Faculty member C. Dale Young’s essay “The Veil of Accessibility: Examining Poems by Frank O’Hara and Kenneth Koch in Light of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness“ appears in The American Poetry Review.

The earliest memories I have involve reading.  In fact, when I go back, when I return to the past, so much of what I can recollect in the farthest reaches are books and the experience of reading books.  Sometimes the memories alone conjure up not just the act of reading and the works themselves but even the feel of the paper, the smell of the bindings, the dusty yellowed halo pulsing away as the book’s leaves are slammed shut.  If part of being human is the act of telling and listening to stories, then what does one make of the act of reading, an act that is both story telling and listening?  The brain must construct story even as the eyes capture the words the writer has left us.  The human brain will construct story from almost anything.  Painters have long been aware of this, the fact that if only a few icons or images are presented on a canvas the viewer will construct a narrative.

And yet, despite the fact that as far back as I can remember I recollect books and the stories in those books, my engagement and desire to make stories, to write, all seem to stem from a very specific moment in time: the Eleventh Grade.  In the dark and at times horrific period of my life also known as my Junior Year of high school, I had a teacher named Kathy Doody.  Yes, this unfortunately named teacher, Miss Doody, was the most laissez fare teacher I had ever had.  She was thin but not anorexic.  She wore her hair up in the way a librarian might but never would for fear of looking stereotypically like a librarian. Read more