

(Re)sources:
All student work published by permission.
Kayla Conde, The Anti-Bra. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Chandler Mordecai, Anti-Domesticated Earrings. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Vix Gutierrez. Don’t Lean on Me Shoulder Pads. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.
Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style. (1979. Routledge, 1987).
Roy Udeh-Ubaka, Caged Heart. PostPunk Cultures Project, Fall 2022.

1950s Yearbook Highlights: Tapping Digital Archives for Student Projects

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1950s coed posing by a red convertibleDo you remember how it felt to begin another full semester of remote learning in January 2021? While my students were scattered and attending class through their laptops or phones, I was facing my first semester teaching on Zoom and Canvas. I wanted to find a way to do group projects for my undergraduate course on the American 1950s (Desperate Domesticity). And I wanted to find a way for my students to feel included in their campus culture.

Since we were all learning remotely in the pandemic, we connected to campus by exploring1950s college students in library digitized versions of 1950s yearbooks on the University Archives website. (UF’s yearbook was called The Seminole back then.) Time traveling through these yearbooks augmented students’ understanding of the time period they were studying. We considered the rise of suburbia and the nuclear family, gender roles and gender rebellion, consumerism and corporate culture, the civil rights movement and alternative domesticities. The time period seemed strangely relevant to our own as we were spending more time cooking, cleaning, and hunkering down at home. We were living our own modes of desperate domesticity.

stage actor applying makeupMy students curated 1950s UF yearbooks for their Highlights, which you can now find on the University Archives projects page. (Click here)

I invite you to explore their takes on their 1950s counterparts and postwar campus culture. If you click on the 1955 yearbook, you’ll find my DIY guide to teaching with yearbooks. We discussed the 1955 issue in class, thinking about what kinds of information and insights yearbooks can offer. For example:

Where might you fit into the UF campus culture this yearbook depicts?
Are there ways you think you would not fit in?
What aspects of student life do you find missing in this yearbook? Who is missing?
What are key ways your life would change if you attended UF in the 1950s?

We invite you to time travel with us through our 1950s Yearbook Highlights project.

My students and I are grateful to our University Archivist, Sarah Coates, for virtually visiting our Zoom squares and hosting our projects on the website. I also thank her predecessor Peggy McBride for showing 1950s yearbooks and other campus artifacts to my previous classes. – MB

1950s male college students outside a restaurant

What Is Sustainable Pedagogy?

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Student architectural modelThe Humanities have become a sustainability study in these STEM-driven times for higher education. How does our hive survive the academic climate changes of a shrinking professoriate, curricular compression, and a nomadic job market? How do Humanities workers maneuver within and across our smaller footprints at public institutions? My Spring course took into account these changes. I designed “Modernist Studies & Pedagogy Workshop” for graduate students in our PhD and MFA programs. In choosing materials, I took into account my students’ diverse interests and career paths. These initial findings are preparatory material for a design review.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Resourceful. Materials-driven, my seminar incorporated modernist literary, critical, and visual texts; short essays about teaching; resources from our campus museum and library; teaching and conference materials I’ve made; materials from conference colleagues. I included teaching materials from other graduate students and from colleagues in English, Art History, Architecture, the Harn Museum of Art, and UF Libraries. My students worked with these shared resources, and they shared each other’s work. We practiced a renewable resourcefulness.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Cross-Campus. Partnerships I have formed across campus proved as crucial as my expertise in designing my seminar. The campus became our campus unit. We ventured across three colleges: Liberal Arts & Sciences; Arts; and Design, Construction & Planning. Interdisciplinary work requires physically crossing over to our colleagues in other disciplines and consulting with them. Through conversations we discovered that we were teaching some of the same materials.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Collaborative. Within our seminar room my students workshopped Beta assignments for future students and draft instructional resources for our campus museum. As the seminar emerged through our texts and campus partnerships, we became a pedagogy ensemble. We offered a roundtable presentation on teaching close reading for our department’s graduate organization. We visited an Art History class before we team-taught it. We were team taught by an undergraduate architecture class.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Creative. Much of our seminar work involved making instructional materials, generated from broad keywords that did not constrain our thinking. For example: Write an actual assignment about Cities that you would give your own students in a college-level course (or type) of your choice. Think of your Assignments as prototypes or Beta assignments. The idea is to generate materials that we can workshop, refine, and use. Connect your assignment to at least one primary text on our syllabus. This was the most creative work many students had done in a seminar.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Ethical. All teaching materials were shared by permission within and beyond my seminar. Our cross-campus consulting proceeded by outreach and invitation. Where possible, we offered resources in exchange for those we received. We shared our resources; we made new resources; I offered to visit my colleagues’ future courses. Through such ethical practices, Humanities workers sustain one another.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Beyond-the-Book. I have taught and benefitted from book-oriented seminars. Yet if Humanities departments are now envisioning beyond-the-book dissertations, shouldn’t seminar design take this into account? My seminar did not conform to the standard production line: seminar paper > journal article > dissertation > book. Using modular forms, my seminar assignments were outward-facing toward classrooms, conferences, journals, museums, and the public. Such assignments are resourceful for jobs within and beyond the academic market.

