We mourn the loss of our Emeritus Sammy McLean. Born on September 29, 1929 in El Dorado, Kansas, Sammy passed away in Seattle at age 88 on August 6, 2018. He graduated from the University of Oklahoma and earned a Ph.D. in Germanic Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. Sammy joined the department in 1967, after teaching at Dartmouth College and for the University of Maryland Overseas Program in England. He taught at all undergraduate and graduate levels in Germanics and Comparative Literature. He published a book on Bertolt Brecht; articles on Brecht, Franz Kafka, Gerhart Hauptmann, and the Double; reviews and abstracts; poems; and English translations of poetry and short prose fiction from German. In 1990 he retired as Associate Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature and Germanics. He was a member of the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and a lifetime member of the American Literary Translators Association.
Sammy had a lifelong interest in music and poetry. We are glad to share two of his poems:
HESITATION BLUES
But I, in the
winter of my soul said
no I
think not I
think I’d bett4er wait a while for that I
have so many other things the
time’s not ripe . . . Why,
you have to prepare for something like that
you can’t just
POW! like do it
it takes time you have to prepare get
ready practice lace up your shoes pull up your
boot straps tighten your belt take a
big breath ready set go like you can’t just
DO IT! Can you?
Don’t you have to DO SOMETHING ELSE
first? Like
get ready? LIKE I'VE NEVER HEARD OF
DOING SOMETHING WITHOUT DOING SOMETHING ELSE FIRST!
That’s impossible you have to
learn to do it first you have to
learn to do it like everyone else does so you can
finally do it or else you might do it wrong you might
do it your own way instead of the way everyone
else does it and that’s wrong.
So you have to do those other things first –
DON’T YOU?
WESTERNER
1
Oh I know things are as they
should be how
else but
the chance for rain doesn’t determine
everything
I think
sometimes things should be
different snow in
summer what if it rained
upwards cows were
green I
loved you and
didn’t worry about my work
2
I want to be
a cowboy with my
own saddle my
own horse gallop
buck jump
fences take you
up ride
over plains through
sagebrush into
mountains away
Sammy McLean
Hesitation Blues, published in Western Edge, Arts Resource Services, 1977
Westerner, published in The Pacific, volume 1, number 1, Summer 1975
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