Tag: English class

Summer Volta

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment 
(For Gloria Johnson)

Dinner is done, and 
the dishes. Dog has eaten
and gone outside. I sit now
at my desk listening to 

classical music and trying 
to finish writing a quiz 
for American literature this
fall while the sun goes down. 

My phone dings with an
alert, which means I will pick 
it up, and I will get lost for 
20 minutes checking the 

socials, all because I forgot to
silence the damn thing, and so 
it is that right in the middle of
writing the third of four 

possible answers on a 
multiple choice question, I 
learn that a grad school mentor
is retiring, and I am suddenly

struck with a sadness so deep
that I forget to return to the 
question. Instead I sit in my room
while voices from the radio intone

Whitacre’s “Sleep,” which now
sounds like a dirge, and the 
music and the dusk mix with
my memories, and I can see 

the room and the desks, eager
master’s candidates in a 
circle discussing Kazin’s “A 
Walker in the City,” and I 

remember being your
student and how much you 
taught me with nary a
quiz. 

© 2020 Deb Moore, All Rights Reserved

The Emancipation of the Canon

~ Deb ~ Leave a comment 
How many poems should
an undergrad read?  It’s not a
riddle or a rhetorical question 
like licks on a lollipop or the 

number of years it would take
one hundred monkeys to type 
Shakespeare. It is the dilemma
I face again for the 25th

or 42nd time devising a reading
list for American Literature,
1865 to the Present. I’ve
built it, shaped it, tweaked it,

trimmed it. I took out Philip
Roth and added Toni Cade
Bambara. I took out Pound
and added Ellison, de-

colonizing my syllabus piece
by piece, semester by semester.
I add up the numbers one more
time: white men 13, Black men 11,

white women 8, Black women 4.
I cling to Frost but release Eliot,
trade Fitzgerald for Nella
Larsen, and Twain for Chesnutt.

I think about the works we’ve read,
The voices we’ve heard, the ones we
have allowed to shape us, tweak us. 
How much more we learn about

our hidden shames, our hidden 
selves, from Zora Neale Hurston 
and James Baldwin than from
the retyping of Hamlet or the

mimicking of Faulkner. So I pile on
Dunbar and Washington and Dubois,
Wells and Johnson and McKay,
Toomer and Cullen and Wright,

I add in Hayden, Brooks, Morrison, 
Baraka, Lorde, Clifton and Walker,
Wilson and Dove and Kincaid.
It’s a lot, I know. So I try to ration,

pare it down so the students won’t
hate me, but how many Langston Hughes’ 
poems should an undergrad read?  

All of them.


© 2020 Deb Moore, All Rights Reserved