Friday Musings

My class last night was excellent. There are about fifteen students and they all have a really good energy. They asked lots of questions and the three hours moved quickly. I’m both pleased and relieved. A three hour block for a class can be painful if the students are not involved, so hopefully this trend will continue.

My meeting with the librarian also went well. I secured the display case for our novel display for March. I wanted to get this display up last semester, but I’m glad that the posters will be displayed along with the student reviews. I also found out about the newly revamped poetry contest that the library is sponsoring and I may end up being a judge, which is neat.
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In the January issue of Poetry, there is an interesting essay by Clive James. He spends a lot of time talking about Stephen Edgar, and I wish he’d spent more time talking about the concept I’m going to excerpt here:

When reacting to a poem, the word “perfect” is inadequate for the same reason that the word “wow” would be. But it isn’t inadequate because it says nothing. It is inadequate because it is trying to say everything. On a second reading, we begin to deduce that our first reading was complex, even if it seemed simple. Scores of judgments were going on, too quickly for us to catch but adding up to a conviction—first formed early in the piece and then becoming more and more detailed—that this object’s mass of material is held together by a binding force. Such a binding force seems to operate within all successful works of art in any medium, like a singularity in space that takes us in with it, so that we can’t pay attention to anything else, and least of all to all the other works of art that might be just as powerful. We get to pay attention to them only when we recover.

I think this gets at the larger question of how do we talk about poetry? This is a very important question to me as a poet and a teacher. How do we find the language to talk about what moves us? What we respond to? I think that many students are intimidated by poetry because they don’t know how to talk about it, and is there a right and wrong way? Also, this essay addresses the issue of moving beyond the first reading of a poem. I know I’ve read poems the first time and been completely taken with them, only to find more to like upon a second reading. This also can have the reverse effect.

Monday (First Day of Class)

I arrived at school at 7 am this morning. I was bit surprised to find that I was the only one here when I got off the elevator. I must be one of the few poor souls who volunteered to teach 8 am classes. A lot of people (students included) groan about the 8 o’clock hour, but I like it. I’m done teaching by 11 and I can spend the afternoon grading, doing paperwork, or counseling students. This also allows me to leave early enough in the day, so that I can go home and actually get things accomplished.

My classes went well this morning. There appears to be some good energy.
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The First Line is the Deepest

Kim Addonizio

I have been one acquainted with the spatula,

the slotted, scuffed, Teflon-coated spatula

that lifts a solitary hamburger from pan to plate,

acquainted with the vibrator known as the Pocket Rocket

and the dildo that goes by Tex,

and I have gone out, a drunken bitch,

in order to ruin

what love I was given,

and also I have measured out

my life in little pills—Zoloft,

Restoril, Celexa,

Xanax.

I have. For I am a poet. And it is my job, my duty

to know wherein lies the beauty

of this degraded body,

or maybe

it’s the degradation in the beautiful body,

the ugly me

groping back to my desk to piss

on perfection, to lay my kiss

of mortal confusion

upon the mouth of infinite wisdom.

My kiss says razors and pain, my kiss says

America is charged with the madness

of God. Sundays, too,

the soldiers get up early, and put on their fatigues in the blue-

black day. Black milk. Black gold. Texas tea.

Into the valley of Halliburton rides the infantry—

Why does one month have to be the cruelest,

can’t they all be equally cruel? I have seen the best

gamers of your generation, joysticking their M1 tanks through

the sewage-filled streets. Whose

world this is I think I know.

courtesy of Poetry January 2009

I like this poem. A lot. Partly because it is clever. Partly because of the pop culture references. Partly because it is brave. Mostly because it is honest. It is a poem made out of the stuff of our current world.
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This is too perfect. I like the question posed at the end of this article. I’m going to think on it.

In the face of his arrest on federal corruption charges, Mr. Blagojevich offered Rudyard Kipling’s “If.”

If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,

Understandably, he left out the last line of the stanza:
And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise.

Too bad poetry is still getting the short end of the stick:

The proportion of adults reading some kind of so-called literary work — just over half — is still not as high as it was in 1982 or 1992, and the proportion of adults reading poetry and drama continued to decline. Nevertheless the proportion of overall literary reading increased among virtually all age groups, ethnic and demographic categories since 2002. It increased most dramatically among 18-to-24-year-olds, who had previously shown the most significant declines.

