Update: Berkeley Alum's Play Performed at Kennedy Center

In March 2010, we wrote about the return to Berkeley of the wildly successful play The Domestic Crusaders, by Wajahat Ali. Ali’s play was recently performed at the premiere theater venue of  the nation’s capital, the Kennedy Center — and to quite a response.  This video from the production shows both the first act  and Wajahat’s narration of the play’s Berkeley origin.  Additionally, the script of the play will be published by McSweeny’s next month; copies can be ordered here.

Recent Grad Describes Writing Life After Berkeley

In what follows, Margaret Boehme, who graduated from Berkeley in 2005 and now writes for the NPR program The Writer’s Alamanc, reassures her parents about her writing career.

***

My well-meaning parents, concerned about the security and stability of their middle child, seem somewhat incredulous of my claims that I am gainfully employed, given that my daily habits appear strikingly similar to those of my undergraduate days at Berkeley, where I was once a practicing English major.  “When are you going to get a real job?,”  they enquire with faces full of loving earnest.    I try to tell them that I have a real job – as a writer – but people have these pre-conceived notions about writers which are really very hard to repudiate, much less vanquish.

Versed in the empirical school of thought, my scientist-parents make the following observations which they point to as evidence of my perpetual Berkeley English undergraduate existence.  Now, as then, I burrow into Bay Area libraries in clothing resembling pajamas, where I hunch over a tiny little screen, zombie-like, oblivious to closing hours and natural disasters, fingers prancing above those qwerty keys, one or the other leg bouncing restlessly up and down.   Now, as then, I surround myself with stacks of bulky literary anthologies and notepads with indecipherable scribbles.  I carry these colossal high-tech black audio headphones which make me look like an independent public radio producer but whose purpose still is to convey the following message: do not attempt to make small talk with me. Copious amounts of coffee, a ritual which had its singular origins in the Free Speech blend, continue to be consumed.  And there are the 2:30 am bedtimes, a pattern developed at the Underground Stacks 8 or 9 years ago, which I can’t or won’t seem to kick.    Some things don’t change.

But then some do.  No longer do I consult the MLA style manual, given that my yellow Labrador ate it, leaving a trail of shredded, meticulously footnoted pages in his wake.   Eschewing dangling modifiers and end-of-sentence prepositions is something I’m no longer so vigilant about.  I take highly presumptuous liberties with verbifying nouns and so forth, but then I think we all do these days (think: “google” and “friend”).   For what it’s worth, strong stand I still against text-message-formatted shortcuts (gr8! Cant w8 2 c u l8r!) outside of the text message medium,  while occasionally proclaiming with great ceremony:   “There is nothing outside the text”just to see who will get the allusion.   If he or she had been a Berkeley English major, it is likely that he or she would.

Aspirations of sophisticated syntax are a thing of the not-so-distant past, my sophomoric and even seniorific days as an English major. But now, while hunched over a blaring white screen, the little cursor blinking impatiently at me, I tend to ask myself the following:  “Can a hybrid-vehicle driver in the center left lane going 65 miles an hour, who is trying to keep an eye on the hulking SUV in her blind spot and also squinting into the sunshine in her windshield —- can she comprehend this clause I’m composing, and maybe even find it interesting?”   A compound question which lacks written grammatical niceties, true.    A lower standard, perhaps, but in this case a pragmatic one — since I write for radio.  English majors are capable of pragmatism, too, you know.

But I digress.   What I’m here to tell you, Mom and Dad, is not to give any more thought to that sensible biology second major which I had planned to do but did not – I’m on the full-time English major career track now!  And here’s the reassuring part: English majors can find paid employment at which their English major backgrounds are really very useful.  It has happened to the least of us.

I try to explain to my parents that the pajamas that I work in are not unlike those weird monogrammed bathrobe-type white frocks which scientists wear into laboratories and sometimes forget to remove upon exiting.  Tools of the trade.   It is a stretch of a simile, I acknowledge, compounded with litotes.  My parents renew their looks of incredulity and go back to sketching on paper napkins the molecular structure of Curiosity (Cu+) which I deem both Surreal and Fictitious; the familial metaphysical crisis passes.  Security and stability hover in the wings, and I deduce that we all will be just fine.

