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Answers to Go with Susan Smith

Sunday, August 2, 2020

Q.Who has written the library column in past years?

How nice of you to A.ask! The answer is Stephanie Langenkamp, Kay Banning, Diane Insley, Arro Smith, Robin Wood, Ben Pensiero, and me. Diane is our library director now, Arro runs technical services, and I (drum roll) am retiring on August 31!

How many columns will I have submitted by then? I will have written 843 columns by the end of this month. As this is a transition time, I thought it would be fun to run some of my favorite questions each week.

Q.One of the many rules of English grammar which I find hard to live with and impossible to obey is that sentences should never be ended with a preposition. I seem to remember running across an amusing quotation about this rule. Could you locate it for me?

A.This answer was written by Stephanie Langenkamp, our first columnist and long-time director.

When told that one must not end a sentence with a preposition, Winston Churchill is said to have remarked, "This is something up with which I shall not put."

Actually, there is no hard and fast rule against using prepositions at the end of a sentence. It is perfectly acceptable to use one there when it would be awkward in another position.

Q.Is it true that an award-winning poet grew up in San Marcos?

A.Let me begin by saying, that there may be more than one such poet. This subject of this column is Tino Villanueva, a native of San Marcos who won the 1994 American Book Award for “Scene from the Movie Giant.”

He is profiled in “Sueños y Recuerdos del Pasado—Dreams and Memories of the Past: A Community History of Mexican Americans in San Marcos.”

Here’s an excerpt from that book: “The interrelated poems in “Scene from the Movie Giant” explore Villanueva’s sensations while viewing the film “Giant” as a fourteen-year-old boy at a segregated movie theater in San Marcos.

“Villanueva was born to a family of migrant workers. Like many other Mexican Americans in San Marcos at the time, they traveled widely, picking cotton and other crops to survive.

Villanueva was never able to attend school regularly, yet he managed to graduate from San Marcos High in 1960.

“After service in the military, he returned home and took advantage of the G.I. Bill to attend Southwest Texas State University. He earned his bachelor’s degree in three years.

“His first book, “Hay Otra Voz Poems,” was published in 1972. Villanueva eventually earned a PhD., and he is currently a professor at Boston University. In 1994, Dr. Villanueva received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from SWT.”

This award-winning poet writes in both English and Spanish. If you do an author search of our catalog, you’ll see that we have nine of his books. Some are found with our English language poetry and others are shelved with the library’s collection of books in Spanish.

According to the Poetry Foundation website, a selection of Villanueva’s papers is held at the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University. He has also taught at Boston University and Wellesley College.

San Marcos Record

(512) 392-2458
P.O. Box 1109, San Marcos, TX 78666