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Notebook: December 6, 1995
Gordon Wu '58 Pledges $100 Million
Gordon Wu '58 Pledges $100 MillionThe largest gift ever to Princeton kicks off the university's $750 million campaign
Hong kong entrepreneur Gordon Y. S. Wu '58 has pledged $100 million-the biggest gift in Princeton's history-to strengthen the engineering school. Wu's gift is the sixth-largest donation to an American college or university since 1967, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the largest ever made by a foreign national. The pledge was announced in conjunction with the November 10 launch of the university's five-year campaign to raise $750 million.
New Building to Link Jadwin, Fine HallsThe planned addition to Jadwin Hall may not be very large, but its programmatic aim is ambitious: to create a center for teaching and learning at the heart of the physics and math complex, one that can accommodate undergraduates from across the disciplinary spectrum.In September the trustees approved a plan developed by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, Architects, of New York, for a 21,000-square-foot teaching space in a facility between Jadwin and Fine halls, which house the physics and mathematics departments, respectively. Introductory physics and math courses are currently taught in Palmer Hall, an older facility built in 1908. The physics department moved to Jadwin in 1969 and mathematics to the new Fine Hall in 1970. Now both departments are eager to reintegrate introductory teaching and locate it closer to where their faculties work, making the Jadwin-Fine complex a center for undergraduate learning in the sciences.
Class Act: Nurturing Creativity and ImaginationIn a spacious office that doubles as a classroom, a somewhat rumpled poet guides his charges to dig out what's deep inside them. Unlike other class assignments that demand correct answers, the assignments in James Richardson '71's beginning poetry class are almost never right. And they are almost never done, at least not by the time the students finish the course.Poems aren't written in a week or months. They may take years to finish. "That has nothing to do with talent," says Richardson. "Poems just don't get done that fast." The writer needs to let the manuscript sit for a month or so and return to the work in a different frame of mind, says Richardson, who has written three books of poetry. That's where a workshop comes in; classmates bring a needed perspective to the poem. Before each class, the students read each other's poems-they write one a week-and arrive with lots of things to say about metaphors, images, and turns of phrases. The budding poets lounged in couches and comfortable chairs in Richardson's second-floor office at 185 Nassau Street, the same building where he took poetry as an undergraduate. One student munched on frosted flakes. Others relaxed with their legs curled up and their feet tucked under them. A man-child in his 40s, Richardson slumped in a chair, hands in his pockets. In between the students' comments, he worked in his own critiques in a gentle voice that was sometimes hard to hear over the traffic sounds coming through the open windows. A director of the creative-writing program for 10 years and a professor of English, Richardson's floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are filled with works by poets, including Shakespeare, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning. There's no single reading list for this course; Richardson says it's "more useful to prescribe for people individually." When Richardson critiques his students' poems, he often finds barely anything in the poem worth saving-perhaps only a seed of what a future poem may become. Often the students don't know what the subject is, explains Richardson. He also finds that lines are often out of order "because they are coming out of feelings, which are simultaneous and all mixed up. . . . It's like putting a fence around a cloud." Every once in a while, he adds, "lightning strikes and you get a poem all in one. But it doesn't happen that often." The students don't set their poems aside after each workshop but keep at them, revising and reworking. "Revising is much harder than writing," says Richardson. "It takes a firmer sense of what you want and some objectivity." By the end of the semester, each student has written 11 poems. Several have been abandoned along the way, while others have been rewritten and will be presented at the end of the course as their "final" poems. The students write in free verse, the no-rules form of most contemporary poetry, and in traditional rhythms, such as iambic pentameter and trochaic. Richardson wants his students to learn to write, to learn how to read carefully and critically, and to learn about themselves. Some people write poems as therapy. But poems don't have to be autobiographical or confessional. Those poets who don't write from personal material will learn about language, images, and how words work, and they find themselves writing about certain ideas, themes, and attitudes over and over again. Students can't major in creative writing, but some seniors may write a collection of poems in lieu of a thesis for their major. To do so, they need the permission of both the creative-writing program and their departments. The English department automatically approves creative theses, but other departments may not. If seniors don't get permission, they may elect to write two theses, one in their major and one in creative writing. Teaching beginning poetry is an adventure for Richardson. Numerous gifted students walk through his door. "Often there are several people [in one class] who show little tiny flashes of [special talent]. There are even classes where everyone seems to." A gifted student may not produce a finished poem, "just a dynamite stanza." Yet even students who manifest real talent may not pursue poetry for long. Some people "write through their good poems and that's it," says Richardson. Great poetry, he explains, is usually born in one's 30s and later. Richardson started writing poetry when he was a student at Princeton and has been writing ever since. His poetry is filled with images from nature and looks at pain, fear, suffering, joy, wonder, and awe. Why does he write poetry? "It's a question I don't seem to need to have an answer for," he says. "It's just the kind of thinking, feeling that I like to do." He calls his writing process "fishing." He sits, looking vacantly, maybe with someone's book in his lap. He may end up with two or three pages of notes that he later throws away. Or he may get an idea for a new poem, or a few lines, or an idea on how to change a poem. He's not surprised if he gets nothing accomplished. There are times when he "just doesn't have it." Especially right after he publishes a book. So he waits "until there's some new part of me there to work with." Ideally, he writes three mornings a week, two or three hours each session. Because of lectures to prepare and committees he's on, he's only been able to write Friday mornings this semester. And he's "very frustrated and not feeling like a real person. [I'm] feeling like a person without a soul. A shallow instrument of myself." -Kathryn F. Greenwood
Metaphors, Images, Turns of Phrases |