Hello Houston!

Downtown Houston, seen from the Buffalo Bayou

I had a wonderful time last week visiting the University of Houston. On Wednesday I was a guest in Robert Cremin’s Nations & Imaginations class, where the students were using Benedict Anderson’s modern classic Imagined Communities as their textbook. Robert had previously told me the class had been studying “Lord Byron’s romance with Greek nationalism, South Korea’s soft power thanks to the “Hallyu” phenomenon, The Battle of Algiers, the web site of the National Museum of Singapore, and the institution (in the UK and the US) of the national poet laureate,” so I wondered how my work would fit in with that heady conversation. I needn’t have worried: the students were eager to discuss the topic of political poetry and its relation to nationalism and to national trauma. I was impressed by their gravity and their curiosity.

At 5 pm I gave a poetry reading in the UH Honors Commons, followed by a “talkback” moderated by Robert, who had a serious of thoughtful questions and observations. I got to meet a number of university faculty and I was also happy to see my cousins Tom and ChiChi, who had driven in from Austin.

On Thursday I visited Mohan Ambikaipaker’s Global Politics and Poetry, where I faced a roomful of mostly anthropology majors. They had spent the previous class period discussing and selection of my poetry, and had each been tasked with coming up with a question to ask me. Since this was exactly the procedure I used in my own classroom when a poet was due to visit, I got to experience how gratifying it can feel to have conversation about your own work with interested students. During the last part of the class, Mohan, who is a poet himself, asked me to give students a writing prompt. Lucky students, to have a professor willing to incorporate creative writing into the course!

On the final day, I gave a 45-minute lecture on “The Lyrical Poet in Troubled Times” to the first-year honors students. I was more than a little nervous about that–but the students payed close attention and seemed to find my points convincing. The college had purchased a number of books to give out to interested students and I ended up signing books for a long line of young people who were majoring in everything from physics to accounting.

I came away from these three days excited about the prospects of my country: these students were as diverse as America is now, and had the boundless enthusiasm and idealism of youth. They were the opposite of what you hear when Texas is in the news.

Forty minutes is a long time to hold students’ attention–fortunately I have been doing that for 30 years.

A long line of students eager to have their copy of Empire signed by the author.

In between all this activity I had a chance to catch up with my brother Richard. We had long walks on the Buffalo Bayou, sampled the excellent food of America’s fourth largest city, and, on Saturday, got to visit the eclectic artworks in the Menil Collection. Thanks Richard!

My brother the classics professor demonstrating his mysterious ability to increase the fecundity of house plants.