St. John the Divine - Saadia Hammond

                                 St. John the Divine, Upper West Side, Manhattan

Located in Saint John Divine, a famous Catholic Church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the poet's corner is set as a memorial. The American poet's Corner was created in 1984 to memorialize American writers of high repute, modeled after a similar alcove for writers at Westminster Abbey in London. As you walk into the church the poet's corner is to your left. The poet's corner is made up of stone slabs on the wall and on the floor. Each stone has the writer’s name, their date of birth and death, and a memorable quotation from the writer's work. To date, there are thirty writers with stone slabs and the list will expand yearly. Visiting the Poet's Corner opened my eyes to many aspects. I realized although i have lived in New York City all my life I never made an effort to explore Saint John's and what it has to offer. I seen not only the poets corner but also the memorial to the F.D.N.Y. and the beautiful chapel.  Visiting the American Poet's Corner at Saint John the Divine helped me appreciate American writers that helped alter my learning ability as an aspiring writer and also helped me contribute toward their memorable honor. - Saadia Hammond, 16 years old PACE High School, Chinatown, NYC

Literary Sites in New York City

So for the next leg in my literary road trip, I will be working a little closer to home:  New York City!  Since I do teach in Chinatown and my students live all around the five boroughs, I asked their assistance in seeking out places of literary importance in the city.  Here I will post their descriptions of the sites they visited and the pictures they took while there.  They will receive extra credit for their footwork and submissions.  Enjoy!

Frost Farm

Robert Frost's house from his "yard." 
   This is the wall from "Mending Wall," Frost's favorite poem.  Kind of exciting.  
This is a picture of the big guy.
A certain slant of light pours into the barn, which is made into a sort of central meeting point and museum lobby, which also displays pictures of group visits and Frost memorabilia.

Robert Frost's home, where he lived for eleven years from 1900 - 1911, is located in Derry, New Hampshire, and is a quaint place to visit.  In addition to the inside tour, complete with furniture from the time period and a well-versed Robert Frost guide, there is also a poetry walk that you can do outside around the grounds.  There is an actual wall, the one that perhaps inspired the poem "Mending Wall," and a path through the woods.  At certain intervals you can see a number placed besides some plants, etc., and in your Frost pamphlet, next to that corresponding number, there is some information about the significance of the location, and also a poem or part of a poem to read when you stop there.  I liked this a lot. 

Jack Kerouac, Lowell, MA

Jack Kerouac was born in Lowell and there are many locations in the city that speak of his presence.  On this trip I visited Kerouac's first home, his birthplace, at 9 Lupine Road.  He was born there on March 12, 1922, right in the house, on the second floor of the duplex.  In Doctor Sax Kerouac wrote, ""It was in Centraville I was born, in Pawtucketville saw Doctor Sax."  Kerouac claimed a stellar memory and actually recalled details of the day he was born on Lupine Road.  

The next stop on the Lowell tour was the public library.  The following is excerpted from the web site  http://ecommunity.uml.edu/jklowell/jkdtt.html, a guide to Kerouac's Lowell: 

"The Lowell Public Library is a fine place to begin a walking tour of Jack Kerouac's Lowell. Today it's called the Pollard Memorial Library, after Samuel S. Pollard, a prominent Lowell politician, but the library looks the same as it did when Jack Kerouac scoured the shelves in the 1920's and 30's.

In Maggie Cassidy and Vanity of Duluoz, Kerouac writes of skipping school "at least once a week" to read Shakespeare, Victor Hugo, William Penn, and scholarly books on chess. "It was how I'd become interested in old classical looking library books," he writes in Maggie Cassidy, "some of them falling apart and from the darkest shelf in the Lowell Public Library, found there by me in my overshoes at closing time."

Halfway between "downtown" and Centralville, there is a Jack Kerouac park that highlights his written work.  On giant granite (I think that's the material) rocks, excerpts from Kerouac's books are engraved and displayed in the middle of this little escape.  Visitors can sit on benches and read parts of On The Road, Lonesome Traveller, Book of Dreams, Mexico City Blues, Doctor Sax and others.  

Just outside of the downtown area, a short drive away, is the graveyard where Kerouac and his wife are buried.  Allen Ginsberg and Bob Dylan visited Jack Kerouac's grave.

That video is available at the link above.  It's also on the DVD, "The Life and Times of Allen Ginsberg."  It was exciting to visit Kerouac and to literally follow in the footsteps of these great artists.  

N'Orleans!

Here are some pictures to get a feel for the flavor of New Orleans.  Karen is eating alligator soup, at a restaurant recommended by Andrew Decker.  (Thanks, Andrew) and I am smiling about the beignets (if you don't know what that is, read:  French zeppole) at Cafe Du Monde.  

There are also some pictures of the French Quarter as the night got kicked up as infamous Louisianan, Emeril Lagasse, would say.  Also, you will see a horse and his cop entering a bar through a window to get a glass of water.  It was sort of a spectacle, I'd say.

Snapshots of Austin

So here are a few pictures of me and Marianne doing some Austin-y things like:  try on cowboy boots. listen to live fiddle music, eat cupcakes from the cupcake trailer and just sort of soak in the local flavor.  

N.B.  The picture of the giant Texas flag was snapped en route to Austin, actually outside City Limits.  

O. Henry's House

Hey guys!  

So the rest of these entries will be written retrospectively since I am now home safe in New York.  My last entry was written in the research library at UT Austin while I was waiting for the Steinbeck letters to be culled for my perusal.  They were sooo cool to actually hold and look at.  They were written on all kinds of paper, but mostly on yellow legal sheets.  He wrote a lot about his daily routines, the purchase of his new home and the progress he was making on his books.  He seemed particularly concerned with how things were going on The Pearl.  Very interesting.  The letters were written to his publisher over a course of many years.  There were hundreds of letters and, since the library was closing, I couldn't possibly read all of them.   In any event, it was probably one of the coolest stops on the trip.  The resources at this library were very impressive, though not all of them were accessible to the general public without good reason.  I should try to access more of these research centers near home, etc. 

So the following day I visited O. Henry's home in Austin.  He lived there from approximately the age of 24 - 38.  His time in Texas, however, was sort of colored by all kinds of hard times.  His wife died in 1897 and soon after that he was found guilty of embezzlement charges and was sent off to jail...in Columbus, Ohio, one of the first stops on my literary tour (though I didn't visit the prison). After his time in jail he never returned to Texas, but made it out to the east coast, Philadelphia and New York.  In New York you can have a beer in the booth where he penned "The Gift of the Magi" if you hit up Pete's Tavern on Irving Place, just a short walk from Union Square.  At the O. Henry house I purchased a comic book that graphically depicts many of O. Henry's stories.  I'm excited to use this in my class this year because hopefully it will break down the material for the students and also inspire them to produce their own graphic versions of literature. 

Another thing that I learned at the O. Henry house were all the different theories as to how O. Henry (whose real name is William Sydney Porter) got his pen name.  One idea is that he basically just made it up while looking through the newspaper and trying to create a name for himself under which to write.  It has also been said that the name comes from the title "OHio pENitentaRY."  I'm not exactly sure but either way it sounds like he basically picked something he liked without much rhyme or reason.