A Review of Rinne Groff's Compulsion, the Preview

Writing about web page http://www.yalerep.org/on_stage/2009-10/compulsion.html

Venue: Yale Repertory Theatre
Date: 2nd February 2010
[Contains spoilers]

Compulsion is a play about a play that plagiarises a play about a book. It is that complex! The idea for Compulsion apparently came from an article in a New York newspaper titled ‘An Obsession with Anne Frank: Meyer Levin and the Diary’ ( see interview in New Haven Register). The feature caught the eye of the writer Rinne Groff and she went on to create an entire play based on the life of the Jewish writer Meyer Levin , who was one of the first American journalists to become aware of the diary of Anne Frank . The title of the play is, of course, riffing on Levin’s 1956 book Compulsion about the Leopald and Loeb case . In this play, however, it refers not to a crime, but to Levin’s obsession with the Anne Frank diaries and his turmoil when his own adaptation of the play is rejected for a version that is ‘less Jewish’.

In Groff’s play, Levin becomes Sid Silver, a doppelganger that Levin created for himself in his own writing, and the play moves beyond the biographical. The play is divided into three parts:
*the discovery of Anne Frank’s diary and Sid Silver’s deal with Doubleday Publishing to write a play version;
*Silver losing the rights to the play and his legal battle with Doubleday and the “other play’s” producers;
*and his move to Israel where he tries to create a new production of his Anne Frank play.

Sid Silver is played by Mandy Patinkin who works hard to make us understand his character’s obsession. Hannah Cabell is excellent too in her two roles as the ambitious and amoral Miss Mermin who represents Doubleday publsihing; and the long-suffering wife of Sid Silver, one of the most sympathetic characters in the whole play. Sid Silver is attracted to both women and this doubleness seems to say something about Sid’s perception of womanhood itself. Stephen Baker Turner is also good playing a succession of anti-Jewish/anti-Sid businessmen and lawyers; he is also convincing in the more sympathetic role of Mr. Matzliach who sets up a production of Sid’s play with Israeli youth, only to find that Sid has signed an agreement never to produce the play.

One of the most spectacular actors in the play is Anne Frank herself who appears in a number of eerie scenes in puppet form (manipulated by puppeteers Emily DeCola, Liam Hurley and Eric Wright). In one especially memorable scene, Mrs Silver wakes in bed only to find the puppet there between her and her husband. They begin a conversation in which the wife begs Anne to leave her husband alone, and Anne Frank’s replies – ominously voiced by Patinkin himself – offer little hope that the girl will be forgotten.

So the eerie presence of the puppets and the precision of the actors makes this play worth watching, but there is something missing. It is, of course, difficult to make a book deal and its consequent legal wranglings into a proper subject for drama, and there is something lacking in the exchanges of dialogue. It is obvious where this play is going and I could have predicted what happened from beginning to end after the opening scene. There are not many surprises here, and while it could be said that this is down to the connection to the real-life story of Meyer Levin, we are told that the play departs from this biography so why not surprise us? The extracts of the “Anne Frank plays” acted out by the puppets only reflect badly on the dialogue in the actual play which seems to be lacking energy and originality.

There are a lot of jokes surrounding Jewishness, but most of these have been done to death. When a lawyer asks Sid Silver, ‘D’you’, and he replies, ‘Jew?’, you immediately think of Woody Allen in Annie Hall and wonder why a more original line wasn’t found for the exchange. Sid Silver’s quest to foreground the Jewish issue is sympathetic however, and the play does make you wonder about the extent of post-war anti-semitism in the US. When the play moves to Israel for its final scenes, Sid becomes less sympathetic in his views about neighbouring arab states, and his wife is set up as a foil, expressing more pacifist views about relations with others. The writer holds up an irony here: that Sid begins his quest fighting for the rights of a minority and the suffering of the Holocaust, but ends by celebrating the beginning of a new war because it gives his play a better chance of being produced. Some of the scenes in which he expresses his views about Palestine/Israeli relations are very uncomfortable.

