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News Articles, with Rus Bowden

3/30/2004


In 1903, following a two-year campaign by her [Emma Lazarus'] friend Georgina Schuyler, "The New Colossus" plaque was placed on an interior wall of the statue's pedestal, where it remained virtually ignored for more than a generation. It was not until the 1930s, when Europeans in droves began seeking asylum from Fascist persecution, that the poem was rediscovered, and with it the growing recognition that it expressed the statue's true intention.

from Smithsonian Magazine: Colossal Ode



Then last May, while surfing the Internet for the first time, [Carolyn] Carty typed "footprints" into a search engine on a whim. The tsunami of results stunned her. (A Google search yields 70,000 hits, including "Footprints" Bible studies, a "Footprints and More" Christian music ministry, mouse pads, screen savers, "prayer rocks," and afghans.) "I couldn't believe all these people had been making millions off my poem all these years," says Carty. "And I never saw a single penny!"

from Beliefnet: Whose 'Footprints' Is It?



Most of all, Tagore was for the Nobel Committee, a true inheritor of the keys to “that treasure house of the East�, rather than a purveyor of bad “Oriental philosophy�.

What loss should I lament now? The loss of a medal, cast in gold, but replaceable by a replica from Stockholm? Or the loss of the idea that Tagore was the first Indian writer to be internationally recognised for his talents?

from Business Standard: 'The distant location of his home'



[Don] West defined and defended a cultural identity without having the baggage of an outsider’s agenda, without having “poverty warriors who play at being poor,� without “Columbuses discovering Appalachia ... Culture diluters, Culture polluters, Culture exploiters, Circuit riding freaks ...�

As he would conclude in his poem “Appalachian Blues�:

“Your Appalachia is not Appalachia/ but a life-style travesty/ a foreign thing!/ Yours was a revolt in patterns/ counter culture/ counter revolutionary/ counter poor people!?�

from Sunday Gazette-Mail: Don West’s Appalachian legacy set out in new collection



[Elinor] Wilbur provided insight into some of Frost's more famous poems, such as "The Road Not Taken," which he wrote for his friend, Edward Thomas.

Thomas and Frost took rambling walks together through the woods and discussed poetry. When they came to a fork in the road, Thomas often could not make up his mind as to which path to take.

"He wrote the poem for Thomas and his indecisiveness," Wilber said. "It has been taken much more seriously over the years, but it was written literally about someone who couldn't make up their mind about where to go."

from The Stamford Advocate: Poet's granddaughter, fifth-graders share love of poems



The world of Basque letters was rocked by a sad piece of news yesterday: the writer Andolin Eguzkitza died of a heart attack yesterday morning in the hospital of Basurto (Bilbo).

from Berria.info: "When it rains in our very depths�



[Spencer Reece's] descriptions -- of people, places and things -- are exactingly detailed without lapsing into floridness. As Louise Gluck, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet who picked Reece from among hundreds of entrants for the Bakeless award, says, "There's nothing fake in the whole book."

Here is Reece on a day's end in Florida: "when the red tile roofs deepen to brown / when the exhausted beach fires with blues / when the hush of the waves reminds us of regrets." And here is Reece on a winter scene in Minnesota: "Snow piles up around the house, thick as pillows. / No people. No music. No invitations. / Plowed roads diminish into tiny zinc strips. / Cold stars snail away."

from The Palm Beach Post: Spencer Reece is at your service



These were variously extreme actions, which aroused considerable hostility, but which the poets performing them knew to be necessary if poetry in English wasn't all to sound like this:

"It is noon; the bells let fall soft flowers of sound.
They turn on the air, they shrink in the flare of the noon.
It is night; and I lie alone, and watch through the window
The terrible ice-white emptiness of the moon.
Small bells, far off, spill jewels like the sound of rain,
A long wind hurries them whirled and far,
A cloud creeps over the moon, my bed is darkened,
I hold my breath and watch a star."

