Author: bripike

Tuesday Musings

Over the weekend I got my hair cut. I now have bangs for the first time in about 5 years and I love them. Change is good!
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I was reading the Elegant Variation earlier today and came across one of Joshua Henkin’s 24 posts that he did for M. Sarvas while Sarvas was off traveling the world. The man is a posting machine, but he mentioned a writing exercise that I am now determined to do with me creative writing class (that begins in about two weeks). He suggested cutting off the end of a short story and allowing the student to write their own version. In a way, I’m surprised this exercise didn’t occurr to me earlier, because I love things like this that stretch the mind, but I’m definitely going to try it now.

I checked Sarvas’s novel “Harry, Revised” out of the library but have yet to dive into it. Too many books, too little time.
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I’m very tired today. I only get up really early (5 AM) to go to the gym once a week, but that once a week is brutal. Early to bed this evening…

Somewhere, somehow, fall arrived. I was conscious of it on my calendar and through my poetry (hence your regular fall poetry posting, which will be continuing through October) but I had not noticed any drastic changes in the landscape until yesterday while Iwas walking Kwe. Leaves are changing and in some instances, already falling. The air is crisper and I think I saw a pumpkin on a stand the other day…
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The cover of this weeks NewYorker makes me chuckle

Monday Musings

This weekend was a roller coaster. Usually, I try to post during the weekend, but Friday afternoon I managed to dump a glass of Crystal Light lemonade onto our Macbook. It wasn’t pretty, but R’s quick thinking may have saved the machine. He turned it upside down on a dry surface and immediately took the battery out. We let it “dry” for 24 hours and Saturday we managed get it turned on. Remarkably, the computer works just fine. There is a small amount of screen damage to the lower right hand corner, but otherwise all programs work well. The biggest problem is that the computer will not recognize the battery. We’re exploring the options and yes, I am kicking myself repeatedly.
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Greekfest was fun but somewhat marred by the computer fiasco. The lines were long and the food was overpriced, but it was delicious. My favorite item of the evening came when I was introduced to the “baklava” sundae. Yes, it is as sweet as it sounds. It’s composed of a scoop of vanilla ice cream, a scoop of gooey baklava, and a drizle of chocolate syrup. Yum!

Oktoberfest (Saturday) found me in a better frame of mind and I enjoyed myself even though there wasn’t much German about the event. RJ and I rode on the Ferris Wheel and the Paratrooper (R’s favorite) and we drank some beer. We had a good time with friends,- and I’m glad we went.
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I took Kweli on a long walk yesterday. We walked along the canal, through Rocky Ripple, all the way to Butler’s campus and back. I like walking Kwe, even though he get’s over stimulated and has slight ADD. I like being outdoors and it was a beautiful day. That being said, I wish other dog owners/walkers would be a little more aware when they walked their pets. This woman was walking her dog (looked like a beagle mix) and she crept up right behind me without even letting me know she was there. So she startled Kweli and she startled me, which caused me to stop, and let her go ahead. The same goes for bikers and joggers. Say “passing on your left or right” don’t creep up behind a walker and then almost run them off the road. Maybe someday when I have more time I’ll right a trail etiquette book.
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Your fall poem for today:

Home

I didn't know I was grateful
           for such late-autumn
                       bent-up cornfields

yellow in the after-harvest
            sun before the
                       cold plow turns it all over

into never.
           I didn't know
                       I would enter this music

that translates the world
            back into dirt fields
                        that have always called to me

as if I were a thing
             come from the dirt,
                         like a tuber,

or like a needful boy. End
            Lonely days, I believe. End the exiled
                          and unraveling strangeness.

~ Bruce Weigl
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Two interesting articles about Robert Giroux. A tribute and then an article about missed oportunities.

I love this idea. We sometimes forget about muses.