One of the most successful parts of the play is the relationship between Sid Silver and his wife. Some of the most entertaining exchanges feature Sid in the stereotypical feminine role of non-logic and emotion and his wife as a voice of reason. This reversal works well and is one of the most entertaining aspects of the play.

Zoe Brigley : 05 Feb 2010 18:49 |  Tags: Articles And Reviews Drama |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

The American Diaries of Iorthryn Gwynedd: A Fascinating Discovery in Swansea University Library

Writing about web page http://voyager.swan.ac.uk/vwebv/holdingsInfo?searchId=4676&recCount=10&recPointer=2&bibId=337344

Back in Wales over Christmas, I had a brief opportunity to have a look in Swansea University Library. I was searching for books on the Welsh in the United States and what I found that was of particular interest was a set of diaries written up by typewriter. The first page explains that they were completed on the ship ‘New World’ on the Atlantic Ocean , June 10th 1852.

An introduction by Clare Taylor explains the significance of the diaries: ‘“Iorthryn Gwynedd”, the Rev R.D. Thomas, was to make other visits to America and to settle there, but this little diary of his first visit to America from 1851 to 1852, still remains a vivid travel account of a tour of Welsh settlements in the mid nineteenth century’ (1973: 1) Discovered among the papers of Samuel and John Roberts, the diary was translated from Cymraeg (Welsh) by a Mrs T.I. Ellis and typed by a Mrs. Gillian Glover.

• the wages of Welsh-American labourers,
• the distances and fares of rail road journeys,
• the exchange rates presented to immigrants at the New York exchange offices,
• the values of American money,
• maps of towns and villages,
• details of land “bought” from the Native Americans in Oregon for settlers (some among them Welsh),
• a newspaper clipping about lows in temperature across the Eastern United States,
• a note about tragic deaths in Brooklyn when a frozen river collapsed (1852),
• and a letter from home included in the diary, a friend asks Iorthryn, ‘Why did you leave Wales to come to this barren country?’(!).

Zoe Brigley : 19 Jan 2010 19:51 |  Tags: United States Wales |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Wales and the United States

I didn’t really have a sense of the connection between the United States and Wales, until 2008 when I was visiting Philadelphia and I took a photograph of a plaque put there by the Welsh Society of Philadelphia (erected March 1st (St David’s Day) 1968). The plaque is inscribed with the following words:

COMMEMORATING THE WELSH CONTRIBUTION TO THE FOUNDING OF THE CITY OF PHILADELPHIA, THE COMMONWEALTH OF PENNSYLVANIA AND THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A number of famous Americans are commemorated on the plaque including:
*William Penn 1644-1718 – described as ‘proclaimer of the free religion and founder of New Wales, later named Pennsylvania’;
*Robert Morris 1734-1806 – ‘foremost financier of the American Revolution and signer of the Declaration of Independence’;
*and Thomas Jefferson, 1743-1826, – ‘Third President of the United States and author of the Declaration of Independence’.

What I didn’t realise then was that the Welsh heritage of colonialists who came to the US was in fact deeply valued and emphasised. As E.T. Ashton writes, Welsh immigrants ‘were able to maintain their Welshness because of certain identified characteristics such as a sense of nationality, a distinctive culture and identifiable standards of respectable behaviour’ (1984: xv). Ashton goes on to define the factors that stimulated Welsh immigration in the US as being ‘religious (such as the Quakers who fled from religious persecution in the late seventeenth century), economic, political, cultural and even what might be termed nationalistic, those attempts to establish a new Wales on American soil (such as the setting up of the Brynffynnon colony in Tennesse by Samuel Roberts in the 1850s’ (xvi). William D. Jones puts it simply: ‘they moved in search of a better life’ (1997: xviii).