Anne-Lise François wins 2010 René Wellek Award

The English Department congratulates Professor Anne-Lise François, whose Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford University Press, 2007) was recently named the winner of the 2010 René Wellek Prize.  Awarded by the American Comparative Literature Association (ACLA) every other year, this prize recognizes an outstanding work in the field of literary and cultural theory.  It is one of the country’s most prestigious honors in the discipline; previous winners have included John Guillory, Geoffrey H. Hartman, N. Katherine Hayles, Barbara A. Johnson, Rei Terada, and others.

Open Secrets identifies “an ethos of affirmative reticence and recessive action” in Mme. de Lafayette’s La Princesse de Clèves, Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, and poems by William Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, and Thomas Hardy. François argues that “these works locate fulfillment not in narrative fruition, but in grace understood both as a simplicity of formal means and a freedom from work, in particular that of self-concealment and self-presentation.  Declining the twin pressures of self-actualization and self-denial defining modernity’s call to make good on one’s talents, the subjects of ‘the literature of uncounted experience,’ do nothing so heroic as renounce the ambitions of self-expression; they simply set aside the fantasy of the all responsible subject. “

In its citation, the ACLA described Open Secrets as “an ambitious, beautifully written book, whose richly textured original argument offers an important provocation to the current mores of literary studies.  Enlightenment reason and especially literary criticism are dedicated to the idea that everything should count, and the most diverse schools of criticism train us to let nothing escape.” Yet passed by or uncounted in these several emphases on event or plot – as well as in anti-Enlightenment revaluations of passivity as the fundamental task of the ethical subject – are moments that promise a different ethos: just “letting be,” imagined without a heavy ethical burden.  Francois calls for “a mode of theory that values what is visible and appreciable over what can be quantified and disclosed.”  Marc Redfield, Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University, has called her book “one of the most important publications in its field in many years,” and other scholars have registered its implications in similar terms: as “something like a new paradigm for literary study” (Ian Balfour, Professor of English, York University); as a book that “no reader concerned about the ‘nothingness’ of literary reflection can lightly pass by” (Geoffrey Hartman, Sterling Professor Emeritus at Yale).

Recent Alumna wins National Poetry Series

This past September, Berkeley alumna Laura Wetherington (Class of ‘04) was notified that her manuscript A Map Predetermined and Chance was one of the five winners of the National Poetry Series’ Open Competition.  The Open Competition was established in 1978 to recognize and promote excellence in contemporary poetry by ensuring the publication of five books of poetry a year through a series of participating publishers. Five distinguished poets each select one winning manuscript for publication.  In a moment of well nigh poetic coincidence, Berkeley Professor Cecil Giscombe selected Laura’s manuscript, despite not having known her while she was an undergraduate here.  Her book will be published by Fence Books in the fall of 2011.

Laura is a Virginia native, but moved to California where she attended Cabrillo College before coming to Berkeley.  She is also a graduate of the University of Michigan’s MFA program. She co-founded and co-edits textsound.org, an online journal of experimental poetry and sound; she currently teaches creative writing at both Eastern Michigan University and in the University of Michigan’s New England Literature Program.

Laura describes her book as “fairly short, as books go – about 50 pages.”  It was written over the course of 6 years, and she says that a few of the poems come out of the time she spent at Berkeley.  It’s a varied work that is split into three sections.  The first is rather sexually explicit with frank images of gendered bodies.  She wrote it, she said, “as a response to the many talented male writers who refer to their manhood as a metaphor for their genius. If genius = genitals, I’m putting my bid in here.”  The second section consists of a series of “vaguely dark” poems that address the violence we do to one another, while the third section is a long poem “meditating on cultural otherness and war.”

Laura describes the motivations of the poems in this book as an attempt to “drive the grammar engine off the tracks. The book overall, I would say, grapples with the difficulty of relating and sharing experience, usually in the context of intimate relationships.”  She went on to list a number of questions that sparked her composition: How can a person feel at one with another and yet never fully inhabit their perspective? If subject and object are never able to occupy the same cognitive space, what does this imply about one’s capacity for empathy? How does one ever get to know someone else? What constitutes a satisfying human connection?
Laura has also had some of her poetry appear in online publication.  Two of her more sexually explicit poems appear in Verse magazine and follow below, while others have appeared in Oxford Magazine and Just Magazine.  Please join us in congratulating Laura on a very fine achievement and a promising career in poetry.

