bripike@gmail.com
Here are some pictures from the first real snow fall Indy has experienced this winter. You’ll note the picture of R shoveling with a bright yellow snow shovel. This is our second shovel, which we had to purchase this afternoon because someone stole our other blue snow shovel off our porch…
The temperature dropped drastically last night. In fact, when I took Kweli out at 9, it was sleeting. He was not impressed. He walked about 50 feet away from the door and then proceeded to shake his head vigorously for five minutes. My thoughts exactly.
It’s official. I don’t like attitude. Just so everyone knows.
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Break-up Poetry
And if more people break up after hearing his poetry, Arnold, who is himself divorced, can relate. The difference between offering your poetry to an audience and offering your heart to someone you desire, he said, is small.
“Whether in writing or in love, it’s a similar gesture,” he said.
I think I’m over winter. The weather forecasted “snow showers” for today but when I left at 7:30 this morning, the snow was coming down at a steady clip. Needless to say, the morning commute was a mess. My students were all late (understandably) and one student informed me that they had closed three of the major interstates. The weather service issued a Severe Winter Weather Advisory and it is in effect until noon. I hope it stops snowing, because otherwise the evening commute is going to be very messy.
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I’ve discovered a market, Georgetown Market, that sells meat from local Indiana farms as well as cheese, eggs, and baked goods. I’ve decided to start dividing my grocery shopping between Georgetown and the Farmer’s Market. I really want to support local farmers and I think this is important. As an important side note, RJ and I had pork chops last night and they tasted wonderful.
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This article gives me hope:
In a hundred ways, we pretend that screen experiences are books —
PowerBooks, notebooks, e-books — but even a child knows the difference. Reading books is an operation with paper. Playing games on the Web is something else entirely. I need to admit this to myself, too. I try to believe that reading online is reading-plus, with the text searchable, hyperlinked and accompanied by video, audio, photography and graphics. But maybe it’s just not reading at all. Just as screens aren’t books.
One of the ways I like to procrastinate is by browsing the NY Times Arts & Design section and looking at their slide shows. Here are a few of my favorite pieces:
“The Dessert,” 1940, by Pierre Bonnard
“Time of Change,” 1943, by Morris Graves
RJ has created a blog to document Greg’s progress throughout his recovery. This is the link to the page.
My creative writing class was great again last night. We talked about voice and character in writing. I devised this exercise where I gave my students four index cards. One card had a name, another an age, another an occupation, and the final card had one or two personality traits. Then I put the students in small groups and asked them to put their characters in a situation together so they could interact. They seemed to enjoy it and begin to understand how to make a character.
The snowstorm we got on Tuesday/Wednesday morning continues to be annoying. The owners of our apartment building came during lunch yesterday and plowed out the parking lot. This is awesome, but of course the only person who didn’t move their car was the girl who parks next to me, so when I got home last night I still couldn’t park in my spot. I switched with RJ and he parked on the street.
Today is my first cooking class at school. I’m really looking forward to it.
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I will be watching the Superbowl this weekend. The Steelers are RJ’s team, so in that spirit here is probably one of the few sports related articles you’ll see on this blog.
Myron Cope left behind something far more personal than a legacy of terrycloth, a battle flag for a city and its team. In 1996, he handed over the trademark to the Terrible Towel to the Allegheny Valley School. It is a network of campuses and group homes across Pennsylvania for people with severe intellectual and developmental disabilities. It receives almost all the profits from sales of the towels.
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I’ve started following the blog Starting Today: Poems for the First 100 Days. I like the concept and I think I might try it myself. I’m not expecting anything, but I think it’s worth thinking about. I’ve linked to this page under my Links section.
I like the one posted yesterday:
New Time Old Time
The unchosen have always been the starbeams
for the poor, the tortured and beaten, the homeless,
the suffocated. They have been the wind that bursts
open poppies in an endless field, just as this morning
the January wind blew the seeds of this poem jotted
down with coffee 3 days before my daughter’s 39th birthday.
She is, at this moment, in a classroom downtown studying
nursing, while her daughter, my little Izzie, sits
at Wanda’s Daycare spilling blocks onto the carpet
with no awareness of the children’s blood spilling
in the Congo while fathers’ heads are crushed
like brittle stone and mothers’ bodies are torn open
by monstrous attackers, children they, all written
off as lost Africa which will remain lost for the next 100
days as it has for the past 300 years. It’s a tell of people
my age when you hear us say, I’ve seen this before,
Camelot and the revolution just around the corner.
Today my around the corner is the Fine Fare,
where I pick up milk, orange juice and peanut butter
for my girls before getting back to work.