Welsh immigrants largely came to the US between 1820 and 1950, and there were only about 90,000, which is paltry compared to the Irish immigration figures, but it is the closest Wales came to mass immigration (Ashton 1984; xvii). Jones points out that most of the immigrants ‘headed for industrial areas’, mainly because the types of workers moving into the US from Wales were not farmers or rural labourers by the end of the nineteenth century (1997: xx). Instead they were ‘Welsh miners, iron and steel workers and tinplate workers, together with slate quarrymen from North Wales’ (xviii). Jones even claims that ‘Welsh expertise in puddling iron, cutting coal or rolling tin-plate was highly prized and in great demand in industrializing America, and it commanded higher wages’ (xix). Along with this though came the risks of such industrial work. So ‘By the end of the nineteenth century Welsh gold miners could be found in California, lead miners in the Rockies, copper miners in Montana and coalminers in Pennsylvania, Ohio, California. Utah, Illinois, West Virginia and Tennessee’ (xx).

References (Books accessed at Swansea University Library)
Ashton, E.T. (1984) The Welsh in the United States, Hove: Caldra House.
Jones, William D. (1997) Wales in America : Scranton and the Welsh, 1860-1920, Cardiff: University of Wales Press; Scranton, Pa: University of Scranton Press.

Zoe Brigley : 14 Jan 2010 16:52 |  Tags: United States Wales |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

'Why not choose a happier subject?'

Writing about web page http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=409300&c=2

This week’s Times Higher Education Supplement features an article by Sorcha Gunne and I that anticipates the launch of our edited collection Feminism, Literature and Rape Narratives: Violence and Violation. The essays in this volume discuss narrative strategies employed by international writers when dealing with rape and sexual violence, whether in fiction, poetry, memoir, or drama. In developing these new feminist readings of rape narratives, the contributors aim to incorporate arguments about trauma and resistance in order to establish new dimensions of healing. In this article, however, titled ‘Why not choose a happier subject?’, Sorcha and I talk about the problematic nature of researching rape narratives and we consider the attitudes of other academics as well as friends and family to our work.

Facebook group for the book: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=211697720013
Details on the Routledge website: http://www.routledge.com/books/Feminism-Literature-and-Rape-Narratives-isbn9780415806084

Zoe Brigley : 03 Dec 2009 15:54 |  Tags: Feminism |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Polanski, Tess and the Phenomenon of the Rapist

How to solve the problem of Roman Polanski and his recent arrest for the rape of a thirteen year old girl? A director of numerous wonderful films: Rosemary’s Baby, The Pianist, Chinatown, Macbeth , and Death and the Maiden, Polanski also directed and co-wrote the script for a film that has rape at its heart: his exquisite adaptation of Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. There are many sets of debates raging, questioning whether Polanski is guilty, whether the testimony of the thirteen year old girl involved can be trusted, whether the corrupt dealings in the US legal system mean that Polanski should be acquitted, what it means that the 13 year old girl (now mother and wife) can’t bear to have the case re-opened etc. For my own part, whilst I can see that Polanski’s court case was not exactly fair and that the judge was rather suspect, a fair punishment does not seem to have been meted out for what appears from the evidence to have been the rape and anal rape of a minor. But this is not what I want to discuss here.[1] What I would like to do is rethink how Polanski’s case is narrativised using, as a point of comparison, Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Polanski’s film version of it: Tess. [1]

The great irony is that Polanski so carefully portrayed the agony of Tess, a woman convinced that her true lover, Angel Clare, would reject her when he knows that she is soiled by a rape in her early life. In the script for Polanski’s Tess, she writes to Angel how “My youth, my simplicity and the strangeness of my situation may perhaps lessen my fault. But since I committed it, I am guilty”, words that now seem eerily prescient: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mezs1kCTML0.