In the day I dream in future tense: past sedative plus perfect

the present is a pasture:
a funny joke about pointers. it points to itself.
my vagina is a closed circuit television.
but how can one question with a period.

there is no narrator, no barrier.
I know how to see with my cells.
oscillate does not mean vacillate. both could mean masturbate:
my vagina is an electrical engineer.

Quiet people are crazy in bed

All orgasm is just me clapping for myself on the inside.
We are sound waves reverberating in the chambers of our skin.
We are sound whales crooning the universe in.

Alumna Makes a Therapeutic Career out of Literary Study

When Ilene Wolf first stepped onto the Berkeley campus as an undergraduate over twenty years ago, she was a littleoverwhelmed.  From upstate New York, Ilene was beginning the long and sometimes difficult project that many college students face: breaking away from one’s family and creating one’s own identity as an independent adult.  She jumped into courses at Berkeley from a number of departments; so many things interested her, but she wasn’t sure how she was going to use what she was learning.  She eventually ended up in the English Department, a decision which – perhaps unexpectedly – has had major influences on the trajectory of her career.

As Director of the Drama Therapy Institute and a certified marriage and family therapist, Ilene currently practices in San Francisco, Mill Valley and San Rafael.  Her specialization in drama therapy is in what one might call a particularly “literary” form of counseling.  This technique involves intense role-play sessions in which patients are able to try out different ways of relating to the circumstances and people in their lives.  As the therapist, Ilene works as a kind of “director” of this unscripted interaction that allows the people involved to access parts of themselves which they aren’t always willing to acknowledge.  By “performing” these parts and acting them out, they have the chance to move beyond what Ilene calls “an encrusted self-image” that often hobbles people from creating the life they want to live and doing what they want to do.

Although Ilene studied the Drama Therapy technique at Antioch College and Strategic Therapy, involving both brief solution-focused practice and narrative therapy, at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, she began developing the skills she brings to her current work in the classrooms and corridors of Wheeler Hall.  As an English major, she learned how to read a character and was schooled in the workings of narrative.  These are lessons she still uses today as she asks her patients to construct a story about themselves and create a meaningful and significant persona to try on.  Her study of literature allowed her access to words that, she says, “cut to the quick” and groomed her to be a speaker in any context.

She particularly remembers the way in which Professor John Bishop invested himself in her writing, how his sensitive comments showed the awareness he had of her vulnerability and the care with which he approached her.  As a fellow native of upstate New York, Professor Bishop was charmed when she brought him back some apple cider from a trip home and, she recalls, immediately drank some out of an old, dusty mug he had sitting on his bookshelf as a gesture of his good will and openness.  This kind of teaching became a model of Ilene as she moved into the world of counseling and therapy.  She wants to teach her patients to learn to trust their own voice and question the stories they tell rather than themselves.  Her work now, like Professor Bishop’s then, is to facilitate others’ creativity, something she achieves both in her counselor-patient interactions and in the workshops she runs to train therapists in integrating drama therapy into their practice.

People often question what one does with a literature degree, and she herself often worried about how she was going to make it relevant to her day-to-day life.  In her combination of literature and psychology, Ilene Wolf has taken her literary education out of the classroom and into the world.  Unplanned though it was, in hindsight, it seems, majoring in English at Berkeley was the most “useful” thing she could have done.

Ilene Wolf, MFT, RDT is the director of The Drama Therapy Institute. Ilene is a consultant for The Worldwide Forgiveness Alliance. Ilene trains students and professionals How to Use Drama Therapy To Get to the Heart of the Matter. She owns Affinity Counseling with offices in San Rafael, Mill Valley and San Francisco.  You can contact Ilene at: Ilene@ilenewolf.com

Professor Cecil Giscombe Wins Henderson Award for Poetry

This past spring, at a meeting of the American Literature Association in San Francisco, Professor Cecil Giscombe was awarded the 2010 Stephen E. Henderson Prize by the African American Literature and Culture Society.  The Henderson Prize recognizes outstanding achievement in literature and poetry.  Past recipients include  Sam Cornish (1995), Ouincy Troupe (1996), E. Ethelbert Miller (1997), Sherley Anne Williams (1998), Clarence Major (2002), Askia Toure´ (2003), Charles Johnson (2004), the poet laureate of California Al Young (2006), Marilyn Nelson (2007), Nathaniel Mackey (2008) and inaugural poet Elizabeth Alexander (2009).

