Anthology Project Illuminates Student Creativity

Griffin Rankin with her collection of "entrapment" poems, "Let Me Out," housed in a cedar-lined red box.

Creative approaches to the concept of "anthology" by Davidson students were recently on display in the college's E.H. Little library.

John Dunwoody was inspired by the course in "American Women Poets" to craft his anthology as sculpture. Katie Crane, a double major in English and political science, researched and gathered "Headline Poetry" by women responding to big news. Her collection pairs poem with newsprint and includes Lucille Clifton's "december 7, 1989" written about the Pearl Harbor attack, and Sharon Olds's "Photographs Courtesy of the Fall River Historical Society" responding to the arrest of Lizzie Borden in Fall River, Mass., for the murder of her father and step-mother.

Griffin Rankin created a project she calls "Let Me Out," and submitted it in a cedar-lined red box. She found inspiration in Jane Eyre's childhood punishment of being locked in a red room and focused her anthology on "entrapment" poems.

Carey Arvin, Patrick Miller, and Ellen Stilz collected various poets' reinterpretation of myths, while Paula Davis supported the notion in "Sick and Tired of Being Sick and Tired," that "poetry for black women becomes an opportunity to discuss the issues that keep them awake at night."

Katie Crane's, "Headline Poetry" pairs poems with news headlines.

Their professor, Elizabeth Mills, had hoped for just such a variety of approaches to the assignment as her upperclass students worked on this major end-of-term paper. "Conceive of the project as your opportunity to create a book, a collection of poems, and imagine any and all ways you can instruct and entertain your audience," she had directed them at the beginning. At the end, she displayed a box full of student work that included a quilt-covered book by Laura Bradford, who learned the craft from her mother to complete the project.

Harrison Higgins bound his anthology in a wooden cover with his title, "Burning Out From the Grain," routed into the surface. The poems he chose to include illustrate how, for women, writing poetry may often be "an act of insurrection" towards prevailing patriarchal poetry. As he says, these poets seem to be "harvesting the grain and revolting against the grain simultaneously." Many collections, such as Elizabeth Fraser's anthology of poetry in praise of motherhood and Elissa Weddle's "Power" with its poems by American women and art by Remedios Varos, included photography or paintings.

Harrison Higgins' anthology title, "Burning Out From The Grain," is echoed in the carved wooden cover.

Mills emphasized that class discussion considered the thorny issue of what gets included in an anthology, when the volume of available material might be overwhelming. She noted that the word, "anthology," is derived from a Greek phrase meaning "the gathering of flowers," and said anyone creating an anthology faces a similar task. "You can't include all of Emily Dickinson's 1,775 poems in an anthology of her work. Every combination of choices constructs a particular version of a poet's art; so how do you choose?" asked Mills. "We examined different anthologies and also discussed the ways books by individual poets were constructed, and then the students created their own anthologies that reflected their intellectual interest and understanding of the subject they chose."

John Dunwoody stands next to his six foot ecphrastic sculpture, "Dissolving Boundaries."

The one student submission that wouldn't fit in Mills's box was John Dunwoody's "Dissolving Boundaries," a six-foot-square tubular frame sculpture he created on the wall of his studio in the Belk Visual Arts Center. Dunwoody, an Orlando, Fla., senior majoring in English and studio art, described his project as "ecphrasis" -- one art form responding to another. "As complementary colors such as blues and oranges enhance and charge each other, so do the visual and the written," he writes in the introduction to his project.

On the frame hang 22 page-size wooden panels, painted in acrylic and bearing a metal strip in a lower corner embossed with the name of a poet. Viewers who lift the panels from the frame can open them to read a poem by that poet, and see associated paintings or other graphics on the facing page.

The panels have no set location on the frame, and Dunwoody encourages viewers to rearrange them as they examine the work. He describes his anthology as a "three dimensional artistic bouquet," with each element increasing the beauty of the whole.

He chose a range of women poets to represent the entire sex, covering history and different ethnicities. In keeping with the spirit of the work, he also included work by poets responding to other art they had seen. Certain poets in the collection, such as May Swenson and Mary Ellen Solt, blur the boundary between the visual and written forms by presenting their work in a graphic arrangement where the letters and words create a picture of their own.

Mills said she was excited by the quality of the student work, and hosted the class for an evening at her house so they could all review each other's work in a social setting. "I am grateful for the creative energy that you devoted to the process of conceiving, selecting, organizing and explaining your choices," she said. "I remain astonished by the variety and consistent excellence of the individual anthologies from the class."

Professor of English, Elizabeth Mills

Mills's academic interests encompass poetry and prose by women writers, literature of the American South, and contemporary poetry. She graduated from the University of Texas in El Paso and has been teaching at Davidson since 1985. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of North Carolina writing her dissertation on "Wording the Unspeakable: Emily Dickinson and A.R. Ammons."

Hours at the E.H. Little Library to view the exhibit of student work are Monday - Thursday 8 a.m. - 1 a.m.; Friday and Saturday 8 a.m. - 9 p.m., and Sunday 1 p.m. - 1 a.m.

Call 892-2331 for directions and more information.

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