Hardy never actually tells us what Tess writes in her letter; instead when she does confess to Angel after their marriage she tells him, “I was a child—a child when it happened! I knew nothing of men”, words that are repeated in Polanski’s script. This is no defence in Angel’s view, and is also no defence in the eyes of many commentators offering their take on Polanski’s act of rape and the thirteen year old girl, whose testimony makes shocking reading. There are in fact sinister parallels between that testimony and Hardy’s representation of Tess’ rape by the rich and powerful Alec D’Urberville.

—

Q. What did you do when he said, ‘Let’s go into the other room’?
A. I was going ‘No, I think I better go home’, because I was afraid. So I just went and I sat down on the couch.
Q. What were you afraid of?
A. Him…. He sat down beside me and asked if I was OK. I said ‘No’.
Q. What did he say?
A. He goes ‘Well, you’ll be better’. And I go, ‘No I won’t. I have to go home. He said ‘I’ll take you home soon’.
Q. Then what happened?
A. Then he went down and he started performing cuddliness… I was kind of dizzy, you know, like things were kind of blurry sometimes. I was having trouble with my coordination… I wasn’t fighting really because I, you know, there was no one else there and I had no place to go.”
Q. Did he ask you about being on the pill?
A. He asked, he goes, ‘Are you on the pill?’ and I went, ‘No’ and he goes ‘When did you have your period?’ and I said, ‘I don’t know. A week or two. I’m not sure’... He goes, ‘Come on. You have to remember’. And I told him I didn’t…. and right after I said I was not on the pill… and he goes… and then he put me – wait. Then he lifted my legs up farther and he went in through my anus.
Q. Did you resist at that time?
A. A little bit, but not really, because…
Q. Because what?
A. Because I was afraid of him.

(Source: Dominic Lawson’s article ‘Let’s not forget what Polanski did’: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/dominic-lawson/dominic-lawson-lets-not-forget-what-polanski-did-1794717.html)

—

There is even the fact that, as in the case of Tess who was sent to the D’Urberville household by her ambitious mother, it is claimed that this 13 year old girl was given to Polanski by her own mother as a delicacy, as if that lessens the criminality of the act committed. Of course, Polanski is like Alec too, in that he is accused of raping (and anally-raping) a teenage girl from a position of power and money and with little regard for the consequences. [3]

There is a difference, however, between Alec and Polanski; while Alec remains a shadowy figure [4], we know a great deal about Polanski’s life: especially about his tragic early life in Poland during World War Two and the death of his wife, Sharon Tate. Many commentators use Polanski’s past to argue that his terrible life experiences explain the act of raping a 13 year old girl. The French minister Frédéric Mitterrand recently said he was ‘dumbfounded’ by Polanski’s arrest, adding that he ‘strongly regrets that a new ordeal is being inflicted on someone who has already experienced so many of them’. But does Polanski’s past really explain his actions?

Shouldn’t the real question be, why did Polanski still have sex and anal sex with a thirteen year old girl despite his intimate knowledge of pain, suffering and humiliation? Prof. Joanna Bourke’s commentary at the end of Rape: A history from 1860 to the present is particularly relevant to this kind of questioning, because she concludes that rape must be reframed as a male political issue rather than a female one. Following Bourke’s recommendation, the painful hounding of the 13-year-old-girl-now-mother should cease and instead we should be asking what made Polanski rape in the first place. Does violence create violence? Do we honestly believe that all rapists are totally evil like the “baddies” from some children’s TV show?
Do we really think that rape is a glitch in society, that it is just an unaccountable phenomenon committed by evil outcasts who were never part of our community to begin with? Or is there, as Bourke contends, something brutal and sinister in certain modes or parts of modern masculinity? [5]

Even great directors like Polanski rape, hence Whoopi Goldberg’s desperately lame comment ‘It wasn’t rape-rape. It was something else but I don’t believe it was rape-rape.’ (Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/29/roman-polanski-whoopi-goldberg). Goldberg finds it hard to reconcile the Polanski she knows with Polanski the rapist, just as anyone would find it difficult to believe that a friend or colleague had committed an act of rape. What I am really saying here, to use Bourke’s words, is that understanding rape ‘exclusively through rape victims is wrong: it lets men off the hook’ (Rape, p. 116) [6]. Why a man like Polanski committed this crime is a crucial question and one from which cultural commentary is too easily diverted. As Hardy would put it, ‘The woman pays’.