I’m lucky to have work, I’ve heard a dozen people
tell me in the past week. The Dominican check-out girls
have no union though surely they thirst for something
greater. I can’t know. I don’t speak their language.
I am one of those who has sat at the bar with his whiskey,
whispering to himself on an unchosen night, I was born
too late, thinking I might have liked to have lived through
the Depression and now it looks as if I will get my wish.
But will I get my FDR? No I will get my Obama,
the first president to have a name that begins with O.
O, Obama, be not the chosen, but the unchosen
of the unchosen revolution, not around the corner
but here on St. Nicholas Avenue where the swollen tribes
of unchosen are chanting, Africa come home, and raising
their sunbroad arms to demand of you to be what they believe
you are.
John Paul O’Connor resides in New York City and in Franklin, NY. His poems have appeared recently in Indiana Review, Eclipse, Lilies and Cannonballs and Rattle, on whose website you can hear him read his poem, “Stone City.” John hopes we will all do what Obama has urged us to do, which is to keep the pressure on to make sure he is the president we want him to be.
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OK. We received an inch of snow. I was about to say I told you so to the weather man this morning, until I saw the forecast for this afternoon/evening into Wednesday morning. We’re supposed to get 6-8 inches. The last time it snowed this much was two years ago over Valentine’s Day and I didn’t go to work for three days. We were living outside of downtown at the time, and you couldn’t get out of your neighborhood because the side streets were impassable. Fortunately, we live on a main street now, although the parking lot situation could get interesting. Again, I’m not holding my breath because it could miss us. If it doesn’t, you’ll be seeing lots of winter wonderland photos tomorrow.
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I posted this note on Facebook but I thought I’d reproduce it here. I should be grading journals.
25 Random Thoughts About Me
1. I like animals more than I like most people.
2. I adore and am fiercely protective of my younger sister. She is my opposite and yet looking at her, I sometimes feel like I’m looking into a mirror.
3. I believe flowers are mystical, mythical, intimate, erotic, and full of poetry.
4. I feel things deeply and it makes my life difficult sometimes. Emotions rule my decisions and that can be dangerous.
5. I love being outdoors. I love mud and snow and rain and ice. I love walking in the woods no matter the season.
6. Other people’s pain often reduces me to tears, which is why I try to avoid daytime talk shows. I do not revel in others heartbreak.
7. I am an English instructor at a community college and I think it may be some of the most important work I will ever do. My students are damaged and vulnerable, but they are also brave and optimistic. They humble me on a daily basis.
8. I am in constant awe of how many brilliant people I know.
9. I am very interested in organic food, sustaining local farmers, and farmer’s markets. I’ve been this way since I was small. My parents come from a family of farmers (dairy) and I want to make this a more prominent part of my life. I admire and like the idea of being an integrally involved in the entire process of growing food. I cannot wait until I can plant my own vegetable garden.
10. Poetry is the stuff of life and I wish more people loved it like I do. I try to bring it to my classroom everyday. I wish more people read poetry.
11. I love taking pictures. I prefer flowers to faces, but I love experimenting with film and light and angle.
12. I love art and museums. My mother introduced me to art as a young child, because she is a painter. I would like to take oil, acrylic, and watercolor classes. Some of my favorite memories from when I was a kid were going to the Met to see the Matisse exhibit or going to the Cleveland Art Museum to see a Faberge exhibit or going to the Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh.
13. I want to travel more. I spent 6 months in England my junior year in college and that sparked my interest. I like travel writing and I’d like to do some more of that too.
14. I’d like to write nonfiction but I’m scared. Not of the content but of writing prose. I know. I’m a wimp.
15. I could not live life without a dog in the house.
16. I am a daddy’s girl and will always be one. I’m constantly amazed by my father and all of his accomplishments. When I was younger, I worried about living up to the standard he set, but as I get older I’m just grateful I have such a good example for a dad.
17. I cut my face open shaving when I was a little girl. I wanted to be like dad. My mother said she had never seen so much blood.
18. I rode horses/ponies from the time I was 9 till I was about 22. Selling my horse, Cannes, was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. My two older equines, Sprite and Daniel, were best friends. They are buried out behind our barn. When I visit my parents house, I go and stand on their graves to say hello.
19. I don’t like funerals or wakes. Not because they’re depressing, but because they feel fake and somber. I think you should celebrate the life that passed and traditional funerals don’t seem to focus on that.
20. It saddens me to know that we will eventually live in a world where children will no longer feel a book in their hands. Instead, they’ll have one of those reader things they’re selling on Amazon. I’m already mourning that loss.
