MPR’s Beth Friend has a phone interview with poet Christopher Merrill about his teaching experience in Sarajevo.

Transcript:

(00:00:00) Poet Christopher marrow is teaching American literature in Sarajevo for the open Society Institute a humanitarian organization based in Budapest. The Institute sponsors a higher education Support Program, which is trying to jumpstart the decimated City University before the war in Bosnia began. The University of Sarajevo had 3,000 students. Now, there are 300 before the war. They were 18 professors in the faculty of philosophy. Now only one is left Merrill's classes cover a Wide range of poetic expression from English Renaissance to the Poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. His students are almost exclusively young women 18 to 20 years old because the young men are either at the front or have left the country talking from Sarajevo. He describes the

(00:00:45) scene. I need a four-story building a hundred meters from the front which has no electricity or no heat the windows have all been blown out and so they're covered with a kind of plastics. Eating that doesn't keep the wind or the noise out. So it's very cold. This is the winner of course and we sit there in our coats and gloves and I have to shout because it feels a bit like an open Amphitheater in which we're talking yesterday sniper was working outside most of the time so there was a lot of gunfire while we were trying to talk about the Poetry of Wordsworth and Blake and Coleridge and that's a pretty fairly common occurrence here.

(00:01:29) And so what happens do you just all ignore the sniper fire and continue to talk about Wordsworth or do try to integrate somehow the reality of what's outside the window with what's on the printed page?

(00:01:41) Generally speaking when this when the gunshots ring out that's an occasion for humor from the students because they're so used to it that it doesn't FaZe them that I'm not used to it and I suspect I will never get used to it and I generally Flinch and I make some kind of joke about it. And then we find a way to to integrate that into the poems that we're talking about. For example today. We looked at what Whitman Song of We looked at his preface to the 1855 edition of the Leaves of Grass in which he talks about what you have to do to be a poet and he says you have to love the stupid and crazy and we happen to say something about that just as a shot rang out and someone said well, you don't have to lose love all the stupid in the crazy referring to the serbs just on the hill above the shooting down. That's the kind of joke that gets made.

(00:02:36) Hmm. Are you students passionate about the

(00:02:39) subject? I think that they are passionate about learning English. I'm not so sure that they're passionate about poetry yet. It's an interesting thing because they're young they're being exposed to poetry from a different culture than theirs and we're trying to find the analogs between what poets like Thomas Wyatt or John Keats we're talking about and what they've been experiencing. So at first it, A little bit slow but for example today we talked about Emily Dickinson. We did her poem after great pain of formal feeling comes and that seemed to strike quite a note around the room because everyone in that room has experienced such great pain and understands the ways in which for example and we dickon said and says, this is the hour of lead. Well, of course everyone in Sarajevo knows what that means with the hour of lead is all about that time in which the grief has been so overwhelming that you feel in. Different to the universe and that's something that they can respond to even though Dickinson was talking about something altogether

(00:03:40) different. Do they want to talk about politics with you about Americans about the American position or lack of the American position with regard to

(00:03:48) Bosnia? The interesting thing is that on my first two visits here. Everyone that I talked to was deeply interested in whatever the American position was. They wanted to know what the Americans were going to do and this visit here. I have a sense of just complete cynicism about the Americans. They've given up any hope that our government will do anything responsible regarding the situation in Bosnia. There was a kind of Hope before and that that's gone which is sort of interesting because today we did a poem by Dickinson Hope The thing hopes the thing with feathers, will they understand what that means when hope no longer means anything in a situation like this.

(00:04:31) Still they want to continue to learn English. They want to continue to study poetry.

(00:04:35) They recognize that the study of English is a is probably the most useful thing that they can study here because those who speak English in the city make the most money working for humanitarian agencies were working as translators for Oprah for Orthopedic for unhcr. There's a recognition that English as a lingua Franca of the world is the ticket out of this kind of hell.

(00:04:59) Right tell me how your day goes as a teacher in

(00:05:02) Sarajevo standard a for me is to lecture 9 to 10 10 to 11 11 12 3 separate subjects certain amount of discussion before and after and between the lectures then off to to a lunch with various members of the International Community and then we go and visit writers last night. I appeared on very interesting radio program called Country Club Sarajevo Country Club the man I'm working for Savannah Myriad L kovitch is Professor of American literature and he also hosts a weekly country music program his feeling is that in country music all of the ideals of America democracy individual rights and freedom are summed up in the songs of Willie Nelson and Mary Chapin Carpenter and people like this so yesterday I appeared with the money show and we talked about country music and we talked about democracy and it's his way of fighting off The Barbarians The Primitives is to say look we can maintain some kind of a multinational multi-confessional City here in the center of Europe we cannot have to give in to fundamentalism we don't have to give in to nationalism and I'm going to celebrate that through the music of will yesterday Willie Nelson The Merle Haggard we played Pancho and Lefty we ended by a ski ended by asking me whether I thought Elvis was alive or not and I told him that here in Sarajevo you have to believe that Elvis is

(00:06:33) alive poet Christopher Merrill is teaching English literature in Sarajevo his accounts of the war in Bosnia will appear later this year in the book only the nails remain three Balkan Journeys from Henry Holt & in the old bridge to be published by the Twin Cities based milkweed editions for the FM New Station I'm Beth friend