All Things ASE
Ecstatic ASE.
Students have one more month to sign up for our Summer programme for 2024.
In this month’s blog, 2023 Summer tutor Dan Rosenberg, from Wells College, NY, gets ecstatic about his students’ ekphrastic response to the UK.
I should start my tale of teaching for ASE this summer with a confession:
I left my wife and eight-year-old son back in New York for my first three weeks in Bath, which means that time was tinged with a combination of missing them and enjoying the simplicity of living alone. Sure, there was a distinct lack of cuddles in my life during those weeks, but also, nobody was leaving socks on the kitchen counter.
I had come to teach a poetry course called “Ecstatic Ekphrastics,” and the students were wonderful, adventurous, and delightfully strange—in short, the sort who would sign up for a course with an inscrutable title. The premise: We would learn about the traditions of ekphrastic poetry (essentially, poems in conversation with other artworks), think deeply about both poetry and visual art, and write into and from our new discoveries.
A highlight of the course was our weekend class trip to London, where we visited the British Museum. We examined first-hand some of the works we’d been reading about, and then we split up so each student could find an object that inspired them to write. The following day, each student took us to their object and shared what they’d composed in response to it.
It turned out the Akan drum one student wanted to write about was to be found not in the African gallery (which is located, in what I wish were an example of British dry humor, in the basement). Instead, it was in the North American gallery. This placement seems to be in honor of the original, erroneous notion that it had been made by Native Americans, or maybe the curators believe it represents African-American work despite being made of West African materials. I knew nothing about this drum until one of my students introduced me to it, and now I think about it often.
Another student joined me on a quest to find a water jug depicting Sappho before guiding me to the Warren Cup and the many fascinating and suggestive notions about Greco-Roman sexuality it raises. (Do click on that link, but maybe not at work.)
Each student brought an expertise and a passion, but by far the greatest expert on our trip was Lucy, ASE’s Director of Studies. She so enriched our encounter with the Sutton Hoo exhibit, and the Lewis Chessmen, that her voice echoes in my head whenever I think of them. She also allowed me to impersonate her husband to gain entry into the Members’ Room, where we lunched, as a verb, while looking down at the hoi polloi milling about the Great Court.
The ASE crew added The National Gallery to our weekend itinerary, and that idea turned out to be brilliant as well. The Gallery features a surprising number of images that we’d seen reproduced in John Berger’s Ways of Seeing – a book one student described as “absolutely calling out me and all of my friends” despite being 50 years old. We couldn’t round a corner without someone (OK, often me) squawking in recognition and excitement. A favorite moment was when the entire class gawped at Holbein’s The Ambassadors from the oblique angle that allows its famous anamorphic skull to resolve.
Those weeks were full of many such surprise recognitions. A brilliant poet I’d taught many years ago in the Iowa Young Writers Program happened to live nearby, and she visited our class to talk about her newly-published book. Another former student from Wells College, who had studied abroad with ASE years ago, also happened to be visiting, so I showed her the updated Nelson House. Then she brought me to Nando’s, where we watched with horror and delight as pigeons gulped down, in a kind of cannibalistic glee, our fellow diners’ unprotected chicken meals.
I found Bath to be a delightful city, simultaneously proud of and unaware of its charms. The wonderful folks at 44AD Artspace invited my class to the opening of Jonathan Roelofse’s Floor Poems exhibition, and Jonathan gave us a very generous impromptu artist talk. Later, the ASE staff informed us all that the entire city was on alert because there were reports of a young man with—gasp!—a knife. We appreciated the heads-up, of course, but some of us more jaded Americans couldn’t help smirking. Oh no, cutlery! We joked, darkly, all the while thinking how nice it was to be in a city where guns were basically unthinkable.
I walked over Pulteney Bridge every day, and it presides over the Avon like a metonym for the entire experience, showing a gorgeous Palladian face to the downtown while also sporting a patchwork of bulbous and inelegant extensions on the north side. It was much like Sham Castle, which I also visited on my endless hikes around the city: a classical, sophisticated front that reveals itself to be a bit less serious than it seemed, a bit more playful, upon closer inspection.
Some stand-out memories from the giddy north side of my time with ASE: During the program trip to Oxford, after I accidentally broke into University College to see the Shelley Memorial (50% of the security officers were very forgiving), I visited the Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Masquerading as someone who knew anything about papyrus, really, I got to hold fragments of Sappho in my dumb, human hands. When we were in London, I wandered into the British Library and saw the Diamond Sutra, which inspired a poem I’m currently working on entitled “The Oldest Dated Completed Printed Book in the World.” Who could resist all those modifiers?!
And when my family (and their socks) finally joined me, the nerdy giddiness of my Bath life proved expansive enough to include them seamlessly. My son’s first experience was Rob Jones’s medieval swordplay demonstration, where he joined the college students in threading the needle between listening attentively and almost beheading poor Rob. When I announced in class that I had found an escape room to try with my family, the energy got very prickly until I invited them to join us. The escape room’s theme, a cult pretending to be a research organization, was perhaps too on the nose. We had become so close, over these few weeks, that escape was inconceivable.
And who would want to escape such a place, such people? I am old enough to remember a world before the internet, before cell phones. I remember the rise of irony as a default mode of human experience, and I have been happy to observe the death of irony in my students, most of whom simply want things to matter. On excursion after excursion, they taught me to give myself over fully to that mattering. An example: I was warned repeatedly by friends and colleagues that Stonehenge would be underwhelming. It’s smaller than you’d think, you can’t approach the stones, etc. etc. When we walked up to those stones, having read several poems about them, I was moved by their age and uncanniness in the landscape, but I understood why I’d been warned. Then I turned to my left, and one of my students was sobbing. She was experiencing the ecstasy of the sublime, genuinely feeling the weight of the history of this space, the magic of it. I turned back to the stones and tried to open myself up to that experience, to see this place stripped of its baggage, as its glorious and strange self. We slowly circled the stones in deeply unironic awe, noticing not just the many languages being spoken around us, but the rooks making visible each near-imperceptible breeze as it breathed through the stones. It was only through my students’ guidance that I truly experienced the ecstatic part of my “Ecstatic Ekphrastics” course.
Similarly, a small crew of students joined me to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Globe after our official class trip to London had ended. It was an incredible production, with the Globe’s artistic director playing Puck with a beautifully unsettling malevolence. We were so close to the stage we could touch it, looking up at these actors bringing familiar words to life under the open night sky. I was thrilled, of course, but my students were reduced to trembling, tearful messes, barely able to stumble through the London streets to catch the last train of the night back to Bath. It was like how Rilke imagined being hugged by an angel: they, we, were consumed by contact with something so much greater than ourselves.
So this is my advice, to anyone who can pull it off: Experience beauty alongside people who are willing to be exposed nerves, who are so excited to be transformed that they seem at times to be standing beside themselves. This was the gift my students gave to me during our five weeks together. I’m made anew from it.