Friday Musings

I’m back at school today. As a new faculty member, I have orientations every Friday. So far they’ve been very helpful. Today’s session was over wikis and blogs and how we can incorporate them into Blackboard. We also received a tutorial over smart boards, which was neat and informative. Unlike some of my colleagues, I’m more than willing to embrace technology in the classroom. I think where educators make the mistake is when they don’t have a Plan B. Technology, just like many other things, is not full proof. If you go into a classroom planning to use a computer, projector, or smart board, you should also go into that same classroom prepared that those machines may not work. Part of teaching is being prepared. If you’re prepared, you’ll be fine no matter what.
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This theme of this weekend is “eat, drink, and be merry.” R and I and friends are attending the Greek Festival and Oktoberfest. Good times!
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I just read the winning story for the Emerging Writers Network fiction contest. Here is the link to the story, The Secret Life of Engineers, by David Borofka. I was struck by the title and the story is very good. Here is what the judge, Alyson Hagy, said about it:

The height of summer in the Rocky Mountains is the worst time of the year to judge a literary contest. Because it’s perfect outside. The sky, the alpine meadows, the back country streams are all signing their Siren songs. So it takes a very good set of short stories to keep me indoors…and interested.
“The Secret Life of Engineers” is a story that knows its voice and heart. It never resorts to literary pyrotechnics. It doesn’t try to do too much, and it left me with a rich, complicated sense of its characters despite the fact that it’s not very long. It’s a story that believes in itself, and thus, it made a believer out of me. The author of this story has a wonderful ear (there’s not a syllable out of place, in my opinion). He or she also has a keen sense of comic timing. In fact, most of the best stories I read for the contest were funny. Thank goodness for that. I loved the brio and balls of many, many of these entries. These writers are not shy, and that’s a good thing. They have something to say and good tales to tell…and they kept me glued to my chair despite the lure of the great Wyoming outdoors.

Thursday Musings

It has been an interesting two weeks here at the community college where I teach. There have been a lot of major changes that have impacted the school on a global level and then there have been smaller changes that have only impacted me. Having recently moved from an adjunct faculty member to a full time faculty member, I’ve had to readjust a little bit and some of those adjustments have caused me to discover new things, while others have reaffirmed things I already knew.

DISCLAIMER: I would just like to say that in the next part of this post I am in no way shape or form slamming adjuncts. I was an adjunct/Teaching fellow for 3 1/2 years, so I understand and sympathize with the hardships that come along with that kind of work.

I’m often frustrated by the lack of extra time that adjuncts are willing to spend with students. I know that they are only part time faculty, I know that they are more often than not under appreciated and under paid, and I know that many of them have second and even third jobs that they must have to make ends meet. That being said, it is their decision to teach and that is a decision that should be taken seriously. This little rant was prompted by a former student of mine who emailed me for help concerning her English class this semester. She was having a hard time thinking of a topic for her essay and wanted to run a few ideas by me. I told her I’d be happy to help but that she should ask her new instructor for help first. Well, I know her instructor and I know she’s an adjunct, so unfortunately it came as no surprise when she told me she had asked and the instructor had said “I’ll help you after you have a first draft.” Well, obviously, this isn’t going to help much in the area of topic generation. While it is a students responsibility to come up with their own topic, more often than not they just need to bounce some ideas of someone in order to get on the right track (which is exactly what happened with my student). We talked for twenty minutes, and she left here feeling more confident about her essay. All it took was twenty minutes. Sigh.
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Wednesday Musings

This story is unfortunate and it annoys me.

Here is the poem. You decide.

Education for Leisure

Today I am going to kill something. Anything.
I have had enough of being ignored and today
I am going to play God. It is an ordinary day,
a sort of grey with boredom stirring in the streets.

I squash a fly against the window with my thumb.
We did that at school. Shakespeare. It was in
another language and now the fly is in another language.
I breathe out talent on the glass to write my name.

I am a genius. I could be anything at all, with half
the chance. But today I am going to change the world.
Something’s world. The cat avoids me. The cat
knows I am a genius, and has hidden itself.

I pour the goldfish down the bog. I pull the chain.
I see that it is good. The budgie is panicking.
Once a fortnight, I walk the two miles into town
for signing on. They don’t appreciate my autograph.

There is nothing left to kill. I dial the radio
and tell the man he’s talking to a superstar.
He cuts me off. I get our bread-knife and go out.
The pavements glitter suddenly. I touch your arm.

~Carol Ann Duffy
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I don’t think I agree with the first line of this article. I mean, how else do you explain political poetry? As a rebuke I give you one of my favorite political poems:

The Colonel

What you have heard is true. I was in his house. His wife carried a tray of coffee and sugar. His daughter filed her nails, his son went out for the night. There were daily papers, pet dogs, a pistolon the cushion beside him. The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house. On the television was a cop show. It was in English. Broken bottles were embedded in the walls around the house to scoop the kneecaps from a man’s legs or cut his hands to lace. On the windows there were gratings like those in liquor stores. We had dinner, rack of lamb, good wine, a gold bell was on the table for calling the maid. The maid brought green mangoes, salt, a type of bread. I was asked how I enjoyed the country. There was a brief commercial in Spanish. His wife took everything away. There was some talk of how difficult it had become to govern. The parrot said hello on the terrace. The colonel told it to shut up, and pushed himself from the table. My friend said to me with his eyes: say nothing. The colonel returned with a sack used to bring groceries home. He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there. I am tired of fooling around he said. As for the rights of anyone, tell your people they can go fuck themselves. He swept the ears to the floor with his arm and held the last of his wine in the air. Something for your poetry, no? he said. Some of the ears on the floor caught this scrap of his voice. Some of the ears on the floor were pressed to the ground.
~Carolyn Forché

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I am weary this afternoon. I taught two comp courses back to back this morning and it always puts a strain on my voice. My morning classes are a touch more apathetic then my afternoon class, so I’ll have to adjust my teaching method a bit.

Tuesday Musings

Just received this in my email:
New York, September 2—Louise Glück has been selected as the recipient of the 2008 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets. The $100,000 prize recognizes outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry. Brigit Pegeen Kelly has been selected as the recipient of the 2008 Academy Fellowship, which is awarded once a year to a poet for distinguished poetic achievement and provides a stipend of $25,000. The Academy’s Board of Chancellors, a body of fourteen eminent poets, selects the Wallace Stevens Award and Academy Fellowship recipients.
Of Louise Glück’s work, Academy Chancellor Robert Pinsky said:

Louise sometimes uses language so plain it can almost seem like someone is speaking to you spontaneously—but it’s always intensely distinguished…There’s always a surprise in Louise’s writing; in every turn, every sentence, every line, something goes somewhere a little different, or very different, from where you thought it would.

Louise Gluck was born in New York City in 1943 and grew up on Long Island. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, including Averno (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), The Seven Ages (Ecco, 2001), Vita Nova (1999), Meadowlands (1996), The Wild Iris (1992), Ararat (1990), and The Triumph of Achilles (1985). She has also published a collection of essays, Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry (1994).
Her many honors include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, the Bollingen Prize in Poetry, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry. In 2003, she was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States by the Library of Congress. She currently is a writer-in-residence at Yale University, and she lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
About writing poetry, Louise Glück wrote:

The world is complete without us. Intolerable fact. To which the poet responds by rebelling, wanting to prove otherwise… The poet lives in chronic dispute with fact, and an astonishment occurs: another fact is created, like a new element, in partial contradiction of the intolerable.

Brigit Pegeen Kelly was born in Palo Alto, California, in 1951. She is the author of The Orchard (BOA Editions, 2004), a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry and the National Book Circle Critics Award in Poetry; Song (1995), which was the 1994 Lamont Poetry Selection of the Academy of American Poets; and To The Place of Trumpets (Yale University Press, 1988), which was selected by James Merrill for the Yale Series of Younger Poets.
About Kelly’s work, Academy Chancellor Carl Phillips said:

In the course of her three books, Brigit Kelly has shaped a poetry and vision that demand to be taken on their own terms—which is to say, there’s an originality that is everywhere unmistakable. Her sentences shuttle steadily back and forth to produce a tapestry-like meditation that throws into arresting—often disturbing—relief a world that lies “beyond the report of beauty,” where cruelty and sweetness are easily, perhaps necessarily, confusable for one another, a world whose topography is at once mythic, recognizable, and utterly Kelly’s own.