Notes
[1] Polanski’s Tess was in fact made only two years after Polanski was tried for rape, posing a few questions about his intentions in making the film.
[2] I would direct you to Kate Smurthwaite’s blog for a great piece of writing that deflates some of the more ridiculous arguments for Polanski’s release: http://cruellablog.blogspot.com/2009/09/roman-roads.html Also see Amanda Hess’ blog: http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2009/09/28/common-roman-polanski-defenses-refuted/#comment-17499
[3] Polanski’s “position of power and money” is not sufficient to explain this case of rape. Money is related to power though (see Bourke’s comments in Rape about the sexual exploitation of working class women), but obviously it is not the main factor in every case and it is not only wealthy men who rape.
[4] We know that Alec D’Urberville has an invalid mother, that his family bought the D’Urberville name with their new money and later in the book, we see him working as a lay preacher to try to atone for his sins. Otherwise he is merely seductive, dangerous, brutal, sensuous and self-serving.
[5] I am far from saying that these issues surrounding masculinity are a new or modern phenomenon, but merely want to suggest that we need to look at masculinity in its modern context. Bourke’s study Rape, however, does cover the period from 1860 to the present day, so there certainly are lessons to be learned from history.
[6] I want to highlight that when Bourke calls for a focus on masculinity, she is not saying like Marilyn French that “All men are rapists.” Rapists, however, are not always male. She explains her argument in ‘Women, men and rape’, when she explains that

sexual aggression is not innate to masculine identity. There is nothing “natural” about men’s violence. Sexually aggressive men in modern western societies don’t bolster manliness but actually enervate male power regimes. Rapists are not patriarchy’s “stormtroopers”, but its inadequate spawn. Rape is a crisis of manliness; its eradication is a matter for men – for a radically different conception of agency and masculinity. (http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/democracy_power/5050/tackling_rape)

Bourke suggests that rape is not innate to masculinity, but is characteristic of a particular type of masculinity, and I would argue prevalent in a specific masculine mode.

Zoe Brigley : 30 Sep 2009 00:45 |  Tags: Feminism Video |  Comments (8) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Spanish translation of my poem, 'Blodeuwedd'

This is a translation into Spanish of a version of my poem, ‘Blodeuwedd’, a poem based on the story of the woman of flowers in the Welsh book of myth, The Mabinogion. It was made quite a few years ago through a project at UEA and the Centre for Translation in Tarazona, Spain. It was done by Eugenia Vasquez and Enrique Alda.

Zoe Brigley : 27 Jul 2009 15:24 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Women Writing Myth

This entry reviews some reading around women and myth and begs the question, why are so many British and American contemporary women writers attracted to rewriting Western mythologies? Partly these thoughts come out of attending a recent Angela Carter conference at University of Northampton and Angela Carter might be a good place to start. Sarah Gamble writes in Angela Carter –Writing from the Front Line that during the 1960s Britain was opening up to new European influences. Gamble argues that ‘counterculture’ was particularly significant to Carter, because it ‘represents a strategy by which she could renegotiate the boundaries between fantasy and concrete political action’ (1997: 43). According to Gamble, ‘in the wreckage of old myths and moral values, the subversive writer is free to play’ (45). Carter believed that ‘appropriation and adaptation is really what the fairytale is all about’ (67), and ‘the relationship between the radical writer and myth […] has necessarily to be contentious because […] myths have to be argued with, dismantled through the act of writing’ (138). In Gamble’s commentary on Carter, gender is implicit, yet there is a stronger sense of radicalism being a key influence, rather than a simple or obvious feminist agenda.