The extract is from Conrad Aiken's "Senlin: A Biography", written by a modern poet who never appreciated the need to modernise diction.

from The Guardian: Polite echoes of other voices



For all this, Ms. Carson said, she is not a poet. "Homer's a poet," she said. "I would say I make things."

Ms. Carson was born in Ontario, and her work evokes a lonely childhood: "My mother's kitchen is dark and small but out the window/there is the moor, paralyzed with ice./It extends as far as the eye can see/over flat miles to a solid unlit white sky."

Her father was a bank manager, her mother a homemaker. The family moved around. Her father eventually developed dementia. "He was standing at the turn of the driveway when I arrived./He had on the blue cardigan with the buttons done up all the way to the top./Not only because it was a hot July afternoon/but the look on his face."

from The New York Times: A Passion for the Classics and, Well, Passion



"You buy a computer and six months later it’s obsolete," [Charlie] Cox said.

Cox bought his manual typewriter in 1977 for $75. He’s never had to upgrade. It’s never crashed or caught a virus. The annual maintenance cost is about $6 for new ribbons.

For him, the added value is in the simplicity.

from TCPalm: Tapping the keys


3/23/2004


A sentence starts out like a lone traveler
heading into a blizzard at midnight,
tilting into the wind, one arm shielding his face,
the tails of his thin coat flapping behind him.
[from "Winter Syntax" by Billy Collins]

from The Journal News: Crowning Billy Collins



Spring came in on a 10-ton truck
of Dixie fruit and grain;
Spring came in on a moving van
in a windless night of rain.
[from "Spring Comes to Evansville, Indiana" by Marian Edith Smith]

from Courier & Press: 'Spring Comes . . .': Poem from yesterday celebrates this special day.



We should have stuff
to show for this: for the days
we've sat together, waiting
for our babies to get over
a tooth, a want, a croupy fever;
to get an hour older.
[from "Plain Work" by Kate Clanchy]

from Sunday Herald: Maternity Words



I wrote a letter about this to Poetry magazine recently. Let me quote myself, if I may. "The story goes that James Dickey grotesquely exaggerated the extent of his combat experience. But that, in the end, has little bearing on the quality of his war poems. This is not a pleasant truth. Some experiences are so devastating or traumatizing that we feel they ought to be spoken of only by those who have experienced them firsthand, who have earned the right to speak by the forfeiture of enormous suffering."

I have more trouble with someone like Sylvia Plath, as I also said in the letter to Poetry magazine. I quoted Seamus Heaney, who said that her poem "Daddy" rampages so permissively in the history of other people's sorrows that it simply overdraws its rights to our sympathy." [--Anthony Hecht]


from National Endowment for the Humanities: The Life of a Poet: A Conversation with Anthony Hecht



But there is a further reason for the souring toward Plath in later biographical works. It is that any number of writers who set out to research her fell in love with her husband. Mainly female, and mainly intellectually iconoclastic, they came into contact with Hughes during their research and gravitated toward him as Plath had, probably for some of the same reasons: his shady sexual history, bad press, enormously articulate intelligence, love of women, carefully timed reticence, and strategically deployed loquacity.

from The Atlantic Monthly: Domesticated Goddess



The wrong question to ask [Don] Paterson is how his poetic voice has developed. "You fall in love with the voice, which only leads to self-censorship. You get up in the morning and think, I'm Scottish, I'm male, I'm white and of heterosexual orientation; I'd better write a Scottish-male-white-heterosexual poem. And there are people who do that. They have too clear a definition of their own voice." He cites Ted Hughes and Robert Lowell. "I used to say that poets shouldn't have a voice until Edwin Morgan corrected me. He said poets should have many voices."

from Sunday Herald: Rhyme Lord



Check them out for yourself and while you're at it, also try the poetry of Wilfred Owen and e. e. cummings.

Owen (1893-1918) was a British poet whose hero was Keats and who wrote gloriously vivid, heart-wrenchingly painful poems about the First World War in Keat?s sensuous, romantic style. The combination of blood and beauty in his poetry makes for some really powerful, disturbing and striking reading.