21. I was in a sorority, Kappa Alpha Theta, in college and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I met and kept some really great friends through that organization, so it bothers me when people dismiss sorority girls as superficial.
22. I am intolerant of intolerance of any kind. I can’t stand for bullying. I’m serious enough about this that recently at Target when a bunch of teenage girls were walking behind an overweight woman and openly criticizing her, I said something. They stopped.
23. I’m willing to give people second chances, but after that it is going to be hard to get me back. I never forget.
24. I love writers. They frustrate me and fuel me. I’m glad I know so many.
25. I read The New Yorker regularly. It takes me forever but I learn a lot from it.
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We’re supposed to get some snow starting tonight and continuing through Wednesday. Indiana is different in the respect that they’ve already issued the storm warning and schools are already “closing in preparation.” This has happened in the past and the snow has gone right over us. We’ll see.
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I’m still thrilled with my camera. Here are some pictures I took this afternoon.
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Hair
In a scene in the film
shot at Bergen-Belsen days after
the liberation of the camp
a woman brushes her hair.
Though her gesture is effortless
it seems also for the first time
as if she has just remembered
that she has long hair,
that it is a pleasure
to brush, and that pleasure
is possible. And the mirror
beside which the camera must be rolling,
the combing out and tying back
of the hair, all possible.
She wears a new black sweater
The relief workers have brought,
Clothes to replace the body’s
visible hungers. Perhaps
she is a little shy of the camera,
or else she is distracted
by the new wool and plain wonder
of the hairbrush, because
on her face is a sort of dulled,
dreamy look, as if part
of hersef that recognizes
the simple familiar good of brushing
is floating back into her
the way the spiritualists say
the etheric body returns to us
when we wake from sleep’s long travel.
With each stroke she restores
something of herself, and one
at a time the arms and hands
and face remember, the scalp
remembers that her hair
is a part of her, her own.
Mark Doty
You know it has been cold when it gets to 20 degrees and you feel like you can go outside without a coat on.
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I was sad to see this today in the NY Times. My grandparents have a copy of Christina’s World hanging in the guest room where I used sleep as a kid. I always liked the painting and even incorporated it into one of my poems, Wigs.
Wyeth gave America a prim and flinty view of Puritan rectitude, starchily sentimental, through parched gray and brown pictures of spooky frame houses, desiccated fields, deserted beaches, circling buzzards and craggy-faced New Englanders. A virtual Rorschach test for American culture during the better part of the last century, Wyeth split public opinion as vigorously as, and probably even more so than, any other American painter including the other modern Andy, Warhol, whose milieu was as urban as Wyeth’s was rural.
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It is the end of my week. Unfortunately, I’ve made myself work for the end of my week. I have office hours till 3, then I have a meeting with one of the librarians, then I have our first blank page meeting of the semester, and last but not least I have to come back at 7 and teach my creative writing class. The first week back is always difficult. It takes me awhile to teach my body that 6 am is a reasonable time to get up in the morning. However, I feel all this is worth it in order to not come in at all on Fridays. Also, Monday is MLK day, so I have a four day weekend. I’m ashamed to say I’m looking forward to it.
A colleague introduced me to theradio.com and I’ve been listening to it at the office. Good stuff.
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Nikki Giovanni has a new book out all about love. It’s called Bicycles: Love Poems and this poem appears in it:
We are Virginia Tech
We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning
We are Virginia Tech
We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again
We are Virginia Tech
We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy
We are Virginia Tech
The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all this sadness
We are the Hokies
We will prevail
We will prevail
We will prevail
We are Virginia Tech
This poem interests me because in my thesis defense we briefly talked about handling social and political issues in poetry and how important it is. I admire what this poem is trying to do, but I’m not sure it does it. The language doesn’t seem strong or lyrical. Also, the entire poem seems expected. I understand the form and I understand the intention, but I think it could be more.
It is very cold. Everywhere. After watching the weather and a few morning shows today before heading to school, I’ve made one important decision: I am never moving to Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, or Montana. I know snow. I grew up in New England before moving to Erie. However, the temperatures in Fargo are just not right. Hell, the temperatures in Chicago right now are just not right. Thank goodness for all things fleece.
We had some weather here this morning, so I received the usual onslaught of emails about poor road conditions. I don’t know if the road conditions were poor. I live six blocks from school;however, I also know that Hoosiers are notorious for over reacting to snow, ice, or any combination thereof. The fact of the matter is, missing the second day of class is not a smart move.
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Brianna Pike 
