F24, Week 1 – Welcome to the English Community at St. John’s!

An action shot of me teaching, digitized by Simon LaPlanta

Welcome newcomers, and welcome back to everyone else who’s arriving in Queens this week to begin the Fall 2024 semester as part of the community of our English department!

I’m our new department Chair, Steve Mentz, and I’ll be chiming in on this blog every week to let people know what’s happening in our community.

There will be lots of fun events this semester beyond our classes, including a Bookmarks event coming soon that will discuss Gabe Brownstein’s great new book, The Secret Mind of Bertha Pappenheim, about the woman who co-invented what Sigmund Freud would call the “talking cure.” Maybe we’ll also schedule another about my own new book of poems, Sailing without Ahabwhich re-imagines the greatest sea story in American literature – the one with the White Whale – with the domineering Captain left on shore.

Whitman on Walls!

Our big event of the semester, that I hope everyone will mark on their calendars, will be a weekend event on Sat 10/26, in which Karin Coonrod’s amazing Compagnia de’ Colombari will bring their Whitman on Walls! performance to our campus, in dialogue with original poems from our students and faculty. More soon!

For now – welcome! Come stop by my office (SJH B15) or visit with the other English professors, most of whose offices are in the B43 hallway. I’ll use these weekly posts to introduce some of our classes, our personalities, and our upcoming events. If you have things you’d like me to discuss, please ask!

Sometimes in these weekly posts I’ll also include a poem, or a few lines from another text, if it fits the season and time of the semester. A new semester means beginnings and embarkations. The lines that roll around in my imagination at times like these come from Emily Dickinson –

Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,
Past the houses — past the headlands —
Into deep Eternity —

Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?

I recite this poem to myself every spring, when I get up my courage to plunge into the still-cold ocean and start my daily habit of ocean swimming for another season. I love the poem’s urgency and its commitment to not knowing where we are going. To be an inland soul heading out to sea means intoxication and confusion – but also joy, exultation, and discoveries to come.

I look forward to seeing some of those discoveries in our classrooms, our collaborative projects, our hallways, and maybe even sometimes via Zoom. It’s good to be back!

About Steve Mentz 1298 Articles
I teach Shakespeare and the blue humanities at St. John's in New York City.

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