Kelly’s additional honors include a “Discovery”/The Nation Award, the Cecil Hemley Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Pushcart Prize, the Theodore Roethke Prize from Poetry Northwest, and a Whiting Writers Award. Kelly, who has taught for many years primarily at the University of Illinois, has also taught at the University of California at Irvine, Purdue University, and Warren Wilson College. In 2002 the University of Illinois presented her with two awards for excellence in teaching.
Louise Glück and Brigit Pegeen Kelly will be participating in the Poets Forum (November 6-8 in New York City) where they will read from their work at the Poets Awards Ceremony. Louise Glück will also be part of panel discussions on contemporary poetry presented by the Academy of American Poets. For more information, please visit
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I really admire Kelly and Gluck, so I’m very pleased they received these awards. I would love to go to NYC to hear them read, but alas I’m a poor poet/professor. I wonder what it would be like to have unlimited funds where I could go to any workshop, panel, lecture, or retreat I wanted to go to…one can dream. Speaking of conferences, early registration for AWP is coming up in October. Three cheers for the windy city!
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I enjoyed my class this afternoon. We discussed the art of observation and how it can be useful in all types of writing. I used the famous excerpt about the old tom cat from Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek when I talked about sensory detail. They thought it was gross and talked about it for 20 minutes. I loved it.

Books For Children

This is a pretty smart idea. I like when technology and books come together for the common good.

I do not read The Twilight Series, but a number of my friends (25 and over) and students do. I’ll admit that I have a bias towards it because it has to do with vampires. I did read all the Harry Potter books, attended some of the parties at the bookstores, and even went to a midnight showing of Order of the Phoenix. However, I think the aspect of Twilight that makes me the most nervous is the teen angst. While readers experienced some of this in Harry Potter, it wasn’t at the forefront but I feel it is a major plot point in Twilight. In other words, I’m afraid I’m going to end up reading a Christopher Pike novel, the only difference being that the characters are immortal instead of mortal. This little meditation was sparked by this article. Apparently, I’m in the minority 🙂

A charity to save Superman’s home.

Monday Musings

I took a little break for Labor Day weekend.

Your new fall poem for this week:

Aunt Leaf

Needing one, I invented her –
the great-great-aunt dark as hickory
called Shining-Leaf, or Drifting-Cloud
or The-Beauty-of-the-Night.

Dear aunt, I’d call into the leaves,
and she’d rise up, like an old log in a pool,
and whisper in a language only the two of us knew
the word that meant follow,

and we’d travel
cheerful as birds
out of the dusty town and into the trees
where she would change us both into something quicker –
two foxes with black feet,
two snakes green as ribbons,
two shimmering fish – and all day we’d travel.

At day’s end she’d leave me back at my own door
with the rest of my family,
who were kind, but solid as wood
and rarely wandered. While she,
old twist of feathers and birch bark,
would walk in circles wide as rain and then
float back

scattering the rags of twilight
on fluttering moth wings;

or she’d slouch from the barn like a gray opossum;

or she’d hang in the milky moonlight
burning like a medallion,

this bone dream, this friend I had to have,
this old woman made out of leaves.

~Mary Oliver
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You can now read back issues of The Kenyon Review online.

I love this poem (featured on Poetry Daily)

A Farm in Virginia near the North Carolina Boundary



The shadow of a grass blade falls upon the worm.
A blue-tailed skink slips in under the door.
This is life as lived on a southern farm
with fruit trees (apple orchard; fig and pear).
Scarlet tanagers let themselves be seen
from time to time. Rabbits and deer devour
the season’s garden. Bees linger at the screen.
Some days the sky is low and seems to lower,
and others blue, with clouds a rickrack trim,
or black with blowing rain that stills and hushes
the birds while large-mouth bass and turtles swim
in the muddy-bottomed pond; rain rattles bushes.
It’s busy here; a lot is going on
most all the time and now and then scarlet
tanagers, bright baubles in the morning sun,
and shy despite the gaudy garb of harlot,
fly by, a pair; house wrens flock at the feeder.
The bees that fumble at the sill will swarm.
A cardinal relaxes in a cedar.
This is life on a small southeastern farm.
A blue-tailed skink slips out under the door.
The shadow of a grass blade crosses the worm.
~Kelly Cherry


I discovered Kelly Cherry when I read A Formal Feeling Comes (great book). That book is responsible for changing my feelings about form. I used to be much more intimidated by any type of form and I found myself frustrated by certain forms (sestinas, couplets, sonnets) not only because they were difficult but also because I felt they were inaccessible to the reader. But I didn’t want them to be. Forms are beautiful and complicated and worth study but often times they are dismissed as archaic. This book allowed me to finally relate to the subject and the form, and I discovered a lot of poets that I would not have if I had not picked it up.