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from Steph at sugerbuzz
One of the most inspiring courses I ever took was Victorian Poetry with Professor John North. I transcribed more sound bytes in the margins of my notes for that class than I did for any other. This is a man who loves God and who loves poetry, two of the loves of my own life, and so to listen to him speak several times a week was an incredible gift.
I remember attempting to describe this course to my friends. Professor North is an older gentleman who has had many experiences and who has seen much in his life. His students are privileged to hear of his experiences in his classes, and we are even more privileged to be able to listen to the wisdom that he has gleaned from his years on earth. Attending his class was like entering his living room. He invited us in and began speaking, and though he spoke of poetry, he could not help but give us knowledge greater than simply what the poet was trying to say.
Poetry, he says, is a way for us to “read experiences that are like our own, that we can identify with, that affirm ourselves.”
We discussed some of my favourite poets in this class – Tennyson, Hopkins, Arnold, Browning – and through each step of the course, we could see the above-quoted theme carrying through. While discussing Tennyson’s In Memorium and explaining to us why this poem was so popular when first published, North said,
Tennyson explores grief and put into words for people for the first time their internal worlds and emotions.
In Memorium was a poem that Tennyson wrote over the course of twenty years as he mourned the loss of his best friend. We all have these experiences and these “internal worlds and emotions”, but most of us cannot put words to them. With this poem, Tennyson took something that was incredibly well-experienced, but very rarely expressed (that is, grief), and finally put it to words. Poetry touches the ineffable.
After silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
~Aldous Huxley
I would class poetry with music.
I found Professor North’s class to be an incredibly healing one. Through his class, he carried us into the very depths of the poem, often to the core of our souls, inviting us to examine what we found there, and to actually feel the emotions that we carried within us. It wasn’t that he was not content with a surface-level analysis of a poem; it was that remaining on the surface never even occurred to him. He is a man deeply in love with his wife, passionate about his God, and incredibly moved by the pieces he reads, and all of this came through in his lectures.
Poetry gives shape and a voice to our internal world; it affirms us, we are less alone.
The excitement in Hopkins is that his world makes sense. The problem is that oftentimes our world just doesn’t make sense. When the dark sonnets come, we can see that he has made sense in the non-sense. Despite the darkness, there is joy.
Poetry gives us an insight into other people’s hearts and minds, and into our own. It gives all of that shape, brings form out of chaos. We can understand what we never understood before, and through another’s writing, we realize it is true. It is satisfying both to have words for it, and to realize that someone else feels the way that we do. It takes the loneliness out of life.
It’s hard to fight with evil, but consider the consequence of not fighting with evil.
Evil cannot exist on its own; by definition, it is a perversion of good.
Even evil is under God’s authority.
[Poetry helps us to] accept the potential of the future, without rejecting the beauty of the past.
Poetry says far more than the poet knows he or she is saying.
Poetry is so powerful that it affects us to the core, even if we don’t know why.
We often only need to see something or hear something and we are transformed.
Be aware that you can’t study literature without being changed inside, in spite of yourself.
(the above all taken during Professor North’s Fall ‘07 Victorian Poetry class)
M: “You called me stupid!”
J: “I said you weren’t stupid. It was a compliment.”
D: “Well, that depends where you put the comma.”
J: “Ha. I said you weren’t, stupid.”
Dr. Gary Draper was an excellent professor of mine. From what I understand, this past was his last year before retirement. This is what one student had to say about him:
Dr Draper has a one of a kind personality and truly enjoys what he is teaching. It is up to the students if they want to join him in his wonderful world of english or not. He is a hard marker which makes one really feel as if they are earning something in university. Awesome sense of humour and helpful to the fullest.
I’ve always loved writing. From the time I was old enough to hold a pen, I wrote, even before I could form letters. I’ve been telling stories on paper for as long as I could remember, and all of my old notebooks (when they don’t contain the silly “Dear Diary” scribbles of young girls) hold short stories and story ideas. I have easily an entire box of writing on paper, and a lot more in electronic form, but this professor was the first “outsider” (someone who wasn’t family or a close friend) who recognized me as a writer.
The very first class I walked into in my first term of my first year of University was his, and I still remember his opening speech. He walked up to the board and wrote “PLEASURE” in big letters across it, and then turned to us saying that this was why he wanted us to read. Not to analyze it, not to glean some truth from the text (although he hoped we would be able to do that, too). His primary goal in what we were reading was that we would enjoy it. It was a breath of fresh air, because that, after all, is why writers write. There are many who write to make a point, and who have all sorts of hidden messages and meanings, but primarily, writers write to put words to their emotions, and bring enjoyment to their audiences. As an avid reader and an even more avid writer, hearing these sentiments expressed by this professor assured me that it was going to be an excellent term.
I went on to take two more classes from him, and I enjoyed all three, even the Canadian literature class (coming eventually 
), and most of the material we covered. And through his courses, I became a better writer, mostly because he came to expect it of me. I didn’t even realize that he did. I just remember speaking up in class, which I had never done before. His classes were often discussion style. He would take our opinions and ideas and pursue them further, pushing us, seeing what we could come up with. He seemed to learn almost as much as we did in a term, and his appreciation for our contributions encouraged me to contribute more.