Sustainable Pedagogy is Repurposing. I tell all of my graduate students that everything they write or make in their coursework should have at least one afterlife. My debut pedagogy seminar-workshop practiced repurposing, opening new synergies between our academic writing and our teaching. We can repurpose our student assignments into blog posts, conference papers, publications, and museum guides. We can transpose academic writing into crossover writing. We can transport a module from something we’ve made to something we are now making.

(re)Source
I took this photo in the Architecture Teaching Gallery on Feb. 12. There was no label, so I cannot credit this model’s maker. Resourceful in its available materials (wire, wood, paper), the design offers an inventive prototype. The stained plywood marks the material’s prior states as it supports a new geometric form. A fitting figure for the work of sustainable pedagogy.  –MB

  • I wrote this post at the 2019 Humanities Writing Retreat, sponsored by UF’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere.

 

What If my Students Don’t Like a Text?

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WhatIfAs my unit’s Director of Graduate Student Teaching, I write an advice column for my staff. I generate my topics from their questions and my own experience. Here’s this week’s post. –MB

At this point in the semester, many of us are hitting the outlier, experimental, or difficult text on our syllabus. We’ve built our students’ interpretive skills, and we’re now taking on a literary, critical, or visual text that pushes the boundaries in some way. Something that augments our students’ perspective on our course topic. I typically do this very thing, but sometimes my outlier text falls flat. This week’s topic is What if my students don’t like a text I’ve assigned?

At some point, we’ll all hit a week like that. Here are some strategies I’ve used when it happens to me:

  1. ​Do a Poll Call and ask students to give a 1-word reaction to the text; don’t let them repeat what’s already been said. OR you could ask them for a 2-word response, and have them submit it to Canvas or a Google Doc so they can see the results come in. Tap this energy and map the results; discuss.
  2. Negative reviews tend to be the ones we most enjoy reading. Give students 5 minutes to write “3 Things I Hate about this Text,” imageand let them share one with the class. Ask if anyone didn’t hate (or even liked) some of those things.
  3. Ask students to describe how reading/viewing this particular text requires a different process, and talk about it. Shift their focus from what happens to how it happens.
  4. Ask students to consider the risks/benefits of the writer/creator’s choice to make the text that way. Then consider which outweighs which, and why.
  5. Tap one of the text’s outlier aspects, and discuss it. For example, if the text has an atypical protagonist or speaker (or a collective protagonist), talk about how that maker choice affords a different perspective than what we usually get. Does the text take us indoors when we expect more outdoor scenes (or vice versa)? Does the text present more everyday life than dramatic moments? Is the text disjunctive instead of linear? Does it defy genre categories? Use such differences to consider what things we miss when we read/view a text with typical choices.

Remember that it’s not our job to get students to like everything we assign. We all have texts we love to hate. Thumbs down needn’t shut down our class discussions; it often opens them up. –MB

ArchiTextures: Stories and Stanzas

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storiesWhen a building stands complete and in use, it seems to want to tell you about the adventure of its making. – Louis I. Kahn

What manner of building shall we build? –Wallace Stevens, “Architecture”

I’m in my nine-windowed room in downtown Columbus, OH, where this year’s Modernist Studies Association conference just wrapped. It’s a generative space for thinking about the poetics of architecture and my opening conference session: the Modern Architecture & Narrative seminar co-organized by Katherine Fama and Anne Fogarty of University College Dublin. (They formed the Architecture and Narrative research group).