As for e. e. cummings (1824-1962), he was an American poet loved by teens for his unconventional style, and frank handling of such sensitive and controversial subjects as sex, death and war.

from The Star: Teens drawn to passion



Poet and writer Ali al-Demaini "is being held in a prison in Dammam (in the Eastern Province), but his morale is very high and he said he was being treated in a civilized way," Fawzia al-Demaini reported by telephone from their home in nearby Dhahran.

"But he said that if his release is conditional on pledging not to put his name to petitions, he would not give such a pledge because he is convinced that such pro-reform lobbying is in the interest of the country," she said.

from Middle East Online: Saudi activists demand release of reformists



Educated at Wesleyan and Harvard, [Charles] Olson's work inspired other great poets of the '60s, such as Allen Ginsberg, and though he wasn't exactly in New York or jotting his impressions of trips cross-country, they called him "the big fire source." Though it often takes a dictionary and encyclopedia on hand to understand much of his work (an accompanying guide to the "Maximus Poems" is 800 pages), it is important that the people of Gloucester come to appreciate it, says [Henry] Ferrini.

from North Shore Sunday: His place in history



To mark the anniversary, Daffodils echoed in surround-sound through Dove Cottage, his home in Grasmere in the Lake District, as groups of pupils from local schools recited it more or less simultaneously in William's parlour, bedroom, and guest room.

They were leading an attempt by more than 260,000 children from 1,100 schools on the record for the world's largest poetry reading--in aid of the Marie Curie Cancer Care daffodil campaign.

from The Guardian: Wordsworth's daffs 'toss and reel and dance'


3/16/2004


Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë are without any doubt the greatest sister act in English literature. Among them they wrote a handful of the most admired and widely read novels in English, including two unquestionable classics: Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights. In addition, Emily Brontë has a fair claim as the best British female poet of the 19th century and one of the best poets in English, period.

How did this happen?

from Houston Chronicle: Mythic sisters: Writer explores how the Brontë legend has grown



'I believe that Dostoyevski and Tolstoy refused to meet, though once they were in the same room together.'

'Giant minds have great difficulty in relating to each other or to ordinary mortals. They cannot greet others as equals. So it was between Melville and Walt Whitman and Tchernichovsky and Bialik.' [--Natan Yonatan]

from Jerusalem Post: Poet Natan Yonatan laid to rest Sunday



That--apart from the ÂŁ670,000 that made it possible for him [Derek Walcott] to buy his island home--seems to be the thing which gives him most joy. "I come from a very small island which is not strong, not wealthy. What it does in terms of elevating the . . . not pride, pride is not a good word . . . self-respect, self-consideration, the recognition that the prize brings for the country."

When Ted Hughes died, Walcott expressed some interest in the job of poet laureate. After all, he said, enough black footballers play for England. Some believed that in literary terms he was Hughes’s worthiest successor. However, his relationship with Britain remains ambivalent.

from The Scotsman: Laureate of the Caribbean



One student asked Pinsky how he decides when a poem is good enough to leave alone. The poet said a writer must find a middle ground between a "stupid" acceptance of the first draft and intense self-doubt that can bring writing to a halt. Reading aloud is a sure way of judging quality, he said.

"It's like noodling at a piano, and somewhere in there, you're thinking about the sounds," he said. "It's a physical process."

from The Times Picayune: Former poet laureate shares love of his craft with studentsTulane visitor sits in on writing classes



It knows that the massacre will happen again on the roadside, that the workers in the minibus are going to be lined up and shot down just after quitting time; but it also credits as a reality the squeeze of the hand, the actuality of sympathy and protectiveness between living creatures. It satisfies the contradictory needs which consciousness experiences at times of extreme crisis, the need on the one hand for a truth telling that will be hard and retributive, and on the other hand, the need not to harden the mind to a point where it denies its own yearnings for sweetness and trust.