The next year, I went to speak with him about a scholarship writing contest. It took him a moment to recall who I was. He asked my name and what class I took with him, and immediately recognition came.
“That’s right!” he exclaimed. “Yes, I certainly do remember you. It’s funny, as soon as I saw you, my first thought was ’she’s a writer’.”
He recognized the distinctness of my narrative voice, and in an assignment where we were given creative license to choose our own topic, I attempted to rewrite the ending of a narrative poem we were studying. He complimented my efforts, but said he had hoped to see more of an adoption of the original author’s tone. I spoke with him after class, and said that I had tried. I complained that I had found it very difficult to silence my own voice.
He said, “Yes, I can understand that. You have a very strong narrative voice.”
High compliments for a writer.
Anyway, the long and short of this post is to say that Gary Draper was an excellent professor; I haven’t spoken with anyone who didn’t enjoy a class with him, and I would highly recommend attending any lecture he might give in the future.
[from Saturday night / early, early Sunday morning]
I have finished Gone with the Wind. It is 1 in the morning.
At 11:30, my mom came in the room, a knowing smile on her face.
“How’s the book going?”
A silly grin was my only response.
“Are you going to stay up to finish it?” she asked.
A guilty grin and a nod.
She chuckled and pointedly glanced at the clock.
“I know,” I said, but maintained my plan.
The title is essentially my response to the tale. The first 400 pages seemed to be building action for the delight of the last 200. Not to say the first 400 weren’t delightful (because they were). But in the last two hundred pages, we see the transformation of the characters, tragedy and anguish, love and passion (and love of every sort: between husband and wife, brother and sister, friend to friend).
I feel so achingly empathetic, and yet completely satisfied in the ending of the book. (If you plan on reading it, don’t you dare cheat by starting there! ). It is simply delightful.
I’m writing this at 1am, but I am going to wait until Sunday afternoon to post it, because I am going to enjoy that still feeling that comes after finishing a truly satisfying book. So Sunday afternoon, I will post this and ask for what I mentioned in my last post. Any suggestions that you have been harbouring as to what book I should add to my reading list I will now gratefully accept! I’m hoping for classics, but if you have any suggestions from any other genre/era, I just might start another list. The only other condition is that it must be a book that you have loved, and (or) it must be one that has impacted you deeply.
Thanks for your recommendations! I look forward to growing my reading list 
Yes, admittedly, the summer is half-over (for those of you operating under the three-term University system), but for those operating by the public school system, the summer is just beginning! Besides, I am getting close to starting book number two, meaning I’ll need to add book number four to my list.
- Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
- The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
- The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
I have about ~200 pages left, which actually is getting close, believe it or not—the book is ~850 pages long. When that happens and I begin reading Dumas’ killer Monte Cristo, I will be looking for another book to add to my list. Please, no suggestions just yet. I feel the addition of another title would be simply too much, even for an avid reader such as myself. They are all monstrously long books. But keep in mind the next classic you think I should dig into. I will announce when I am finished Gone with the Wind (I won’t be able to help it; I’ll be so excited), and you can make suggestions then.
I began reading Gone with the Wind when I was probably ten or eleven years old. I was a very ambitious child, choosing it off the shelf primarily because it was so thick. I’d probably heard adults talking about it at one time, because the title was familiar, and despite any doubts in my ability to finish it, I staunchly maintained that I wanted to read it.
Well, big surprise, I did not finish it. I probably made it about 300 pages in, surprisingly enough, but I know that I didn’t actually process most of it. It is a delightful book because it meanders so. It begins by stating it is a story about Scarlett O’Hara, but as it continues, the plot will pause and tell other people’s stories as well. It told the story of Scarlett’s mother and father, how they came to be in Georgia and how they came to be married to one another. It also meanders to philosophize about the happenings in the book, sometimes taking Scarlett’s perspective, sometimes departing entirely from its heroine and her story. As a child, I must have skipped these parts or read without comprehending, because I don’t remember them at all. But I did remember the plot as I was reading. I also remember trusting Scarlett too much as I read. I remember not liking Melanie much at all, and thinking Ashley felt nothing for Scarlett, mostly because Scarlett said she did not like Melanie, and because, despite Scarlett’s obvious feelings for Ashley, he chose to marry someone else. But as an adult reading it, I can detect the nuances of character that Mitchell put in this story, and the meanderings were some of my favourite parts. I would come to the end of one, be pulled back into Scarlett’s story and be surprised as I was reminded that she was the character I was reading about, not the person the text meandered to. In my first reading, I was Scarlett, resolving whatever dissonance I experienced when her actions or thoughts were completely different from what my own would be by ignoring them, and promptly forgetting about them once the narrative moved past them. Now, I am fully aware of what I don’t like about Scarlett, of what I disagree with and of what I would do differently. But even still, I am held to the narrative, wanting to know what happens next and really hoping that things work out in the end for her, despite her selfishness. Instead of experiencing the tale, I am watching it. And thoroughly enjoying it.
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