2006-2007 Speakers Bureau Catalog
CAROLYN WEDIN
Carolyn Wedin is back home in the woods of northwest Wisconsin after 35 years of teaching literature and writing at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and in Kansas, North Carolina, Sweden, Norway, Poland, and England. Her community education literature classes in Frederic have attracted participants from many surrounding towns, perhaps because the group does such things as creating a "Babette's Feast" when reading Isak Dinesen, partaking in a Renaissance banquet to accompany Shakespeare, and visiting a famous soul food restaurant in Minneapolis when studying black literature.
Address: 11080 State Rd. 48, Frederic, WI 54837
Phone: 715-327-8463 (home), 715-296-9962 (cell)
E-mail: carolynwedin@centurytel.net
Poetry, Passion…and Problems
In his foreword to a little book called
101 Poems That Could Save Your Life. . . , Scott Simon, National Public Radio news hour host, writes that poems have the power "not only to take off our heads but to screw them back on." Garrison Keillor, in his Good Poems selection from his radio show "The Writer's Almanac," suggests that knowing a poem by heart is "like a cello in your head, a portable beauty to steady you and ward off despair." Using a bouquet of poems she and her students have deemed helpful and memorable, Wedin will take the audience through A. E. Housman's argument for poetry's power in "Terence, This is Stupid Stuff," and move on through poems of love, despair, death, and hope. These include: Amy Lowell's "A Decade"—"When you came, you were like red wine and honey"; Hamlet's despairing contemplation of suicide in "To be or not to be"; and Emily Dickinson's "Because I could not stop for Death/ He kindly stopped for me." Members of the audience will be invited to share poems that are meaningful to them, including those that take the form in which we usually hear poetry today—as song. The poems Wedin discusses will be distributed as a handout.
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