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: Crediting Poetry --Seamus Heaney



Kyaw San, a poet and journalist with the private cultural magazine Style-thit (New Style), had been detained in the Tharrawaddy prison (100 kilometres in the north of Rangoon). During his questioning, which took place during the beginning of the year 1997, Kyaw San was tortured. He was beaten on the head and is partially deaf as a result of this. This period of questioning, which lasted several weeks, weakened him physically and psychologically.

from reporters without borders: Two journalists released at the end of their sentences. Journalist Win Tin will spend his 74th birthday at Insein prison



Treasury spokeswoman Tara Bradshaw recently told the New York Times that "collaboration on and editing of the manuscripts . . . and facilitation of a review resulting in substantive enhancements or alterations" to them are illegal. The regulations, and correspondence elaborating them, are available for reading on the web site for the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

The logic behind the new rule is that, while publishing is not forbidden under U.S. law, editing and enhancing manuscripts--by illustrating them, for example--makes them more salable, and therefore constitutes an economic service to an embargoed country.

from Hartford Advocate: Hands Off: Bush and Co. use trade rules to block the flow of science and culture from ¨rogue nations.¨ Jail time for editors? It could happen here.



His death was reported on the Web site for English Teachers in Japan. Richard Aaron, his archivist, said that Mr. [Cid] Corman had been in a coma since undergoing heart surgery in January.

Starting with juvenilia in the 1940's, Mr. Corman published more than 150 titles, from hardcover books to slim hand-sewn, rice-paper selections holding 16 poems each.

from The New York Times: Cid Corman, 79, Poet, Editor and Translator Who Lived in Japan, Dies



In one of pop's greatest acts of vindication, and in response to decades of criticism, television has created a counterwar against literacy: While books appear as props on TV, the characters who read and discuss them always signify pretension and pomposity. When Friends' Ross Geller, a paleontologist, even mentions something remotely intellectual, his pals make snoring sounds; Seinfeld's George Costanza and Cheers' Sam Malone, when forced to read a book, discovered movie versions of the same; and whenever a woman (such as Everybody Loves Raymond's shrewish Debra Barone) picks up a book, she is using it to announce her husband's stupidity and to avoid having sex.

from The Globe and Mail: Writers on film: like watching ink dry



Do you remember an Inn, Miranda/ Do you remember an Inn?/ And the cheers and the jeers of the young muleteers/ Who hadn’t got a penny/ And who weren’t paying any/ And the hammer at the doors and the Din?

I could see those young muleteers, as clear as day, never mind that I didn’t have the slightest idea what a muleteer was!

from The Star: Rhymes children can relate to



3/9/2004


Pedro Pietri died on Wednesday at the age of 59. We hear him reading his work in 1968 and Democracy Now co-host Juan Gonzalez reads Pietri’s epic poem “Puerto Rican Obituary.�

from Democracy Now!: Nuyorican Poet Pedro Pietri 1944-2004



I should mention that it was only in this period when it was utterly impossible for literature that I came to comprehend why it was so essential: literature allows a person to preserve a human consciousness.

It can be said that talking to oneself is the starting point of literature and that using language to communicate is secondary. A person pours his feelings and thoughts into language that, written as words, becomes literature.

from Daily Times: Purple Patch: Case for Literature --Gao Xingjian



One of my favourite poets, W. H. Auden, wrote: “poetry makes nothing happen�. When I came to England, at the age of 27, I believed that poetry could make things happen. I had been involved in the China democracy movement in 1989 and I believed that my poetry could be a vehicle for advocating social and political change. Now, my views have changed. [--Liu Hongbin]

from openDemocracy: The Republic of Poetry



"Simin Behbehani doesn't believe in paying attention to a poet's gender -- she believes it is the poetry that is important, regardless of the poet's sex. But in societies like ours, with such differences between the male and female worlds, the works of men and women are different. The most important thing about Ms. Behbehani is that, by virtue of being a woman, she has changed the meaning of ghazal. Ghazal is traditionally the work of a male poet, written for a woman. The man is the poet and the woman is the inspiration. In Simin's ghazals, the roles are displaced. A woman is writing about men, Iran, ordinary people -- this is her inspiration. This is a fundamental revolution in the meaning of ghazal. Simin Behbehani's signature is on each of her poems, even when no name appears. And luckily, Simin Behbehani is a woman," [Farzaneh] Milani said.

