Poem Draft for Revision

This should be recognizable. I wanted to veer away from my discourse on the 9-5 grind and attempt to engage something a little different. Here, I wondered what sort of conversation I might be able to forge between two different generations. **Digital Natives is a term used to refer to those people of the Y Generation born between 1982-95**.Sorry about the wacky spacing...MS Word hates me big time.


Digital Natives


Men at twenty-five howl over shrines of conquered beer cans,

Chanting their victories into the 3 a.m. that always listens.

Men at twenty-five, lost in their drum circles, smell of weed,

And the grimy chorus of that Zeppelin song everyone knows.

They’re camouflaged in decades they’ll never truly understand.

Having slipped the silk noose and action item reports for

torn blue jeans and Ginsberg, men at twenty-five tremble

At words like equity and mortgage, that corrosive gargle

Etched into the graying temples of men twice their age.

These boys, like their fathers, branded with a single letter.


On 48th at Manny’s, men at twenty-five sift through wax coated sleeves.

Those once slick novelties, their ripped edges and weathered faces gone “vintage.”

Draft for Class Revision Week 14

Paolo

"O anime affanate, venite a noi parlar, s'altri nol niega!"

“O battered souls, if One does not forbid it, speak with us!"

(Dante's Inferno, Canto 5)

-----------------------------------

I feel her hands snap shut, 

the feel of quaking steel. 

No longer my own, her hips twist. 

Her arms pull me into plummet. 

My shoulders snarl against 

the vapor stone of her palms.

My head stitched to her hollow chest.

I leave my words with you, Poeta. 

I follow her in this, our waltz,

as the sulfur aches between us.

(Sadly, this is one of those drafts that’s fallen by the way side, which bothers me because I want to know what this draft has to say. At this point, I the draft obviously begs for more length. I’m going to try generating some fresh language and tinker with it. I would appreciate any thoughts or criticism. Dr. Davidson suggested I veer away from expected language of this circle of Hell. Trouble is, I don’t know where to go. )

Poem for Workshop on 11/16

[Untitled]

A pair of hands, gone metronome, directs a smattering of brass and cloth,

The green and white colors tuned to a surgical precision.

Snares quake and tubas wheeze in the sweltering mosquito heat,

The matted canvas etched with yardage chalk.

Lost in their murmur, the brick of my generic pastoral apartment simmers                   against my back.

Their footfalls thump my chest. As I watch them, my Marlboro peters to                        nothing.

Understand them, or their guttural practice? No. I’m thinking of you,

Your flat above the grocery in that London street I’ll never see again,

With its swollen door jambs, and stalwart window frames.

That TV ten years my senior, always blaring the BBC. 

I remember you, shadowed down the back stairs in bare feet and the midnight             of my t-shirt

For chocolate and Kents after a night out with the staples from Marketing.

Heavy with Bitter, I said that you sounded like Julie Andrews. 

You labeled me drunk as the teen garageband in the corner wailed                                  some Kinks anthem I don’t want to remember.

I smiled at their fascination with America, the land of cowboy politics and                       pioneered grease wrapped in wax paper.

Later, I stumbled on those stairs, your fingers sunk in my shoulder blades, guiding my rubber knees through the door.

We emerged two weeks later, my love for the Queen nailed down beside those aching wooden floorboards.

I wonder sometimes, if it’s still there, rising with the heat, against the husband and wife who quiver, lost in their eyelids, in the soaked fish-eye lens twilight. 

Draft for Class Revision Week 13

Apocrypha


I believe now in the owls that roosted in our mortgage.
Your mother's bone china grating against the joists,
its blossoms, now grotesque, slipping, going Rorschach.
I believe in your father's police uniform, still sharp 
in its gasp of cellophane. 
I believe in the olive oil smoking on the stove,
the flayed tomatoes, their skins soaking the grout. 
The aged reds, dust heavy against the baseboard, 
the rotting corks, lost in the beef's casual haze. 
I believe in the hunt for keys as another gentle minor third
slips into yesterday, and Tracy Chapman's gravel legato 
smears the living room walls. 

