Unsound Science
by Simin Daneshvar
2021-02-28 13:19:20
Robert Sonkowsky's creative second-grade teacher, Miss Malarkey, in Appleton, Wisconsin, was his first love. She taught spelling by asking her pupils to compose stories and poems from the spelling-word-lists and to read them aloud standing before the...
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Robert Sonkowsky's creative second-grade teacher, Miss Malarkey, in Appleton, Wisconsin, was his first love. She taught spelling by asking her pupils to compose stories and poems from the spelling-word-lists and to read them aloud standing before the class. As a shy young boy, and future actor and poet, he enjoyed, already then, speaking non-autobiographically, with what would one day become a Stanislavskian basis in the imagination of real life. Robert remembers two lines from the poem he wrote for Miss Malarkey about a MONSTER: "In a laboratory dim a mad scientist created him." Now, seventy years later, he uses the phrase "mad scientist" and the implied abstraction, "mad science" (= "unsound science" - see page X) as the title and broadly inclusive theme of the present selection of his poems. These range from the childhood spookiness of that "monster" poem to allusions to real science, with a lot in between, including love and even religion; from strictly formal verse to free verse, always with high regard for oral reading. After grade school he graduated continuously through Appleton's Mckinley School, Appleton High School, Lawrence College; the Universities of North Carolina (Chapel Hill) and of Rome (Italy); post-doctoral positions at the Universities of Texas, Missouri, Wisconsin, and finally Minnesota, where he is Professor Emeritus of Classics and Theatre. His acting career includes credits at The Attic Theater (Appleton), Lawrence College Theater, Carolina Playmakers (Chapel Hill), Durham Theater Guild, Indian Mound Theater (Berea, Kentucky), Tidewater Drama Theater (Virginia Beach, Virginia), University of Minnesota Theater, several small Minneapolis theaters, The Guthrie Theater, Theatre de la Jeune Lune, La Hoya Playhouse. For details, academic and theatrical see Wikipedia; his agent's website http://www. wehmann.com/profile. php?id=483, his University resume http://cnes. cla. umn.edu/people/profile. php?UID=sonko001.
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