Shakespeare and English Studies

The American Council of Trustees and Alumni , of which Lynn Cheney is the Chairman Emeritus, has recently published a survey of select colleges and universities to draw attention to the absence of Shakespeare in the curriculum of English undergraduate majors. This council laments the decrease in university standards, particularly the movement away from what the council refers to as “a body of important writers, genres, and works that all should know,” making it possible for someone to graduate with a BA in English “without thoughtful or extended study of central works and figures who have shaped our literary and cultural heritage.” The council also expresses surprise and dismay at the kind of courses currently offered in English departments, such as children’s literature, film, theory, and “an array of courses that center on politics, sociology, and popular culture” but not literature.

Although I didn’t attend a university that the US News and World Reports ranks as one of the best, which is the criterion that the council uses in its survey of colleges and universities, I graduated without having had a course in Shakespeare. The English department at Wichita State in the late 1970’s offered three options for a BA, creative writing, English Language and Literature, and English education. The English education degree required Shakespeare because it was necessary for a Kansas teaching certificate in secondary education. Majors in English education, on the other hand, only had to earn 24 credit hours in English whereas majors in English Language and Literature had to earn 30 credit hours. I opted for the more demanding major in English Language and Literature because I didn’t see myself teaching at that time.

In choosing to study English, I wanted to gain what T.S. Eliot refers to as a historical sense. My program largely emphasized poetry, beginning with John Skelton and Sir Thomas Wyatt. When I realized that I would be graduating without having studied 17th and 18th century poetry, I arranged to work independently with a professor who assisted in my reading of John Donne, John Milton (including Paradise Lost), and Alexander Pope. There were still deficiencies in my education because I didn’t complete the course that I started in 20th century American literature; the professor chose to emphasize African-American novels instead of the Harlem Renaissance and modern poets like Robert Frost and Robert Lowell.

A course in Renaissance literature placed greater emphasis on poetry instead of drama, so we read Shakespeare’s sonnets and his two longer poems, “Venus and Adonis” and “The Rape of Lucrece,” but not his plays. Drama hasn’t been my specialty, and I personally haven’t seen the reason or had the desire to study drama. I largely designed and completed my own program of study in college while still completing the requirements for a degree, eventually adding a capstone of sorts to my education by visiting Milton’s cottage in Chalfont St. Giles. While I was attending a high school for military dependents in England, we made a trip during the senior year to Stratford upon Avon, where we saw Anne Hathaway’s cottage and a performance of the Merry Wives of Windsor. Giving Shakespeare more of my attention wasn’t an interest of mine.

I cannot recommend my course of study for everyone. Each institution should offer options in the study of English. Wichita State, I learned recently, has toughened its degree program in English education and still requires a course in Shakespeare for secondary certification. Maybe those colleges and universities surveyed by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni aren't representative of English studies in this country.

Living Life Amid Uncertainty

Those of who grew up in the 1950’s have learned to live with uncertainty and doubt. We were taught to prepare for nuclear bombs. Initially, we were deceived to believe simply ducking down in a school corridor and covering our heads would allow us to outlive the blast; later we came to understand that our bodies would vaporize from the heat, especially those of us who lived in my neighborhood in Glen Burnie, Maryland, which was only a short commute from NSA at Fort Meade.

It’s this uncertainty that led to the turmoil of the 1960’s because when the length of one’s life is not known and when one’s life may be cut short, what’s important is making the most of what we have now. Hedonism, to a degree, is an outcome of this awareness, but so is striving for one’s equal rights.

Those of us who weren’t college material after graduating from high school also recognized that we risked getting drafted into the Army or Marines before being shipped to Vietnam. It was only a matter of time before our birth date would appear in the newspaper as one of those numbers drawn for the draft. My initial attempt at joining the Navy wasn’t successful because of my test scores. I think I would have hated getting crowded onto a ship with so many other sailors and sleeping in a bunk with only a foot of space between my mattress and the bunk on top of mine. I tested for the Air Force soon after and enlisted six months after high school and three months after arriving back in the States from the UK where my father had been stationed.

That familiarity that I had acquired as a child preparing for nuclear war was reinforced in the Air Force when I guarded nuclear bombs. Spending so much time with that kind of weaponry seemed easy at first. Those of us in the restricted area housing jet fighters armed for immediate take-off got together at night, when the fog prevented anyone from outside of the perimeter seeing our movements, and smoked hashish. Even so, it was hard to take life seriously after my discharge. I still kept waiting for that white flash to appear overhead.

It also proved difficult working for anyone else. When I had first started teaching, I mentioned in class one day my job history and included the list of firings and jobs that I left without notice. My students were amused at first but also surprised that I continued to show up three times a week. Knowing they depended on me was what it took for me to become a caring and dedicated teacher.