Your hands will always smell of tea, cigarettes, 

and Summer's last gargled ache. 

Where are we now after the glassy shriek of nights?
Children half our age draped our skin once.
They wore our clothes, uttered our names names as carelessly 
as one tosses a spent match. They knew we wouldn't last 
the sweltering decades in this quiet town with its Technicolor 
lawns, postmarked Alexandria, 1984,
because children half our age seethed over fabric softener, 
Pine-sol, and botched Chinese take-out. 
In the space between yesterday and today, 
my basil sweats in the afternoon heat. 

Draft Revision Week 12

Riff off Mark Doty's "Broadway"



Under the faded tin roof
beneath a fistful of stars 
a coyote wails in the distance.
Far from this moment, but close at hand. 


Desert sage sways under 
the stiff and cracked heat, 
its thin pink fingers caught
in splintered door frames, 


opening and closing, 
those tiny knives, 
a lifetime of snagging
elbows and knees caught unawares. 


The store front groans, 
its faded tattoos 
whisper the age of 
its oak skeleton. 


Glass eyes covered,
blinded with old type print, 
rusted nails turning its grin 
to a pit of abscesses. 


Vultures perch along its spine, 
waiting, always waiting, 
their stomachs roused
from their delicious sloth. 

Draft for Class Revision Week 11

1993


I believe now in the owls that roost in our mortgage.
Your mother's bone china grating against the joists,
its once pristine blossoms, now grotesque, slipping, going Rorschach.
Your father's police uniform still sharp in the last gasp of its cellophane.
My mint stacks, Roger Clemens atrophies in that cardboard mausoleum.  
These things, that burn between the planks,
 have hardened and moldered for years.


I believe in the olive oil hissing on our stove,
the flayed tomatoes, their skins soaking the grout.
I love the quake of our bodies. Your hands
smelling of tea, Sweet Aftons, and Summer's last gargled ache.


I believe in the hunt for keys, while another
gentle minor third slips itself into yesterday.
The strings of my hands twinged. Where are we now,
after the glassy shriek of night, my shattered arm rejoined,
the silt of my wrist glazed in holy steel?


Children half our age drape our skin. They're laughing at us.
They don't believe we'll last the sweltering decades,
because in that quiet town from our Technicolor memories,
postmarked Alexandria, 1984, children half our age
seethe over fabric softener and Chinese take out.
In the space between yesterday and today,
cords tumble on February's Berber slab.

Expansion Week 10

Taken from week 9 Calisthenic
 Trolling for Alligators with my Grandfather


June 2009. 15 miles north of New Orleans.
Like wraiths, we skiff across the womb that birthed us.
Gnarled cypresses dig their cuticles into the sweltering decades.
Our nylon livelihood nuzzles into their contortions.
Steely wolverines shiver in that belly of wrought sheet metal.
The tags salivate in their denim lairs,
 hungry to finish what the rifle will start.
The blades idle, sputtering and wheezing,
the way my grandfather drank himself into an elegy
the bayou will never stop revising.
The three quarter inch high test line trembles,
quivers with promise, a mass of scales and fear.
Behind me, the panoramic lens understands all of this.


Expansions:
Idling for Rommel in the Cradle


June 2009. 15 miles north of New Orleans.
Like wraiths, we skiff across the womb that birthed us.
Gnarled cypresses dig their cuticles in,
peeling back the sweltering decades.
Our nylon livelihood nuzzles into their contortions.
Steely wolverines cower in that belly of wrought sheet metal.
The tags salivate in their denim lairs,
 hungry to finish what the rifle will start.
The blades idle, sputtering and wheezing,
the way my grandfather drank himself into an elegy
the bayou will never stop revising.
The three quarter inch high test line trembles,
quivers with promise, a mass of scales and fear.
Behind me, the panoramic lens understands all of this.


The camera sees this, just as my grandfather did, 
years before his mind slipped into the same murk 
where this year's Christmas simmers. The gnash of 
his oars against the braided roots, his tired pistol 
edged into the corner of his splitting boot soles. 
The keel, knifing its way through those schoolroom windows,
draft papers and German advances. 