Professor Gicombe gave a heartfelt and humble acceptance speech which follows here:

It’s an unexpected joy for me to be here with you this evening.  Some time ago Aldon Nielsen e-mailed me from State College and said, “If you’re going to be in town Memorial Day Weekend next May I have something I’d like to involve you in at the [American Literature Association] conference.”  I’d written back and said Sure, I’m in town, and here we are.

In the space of Aldon and my subsequent communications and in the spaces between those e-mails, I remembered reading Stephen Henderson’s Understanding the New Black Poetry more than twenty years ago.  I’m thinking in particular of Henderson’s introduction to the anthology, the essay he titled “The Forms of Things Unknown.”  Henderson’s title came to him from Richard Wright, and it had come to Richard Wright, as Harryette Mullen points out, from A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

Early in the essay he casts a broad net in response to the question, “What is Black poetry?”  He comes up with five criteria and then says, “Each of these statements poses certain serious and wide-ranging problems of an aesthetic, sociological, historical, political, and critical nature….I raise them chiefly to stimulate creative discussion.”  And the essay—I re-read it recently—is consistently like this, consistent in its generosity: I mean it opens the field of black writing.  It permits; it generates.  He makes reference to “a poet pure and simple” and then, half a breath later, revises that to a poet “pure and complex.”  Re-reading his work I’m incredibly moved to be receiving this honor.

I stole from Stephen Henderson, the phrase “worrying the line,” the folk expression I encountered for the first time in Understanding the New Black Poetry.  My parents had come from the south and had tried, upon their arrival in Ohio, to distance themselves from the old country.  It occurs—the line—in a poem of mine from the 90s, which I’ll read in a few minutes.

But I wanted to say first that I’m honored to be in the company I’m in tonight—Stephen Henderson himself and also the other recipients of this award that bears his name, people whose work I’ve admired so long.  You know the list.  But I’d wanted to especially underline my debt to Sherley Anne Williams who was the recipient of the Stephen Henderson Award in 1998, the year before she died.  I met her when she was at Cornell in the early 1980s.  My encounter (in my 30s) with the brilliant unwieldiness of her two poetry books—The Peacock Poems and especially Some One Sweet Angel Chile—well, that encounter continues to be a very big presence in my life as a writer.  The books are multiple, the poetry is insistent and vocal and interior and specific—the poetry is beyond category.  I taught one of the whole sections of the second book (Letters from a New England Negro) in the 90s and I still recall the day that two of my best students—Yolanda Whitehead and Cherie Reid—appeared together in my office, very excited and wanting to talk more about the work.  Ms. Reid had a Xerox and I saw that at the place in one poem where Sherley Williams talked about hair, about the ambivalent desire for  “such patient plaiting of my tangled hair” and for a scarf to “cover now/ my wild and sullen head,” Ms. Reid had written one word in the margin, “Beautiful.”

The poem Giscombe promised to read, the one in which he steals Henderson’s line, is itself rather “beautiful” and follows below.  It is entitled “Three Ideas About the Future” and comes from his second book of poetry, Here (Dalkey Archive, 1994).  Please join us in congratulating Professor Cecil Giscombe on this significant accomplishment.

Three Ideas About the Future

1.

No real chance against the hidden facts ahead, the long view

forward into tighter & tighter cadences, to myself on the edge of them

all inscrutable, looking like nothing—

no chance in the ugly face of what’s coming, its moments

hanging over that landscape

(like heat or like the wilderness of voices

—this is a paltry given, this is scant news & no speaker here saying so or has to be

2.

At the edge of some heart

it was my father giving me money, an extra 10

sometimes even a 20 slipped to me at the airport

to keep, he’d say, the ha’nts off you

which was language & not here or here

in the world but words for the attitude that was

& which sd If you can see it coming you can buy a way out

that love alone doesn’t do, empty pockets don’t

3.

In Syracuse a line of Southern Railway boxcars I saw once

January 1978 in truth, uncorrected, each painted

LOOK AHEAD-LOOK SOUTH, the new slogan then

a long fragment of the 1-2-3 disembodied on a siding

the future looking unbearable based on the foreground

(the site, the conditions coupled

& all between that & exactly here ritual

improvised at best, that

or song

that or the touted specificity of winter in upstate NY—

the attitude worries the line through the service belt around Syracuse

like anyplace:

what the line of boxcars says, where

& how it says to look meant

Look at yourself, I saw