I’ve been meaning to write about this for months. But I wanted to finish the PBS series Poetry in America first so I could give a complete review of it. But my library copy of Season 1 stopped working halfway through. Then I purchased a DVD from Amazon and that DVD stopped working half way through, too, and so I returned it for a replacement. And it happened again!

All the Poetry in  America DVDs for season 1 seem to be defective and they’re still selling them! So I went over to the PBS app and signed up for the $5-a-month-member to see the rest of Season 1 and found out there was a Season 3! Sweet!

Anyway, all this took time to work through.

Every since I’ve run out of poetry MOOCs (those free Massive Open Online Classes) and burned through a year’s worth of literary celebrities on MasterClass, I’ve been searching for online literary education again. Happily, last year I found it in two places.

The Smithsonian Associates Online Courses

I think I purchased Christmas cards from MOMA one year and then started getting a stream of museum catalogues (not an unpleasant thing) and one of them was just for online, live courses offered from the Smithsonian.

These are great courses offered in all subjects and taught by some pretty respectable teachers. I haven’t had a bad experience yet…except negotiating their website which is hard to log on to, hard to change the password for, and there’s no literature or book category per se. But you can search “literature” and this bring up all the upcoming lit courses.

I also appreciate that the courses are priced well for the time provided, about 25-35 dollars per 1.5-2 hours. This is much more amenable than $50 to $100 for a single course or a yearly subscription contract. Price point has been an ongoing issue for me. It’s just a shame you can’t go back and stream older courses. What an easy money maker for the Smithsonian that would be.

The first class I took was on Moby Dick (a book I still haven’t read and just unsuccessful pitched to my Difficult Reading Book group), a course taught by Samuel Otter, a professor out of U. of California Berkeley. He had helpful suggestions like reading the chapters out of order. He also put the book in the context of Herman Melville’s life to illustrate how unsuccessful the book was at the time. He discussed the Melville conference in Japan and how influential the book’s heroic monster has been to monster movies like Godzilla.  He talked about the idea of “the world in the whale” and how a novel can “swallow everything.” In the Q&A they addressed how the book fit in with his other works, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s influence on the book. Interesting quotes from the class: “This book seems to know how you feel when you read it.”

I also took “Thoreau on Work” because I didn’t know much about Henry David Thoreau either. John Kaag and Jonathan van Belle, two philosophers who wrote a book on Thoreau’s attitudes currently resonating with the culture of quiet quitting, co-ran the session. They also recommended the Jennifer O’Dell Book, “How to Do Nothing” and talked about fulfilling work and privilege (interestingly Thoreau didn’t have much of that and did manual labor most of his life) and Thoreau’s idea of having “work that keeps your mind free” which resonated with me and how I’ve chosen my day jobs in this life.

I really enjoyed the discussion about plants and bloom times versus living a life beholden to mechanical clocks and what time has come to mean for us, doing work that you can take pride in (at least some of the time) and how some work leads men to “live lives of quiet desperation” (Thoreau’s words). They also lightly covered the idea of Original Affluence and we see a lot of young people doing this, scaling down their needs so they can keep work to 40 hours or less.

There was a three part series called Art and Literature and I missed the first one. The second one was on William Blake, given by Jack Dee, an art historian, who explained the time and work of William Blake and how his illustrations intersected with the poems in Songs of Innocence and Experience. We studied these poems in many physical classes throughout high school and college and no teacher (that I can remember)  spent time going through the illustration for each one and how it communicated back to the language of the poem. Dee also talked about how Blake’s wife was his collaborator and what she contributed.

The other session I caught was called Picasso and Stein, given by David Garriff. This was also a facinating dive into Gertrude Stein and her relationship with Pablo Picasso. The course suggested a long New Yorker article on the politics of Stein that got me reading Lifting Belly  and The Alice B. Tolklas Cook Book.

These classes above were about an hour and a half and cost about $35 for non-members and $30 for members. The more expensive classes either went for an hour and a half over multiple days or were classes that lasted 3-5 hours.

Reading Faulkner: Chronicler of the Deep South, taught by Michael Gorra of Smith College, was a dream come true. Ever since hearing about the Faulkner class at Notre Dame I’ve been thinking about trying to finagle my way into such a thing. This was a class with three sessions (each on a book) over three months, one book a month (so you could read along). First book was The Sound and the Fury (a book I once read with zero understanding of what I was reading). After this session, I went back and reread it with much more understanding and appreciation for not only the novel’s stylistic experiments and narrative experiments but for telling a story about a woman through the voices of her brothers. Like for Moby Dick, none of Faulkner’s novels were successful (as we think of them today). Unlike Melville, Faulkner was unconcerned about this.

The next Faulker book we read was Light in August, one of my favorite books period. My best college paper, in fact, was on Light in August. I loved the novel even more after taking this class (even got a poem out of it). The last novel we read was Absalom, Absalom! which I haven’t yet read, but it’s a book that was also referenced in the Poetry in America, season 3 as an important part of an amazing Evie Shockley poem so I’m looking forward to starting on it.