[will expand further]

Poem Riff Week 10

WCW "The Red Wheelbarrow"

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

College Degrees

Everything and no-
thing

hinges on scraps
of

stiff paper under
sheets

of aching cold
glass.

Junk Yard Quote2 Week 10

By 1980, 100,000 Pac-man arcade machines had been sold.

80's Tech, Modern Marvels.

Junk Yard Quote1 Week 10

Ladies and gentlemen, without a safety net
I shall now perform a 180 flip-flop
I shall now amputate, I shall now contort
Because down is the new up
What if I just flip-flopped?
Down is the new up


Thom York, Radiohead

Pedagogy Post Week 10

I've been considering a question that Dr. Davidson raised during our last class. Why is it that we have a division between those whose writing/drafting etc resembles some stretching Ginsberg ramble,  or something out of Whitman? Why is it that others craft poems with very curt and compact stanzas resembling William Carlos Williams? What does this mean in terms of a draft as a whole? I have a tendency to align with the latter camp. I would speculate that this stems partly from the fact that very early on in my poetry studies I uncounted WCW's "The Red Wheelbarrow." I was, and still am astounded that such minuscule works are capable of bearing such a hefty amount of weight, as it were. This isn't to say that approach adopted in "Howl" is less valid, but I do think that it naturally carries this weight easier, and perhaps with a bit of a veil of sorts given its staggering length. It's my impression that poem's such as Williams' must carry this weight "raw" and "openly". I hope this idea makes sense. Surprisingly though, in high school years before I knew the first thing about poetry, I found myself favoring very tight and controlled pieces when I would dabble in what I thought was poetry at the time. Is this distinction something innate in every student of poetry? Is it a learned practice? What role might my early exposure to haiku play in all of this?

Response to Brian's Journal Week 10

Brain,

Once again you show your knack for strange and abstract language pairings (blackstrap afternoon and bird shaped days for instance).You do a nice job here of leading the reader and teasing them with further possible details, yet you seem to divulge these details while being withholding (I hope that makes sense). I noticed a few instances where your words appeared as perhaps a little sing-songish and wonder if this is a bit of bleed over from your experience as a musician. Either way, nice stuff.

Calisthenic Week 10

I will visit the morgue.
Listening to something I will say.
Did you know I was dreaming?
Beneath a sliding glass door.
You and I have heard the song of the long afterward.
I place their invisible stems inside the lake.
I pressed the button twice.
She'd taken the only window seat.
As one thought springs from another
daft and wanting of refinement
the act of careful and rational consolation.
He was late, of course, by afternoon, we could smell him.
The girl would see if she could see anything.
Do you think I will like it there?
A street preacher bending over the waterfront.
The Lady of Kicking Horse Reservation.
Go to the root of all things
For I can snore like Fergus.
I'll go among the dead to see my friend.
I walked away with your face.
Who is St. Vincent?

**Lots of fodder here, with certainly be coming back**

Free Post Week 10

For My Marriage: 1989-1993

You talk of the owls that roosted in our mortgage.
Your mother's bone china softening against the joists,
the pristine blossoms slipping, going Rorschach.
Your father's police uniform,
still sharp in its gasping cellophane.
These things, that burn between the planks,
have hardened and moldered for years,
but more often than not, I don't believe them now.

I believed in the olive oil hissing on our stove,
the flayed tomatoes, their skins soaking the grout
tinging those minute spaces with sloppy pink promises
left to settle against the slab. I loved the quake of our bodies.
Your hands always smelling of tea bags, of spray starch,
of mulch, and Summer's last gargled ache.

Today for example, I scavenged for keys
while another gentle minor third
 slipped itself into yesterday.
The strings of my hands twinged.
Where are we now,
after the glass shriek nights,
my shattered wrist rejoined,
after your cardboard vows and apologies
 I always took at face value?

Children half our age draped our skin.
They laughed at us. They knew,
knew we wouldn't last the sweltering decades.
Yet children half our age
mounted faded barstools with palms of angst and beer
in that quaint town from our Technicolor memories,
 post marked Alexandria, 1984.
In the space between yesterday and today,
cords tumble in February's stack-stone hearth.

Pedagogy Post 9/15/10 Week 6

I spent a fair amount of time last night discussing with a friend of mine what it is that "makes" one a poet, or what "constitutes" a poet. The conversation remained rather interesting given that my friend isn't currently engaged in Academia/scholarship etc. on a continual every day basis like all of us are for instance. With this in mind, it made sense to me that my friend referred to me as a poet, claiming that I have "the way with words." In my personal opinion, I am a very far cry from a poet. I consider myself to be someone who is simply learning all the tools that a poet might use. More like whipping up a home-cooked meal is a far cry from a 5-star chef. But, back to my original point: What is it that makes someone a poet?  One might make the argument that a person inherits the title of poet once they have some piece of work published in some format or another. To complicate this idea further one might make the argument that a poet "earns their stripes" by gut checking their way through a creative thesis track or an MFA program, spending their time, nose to the grind and so on. As a counter to this idea I'm forced to remember and consider poets such as Emily Dickinson given that all of her work was published posthumously.  So basically what I'm left with...I still have no working definition of what constitutes a poet, but I can be sure that this definition must remain in flux along with the various Zeitgeists that we encounter. What does everyone else think?

Calisthenic Week 9

It is June. 2008. Fifteen miles north of New Orleans. The water logged signposts swell and sway in the damp mosquito heat. We hover over the murky waters of the bayou that birthed us. Gnarled cypresses hold their hands their heads forever. Our lines cut into their wrists, marked with neon blue party streamer. Our steel toed Wolverines echo and rattle in the belly of the bent and hollow sheet metal. The tags in our back pockets salivate, hungry to finish what the rifle will start. The motor idles, the way my grandfather drank himself into an elegy. The three quarter inch line is taut with a mass of teeth and scales.

Redux:

Trolling for Alligators with My Grandfather

June 2009. 15 miles north of New Orleans.
Like wraiths, we skiff across the womb that birthed us.
Gnarled cypresses dig their cuticles into the sweltering decades.
Our nylon livelihood nuzzles into their contortions.
Steely wolverines shiver in that belly of wrought sheet metal.
The tags salivate in their denim lairs,
 hungry to finish what the rifle will start.
The blades idle, sputtering and wheezing,
the way my grandfather drank himself into an elegy
the bayou will never stop revising.
The three quarter inch high test line trembles,
quivers with promise, a mass of scales and fear.
Behind me, the panoramic lens understands all of this.

Sign ID Week 9

Gary Gildner's  "First Practice"

After the doctor checked to see
we weren't ruptured,
the man with the short cigar took us
under the grade school,
where we went in case of attack
or storm, and said
he was Clifford Hill, he was
a man who believed dogs
ate dogs, he had once killed
for his country, and if
there were any girls present
for them to leave now.
                        No one
left. OK, he said, he said I take
that to mean you are hungry
men who hate to lose as much
as I do. OK. Then
he made two lines of us
facing each other,
and across the way, he said,
is the man you hate most
in the world,
and if we are to win
that title I want to see how.
But I don't want to see
any marks when you're dressed,
he said. He said, Now.

• weren't ruptured, as if what is coming won't be worse
• "man with cigar" stereotypical image of a "shady" character. Why?
• we enter a safe have, a bunker of sorts, inversion of "safe" space, why? security? 
• name of Clifford Hill, rings as very formal and proper, seems very stereotypical, but in what ways and why?
• "Dog eat dog, obviously savage, by why the cliche?
• killed for his country, assuming WW II, but all elements of glory, honor etc. are stripped away, why?
• savages in training, "men equally hungry"
• "win that title"---what title? men you hate, or the undeclared football/sports title? Obviously the poem remains ambiguous for just this reason, but it still makes me wonder. 
• poem operates on a thinly veiled, unnamed tension---will the boys be practicing football drills, or something equally macabre? no marks when dressed...

Questions I'm considering: 
How does this veiled violence dialog with current cultural politics?
How does this veiled violence dialog with ideas of masculinity and the performance there of?
"in case of attack" who is attacking, and why? does this line root us in Cold War red scare America? Where else could we be?

Response to Laura's Journal Week 9

I think this is an interesting exercise not just for high school kids, but it would prove useful for college students as well. I will say though that I think your students did very well will the red car exercise. I can understand the food imagery, but I think it works quite well as it seems very surreal. I'm curious as to how your students might respond if you were to try to meld this calisthenic with the emo poetry idea. Hope that helps.

Pedagogy Post Week 9

I had an interesting experience with an assignment for my other graduate class, Dr. Erben's early American seminar. The assignment called for me to draft up a book review for a monograph focusing on Susanna Rowson.  In a section of my paper I write, "The first chapter enacts the notion of the sentimental seduction novel to firmly establish the dangers of premarital sex and pregnancy, should the “young and thoughtless of the fair sex” (5), as Rowson terms them in her preface to Charlotte Temple, pursue less than virtuous interests." The other day I had my father read the paper for clarity and he asked me why I didn't use the verb"label" instead of "term"?  My explanation not only answered his question, but reminded me of the creative nature of critical analysis. I told him that I chose the word "term" as it rings a little more "clinical" and does not carry all of the abstract "baggage" that label does. Though this moment seems a bit trivial, I believe it was useful as it helped me to remember that creative elements can invade pretty much anywhere. 
 

Expansion Wk 9

"Rainbow Randolph Gets Rolled by the Irish Mob in NYC"

It didn't happen like they show it in the movies. The door didn't explode, spilling cheap pine shrapnel into the thinly lit bachelor apartment. They took their time, nailed the windows to their swelling frames. Cut the phone line, its thin metallic nerves floating above gray construction standard carpet. A volley of quick knocks. A hoarse "Fuck off!", the crack of forged steel deadbolt. The braided drill bit peeks its snubbed nose into the room. Four bulldogs full of snarling muscle, full of Guinness and regret seep through the flimsy door frame, their leather shoulders pulsing. Tommy holds the leashes in her left fist, her right, a sift of Sweet Afton. On his knees, a meaty paw thumbing his windpipe, Randolph gasps. Tommy rambles the bruiser monologue. "This is for Spinner." The claddagh's crown snags those graying temples. [Expand] Center ice, Madison Square Garden, a cowbell echoes against waves of children. "This is for Spinner."

Junk Yard Quotes Week 9

And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man
-W. Wordsworth

Wine comes in at the mouth / And love comes in at the eye; / That's all we shall know for truth / Before we grow old and die. / I lift the glass to my mouth, / I look at you, and I sigh. 

-W. B. Yeats

"[To] stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,..." -Allen Ginsberg  "Howl"

"You thought it was a fucking Schwinn!" -Brad Pitt, _Burn After Reading_

Free Post Week 9

I tell you these things
that burn between the planks
that have moldered
and hardened for years
but, more often than not,
I don't believe them.

Falling into those minute spaces
I don't believe those rusted promises
that straddle your vocal chords,
settled into the poured slab.
I loved the quake of our bodies.

Today for example,
I scavenged for keys,
while another gentle minor third
slipped into yesterday.

The strings of my hands twinged.
Where are we now,
after your cardboard lullabies
and Cheshire smile?

Children half our age
draped our skin.
They are laughing at us,
They knew we were the last.
In the space between yesterday and today,
cords tumble in the stack-stone hearth.

Poem Riff Week 8

Adrian Matekja

Do the Right Thing

Spike Lee is so small I didn't even
see him at first, surrounded

by Black Expo goers like a gumdrop
in a fist. When I asked him to sign

my "Free South Africa" t-shirt,
he said, You didn't buy that at this

booth. Fresh off seeing Do the Right
Thing, I crowed: "What's that got

to do with your movies?" His fans
laughed, so he edited me like my name

was Pino: Why you care? You
ain't even black. Someone behind

me said, Damn, Spike. That ain't
right. But Spike's shamed scribble

on my t-shirt didn't change the missed
free throw feeling in my chest. 

Riff:

A Substitute in Lovejoy Highschool

Every February MLK and company permeates 

the cracked cinder block of my alma mater.
A swell of pink construction paper `

hearts and black pride. 

These soft dark bodies buzzing in time 

with the bleached florescent, their sagging

t-shirts, long as nightgowns declare

them as asphalt revolutionaries. 

You don't even know who the hell 

Che Guevara was, yet your teenage 

whispers label me as bitch, another cracker 

in the laundry list full of substitutes.

What do I know about struggle, 

in my crisp button down and Rockports?

About losing a mother to the crack pipe? 

Or covering rent in my cardboard apartment?

They eye me as sixth period's squeal 

cracks the hasp of their shackles. 

Their hot brass stares burying 

in the kevlar of my chest. 

Junk Yard Quote Week 8

"At death you break up: the bits that were you / Start speeding away from each other for ever / With no one to see. It's only oblivion, true: / We had it before, but then it was going to end, / And was all the time merging with a unique endeavour / To bring to bloom the million-petalled flower / Of being here." - Philip Larkin 


I forget what poem this comes from, anyone know?

Junk Yard Quote Week 8

When the exalted Guatama, teaching, spoke of the world, he had to divide it into samsara and nirvana, into illusion and truth, into suffering and release. [...] Never is a man or deed wholly samsara or wholly nirvana, never is a person entirely saintly or entirely sinful. It only seems so because we are subject to the illusion that time is something real. [...] And if time is not real, then the span that seems to lie between world and eternity, between suffering and bliss, between evil and good, is also an illusion. -Hermann Hesse _Siddhartha_

JunkYard Quote 2 Week8

"Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer"

The Godfather

Pedagogy Post Week 8

Running in line with some of my other recent pedagogy posts, I've been considering my place within the Academy, what I'm doing, what's it worth, and where am I going. My over-arching thought for this one boys and girls?
How does one go about crafting the "persona" of teacher/instructor?

 I say this because I do have ambitions of teaching at a college level at some point, but I wonder, how do I start. The obvious answer I think is: emulate what you know. While I think this is a very useful approach, I think that there must be more to it, it must be expanded upon. But then I wonder, how much of this initial influence will be inescapable?

Part of why I say all this is that I understand that poetry is intimidating for students, let alone trying to learn about it. Let alone the intimidation of trying to teach the stuff. I understand that part of a teacher's hope is to inspire/motivate -insert appropriate verbiage here- their students such that they begin to explore on their own. One moment that still resonates for me during my time as an undergrad was a moment in which Dr. Fraser explained the Modernist zeitgeist in literally that, one single moment. Throwing a stapler against the wall, Dr. Fraser explained that in the same way as these fragments of metal and plastic could never be fitted together perfectly, Modernists felt the same, and that any attempt to do some was simply, that a faulty attempt to form what can't be formed. Anyway, enough of my ramble. I'm curious to see what you guys think, especially you high school teachers.

Expansion Ex. Week 8

Standing against the faded bike rack, a match echoing in my palm, I see her pink heels clicking, chipping away against the asphalt. She stand about five feet three. Her matching pink dress stretches, nestled six inches above her knees, hugging every curve and body line. Dragging on my cigarette, I wonder how much she paid for those working girl heels. What does she tell her friends? Or the new guy that she's bought them for? How many "just for you's" have fallen off of those full lips, swathed in Midnight Plum? I wonder if she really is working her way through college. What might she say, as those plastic spike slump against the baseboard? A film of her make up left to concrete in the dingy white porcelain. Would you swallow these cliches with a lump in your throat? Or would you tell me to fuck off? Maybe Both? I might deserve it. In the twilight of the sheets on your State issued mattress, do you remember when our eyes burned holes in your department store veneer?  

