How to Play a Poem by Don Bialostosky

Don Bialostosky has long been admired as a writer of dense texts aimed at theory-minded academics and addressing Bakhtin and rhetoric. With How to Play a Poem, Bialostosky plays to a different audience, positioning himself as “something of a popular entertainer,” to use T. S. Eliot’s improbable self-description in the wake of The Waste Land. Aimed not at theoreticians but average teachers of poetry, Bialostosky’s text attempts to make Bakhtin accessible for the college and high school classroom. For my own audience here, I offer a conflict-of-interest disclosure: Bialostosky directed my dissertation over twenty-five years ago, but there is little overlap in our professional lives now. As it turns out, I am happy to offer a positive review simply because this is an important and engaging book

Living with Dying in the Pediatric ICU: A Nursing Perspective

Caring for critically ill children who die quickly or whose condition progressively worsens is often overwhelming with the journey to the end justly stressful and difficult for all involved. Unequivocally pediatric ICU nurses spend a significant amount of time at the bedside attempting to meet and manage the palliative care needs of the children and their families during this arduous time. However, the literature lacks the perspective of the pediatric ICU nurse who provides palliative care to children with a life-threatening or life-limiting illness and their families. Therefore, a hermeneutic phenomenological inquiry to explore the essence of the experience provided by pediatric ICU nurses to children with life-threatening or life-limiting illnesses and their families was conducted. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 12 pediatric ICU nurses who had experience caring for dying children and their families in a rural tertiary level, non-freestanding children\u27s hospital in northeastern United States. Data were analyzed using a descriptive and interpretive phenomenological approach. Participants\u27 descriptions revealed the following five major themes: journey to death, a lifelong burden, challenges delivering care, maintaining self, and crossing boundaries. Findings from the study revealed the intricacies involved in caring for dying children and their families can be demanding at times; however, the study\u27s participants voiced a great deal of professional satisfaction in caring for these children and their families. Especially significant were the rich descriptions of the nurses\u27 stories regarding the death of the child, the after death period and the memories of children who had died. Future research is suggested to explore spirituality and nurses\u27 experiences of caring for children with life-threatening and life-limiting illnesses and their families as this was not evident in the study\u27s findings. Additional research to discover pediatric ICU nurses experiences in urban settings with a more diverse sample of participants, with and without a pediatric advanced care team (PACT) could further expand this study\u27s findings

Using Music to Teach the Sounds of Poetry: Some User-Friendly Advice for the Non-Musician

I will offer some suggestions here that address both the gap in our teaching of poetic sounds and the fears and prejudices of students. While I do foist, unapologetically, the entire apparatus of poetic terminology on my students, my use of music to reinforce such concepts is supplemental and non-technical. In fact, much of my use of music in the Introduction to Literature classroom has less to do with actually listening to CDs, and more to do with talking about what my students already know about music, and then applying that knowledge to poetry

Leonard Diepveen. Modernist Fraud: Hoax, Parody, Deception

Diepeveen has spent a considerable part of his career chasing after the tricky concept of intent, how authors or works signal it, and how interpretive communities respond to it. With his most recent book, he has brought a systematician’s rigour to the question of how modernism addresses, offends, or accounts for its various audiences. One of the most engaging elements of Modernist Fraud is how Diepeveen rescues authorial intention from the New Critical and Barthesian dustbins, revealing its centrality in the evaluation and understanding of art, in spite of its unpindownable nature. The paradox of intent is that its ‘evidentiary weakness’ coexists with its ‘stubbornly large presence’ (p. 98). As we cannot extricate ourselves from the philosophical and aesthetic muddiness of intent, Diepeveen suggests, we might as well get comfortable with it

Bringing Bakhtin to Beethoven: The Ninth Symphony and the Limits of Formalism

Jayme Stayer returns to the question of the meaning and form of the ode To Joy

Exploring the Boundaries of Academic Freedom

A review of the article Exploring the Boundaries of Academic Freedom by Mary R. Lefkowitz

An Exploration of College Student Experiences Regarding Healthy Eating at a Midsized Midwestern University: A Qualitative Approach

This study was an exploration of the experiences college students have while eating in on-campus dining centers at a midsized, Midwest, public university. The present study examined college students\u27 (n = 7) experiences of eating in the dining centers with a campus meal plan. Participants were asked a series of questions regarding their individual beliefs, their surrounding environment, and their physical behaviors while dining. The study concluded that dining habits are very personal to each and every human being in the world. At the higher education level, because each student brings with them a completely different taste, desire, and value in terms of the food they choose to nourish their body with, administrators, faculty, and health educators must acknowledge how complex it is to provide healthy meal options to college students, and emphasize the need for on-going education and assessment