I'm reading Gaston Bachelard's Poetics of Space for a long essay on Emily Dickinson. Bachelard is a self-described addict of what he calls 'felicitous reading', a term which I'll be using in the future.
Bachelard - a former philosopher of science now writing on poetics - writes, 'Sometimes, even when I touch things, I still dream of an element.' I think a whole shimmering tone poem a la John Adams could spring from this phrase.
It is my current hope to go to graduate school for English literature next year: a certain school in a certain place, both a goal and an insurmountable challenge. Having been out of college for a year already, and having graduated as a music major, I am rusty. Trying to compensate, I googled “books every english major has read” but have had a difficult time finding a list that suggests what every (generalized) English major should have read by the time of (undergraduate) graduation. As a person who attended a high school whose meager syllabus prescribed the study of one novel, one play and four poems a year, and who could only scrape enough college literature credits for a minor, I feel woefully behind. Most American kids got a head start in AP English (seriously – who are those freaks who read Ulysses in high school?). American high schools may have their weaknesses, but a strong and ambitious push to read literature consistently is not one of them. There are gaps, and I fear that wh...
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