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At any given time at Providence one can find students studying in the library or in the Academic Support Center, and you can’t miss them mowing lawns or making calls for their work study jobs. Staff members press through the day-to-day grind to keep the college functional and progressing. Faculty are constantly teaching or studying up on what could and should potentially be taught. In all, staying busy is a facet of PCC life. However, if a person were to compare schedules for this coming semester, it’s unlikely that they’ll find one significantly busier or more interesting than that of English Professor Aaron Belz.
His course load for this semester includes a new class on the Inklings—the group of English writers that included C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams. Having chosen the topic for a new challenge, he’s already enjoying the new material and the educational opportunities it holds. For example, planning is currently underway for an optional May-term trip to Oxford for a concrete picture of the locations that drew or even inspired the work of these men. Only a few class periods in, students are already excited about the course and obviously interested to see where it goes. One student remarks, “I love being assigned books and authors that I would have loved to read on my own—but wouldn’t have time for if they weren’t for a class.”
Belz’s academic endeavors are reaching beyond the classroom as well. The current issue of the journal Books and Culture includes a book review he wrote, critiquing a new biography of poet Robert Burns. Come March, Belz will be traveling to Paris to speak at an international conference titled “John Ashbery in Paris.” One of the most innovative poets of the past fifty years, Ashbery is also a personal favorite of Dr. Belz, who will speak on his early poetry, specifically focusing on his connection to French filmmaker Jacques Tati.
However, academic interest in important poetry is not the sum of Dr. Belz’s poetic endeavors. This past weekend, the Washington Post website featured one of his poems on its Books page in the Arts and Living section. The poem is entitled “Thirty Illegal Moves in the Cloud-Shape Game,” and the corresponding article explains his thoughts on thinking like a child and how poetry helps him bridge that gap.
If a single published poem is not enough, come April, Belz’s second book of poetry, entitled Lovely, Raspberry, will be released by Persea Books. To usher in its release, on the 8th of April, Dr. Belz will sit for a signing at this year’s Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) Conference in Denver, CO. The following day, he will host the “Meadowlark Poetry Marathon,” an offsite event to the AWP conference that is described as “poetry readings followed by a disco dance party!” Hopefully he doesn’t plan on dancing too hard, because he’ll also be flying home to be involved in a panel discussion the next day on “Poetry: A Visual Language,” at Literary Orange, put on by the UCI Libraries.
While maintaining the busy schedule of a working poet, Belz still claims that his work at Providence is the most exciting. After all, he says, “lots of poets get published,but being part of a great school like Providence in its earliest years? That's not an opportunity many people receive, and I'm thankful to have it myself."”
Aaron Belz is an assistant professor of English at Providence Christian College. You can find his home away from home on the web at belz.net.
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