Carolyne Larrington frames myth more explicitly in terms of gender in her introduction to the edited volume, The Feminist Companion to Mythology. Larrington points out that

Women need to know the myths which have determined both how we see ourselves and how society regards us. Feminist anthropologists and literary historians in recent years have discovered new evidence about how women have been perceived; they have illuminated mythical patterns and re-examined historical traditions from a feminist perspective (1992: x)

Myth becomes an important space for debate in Larrington’s view, because it offers a site from which women anthropologists, historians and writers can critique the representations and treatment of women in the past. This concords with Marina Warner’s comment in From the Beast to the Blonde that ‘The matter of the fairy tale reflects such lived experience, with a slant towards the tribulations of women’ (xix).

Sometimes in contrast to more negative representations of the past, women writers remake the tribulations of women into something more positive. For example, in her study Celtic Goddesses: Myth and Mythology, Juliette Wood notes that ‘Latterly popular feminist ideas have added a new dimension to modern Celtic mythology, and to the noble savage and mystic can be added a strong but loving matriarchal goddess presiding over a harmonious social and physical environment’ (1992: 134). In contrast to the matriarchal goddess, another type that is drawn upon in the wild woman, the Amazon, as Annis Pratt explains in Dancing with Goddesses: Archetypes, Poetry and Empowerment:

Independent of men, more animal than human, living with each other ‘in groups’, knowledgeable about healing, potentially deadly but sexually hungry although hostile to patriarchal notions of matrimony, the wild women of the Russian woods carry traits of Artemis as Lady of Wild Things, of Amazon legend, and of indigenous shamanism […] The wild women inhabit a free zone closely impinging upon culture, a zone of partially repressed paganism (1994: 285).

The trope of the wild woman is also closely associated with mythical witches and untameable or celibate goddesses like Diana, Artemis, Hecate and the Welsh Arianrhod. Thinking through Robert Graves, Pratt explains that figures like Arianrhod are attractive to women writers remaking myths because they have ‘power not only over sexuality and generation but also over language itself’ (1994: 308). This threatening type of womanhood resurrected from myth is associated by Marina Warner with modern representations of feminists. In Six Myths of our Time, Managing Monsters: The Reith Lectures, Warner compares the blaming of feminists for social ills in the modern media with the threatening women described in Greek mythology: ‘Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin […] and they seize, as in the word raptor’ (1994: 4). Warner concludes that this kind of representation can only be negative for women: ‘The mythology of ungovernable female appetite can’t be made to work for women; ironies, subversion, inversion, pastiche, masquerade, appropriation – these postmodern strategies all buckle in the last resort under the weight of culpability the myth has entrenched’ (11). In spite of the problems in remaking stories though, ‘myth’s own secret cunning means that it pretends to present the matter as it is and always must be’ (13). Although ‘at its heart lies the principle in the famous formula of Roland Barthes, that history is turned into nature’, Warner asserts that ‘contrary to this understanding, myths aren’t writ in stone, they’re not fixed, but often telling the story of the same figures – of Medea or of dinosaurs – change dramatically both in content and meaning’ (13-14).

Bibliography
Cavarero, Adriana (1995) In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, trans. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Aine O’Healy, Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gamble, Sarah (1997) Angela Carter – Writing from the Front Line, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Larrington, Carolyne (1992) Introduction in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, ed. Carolyne Larrington, London: Pandora Press.
Larrington, Carolyne (ed.) (1992) The Feminist Companion to Mythology, London: Pandora Press.
Padel, Ruth (1992) In and Out of Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self, Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Warner, Marina (1994a) From the Beast to the Blonde, London: Vintage.
- (1994b) Six Myths of our Time, Managing Monsters: The Reith Lectures, London: Vintage.
Welldon, Estella V. (1992), Madonna, Whore: The Idealization and Denigration of Motherhood, New York and London: The Guildford Press.
Wood, Juliette (1992) ‘Celtic Goddesses: Myth and Mythology’ in The Feminist Companion to Mythology, ed. Carolyne Larrington, London: Pandora Press: 118-136.

