In his last few days of class as an undergraduate at Duke University, senior Aaron VanSteinberg has a lot to reflect on. The Kansas native, studying English with a German minor, sat down to share his work on his thesis, experience as a DJ at WXDU, and his plans for the future.
VanSteinberg chose to study English as a lens for literary analysis after growing close to the Department’s faculty. “I haven’t had a bad English professor,” VanSteinberg explains. Through his studies and interactions with professors, he realized that he was interested in 20th century American poetry—a field that “professors like Dr. Nathaniel Mackey and Dr. Joseph Donahue are experts on,” he says. VanSteinberg studied Introductory Poetry and William Carlos Williams with Dr. Mackey and Intermediate Poetry with Dr. Donahue, the former where he read the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry and contemporary experimental works. Alongside the “Comparative Modernism Across the Arts” course he took with Dr. Corina Stan, these curricula served as the basis for VanSteinberg’s senior thesis.
For his senior distinction project, VanSteinberg wanted to write about the 20th century poet William Carlos Williams and wanted to work specifically with Dr. Mackey as a thesis advisor, who is “big on Williams.” Williams is a unique figure because he realized that the United States had no distinct English literary culture and thus deliberately set out to “start a new American movement,” VanSteinberg explains. Williams established a movement that later poets like Denise Levertov and Robert Creeley followed of “writing as a war against stasis” and the fitting of English literary forms to American scenarios. Analyzing 20th century poetry through the lens of “personal crisis” and “formal experimentation,” VanSteinberg demonstrates how both Williams and Levertov write poetry as “the process of thought itself rather than product of thought.”
VanSteinberg’s thesis, titled “Lines of Crisis: William Carlos Williams, Robert Creeley and Denise Levertov,” fits into this poetic tradition of deep thought. He acknowledges that the writing process was difficult, joking in the acknowledgement section that “talking about personal crisis is a projection.” The idea of crisis didn’t strike VanSteinberg until a month ago, at which point he reshaped his other chapters to fit the idea. The process changed his idea of “what writing is and how it works.” He explains that thesis writing is a more creative process than writing a term paper, because it involves the “imaginative construction of language for systems to talk about” condensing an array of literature into an effective argument. Even more significant than writing his thesis was revision, according to VanSteinberg. He wrote three or four drafts of most chapters, each of which significantly changed over time.
Alongside his analytical writing skills, VanSteinberg is also a poet whose work was recently selected as the winner of the Anne Flexner Award for Poetry in the English Department. He humbly claims to be a “novice,” but his awarding suggests otherwise. VanSteinberg used to be an editor for the campus literary magazine The Archive as well, but has lately dedicated his focus towards his work for Duke’s radio station WXDU.
At WXDU, VanSteinberg is a regular DJ and just finished his two-year run as programming director. In that role, he was “in charge of constructing the aesthetic of the station as a whole, intaking music into the library that fits the station’s sound, and scheduling and managing DJs.” What’s great about popular music, he explains, is that it is “totally vernacular”—as an art form, the medium maintains its imagination, but it’s easier to discuss casually than the written English literature studied in class. “Not many people want to sit and talk about 20th century poetry, but the culture around music is so different,” he says. That quality of music culture makes being a DJ for WXDU “a nice counterpoint to what most of Duke life is like,” as a space bound by community and mutual interest.
On his interests for the future, the senior says he’s currently “figuring it out.” A graduate school program may be in his future, because he enjoyed writing his thesis and feels he’s “not done talking about those authors.” For now, VanSteinberg is looking for an 'interstitial gig' that will allow him to keep writing, reading, communicating in the company of smart and generous people like those he's encountered in the English department.
English Department
