Song of a Reformed Headhunter

  Last year I visited Rachel Hadas's lit class at Rutgers and read them some of my poems. At the end of their semester the students wrote about a poem that made an impression on them. I'm so pleased that two people wrote about "A Whole History," a gay breakup poem, and one wrote about "Attribution," about the time at Oxford when I was caught for plagiarism. The piece on "Attribution" was particularly perceptive, eloquent, and moving about the aftermath of colonialism. The student wrote, "The concept of this poem was one which I personally could relate to, having lived in South Africa for 4 years and also being from Zimbabwe which was a country that was colonized by the British between 1888 through 1980, I found out Jee and I have similar backgrounds in that aspect. I think when you've experienced living in the aftermath of colonialism even when in modern times you cannot forget about its existence because the residue still lingers to this ...

A colleague has invited me to attend a reading of Racine's "Iphigenie en Aulide," in a new English translation by Rachel Hadas. Presented by Verse Theater Manhattan, Rutgers University and Handcart Ensemble, and directed by James Milton, the reading will take place at Kirk Theater on Monday Feb 9, and is free. I just finished reading "Iphigenia" translated by John Cairncross, the first Racine I have ever read. My first impression is that the play is a pallid thing compared to Shakespeare. The characters are rather flat, the plotting is tight but small, the imagery decorous instead of devastating. Long speeches take turns, and so the scenes lack the life-like spontaneity, the human contingency, the swelling progress, the ironic self-reflexivity of Shakespearian drama. The minor characters in "Iphigenia" are entirely negligible; in Shakespeare, even a nameless knight, in King Lear , is individualized through a brilliant speech. Racine took Euripides for...