from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty: Iran: Simin Behbehani, A Poet For The Ages, Captures Nation's Suffering And Joys (Part 3)



I suspect that the depth of Jewish history in these poems surprised the poet as well. [Jennifer] Barber makes it clear that she is not entirely comfortable with every aspect of Jewish identity. The first half of the book is full of halting, self-questioning moments. A poem called "Opening a Jewish Encyclopedia" starts like this:

I couldn't find the entry I
wanted.
The days of the calendar closed
ranks as though I were the enemy.

from Jerusalem Post: Ghosts of the Inquisition



In another poem, Rumi writes: "every craftsman / searches for what's not there / to practice his craft... Workers rush toward some hint / of emptiness, which they then / start to fill. Their hope, though, / is for emptiness, so don't think you must avoid it. It / contains what you need."

Written poems illustrate this sense of emptiness. What's left out, in the form of line break and negative space -- takes on the same importance as what's there, if not more. We need only consider short poems, or forms like haiku, which have endured for years because of their resonance of meaning.

from Oregon Daily Emerald: Poetry provides access to spirituality, identity



Dr. Seuss created the words "nerd" and "grinch" (there was an obscure 17th century usage for grinch, but Seuss made it mainstream), taught millions and millions of children to read, and almost single-handedly kept the tradition of poetry alive in this country. [Philip] Nel, in fact, calls him "America's most famous poet," and it is hard to think of a better choice.

from San Francisco Chronicle: Hats off to Dr. Seuss. The prankster, polemicist and master of heartwarming verse is more popular than ever.



"Any attempt to broaden poetry's audience is ridiculous. The people who crave it will find it," she [Louise GlĂĽck] said. "You're reaching individual intelligences. The proper gauge is the individual response of the reader."

Children are the exception: "It's important that children hear poems early so that they at least know how to find it," she said. "If something speaks to them in that language, then it becomes graspable."

from The Salt Lake Tribune: Laureate hopeful about poetry's future



Nuno JĂşdice: I have never written poetry thinking of this planetary form of promotion the Internet occupies nowadays. Poetry is an isolated and solitary act where one faces oneself and one's own subjectivity. And it is on this plane that I create it. The publication will eventually give a different destiny to the poem, but naturally that is not part of the writer's creative project. Oftentimes I surprise myself in seeing how a poem or a book follows a certain path I could not have possibly imagined at the time the poem was written.

from Brazzil: Portugal's JĂşdice: A Poet Is a Loner



But once again a jury voted to execute him. That sentence is being appealed.

"I won't be able to write fast enough, long enough, voluminously enough to make up for the stuff I've done," Mr. [Stephen Todd] Booker admitted.

His story does, however, raise questions about poetry (what is it? what is it worth?) and poets (who are they? what do they need?), and about the value of individual lives and capital punishment

from New York Times: A Poet's Spirit Springs to Life on Death Row


3/2/2004


Writer-columnist Muntasir Mamun said, "We receive telephonic threats every now and then. But now after such an attack on Humayun Azad, it is clear these threats are for real. None of us is safe. None should think that these militants will stop after killing a few writers. They will continue their killing spree."

"None should think their silence will save them from attack. We have seen that during the 1971 War of Liberation fundamentalists killed even those intellectuals who kept silent."

from The Daily Star: Writers feel insecure



“I am deeply concerned about the conditions in which Mr [Raúl] Rivero, who is reported to be ill, is being held and I call on the authorities to free Mr Rivero and the other journalists.�

The jury was chaired by Jamaica’s Oliver Clarke, Chairman of Gleaner Company Limited, who declared: “I hope that the international attention the [World Press Freedom] Prize generates, will encourage the Cuban authorities to respect individuals’ basic human right to express their views freely.�

Born in 1945, Mr Rivero is a prominent journalist and poet.

from noticias.info: Jailed Cuban Journalist RaĂşl Rivero Awarded World Press Freedom Prize 2004



