This is the second of several special episodes of Liberal Arts Voices featuring this year’s Penn State Laureate, poet and Professor of English and Womens’ Studies, Robin Becker. Throughout the fall semester, Liberal Arts Voices will be collaborating with Penn State Live to cover the poems and work of Professor Becker.
In this podcast Robin Becker joins Dean Long; CLA Enrichment Coordinator and PSU English alum, Ashley Tarbet; English major Natalie Kovak; and English grad student William Woolfit to discuss Professor Becker’s poem “The Problem of Magnification.” You can read the full version of “The Problem of Magnification” on Penn State Live.
Professor Becker begins by describing how her role as a teacher helped to inspire this poem. Specifically, she wanted to capture an unexpected moment of role reversal when a student becomes the teacher and vice versa. She wanted to explore the kind of broadening of perspectives and the interesting subjects that result from these interactions between students and teachers.
We invite you to respond to this poem or to the question that Professor Becker asks at the end of her poem: Role-reversals sometimes yield interesting material. Under what conditions might you imagine reversing roles?
Liberal Arts Voices: Robin Becker’s “The Problem of Magnification”
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To watch a video of Professor Becker reading this poem or to read more about it, visit Penn State Live.
We encourage all of our listeners to write to us with comments, questions, or suggestions at laus@la.psu.edu. We may even respond to these comments on the next episode of Liberal Arts Voices.