Zoe Brigley : 27 Jul 2009 12:12 |  Tags: Feminism |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Writing Poetry for Children?

After discovering some fascinating children’s books recently such as Shaun Tan’s The Lost Thing and Maurice Sendak’s Outside Over There, I have begun thinking about writing for children and in particular poetry for the child reader. What are the differences then between writing for children and writing for adults?

In thinking about this question, I just wanted to note a few comments in the essay ‘Poetry Mosaic: Some Reflections on Writing Verse for Children’ by Ian Serraillier. Serraillier follows the recommendation of the Russian poet Kornei Chukovsky who suggests that ‘As young children think in images, the poem […] must be graphic, with each verse – or even couplet – suggesting to the artist a suitable illustration’ (p. 97). Rhyme is also important, since it ‘helps the young child to remember more easily, and also to get the sense’ (p. 97). Serraillier goes on from these tenets to suggest that the world of folk poetry is particularly enjoyable for child readers, suggesting ‘English and Scottish ballads’ for their ‘lyric quality and the rapid story-telling’ (p. 98). This kind of poetry is ‘closer to its origins – in song and dance and the spoken word’ (p. 102). For Seraillier, the children’s poet is ‘a curious mixture of creator, interpretor and craftsman’ (p. 102).

I’m still working through my own ideas about writing for children, but I do find Seraillier’s suggestions useful if incomplete.

Works Cited
Serraillier, Ian (1977) ‘Poetry Mosaic: Some Reflections on Writing Verse for Children’, 97-102 in Edward Blishen (ed.) The Thorny Paradise: Writers on Writing for Children, Harmondsworth: Kestrel Books.

Zoe Brigley : 09 Jul 2009 15:11 |  Tags: Literature For Children |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Reading for Oxfam

This is quite a good recording of me reading at the Oxfam Marylebone Bookshop. It was quite a hard reading, because the poem (‘The Jewel-box’) is rather emotional and I hadn’t read it before, but it turned out quite well.

The poem is published in the recent issue of The Manhattan Review which features a lot of young British poets: http://www.themanhattanreview.com/archive/13_2.html You can see more of them reading on UTube.

Zoe Brigley : 06 Jul 2009 13:05 |  Tags: Poetry |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Digest of Kristeva's study Strangers to Ourselves

I am posting here for my MA students an index of the various posts on this blog which constitute a digest of Kristeva’s Strangers to Ourselves. The index covers most of the study (all except the last chapter which you are reading!). It might be useful to put the chapter in context, so do feel free to have a read.

Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/toccata_and_fugue/
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/toccata_and_fugue_1/

The Greeks Among Barbarians, Suppliants, and Metics
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_the/
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/more_of_kristeva/

The Chosen People and the Choice of Foreignness
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_the_1/
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/more_of_kristeva_1/

Paul and Augustine: The Therapeutics of Exile and Pilgrammage
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_paul/ http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/more_of_kristeva_1_2/

By What Right Are You a Foreigner?
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_asks_by/

The Renaissance, “so Shapeless and Diverse in Composition”
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_the_1_2/ http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/more_of_kristeva_1_2_3/

On Foreigners and the Enlightenment
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_foreigners/

On Diderot
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_diderot/

On Fougeret de Monbron, a Cosmopolitan with a Shaggy Heart
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_fougeret/

On Hegel
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_hegel/

On the French Revolution
http://blogs.warwick.ac.uk/zoebrigley/entry/kristeva_on_the_1_2_3/

Zoe Brigley : 07 Jan 2009 17:20 |  Tags: Feminism Theory |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem