Friday Musings (thank the good lord)

Yesterday began as any day would. I came to school way too early, finished some grading, and taught my two classes. Later in the afternoon with all of my grading completed and entered into Blackboard, I began to edit some poems for my manuscript.

At about 4:00 my sister, who is in town visiting because she had an interview earlier this week, calls to say that my mother wants me to take her to the ER. Turns out she had this “rash” on her leg that somehow turned into a flesh eating disease during the course of conversations with my mother. The long and the short of it is she’s fine. We went to Urgent Care. They gave her two shots and three prescriptions and sent her on her way. Apparently she got bitten by something (spider, ant, rabid katydid) and then the bite became infected, hence the nasty looking welt on her leg.

I think I may have been more worried about this initially if a). I wasn’t so exhausted. By the time we left Urgent Care to go get her prescription, I had basically gone into auto pilot mode. b.) I’m not the personality type to think the worst in most situations. c.) I knew she didn’t have what some people thought she had because I’ve had it. Anyway. She’s fine. She’s heading back to Erie this morning leg safely in tow.
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Normally I would not be up in my office blogging at 7:30 on a Friday morning. I don’t even have to be here till 8 usually for my new faculty orientation meetings, but the powers that be finally aligned in the stars and my new office furniture should be arriving in about a half an hour. I’ve packed away all my paper, so all they have to do is come in and arrange it. I believe they are also going to put up a cubicle wall, which will give me a little bit of privacy.
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I received my Emerging Writer’s Network Newsletter this morning and see there is a review of Erin McGraw’s book The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard. I just finished her book The Baby Tree which I bought close to two years ago (I know. I know) when she came to give a craft lecture at MSU. Looks like this is another book to add to the stack…

Thursday Musings

It is amazing how shared space can bring about such tension…
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My twelve week creative writing class has begun. It’s hard to get a feel for a class until a few weeks have passed, but I think that this group seems enthusiastic enough. We discussed creative nonfiction and the sticky subject of what that “creative” really means. I showed them the famous passage from Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, after which one student declared he didn’t like writing that put him in the moment…right.
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I love this from Harpers!

Some of my favorites:

memoir: From the Latin memoria, meaning “memory,” a popular form in which the writer remembers entire passages of dialogue from the past, with the ultimate goal of blaming the writer’s parents for his current psychological challenges.

clandestine science fiction novel: A work set in the future that receives a strong reception from the literary world as long as no one mentions that it is, in fact, science fiction; for example, The Road, winner of the Pulitzer Prize.

chick lit: A patriarchal term of oppression for heterosexual female writing; also, a marketing means to phenomenal readership and prominent bookstore space.

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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

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.

Welcome

This is my first official post on the new blog. My inspiration for this project began with an assignment I was given this past spring while working on my MFA. I instructed to follow two literary blogs (of my choosing) for the entire semester. I followed Avoiding the Muse and Elegant Variation and enjoyed both blogs immensely. I’m starting small and hoping to increase the content gradually.

Here goes!

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The fall semester began this week, so I’m back to teaching composition. When school starts back up again, I start to think about fall (my favorite season). When I begin to think about fall, I start thinking about all the wonderful poems that are associated with the season in some way or another. To commemorate my love of all things autumn, I’ve decided to post a poem a week that is some way associated with fall. This weeks poem is “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, OH” by James Wright.

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, OH

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

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I recently took on a full time teaching position at the school where I’ve been adjuncting over the past two years. I’ll probably be posting about the different experiences that come with this new position. So far, my first week is moving along relatively smoothly. The biggest glitch is that I am currently without any furniture in my office. I’m afraid that if any students stop by during office hours, they’re going to think I’m squatting. Updates to follow.

I took this picture about a month ago. Poetry is everywhere.