In these times of STEM-driven models of higher education, Humanities work tends to signify as narrative-based knowledge that brings stories to data. Architecture reminds us that stories are also material levels of a building. And like poems, architecture also manifests in discrete units called stanzas: a mode of making that includes yet moves beyond narrative structures.

The seminar’s papers expanded the Architecture Narrative Seminar leadersword narrative to include fiction, urban and cultural history, and the history of architecture as a discipline. Some of the seminar participants were educated as architects; invited speaker Kirin Makkar teaches in a department of Architectural Studies. (Co-organizers Fogarty & Fama appear here in the center, flanked by invitees Victoria Rosner & Makkar.) We brainstormed the powers & limits of collaboration, “the architectural Humanities,” domesticity, iconoclasm, functionalism, city planning, fabrication, flanerie, spatiality. We went beyond architecture as metaphor. I told the story of my recent undergraduate course Modern American Poetry & Design, which linked to a Design Studio course in UF’s School of Architecture. (I brainstormed this parallel pedagogy with Charlie Hailey.)

For me, entering UF’s Architecture Teaching Gallery is like entering a modernist poem in the process of its own making. I recall Wallace DistortionOfLightStevens’s phrase stanza my stone in “The Man on the Dump”–a modernist rendition of repurposing and Makerspace platforms. And so I offer these ArchiTextural building blocks toward new concepts, new structures, new pedagogies:

  • * The narrative of modernist writing and architecture is modular, not linear. DoorHinge
    * For modernism and design manifest process; architecture becomes a verb.
    * A building is a structure and a making.
    * The city’s physical, social, and mythic spaces generate modernist writing and architecture.
    * The route of modernist poetry and architecture is repurposing.
    * The ethics of modernist poetry and architecture is sustainability.
    * For the domicile and the junkyard are generative spaces for dreaming and design.
    * Poets, architects, and new modernist pedagogies create Maker Spaces.
    * ArchiTextures generate designs for future Humanities.

SOURCES:
Louis I. Kahn, “Silence and Light.” 1970.
Wallace Stevens, “Architecture.” 1918.
Window scene, Hilton Columbus Downtown. 2018
Architecture and Narrative seminar at MSA 2018
Steven Ramirez, “Distortion of Light.” 2018. (Assembly Matters, Mediation of Light and Mediation on Matter. UF Advanced Graduate Studio 1, taught by Lisa Huang)
Lissandra Dyer, “Door Hinge.” 2018. (Modern American Poetry & Design, taught by MB)

–MB

Hearing the Whole Choir in Your Classroom

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I’ve recently assumed an administrative position that involves mentoring over 100 graduate teaching assistants. They include new and seasoned instructors. They include MFA and PhD students who teach a range of materials from creative writing and literature to critical theory and media studies. Each week I offer them teaching tips through email. Here’s my latest post, which invokes choral singing to think about classroom dynamics:

Many of us like to use small-group work in our classes for a number of reasons: it helps more introverted students participate, it allows the class to consider multiple questions simultaneously, it conserves some of the teacher’s energy. In this mode, the teacher becomes a facilitator. Yet leading the class is also important:  it focuses your students’ collective energies. And your students get to hear more of their peers’ opinions, not just the individual group leaders’. It’s good to be the conductor, too!

Here’s what Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” sounds like when the Alto part gets emphasized:

And here’s what it sounds like with a Full Choir:

https://youtu.be/_i224xsGmv4

Taking on the conductor’s role in the classroom can be daunting sometimes. As you know, a full-class discussion can move in directions you didn’t anticipate. But it’s good to hear the whole choir in our classrooms, even if we don’t conduct it every session. These tips can help:

  • Mentally count to 10 when you ask a question. It takes longer for a roomful of people to process something than for 3-5 people sitting together.
  • If you’re still getting blank faces, break down your question. Sometimes we’re not aware of how complicated our discussion questions really are.
  • If you stacked up more questions than you can cover in conductor mode, try throwing out 2 short ones together, asking students to respond to one or both.
  • Don’t be afraid to scratch a question and try a new one.
  • If several students raise their hands at once, queue them All up first. Then call on them one-by-one.

So go ahead and grab your baton in your classroom. Instead of working individual parts, you’ll hear the whole choir.  –MB

Dubbing the Page: Teaching Linton Kwesi Johnson

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lkjmoretimeThis week I taught Linton Kwesi Johnson again in my PostPunk Cultures seminar on the British 1980s. (I also teach him in Modern British Poetry). Each time I return to Johnson, also known as recording artist LKJ, his work reorients my understanding of how a poem can happen on the page. Take, for example, the opening to one of his poems about the 1981 Brixton riots, “Di Great Insohreckshan”:

it woz in april nineteen eighty wan
doun inna di ghetto af Brixtan
dat di babylan dem cauz such a frickshan
an it spread all owevah di naeshan
it woz truly an histarical occayshan

(You can see the whole poem and hear LKJ read it here.) Dubbing the page, Johnson’s language and rhythms enrich the poem’s sound effects by transferring reggae music to the poetic line. In the process, he dubs Jamaican creole over the U.K.’s populist traditions, remixing the broadside ballad with Black British vernacular and Caribbean culture. In 1977 Johnson marked the emergence of what he called Dub-lyricism: “a new form of (oral) music-poetry, wherein the lyricist overdubs rhythmic phrases on the rhythm background of a popular song.”

The language Johnson uses in “Di Great Insohreckshan” usually makes more sense to non-speakers when they hear Johnson performingLKJ reading it (listen to a musical rendition here). Encountered on the page, individual words can confuse many of my students–although in this format a word can suddenly spark into linguistically adventurous meanings. For example, the histarical occasion of “Di Great Insohreckshan” is historical and hysterical at once: weighted with a deep history of violence, yet bubbling with the ludic energy of a reggae bass line. Naeshan widens its vowels, pushing against the restrictive spaces of the Nation as well as the page. Insohreckshan signals that the great event Johnson’s poem recalls requires an even greater reckoning. Such use of diction bamboozles standard distinctions between the vernacular and the avant-garde.

Linton Kwesi Johnson presides over his page like a dexterous DJ. In my seminar, the poems about Brixton seemed to bleed off the page into this week’s front page news about Charlotte, North Carolina. We marveled at how the revalueshanary language of this Tap Natch Poet strikes at the heart of these times.  –MB

SOURCE for quotations:
Linton Kwesi Johnson, Mi Revalueshanary Fren: Selected Poems. Introduction by Russell Banks. Ausable Press, 2006.

Which Teaching Persona Are You?

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Here’s a conversation starter I tried out for new TA Orientation, co-sponsored by UF English and the University Writing Program. Feel free to play along! Whichever teaching persona you are–or most decidedly aren’t–have a great Fall semester.

Which Teaching Persona Are You?

  • Mr. Feeny, Boy Meets World. You care deeply about your students, yet you’re convinced that pop culture and technology are ruining education. Bring back Gutenberg’s generation!
  • Ms. Norbury, Mean Girls. You’re hip and empathetic, and you’re a pusher. You might get too involved in your students’ emotional entanglements. Make sure you have a life, too! But hey, you’re Tina Fey.
  • Mr. Garvey, Key & Peele. You know that class begins with Roll Call, and you’re not going to make that boring. No way. You do things Your way no matter what, keeping it real. Present!
  • Ms. Halsey, Bad Teacher. Rules? really? And boundaries? What boundaries? Ratemyprofessors.com doesn’t have enough chili peppers for you. Have you thought about a different career choice?
  • Professor Sandiford, Art School Confidential. Theory head? High-concept artist? You dazzle with your brain waves, and pique with your critique. Some students will wilt when you deconstruct their work. It’s hard being John Malkovich.
  • Professor Snape, Harry Potter. You’re a master at your craft, and your first loyalty is to your profession. Students annoy you when they don’t follow your rules. They may hate you, but you’re really doing this for their own good. Your snark tops Sandiford’s.
  • Professor Sprout, Harry Potter. You think hands-on teaching is best, even if it’s hard to keep your hands on those mandrakes. You really know your stuff, so you can get away with a little mischief in your class.
  • Professor Trelawney, Harry Potter. You’re a free spirit, and you’re in touch with the spirits. You go your Own way even if others don’t respect what you’re teaching–or wearing. Organizational skills are a challenge.
  • Mr. Finn, School of Rock. You could have been a rock star, so you tried teaching instead. You live through your students with your students, pushing them in new directions. You’d rather give out gold stars than grades.

