Book briefs: Ginsberg poem costs teacher his job
Welcome to your weekly roundup of book news and literary highlights from The Thread.
This week, parents and poetry fans are split over Allen Ginsberg's work, and the Nebula Awards announces the best science fiction and fantasy of 2014.
English teacher resigns after reading Ginsberg poem in class
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Allen Ginsberg's poetry hasn't lost its power to shock. In 1957, his sexually explicit poem "Howl" triggered a sting operation. A bookseller was arrested for selling a copy to an undercover police officer, and obscenity charges were filed against him, along with the book's publisher.
After a lengthy trial, with nine literary experts testifying in defense of the poem, the judge ruled that it had "redeeming social importance."
More than 50 years later, the controversy carries on, this time in a Connecticut high school. In May, a student brought Ginsberg's poem "Please Master," into teacher David Olio's Advanced Placement English class. The class was focusing on poetry, so Olio agreed to share it with the class and hold a discussion on it.
The poem begins:
"Please master can I touch your cheek / please master can I kneel at your feet / please master can I loosen your blue pants."
It continues with a description of a sexual encounter between two men. The day after sharing the poem, Olio was placed on unpaid leave by the South Windsor School District. Three weeks after that, he reached a termination agreement with the district and agreed to resign. According to The Daily Beast:
Reading the poem in class, the district found, showed "egregiously poor professional judgment," Olio's termination letter stated. "By so doing, you violated the trust placed by the Board of Education in you as a teacher, you brought discredit upon the South Windsor Public Schools, you undermined public confidence and parent trust in you as a teacher, and you put the emotional health of some students at risk."
South Windsor, a town of 25,000 just outside Hartford, is split on the decision. Op-eds in the local newspaper have denounced Olio's reading, while many former students have spoken up in his defense. Olio was a 19-year-veteran of the school district and had won several awards for his teaching.
An English professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign told CNN: "If you can't handle Ginsberg how are you going to teach Walt Whitman? ... For students about to go to college it is a great poem to be confronted by."
New stars honored by Nebula Awards
Every year, the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America anoints a new set of literary stars with the Nebula Awards.
The organization has more than 1,500 members who vote for the best novel, novella, novelette and short story. (A novelette falls between a novella and a short story in length.)
2014 Nebula Award winners
• Novel: "Annihilation" by Jeff VanderMeer
• Novella: "Yesterday's Kin" by Nancy Kress
• Novelette: "A Guide to the Fruits of Hawai'i" by Alaya Dawn Johnson
• Short story: "Jackalope Wives" by Ursula Vernon
VanderMeer's win for "Annihilation" has genre fans talking. As the Los Angeles Times noted, "The book was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, known for literary fiction, not science fiction." With the rapidly growing popularity of fantasy series and post-apocalyptic fiction, it's another sign that genre is finding a foothold with mainstream audiences.