There have been times since that first semester when I have worried about some of my students seeking revenge because of their grades. Some students take any criticism of their writing personally. I have had students break into tears when they got back their essays. Students have also become aggressive, accusatory, and threatening. My grading has even become harsher since I started teaching online. Whereas I used to think about having to hand back the essays in class and having to face the students afterwards, I now grade more consciously aware of the criteria for each assignment. At the same time, I try to stress the positive in any one essay and provide helpful advice for the next assignment.

Much as I love my family and want the best for them, and much as I like my life, despite the hassles of student loan debt and the academic crapshoot regarding full-time employment, I recognize that the possibility of death always exists, whether it’s from an accident while driving, getting shot when walking to the mailbox, getting shot by a disgruntled student, or anything else. All I can do is make the most of my life while I can.



It’s for this reason that I also get outside whenever I can to take pictures and appreciate nature. I find that taking pictures draws me outside, taking me away from the computer and my student essays. It’s easy staying awake all night to get my grading done; it’s easy getting up after three hours sleep to take to my son to school when I know that the possibility of rest and renewal exists at some later time.

Kneeling in Prayer

I am adding an older post here for the day in which we pay taxes to the government in exchange for whatever it is we get from the government--war, death, stockpiles of nuclear bombs, etc.


Kneeling in Prayer

after the Pygmies
of the Iture Forest

I dropped part of my car outside
Enid, Oklahoma, along U.S. 64,
almost two years ago. My mechanic

gives it, maybe, another year.
The rust crunches away at its body,
peeling off strips of paint
before it chews through the frame.
My bank account spits out mud

whenever I lift the handle and try
to fill the sink. The IRS offers
to garnish my wages, adding a sprig
of watercress with each check.
Such gestures won't pay my bills.
If I only knew what to awaken,

I would sing sweetly, like droplets
of rain, offering a song each morning,
afternoon, and evening. My only tree,
a twenty year old cottonwood, whose limbs
shaded my window, and whose seeds
floated past like moths, dirtying

the neighbor's yard, was cut down
last summer when she complained
to the town. Nothing else covers me
but the sky. My landlord releasing
the coolant from the air conditioner
lets its cancer spread to clouds
and gnaw holes over Antarctica.

Maybe I should lie down next to you,
placing my ear over your stomach,
to hear a forest waking in your body.
The hourly bells of academe drifting
over the town call us now into prayer.



This older poem of mine appeared in Red Rock Review 13 (2003): 82. The references to the pygmies come from Denise Carmody"s The Oldest God: Archaic Religion Yesterday & Today, which I read when I was an undergraduate and in one of her classes.

Jim Richardson and the Kansas Flint Hills

Jim Richardson’s photographs of the Kansas Flint Hills appear in the National Geographic's April 2007 edition. These same photographs can be viewed at the website for his gallery in Lindsborg. An exhibit of these photographs is also traveling the state, having started in Topeka in March. These photographs were in Olathe at the Great Plains Mall, where I was lucky enough to see them last Saturday, the last day of the exhibit before it moved to Council Grove. Unfortunately, this exhibit won’t be returning to the Kansas City area.

I encourage any one who happens by this blog to click on the link to Richardson’s photographs. Some of the more memorable ones are “Burning at Sunset,” “Fire on the Prairie,” “Under the Milky Way,” “The Golden Hills,” “Patterns of the Spring Burn,” “Flowing Lands,” “A Sea of Hills,” and “Perennial Partners.”

People unfamiliar with Kansas assume that the entire state is drab and best traversed at night as one drives from Missouri to Colorado. Ian Frazier in Great Plains says that this attitude encompasses not only Kansas but also the entire region because many people, that is, those who haven’t been trained to see, believe that beauty can only exist in the mountains and where the land meets the ocean. Kathleen Norris in Dakota, a book which attempts to disprove the stereotypes associated with that state, makes the same mistake as other outsiders when she refers to “the flats of Kansas.” Actually, Kansas increases in elevation by 1,500 feet as one travels from the eastern edge to its western edge. This upward climb is broken at times and sometimes accelerated when traveling westward by, first, the Flint Hills and, second, by the Smoky Hills. The Smoky Hills are more subtle and not nearly as well preserved because of the bombing range used by the Kansas Air National Guard. One portion of the Flint Hills, on the other hand, remains as undisturbed prairie.

Having grown to love the Flint Hills after moving to Manhattan from Pratt, a small town located on the high plains, my wife says that she wants her body cremated and her ashes scattered on the Flint Hills. Located off of I-35, there is one valley that runs to the north that she has designated as her final resting place.