I also attended a half-day Saturday class on The Russian Novel: Anna Karenina (which I’ve read) and The Brothers Karamazov (which I haven’t) given by Joseph Luzzi from Bard College. I accidentally slept through the first hour of the class. But luckily you get 48 hours to rewatch any recorded sessions. This was the professor who tipped me off to the Cambridge Companion books for authors and art forms.

I took another Luzzi class, one of his high school revisited series, for The Great Gatsby, which prompted me to read a few other F. Scott Fitzgerald novels (now sitting in a stack by my bed, including The Beautiful and Dammed which I’m reading as we speak).

Another interesting thing about this class was the handsome professor. During one of his Q&As at the end of the classes, one devotee suggested (with fluttering eyes you could entirely imagine) that Luzzi should start a podcast. In mild frustration he insisted that he was too busy with writing books, running his online book club, teaching and “I have a family!”

The most recent course I took was on Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Loss and Invention, taught by writer Robert Morgan, a class that worked well to overturn the myths of this most famously mythologized writer. This was less of a lecture than Morgan reading from a paper. So that felt kind of stilted, but he knew what he was talking about so that mitigated the annoyance.

Coming up I’m taking the class Cinderella: Beyond Bippidy Boppidy Boo (tonight, actually) and Wuthering Heights and Invisible Man, again with the handsome Joseph Luzzi as part of his High School Revisited series.

Poetry in America

This PBS show is another, little-known but excellent source for literary continuing ed that I loooved.

The half-hour series was hosted by Elisa New of the aforementioned Harvard poetry MOOCs. In fact, I vaguely remember her talking about filming such a new show poems exploring aspects of America back when I was watching one of those final Harvard MOOCs.

The production values, the ingenuity in illustrating the poems, the wonderful animations, the travels to the places of the poems, the pathos of the shows, and the stellar guest rosters of not only literary but subject-matter experts, just really, really superb and well worth the price of the one or two months of membership to PBS it might cost you to watch all three seasons.

Here are the poems and poet episodes listed below. I have to say, the episodes I was least interested in watching at first were probably the ones I enjoyed the most.

Season 1:

  1. “I Cannot Dance Upon My Toes” by Emily Dickinson exploring the idea of fame.
  2.  “Fast Break” by Edward Hirsh about American sports and male bonding (I loved this one and I don’t really like sports).
  3.  “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden talking about “the black sonnet,” the blues sonnet.
  4. “Hymn” and “Hum Bom!” by Allen Ginsberg about God and The Bomb.
  5. “Skyscraper” by  Carl Sandberg about capitalism and the idea of the city.
  6. “Harlem” by Langston Hughes about ruined dreams.
  7.   “Musée des Beaux Arts” by W. H. Auden about suffering and war.
  8. “Shirt” by Robert Pinsky about factory labor, particularly New York City garment labor.
  9. “To Prisoners” by Gwendolyn Brooks about prison (this one was very moving, too).
  10. “The Grey Heron” by Galway Kinnell about nature.
  11. “New York State of Mind” by Nas about Rap music as poetry (a must see episode).
  12. “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus about the immigrant experience (which included a guest singer I really like, Russian immigrant Regina Spektor).

These are available on DVD but good luck finding a playable copy of episodes 7-12.

Season 2:

  1. “Urban Love Poem” by Marilyn Chen about the immigrant experience.
  2. “One  Art” by Elizabeth Bishop” about grief.
  3. “The Fish” by Marianne Moore about close observation.
  4. “This Your Home Now” by Mark Doty about male barbershops and AIDS (I looooved this one).
  5. “Finishing the Hat” by Stephen Sondheim from the musical Sunday in the Park with George about French painter Georges Seurat and the creative process. (I also love how this show incorporates music into its definition of poetry. See #11 above.)
  6. “You and I Are Disappearing” by Yusef Komunyakaa about the Vietnam War. (Another one of my unexpected favorites on how to write about war).
  7. “This Is Just to Say” by William Carlos Williams about marriage.
  8. “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman about the ideals and multiplicity of America.

These are available on DVD and I had no issues with Season 2.

Season 3:

  1. “Sonnet IV” by Edna St. Vincent Millay about turning upside down the classic love sonnet.
  2. Two southwest poems, “Bear Fat” by Chickasaw poet Linda Hogan and “Rabbits and Fire” by Mexican-American poet Alberto Rios — both about storytelling and tragedy in the southwest.
  3. Motherhood poems by Sharon Olds (“The Language of the Brag”) and Bernadette Mayer (“The Desires of Mothers to Please Others in Letters”) – another amazing episode, “The Language of the Brag” ended up being one of my favorite new finds.
  4. “Mending Wall” by Robert Frost about when walls work and when they don’t work.
  5. “you can say that again, billie” by Evie Shockley about blues, humor, racism in the American South, (another one of my favorite episodes).
  6. “Cascadella Falls” by A.R. Ammons (also showcasing his paintings) about geologic time.
  7. “Looking for the Gulf Motel” by Richard Blanco about the nostalgia of a lost youth, especially with immigrants for their homeland as  places left behind.
  8. “The Wound-Dresser” by Walt Whitman about the Civil War.

I have loved every minute of these classes and TV shows. To find out more information about them, visit: