Tonight from 7 to 9 p.m., Cecil S. Giscombe will give the University community a taste of a lost art — poetry — with a reading of his own work in 205 Smith Hall.
Giscombe is the latest featured writer of the Bankhead Visiting Writers Series, an initiative of the University’s English department that brings world-renowned writers to Alabama’s campus. The program has given English graduate students opportunities to expand their creative horizons.
“Picking the minds of these great writers has been invaluable,” said Curtis Rutherford, a creative writing graduate student concentrating in poetry. “In a creative enterprise like poetry, you benefit most in an environment where ideas can be bounced around, so it’s good to talk to people.”
Giscombe, a professor at the University of California Berkeley, has spent the last two days teaching Alabama graduate students. Field trips — perhaps a method of learning forgotten by most college students — are integral parts of his teaching.
“You have to leave the safety of the classroom,” Giscombe said. “You never know what will happen during an open-ended field trip. Disasters can even happen.”
Giscombe uses field trips primarily as a tool for retracing the steps of past writers. While he and his students at Berkeley were reading “The Dharma Bums” by Jack Kerouac, they traveled to Yosemite, retracing the steps of Kerouac and Gary Synder.
“Going over there to the mountain was a homage to Kerouac and Snyder,” Giscombe said. “It was worth doing then; it’s worth doing now.”
This week, Giscombe and his new Alabama students visited the Tuscaloosa Amtrak Station. He said he believes public transportation is an interesting source of inspiration for creative writers.
“Trains come with a lot of sexual stuff — a lot of racial stuff, too,” Giscombe said. “People are in close proximity, and it’s a slow trip to their destination.”
As a poet and professor, Giscombe is a strong supporter of liberal arts education. He says economic forces have pushed our country’s educational focus in a direction away from our literary past.
“Our desire to keep up with China has us training students to pass exams and be proficient in technology,” Giscombe said. “In doing so, I think we bypass the humanities.”
Though disappointed with the current system, he isn’t calling for a reversion back to the days of Longfellow. After all, times are simply different, whether for better or worse.
But Giscombe said he believed people need to create new means for poetry to find pedestals. Proficiency in technology may be the art form’s savior.
“There is no cash value for the best stuff in the world — like poetry,” Giscombe said. “And a lot of it’s on the Internet.”
The professor does his part in making poetry widely available by giving “Mixed Blood,” one of his publications, away to libraries. Increasing poetry’s accessibility and encouraging young people to read it may help teach forgotten lessons.
“Poetry encourages us to understand that life is very complex,” Giscombe said. “It ain’t simple; it’s messy. Poetry wallows in that.”