Wednesday (tedious, tedious, tedious) Musings

I arrived at my office around 10 this morning and I’ve been working steadily on my composition syllabus every since. I didn’t change much from last semester, but changing the dates and adjusting journals and a few other assignments takes forever. On top of that, we’re required to post our syllabus and course notes to an electronic system. I embrace technology (to a point) but when that technology creates more work than is necessary, I start to get cranky. My irritation increases when I realize there are students of mine that never even log onto said electronic system. Sigh.

It is snowing. For real. In Indiana. I’m enjoying it even though I haven’t seen a window in about five hours.

This is what I would have (among many other animals) if I had unlimited space.
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Too bad this is memoir is probably going to be as dull as it sounds:

Scribner said in its announcement that the memoir would offer “an intimate account of Mrs. Bush’s life experiences.” Mrs. Bush said in the release that she would tell “the stories of the extraordinary events and people I’ve met in my life, particularly during my years in the White House.” Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Wednesday (Origami Swans) Musings

I received several origami swans from one of my students today and it made me think back to when I tried origami. I was a kid, and I didn’t really have the patience for it. This fact amuses me now because of what I’ve chosen as a profession: poetry/teaching. Both require infinite patience, but somehow I couldn’t manage origami.
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Paul McCartney. A man of many talents a lot of freaking money:

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Adam Kirsch has an essay, The Fight for Recognition, in Poetry. It’s an interesting essay and below are some excerpts I pulled out that I found thought provoking:

It is because writing is a communication of one’s mind and experience–one’s being–that it promises to gratify the original desire of spirit: to have one’s being confirmed by having it acknowledged by others. Writers makes others the mirror of the self.

Because there is not enough money in the world, people steal; because there is not enough power, people do violence; because there is not enough recognition, they make art.

Online, there are no mediating institutions–no editors, magazines, publishing houses, or critics with the power to confer or protect literary reputation.

So too with the virtual mind of the inconceivable future. When it looks for traces of us, it will not turn to novels or poems, but to emails, blogs, and Facebook pages.

Tuesday (Grumpy) Musings

Here is the fall poem of the week. This will be the last one, and then I’m going to start moving into winter…

Thanksgiving

In every room. encircled by a name-
less Southern boy from Yale,
There was my younger sister singing a Fellini theme
And making phone calls
While the rest of us kept moving her discarded boots
Or sat and drank. Outside, in twenty-
nine degrees, a stray cat
Grazed our driveway,
Seeking waste. It scratched the pail.
There were no other sounds.
Yet on and on the preparation of that vast consoling meal
Edged toward the stove. My mother
Had the skewers in her hands.
I watched her tucking skin
As though she missed her young, while bits of onion
Misted snow over the pronged death.

Louise Glück
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Today has been a killer day. I stayed up too late last night watching some low budget horror movie on AMC. I think it was called Return to the House on Haunted Hill or something equally terrible. As a result of staying up too late, I went to bed late and woke up too early, and that has resulted in me being cranky throughout most of the morning. I started to recover during my creative writing class, which I love. Today we talked about Carolyn Forché and Maxine Kumin. I have them reading The Things They Carried for next week and then we’re moving into poetry.

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Friday (Are we done yet?) Musings

I’m here at school at 8:47 on a Friday morning. Again. I’m gearing up for new faculty orientation. Again. I feel like I’ve been oriented almost to the point of exhaustion. It isn’t that these sessions aren’t helpful. It’s just that I’ve been here long enough where the information is starting to repeat.
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It is a rainy fall day. There is a mild chance of flurries next week and the temperature is supposed to slip down to 20. Welcome winter…believe it or not, I’ve missed you.
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I’m playing with an idea for a poem, which has begun in the form of a free write about flannel sheets. This is what I have so far:

I was lying in bed the other night and it was the first night this month, October, where it felt like fall. The temperature was about 40 degrees. I’ve had flannel sheets on my bed since September, as if I am trying to will the cooler air through the windows. Finally, my cool air came and I twisted myself up as tight as I could in those sheets.

What is it about flannel?

For a time, my flannel sheets smelled like cedar because we used to keep them in a cedar chest that my grandfather built. There was something primitive about the feel of flannel, grainy but soft and the smell of cedar that made me feel like I was sleeping in dirt.

Flannel means comfort and nurturing and a sense of home. I associate flannel sheets with Christmas and holidays.