On the poets' side, we need a lot less of the post-modern, endlessly introspective, culture for the cognoscenti, self-consciously unstructured work that is geared to winning sinecures, juried prizes, and praise from a tight circle of learned professionals. What's needed, in other words, is less Percy Dovetonsils and more Percy Shelley.

from IntellectualConservative.com: A Call For More Political Poetry On America's Op Ed Pages



In Beginnings, an excerpt of his autobiography included here, [Louis] Dudek says: "I am a poet who at one time infiltrated the university - to see if I could somehow transform the teaching profession. To make it relevant to the concerns of life and of living poetry. I have been a radical reformer in this way - but the radicalism is not destructive, it is to bring back the values of our civilization."

Dudek was also the godfather of Canadian literary magazines and presses. He believed that the establishment of little magazines and small presses were essential in the fight for a civilized society.

from Montreal Gazette: Dudek gets his due: The Canadian Socrates deserves to be better known, not for his sake, but for our own



"At the time, the English critics were hailing everything Larkin was doing, but it didn't make much impact on me. I was looking for something else, and when Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti and Corso and others appeared in America, that was more like the thing that would interest me. There was nothing like that in Scotland, or in England either. I liked the outspokenness of the Beats. When Ginsberg's Howl [1957] appeared, it had words that could hardly be printed at all. I was attracted by the idea of someone taking risks in poetry, which seemed to me the very opposite of what the Larkin lot were doing in England." [--Edwin Morgan]

from The Guardian: Northern lights



"[. . . .] And then when I began to take it seriously, it was because I realize . . . I became politically aware and realised that poetry could say something about the political conditions that we live in and say something about the kind of dreams and aspirations that we have, certainly, that I had and it just happens that other people identified with those dreams and aspirations". [--Benjamin Zephaniah]

from Vanguard: My inspirations come from oppression—Zephaniah, Jamaican born British poet



Owen's poem speaks of the sentry in his platoon being blinded in an attack and the poet placing a candle near his face to see whether his sight was irretrievably damaged:

'Oh sir, my eyes - I'm blind - I'm blind, I'm blind!'
Coaxing, I held a flame against his lids
And said if he could see the least blurred light
He was not blind; in time he'd get all right
'I can't,' he sobbed'.

The skeleton was found with three candles beside it.

from The Guardian: Researchers' find brings Wilfred Owen poem to life



Critic Andreas Hadjithomas said [Costas] Montis completed the cycle of poetry in Cyprus. “He lived to recite the beauty and trials of Cyprus. He had verse as his weapon and his gift and will always be remembered,� said Hadjithomas.

from Cyprus Mail: Cyprus’s most famous poet dies



Apprenticed to Wallace Stevens, from whose notebooks she [Lucie Brock-Broido] takes the titles of several poems, she writes a sensual, sonically rich poetry, typified by the opening of ''Spain'': ''The god-leash leaves / Its lashes on the broad bunched backs / Of sacrificial animals.'' This acoustic gorgeousness, along with her highly figurative cast of mind, creates a striking tension: her new theme is austerity, yet her means remain profligate.

from The New York Times: 'Trouble in Mind': Poems of Gorgeous Austerity



The office was the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Co., the boys were those who knew him as a vice-president, lawyer, and the most solid of citizens.

No one who thought a poet looked pale, distracted, unkempt and unbarbered was likely to recognize [Wallace] Stevens: he was a physical giant, robust, red-faced, and his large round head suggested not only a banker and judge, but Jupiter. He said then and after that the boys would hardly be more shocked to discover him the secret head of an opium ring--and although I would guess that in this instance he may have mistaken tact for ignorance--the important point is that he felt sure that this was how others regarded a poet. [--Delmore Schwartz, 1955]

from The New Republic: Wallace Stevens--An Appreciation



Special section: Wolf in Bloom

In the late fall of 1983, professor Harold Bloom did something banal, human, and destructive: He put his hand on a student’s inner thigh-a student whom he was tasked with teaching and grading. The student was me, a 20-year-old senior at Yale. Here is why I am telling this story now: I began, nearly a year ago, to try-privately-to start a conversation with my alma mater that would reassure me that steps had been taken in the ensuing years to ensure that unwanted sexual advances of this sort weren’t still occurring. I expected Yale to be responsive. After nine months and many calls and e-mails, I was shocked to conclude that the atmosphere of collusion that had helped to keep me quiet twenty years ago was still intact-as secretive as a Masonic lodge.

