I couldn't be more excited about the honors seminar I'm teaching this Fall, 'Working-Class Cultures, Identities, and Rhetorics,' an interdisciplinary course in which we study literary, scholarly, and pop culture representations of working-class people. Students are interacting with many of the writers we're reading, including two former autoworkers who've used the assembly line as muse, setting, and topoi for their work. Lolita Hernandez, author of Autopsy of an Engine, will pay us a visit, as will poet Jim Daniels.
I've been working on arranging Daniels' visit for the past week or so, securing funds and planning his time on campus. In addition to visiting our class, Daniels will give an open-to-the-public reading, have lunch with the editorial board of our literary magazine, and (hopefully) screen his indie film "Dumpster." When I was an undergrad, I loved events like this, meeting writers, interacting with lovers of language (see Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys for a dramatization of this dynamic), thinking about how what we study impacts life off campus and vice versa. This is why I love working in academe.
If, reader, you live in Metro Detroit, stay tuned for details on Daniels' reading.
1 comment:
Tony&Jim:
Jim Daniels does indeed rule, as dhawhee sez above! Check out one of his early books like Punching Out or M-80. Raw, unadorned poetry.
RE: the beats, you can't go wrong with Ginsberg's two City Lights chapbooks ("Howl and Other Poems" and "Kaddish and Other Poems"), "Queer" and "Junky" by Burroughs, Kerouac's "Pomes all Sizes," and the following records: Patti Smith's "Horses," Velvet Underground's "Loaded," Richard Hell's "Blank Generation."
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