Member: AlanWPowers

CollectionsYour library (64), Currently reading (3), All collections (64)

Reviews61 reviews

TagsThomas Greene (1), Canale (1), Theodore Baird (1), Rhoda Sheehan (1), Leopardi (1), Martial (1), Checkhov (1), Joseph Kennedy (1), Lucretius (1), JFK (1) — see all tags

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About meThe only thing Alan W Powers shares with Dr. Seuss is their place of birth, Springfield MA. Powers has worked as a harmless drudge, a college teacher of composition and Shakespeare, in Minnesota and Massachusetts. He has written a guest Safire "Head over Googles," and appeared in two poetry films, Keats and his Nightingale and A Loaded Gun. He has been interviewed on Italian TV and radio, and American radio. As a jazz trombonist on the bench, he wrote jazz tunes based on British and American birdsong, the subject of his first popular book. With the ears of a spy, he has written verse monologs based on scandalous overheard conversations. Despite several articles on Shakespeare (and law), his lifework turns out to be translations and a biography of Giordano Bruno, who was sent to the Inquisition by one bad student evaluation. A sceptic on education reform, he says, "Good teachers get fired; great teachers, killed--Socrates, Christ, Giordano Bruno."

About my libraryApparent chaos, but minutely--if subconsciously-- organized by book size and frequency or value. Hence a nearly complete 19C Twain is prominent, though I haven't read in it for two decades; a shelf of Loeb Latin plus half a dozen Oxford Latin above a shelf of French. A bookcase of Italian and a shelf of Russian, in another room. As for English Lit, my ostensible subject, I have several editions of Chaucer, Shakespeare, 17C English poets, most of Dickens, half of Updike, all of Austen, Dickinson, and Saul Bellow, complete poems and plays of WBY, TS Eliot, and several of my mentors' books: Leonard Unger, A MacLeish, LL Lipking, Tony Molho, Marge Garber, Sander Gilman, Thomas Greene, Theodore Baird, Armour Craig, Richard Cody, William Pritchard, Annabel Patterson, Jean D'Amato Thomas. But most of "my" library is at the British Library, Biblioteca Nazionale Napoletana, Biblioteca Marciana (Venezia), Biblioteca Communale Milanese, Rockefeller and John Hay and Annmarie Brown Libraries (Brown University), the Folger Library and nearby Library of Congress, the Treasure Room at Harvard Law School, the Houghton and the Widener, Cornell's Olin Library and Agricultural College Library, Princeton's Firestone, the Middlebury College and Breadloaf Davison Libraries, the Williams College Library, the U Minnesota Library, and first but not least, the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College.

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Member sinceMay 3, 2012

Currently readingIl giardino dei Finzi-Contini (The Garden of the Finzi-Continis) [Italian Edition] by Giorgio Bassani
Poesia italiana: il Seicento. Garzanti, i grandi libri, Milano, 1978 by a cura di Lucio Felici
Lettres persanes by Montesquieu