It is difficult to climb out of a bed made with flannel sheets.

Flannel means bargain. The last two sets of sheets I bought were one sale. High quality. Laura Ashley.

Flannel means sleep, hibernate, tunnel down and don’t come out.

Flannel smells like a wet dog when it is being washed.
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National Novel Writing Month is upon us once again. Despite the fact that I have no spare time and currently no computer at home, I’m going to give it a go.

Wednesday (neglected blog) Musings

Yes, I have been neglecting my blog. Yes, I am insanely busy. Yes, I have been at school until 5 almost every day this week. No, that may not seem like a long time except I usually get there between 6:30-7 in the morning.

Bah.
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Your weekly fall poem that is woefully late. All apologies…

Autumn Birds

The wild duck startles like a sudden thought,
And heron slow as if it might be caught.
The flopping crows on weary wings go by
And grey beard jackdaws noising as they fly.
The crowds of starnels whizz and hurry by,
And darken like a clod the evening sky.
The larks like thunder rise and suthy round,
Then drop and nestle in the stubble ground.
The wild swan hurries hight and noises loud
With white neck peering to the evening clowd.
The weary rooks to distant woods are gone.
With lengths of tail the magpie winnows on
To neighbouring tree, and leaves the distant crow
While small birds nestle in the edge below.

John Clare

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I’ve introduced my creative writers to flash fiction and they’re taking to it like ducks water. I think they’re intrigued by the compression of language and ideas required in flash fiction. Also, let’s face it, flash fiction is cool. In order to give them a wide variety of examples, I bought Flash Fiction edited by James Thomas, Denise Thomas & Tom Hazuka. They compiled flash fiction from the likes of Raymond Carver, Julia Alvarex, Joyce Carol Oates, David Foster Wallace, and John Updike just to name a few. I’ve been reading all night an pulling examples I think my class will like. I’m looking forward to class tomorrow.

I met with the blank page again today, but our group was a bit small. We’re received the go ahead from the library for our National Novel Writing Month project, but I might have to tweak it a bit in order to get in done in a time frame that is realistic for our members.

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My department chair gave me this Salvador Dali print to help me battle aganist my depressing white walls. Gotta love Dali…

Wednesday (Rainy) Musings

The computer lab where I teach my M/W classes is insanely cold. My hands were turning blue while I was teaching this morning. Not cool (pun intended).

I’m beginning to acquire a nice little collection of flash drives that were left behind in the lab. I’ve emailed all the students, but have heard back from none. Strange.
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Here is another take from the NY Times on why A mericans just don’t get it (the Nobel Prize):

On Tuesday, Horace Engdahl, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy, the organization that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature, gave an interview to The Associated Press and, while not dropping hints about this year’s winner, seemed to rule out, pretty much, the chances of any American writer. “Europe is still the center of the literary world,” he said, not the United States, and he suggested that American writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture.” He added: “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature. That ignorance is restraining.”

And then he backtracks:

He insisted that the academy strictly followed Alfred Nobel’s rule that in awarding the prize no consideration should be given to an author’s nationality, and added: “It is of no importance, when we judge American candidates, how any of us views American literature as a whole in comparison with other literatures.”
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When Doctors, and Even Santa, Endorsed Tobacco

*courtesy of the NY Times
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I completely rewrote a poem yesterday. I don’t know if the rewrite works…

Tuesday (yawn) Musings

I’m tired. It’s Tuesday afternoon. This is not a good sign. I need to stop scheduling my weekends so tightly because I’m not getting a chance to recharge which will only lead to bad things.

Today feels especially fall like. Although, I have not seen a window since my 11:00 class, so it could be balmy and sunny by now.

Coughing and sniffling has started. Bah.
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This is kind of unfortunate. You know things are backwards when a dance studio is being put out by a Banana Republic.

This is really unfortunate.

Tuesday Musings

Kwe survived his first day at school. The highlights of my “parent” conference occurred when the trainer told me 1.) your dog is not other dog aggressive. He is other dog inappropriate. 2.) Your dog is insecure. In short, we have to provide Kwe with lots of structure and heavily socialize him with other dogs. I’m interested to see what the rest of the week brings.
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I’m still enjoying my creative writing class. Today was especially interesting…
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I’ll post more tomorrow. I’m starting to get the “I’ve stared too long at the computer screen” headache…