Notebook: December 6, 1995

Gordon Wu '58 Pledges $100 Million
New Building to Link Jadwin, Fine Halls
Class Act: Nurturing Creativity and Imagination

Gordon Wu '58 Pledges $100 Million

The largest gift ever to Princeton kicks off the university's $750 million campaign

Hong kong entrepreneur Gordon Y. S. Wu '58 has pledged $100 million-the biggest gift in Princeton's history-to strengthen the engineering school. Wu's gift is the sixth-largest donation to an American college or university since 1967, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the largest ever made by a foreign national. The pledge was announced in conjunction with the November 10 launch of the university's five-year campaign to raise $750 million.
In a November 9 press conference in Bowen Hall, the long-time Princeton benefactor expressed his gratitude to the university for educating him and to "the American people" for their hospitality during his undergraduate years.
Prior to Wu's pledge, the biggest gift to Princeton was $35 million, made in 1961 by Mr. and Mrs. Charles S. Robertson '26 to the Woodrow Wilson School.
One of Hong Kong's richest businessmen, Wu told The New York Times that his personal fortune is $1 billion. His "tithing" to Princeton is one in a string of major gifts he has made to the university in the last 15 years. Wu's prior gifts totalled some $15 million and have included endowed professorships; $3.5 million for the construction of Wu Hall, the social and dining center for Butler College; and $7.5 million for Bowen Hall, the home of the Princeton Materials Institute. "As long as I live, I'm going to give to Princeton," said Wu, who is the father of two recent graduates, June Wu '92 and Thomas Jefferson Wu '94.
Wu runs Hopewell Holdings Ltd., one of the largest property-development and infrastructure groups in Hong Kong, and Consolidated Electric Power Asia Ltd., Asia's largest independent power-production company. The entrepreneur, who was profiled in the February 23, 1994 paw, called himself a "gentleman-C student" at Princeton. He has built hotels, power plants, and China's first superhighway, connecting Hong Kong and Guangzhou. He's working on another superhighway and a rapid-transit system in Bangkok.
Some $65 million of Wu's pledge has been included in the campaign's advance fund of $215 million, and the balance will take the form of challenge grants. The $750 million effort, which coincides with the university's 250th anniversary, is officially known as The Anniversary Campaign for Princeton. The five major areas designated in the campaign's table of needs and their monetary goals are: unrestricted support through Annual Giving, $125 million; undergraduate education and campus life, $300 million; graduate education, including financial aid and a Graduate Seminar Fund, $55 million; academic and research initiatives, $155 million; and facilities for education and research, $115 million.
The campaign kickoff took place on the weekend of the Yale football game, but the Tigers' 21-13 loss did little to dampen the enthusiasm of the thousand or so alumni volunteers and their spouses on campus for the festivities. Events included panel discussions, a chamber-music concert, a reading from her works by novelist and Professor in the Humanities Joyce Carol Oates, and the premier of a film commemorating the 250th. Capping the weekend was a Friday evening of dinner and dancing in a Jadwin Gym transformed for the occasion with islands of food, potted trees, and music by the University Glee Glub and the Stan Rubin ['55] Orchestra. The campaign theme, "With One Accord" was everywhere-on floor-to-ceiling orange banners, on rich chocolate cakes that doubled as centerpieces at each table, and on orange ribbons around chocolate tigers. It was an evening to revel in Princeton's past and look toward its future.

New Building to Link Jadwin, Fine Halls

The planned addition to Jadwin Hall may not be very large, but its programmatic aim is ambitious: to create a center for teaching and learning at the heart of the physics and math complex, one that can accommodate undergraduates from across the disciplinary spectrum.
In September the trustees approved a plan developed by Gwathmey Siegel and Associates, Architects, of New York, for a 21,000-square-foot teaching space in a facility between Jadwin and Fine halls, which house the physics and mathematics departments, respectively.
Introductory physics and math courses are currently taught in Palmer Hall, an older facility built in 1908. The physics department moved to Jadwin in 1969 and mathematics to the new Fine Hall in 1970. Now both departments are eager to reintegrate introductory teaching and locate it closer to where their faculties work, making the Jadwin-Fine complex a center for undergraduate learning in the sciences.

Class Act: Nurturing Creativity and Imagination

In a spacious office that doubles as a classroom, a somewhat rumpled poet guides his charges to dig out what's deep inside them. Unlike other class assignments that demand correct answers, the assignments in James Richardson '71's beginning poetry class are almost never right. And they are almost never done, at least not by the time the students finish the course.
Poems aren't written in a week or months. They may take years to finish. "That has nothing to do with talent," says Richardson. "Poems just don't get done that fast." The writer needs to let the manuscript sit for a month or so and return to the work in a different frame of mind, says Richardson, who has written three books of poetry. That's where a workshop comes in; classmates bring a needed perspective to the poem.
Before each class, the students read each other's poems-they write one a week-and arrive with lots of things to say about metaphors, images, and turns of phrases.
The budding poets lounged in couches and comfortable chairs in Richardson's second-floor office at 185 Nassau Street, the same building where he took poetry as an undergraduate. One student munched on frosted flakes. Others relaxed with their legs curled up and their feet tucked under them. A man-child in his 40s, Richardson slumped in a chair, hands in his pockets. In between the students' comments, he worked in his own critiques in a gentle voice that was sometimes hard to hear over the traffic sounds coming through the open windows.
A director of the creative-writing program for 10 years and a professor of English, Richardson's floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are filled with works by poets, including Shakespeare, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Browning. There's no single reading list for this course; Richardson says it's "more useful to prescribe for people individually."
When Richardson critiques his students' poems, he often finds barely anything in the poem worth saving-perhaps only a seed of what a future poem may become. Often the students don't know what the subject is, explains Richardson. He also finds that lines are often out of order "because they are coming out of feelings, which are simultaneous and all mixed up. . . . It's like putting a fence around a cloud." Every once in a while, he adds, "lightning strikes and you get a poem all in one. But it doesn't happen that often."
The students don't set their poems aside after each workshop but keep at them, revising and reworking. "Revising is much harder than writing," says Richardson. "It takes a firmer sense of what you want and some objectivity."
By the end of the semester, each student has written 11 poems. Several have been abandoned along the way, while others have been rewritten and will be presented at the end of the course as their "final" poems. The students write in free verse, the no-rules form of most contemporary poetry, and in traditional rhythms, such as iambic pentameter and trochaic.
Richardson wants his students to learn to write, to learn how to read carefully and critically, and to learn about themselves. Some people write poems as therapy. But poems don't have to be autobiographical or confessional. Those poets who don't write from personal material will learn about language, images, and how words work, and they find themselves writing about certain ideas, themes, and attitudes over and over again.
Students can't major in creative writing, but some seniors may write a collection of poems in lieu of a thesis for their major. To do so, they need the permission of both the creative-writing program and their departments. The English department automatically approves creative theses, but other departments may not. If seniors don't get permission, they may elect to write two theses, one in their major and one in creative writing.
Teaching beginning poetry is an adventure for Richardson. Numerous gifted students walk through his door. "Often there are several people [in one class] who show little tiny flashes of [special talent]. There are even classes where everyone seems to." A gifted student may not produce a finished poem, "just a dynamite stanza." Yet even students who manifest real talent may not pursue poetry for long. Some people "write through their good poems and that's it," says Richardson. Great poetry, he explains, is usually born in one's 30s and later.
Richardson started writing poetry when he was a student at Princeton and has been writing ever since. His poetry is filled with images from nature and looks at pain, fear, suffering, joy, wonder, and awe. Why does he write poetry? "It's a question I don't seem to need to have an answer for," he says. "It's just the kind of thinking, feeling that I like to do." He calls his writing process "fishing." He sits, looking vacantly, maybe with someone's book in his lap. He may end up with two or three pages of notes that he later throws away. Or he may get an idea for a new poem, or a few lines, or an idea on how to change a poem. He's not surprised if he gets nothing accomplished. There are times when he "just doesn't have it." Especially right after he publishes a book. So he waits "until there's some new part of me there to work with."
Ideally, he writes three mornings a week, two or three hours each session. Because of lectures to prepare and committees he's on, he's only been able to write Friday mornings this semester. And he's "very frustrated and not feeling like a real person. [I'm] feeling like a person without a soul. A shallow instrument of myself."
-Kathryn F. Greenwood

Metaphors, Images, Turns of Phrases
A reading list by James Richardson '71
The Complete Poems 1927-1979, by Elizabeth Bishop (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1983)-By consensus, Bishop is the leading American poet of this half-century.
Poetic Rhythm: An Introduction, by Derek Attridge (Cambridge University Press, 1995)-A book by the leading expert on poetic meter and form.
Selected Poems 1966-1987, by Seamus Heaney (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990)-The 1995 Nobel laureate splits his time between Ireland and Harvard in this collection.
Collected Poems, by Philip Larkin (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1988)-England's best recent poet is grumpy, poignant, and popular.
Selected Poems, by W. S. Merwin '48, (Atheneum, 1988)-A strangely compelling poet who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1971.
The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Alex Preminger et al., eds. (Princeton University Press, 1993)-The new and much-improved edition of this guide to poetic devices, forms, schools, and genres.
The Norton Anthology of Poetry, Alexander Allison et al., eds. (W. W. Norton, 1983)-A reliable selection of the best poetry in English from the 13th century to the present.
Omeros, by Derek Walcott (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990)-A Caribbean epic by another recent Nobelist.
From Princeton One Autumn Afternoon: Collected Poems 1950-1986, by Theodore Weiss (Macmillan, 1987)-A much-honored poet who was for more than 20 years an eminence in the creative-writing program.


paw@princeton.edu