–MB

Sonnet Ascent! (a teaching adventure)

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StudentsStairs
Students ascend Century Tower

Imagine arranging your students in vertical rather than horizontal space. Imagine them traversing the tower stairs in iambic rhythm, working the meter into muscle memory. Imagine composing a carillon piece from sonnet forms, and parsing sonnet forms through musical notation. Crossing artistic media–and crossing the street from our classroom building to UF’s Century Tower–my Modern British Poetry class recently embarked on a Sonnet Ascent with carillonneur-composer Mitchell Stecker, a graduate student in Musicology. You might say we took poetry from the ivory tower to the bell tower.

Carillon clavier. Photo by Joselliam Urbina
Carillon clavier. Photo by Joselliam Urbina

Proposition A: Inviting poetry survey students to become sonneteers expands the experience of reading formal poems. This is an especially effective pedagogy for British poetry because modern British poets tended to stay in form more often than their American counterparts. (The sonneteers on our syllabus are W. B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, W. H. Auden, Philip Larkin, and Carol Ann Duffy.)

Photo by Joselliam Urbina
Photo by Joselliam Urbina

Proposition B: Generating a musical composition from traditional sonnet forms expands the possibilities for sequencing 21st century music. The aim is not to set a poem, but to transpose a poetic structure into a musical one. The challenge for this carillon piece is to avoid monotony, as the musical equivalent of rhymed words would be repeated notes. How to rethink sonic repetition in patterned forms?

Proposition C: Hearing a musician talk about the creative process of working with sonnet forms can inspire poetry students with their sonnet-making.

Proposition D: Constraint does not close off creative expression.

Excerpt of Stecker's compositionSonneteering and sonatinas. My students had already acquired sonnet-Slide Lecture excerptmaking gear in the form of technical resource sheets. Now they needed to think about form itself in an unexpected way. Why would someone write new music based on old literary forms? Did the constraint present obstacles or limitations?

On Sonnet Ascent day, we warmed up by marching in place as students spoke in impromptu iambic rhythm when I pointed to them. Stecker then discussed his carillon composition in our classroom, focusing on the Shakespearean sonnet movement he would play for us in Century Tower. (The other movements are based on Dantean and Petrarchan sonnet structures.) Here are excerpts from Stecker’s slides. Students asked him questions about his creative process, the layout of the carillon clavier, and how one plays the instrument. We all made an expedition to Century Tower, learning more about UF’s carillon and exploring the soundscapes we made in the 11-flight stairwell. (Later, I recalled the 11-line English stanza form called the roundel.) At the top of the tower, Stecker debuted his composition for my students.

Stecker performs the new composition. Photo by Joselliam Urbina
Stecker performs the new composition. Photo by Joselliam Urbina

 

Claire, MB & Stecker. Photo by Joselliam Urbina
Claire, MB & M. Stecker. Photo by Joselliam Urbina

After making their Sonnet Ascent, my students have gained their rhythmic feet. I look forward to hearing them perform their summer sonnets on our last day of Modern British Poetry.

Never had I more
Excited, passionate, fantastical
Imagination, nor an ear and eye
That more expected the impossible
—  W. B. Yeats, “The Tower” (1927)

Sources:
Digitized Polaroid photos by Joselliam Urbina.
Lecture slides by Mitchell Stecker.
W. B. Yeats, Selected Poems and Three Plays.
All recognizable people pictured gave permission for this post.
*The linked YouTube video is Benjamin Britten’s setting of Wilfred Owen’s Shakespearian sonnet “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” from War Requiem (1962).
–MB