from New York Metro: The Silent Treatment



Yale General Counsel Dorothy Robinson said Yale has appropriate methods for addressing sexual harassment complaints, but she said Wolf should have raised her allegation within the two-year statute of limitations that exists for such complaints.

"We do have rules that require that grievances be filed within a limited time period. They are intended to promote fairness," Robinson said in an e-mail. "When time passes, memories fade, witnesses and evidence become unavailable, and these things make it much harder to determine the truth. Yale's procedures are robust, and its students are routinely informed about them."

from Yale Daily News: Wolf '84 writes on harassment



According to Conroy, however, the Administration attempted to explain to Wolf on several occasions that it was far too late to file a complaint against Bloom. And, with regards to her desire to see female undergraduates protected, he added that "the University's procedures regarding sexual harassment are crystal clear and readily available." In other words, in the eyes of the Administration, there was little else they could do for Wolf.

from The Yale Herald: Yale reacts to Wolf accusations against Bloom



I doubt that even the savvy Wolf could have anticipated the personal savagery which her article has unleashed. Sadly, most of this misogyny has been from other women, many of whom seem unwilling to grant Wolf the right even to speak on the subject of sexual harassment. Their hostility, and their wilful misreporting of what Wolf actually wrote is an unwelcome reminder of the distance we have yet to travel before women's right to work or to study without harassment is universally accepted.

from The Sidney Morning Herald: Claws rip the heart out of Wolf's theme



"Don't try to shut me up!" she shouted. Horowitz looked at her, mystified. "What did I do?" he asked. "It's all in your body language!" Wolf said, indicating the movement he had just made in his chair.

"But Naomi," Horowitz replied in some confusion, "you told me during the last commercial break that I should turn and face you the next time you spoke. I was trying to do just that."

from www.telegraph.co.uk: Enough of this whingeing Wolf



But, in her New York essay, Wolf is at pains to say that she does not feel like a victim. She says she would have let the matter slide if only Yale had moved, in a series of private conversations over the past year, to reassure her that steps had been taken to ensure that such things weren't still happening. Yale tells a different story.

from The Sidney Morning Herald: Crying Wolf



I majored in English during the early dawn of feminism. It was a glorious time on campus. The professors had traded in their ties for love beads. The most popular ones offered courses where you could grade yourself, and fraternized shamelessly with their students. We smoked dope with them. Sometimes we slept with them, or hoped to. Two of my best friends wound up marrying their professors.

from The Globe and Mail: A prof, a pass and a co-ed



It's hard not to suspect another motive for Wolf's belated attack on Bloom, now 73 and in poor health.

In recent years he has railed against feminists, Marxists and multiculturalists who "tell us we are to value a literary work because of the ethnic background or the gender of the author", Bloom told Atlantic Unbound last year.

"I have sometimes characterised these people as a Rabblement of Lemmings, dashing off the cliff and carrying their supposed subject down to destruction with them." Wolf, in her profound solipsism, probably took it personally.

from The Sidney Morning Herald: Crying Wolf belittles plight of real victims



Nor did Wolf complain at the time to the authorities at Yale. But she did tell her mum.

"How would you feel if your daughter came home and said, 'Please help me,' and there's nothing you can do?" she says, her voice cracking. It is as if the memory of her mother's powerlessness bothered her more than her own and turned her into a girl again.

Wolf, herself the mother of Rosa, 8, and Joey, 4, is on a mission to spare herself her mother's fate. "As a grown woman, I can say, 'Oh, a hand on a thigh, it's no big deal', but I have an eight-year-old girl and I teach 20-year-olds, and I know how they feel," she says.

from The Australian: Feminist payback in court of poetic justice


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