Response to Laura's Pedagogy Blog Wk 8

I'm glad to hear that this little experiment of yours went well. I've always wondered why boys shy away from poetry. I understand the obvious reasons, but I've always been biased. I'm curious as to what your students might come up with if you give them something a little more "expected"? Something like Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" and all of the stereotypical nature baggage? The class might veer a little heavier on the lecture aspect of things, given the need to place Frost in a Modernist context, but I think that trying to break up some of these preconceived notions might prove useful. I hope this helps.

Junkyard Quote 1 Week 8 10-4-10

"Are you a blonde sir?"

....Yes....-awkward pause-

"I'm sorry if I offended you!"

-My friend Lee, extremely drunk and more chatty than he should have been during Oktoberfest in Helen Ga.

Sign ID 9-28-10 Wk 7

Tomas Transtormer
"Sketch in October"

• very tight and controlled, almost William Carlos Williams maybe?
• operates on tense but seemingly flat language
• offers a question- call and response tactic?
• extinguished lamps-reduction?
• trees act as signal lights, why?
• "shore" line 3. numerous potential metaphorical 
• trees have agency, obvious play and reversal here
• people have no agency as they require machines for movement. How can I complicate this?
• mushrooms as fingers-again no human agency- why mushrooms? what implications might i be missing here?
• Transtormer defines the someone (line 7) as male. Possible feminist reclamation trope at work? Prufrock like impotence?
• Yet we (humanity) belong to the Earth. Evidence that power, female or otherwise is futile?
• Similar maybe to Frost's Design or Desert Places? 

Pedagogy Post 9/28/10 Week 7

I've had a few discussions with fellow graduate students over the past weeks where I've generally posed the same question. This is: What am I/we really paying for in terms of the coveted M.A? I wonder about this for a variety of reasons. I remember thinking to myself and vocalizing this idea to others that, I wish I could go one day where I didn't feel like I was behind the wheel with a thousand things to do. I suppose part of the reason why I can appreciate this constant sweat is because of the "old school" mentality that one has to put in their time in the trenches and earn their stripes.
I raised these questions to Dr. Davidson the other day and it made me remember a few things. Yes, there is a large intrinsic value to earning ones stripes but obviously there is equal value in establishing a hybrid environment where we attempt to buttress the hard-nosed gut check with the firm but loving criticism mentality.

Another question I had in all of this mess: Obviously no one wants to think that we are being trained simply as replacements, but rather that we craft ourselves and our skills to be part of the machine that is academia. But, I wonder? Just how much are we being tailored as replacements?  I feel that this question bears more weight and significance especially since our class has a mixture of English and education students. I can't necessarily bash the idea of being made into a replacement, because they have to come from somewhere eventually right? I dunno guy, the jury is still out on this one, What do you think?

Junk Quotes 9-27-10 Week 7

Try to play any instrument such that it's only an extension of your finger tips.

-Doug Kees, my former music teacher

The things that go on in broad daylight, it boggles the imagination.

- my uncle discussing the rate of crime in Las Vegas.

Think of Judo as a way to just be lazy, except you have to exercise and you get to throw people.

-Hap, my former Judo coach

Free Post Week 7

I thought everyone might enjoy this poem. It reminds me that poetry really can be quite funny. Enjoy

What I Want
By George Bilgere

          for my marriage, 1996-2000

I want a good night’s sleep.
I want to get up without feeling
That to waken is to plunge through a trap door.

I want to ride my motorcycle
In late spring through the Elysian Fields
Of the Rocky Mountains

And lie once more with Cecelia
In the summer of 1985
On a blanket in the backyard of our house

In Denver and watch the clouds expand.
And it would be great to see my mother
Alive again, at the stove, frying a pan of noodles

Into the peculiar carbonized disc that has never been replicated.
I would like for my ex-wife to get leprosy,
Her beauty falling away in little chunks

To the disgust of everyone in the chic café
Where she exercises her gift
For doing absolutely nothing.

*   *    *

I want world peace.
I want to come home one evening
And find Julia, the new assistant professor

In the history department,
Has let herself into my apartment
For the express purpose of lecturing me

On the history of lingerie.
I don’t ask for much: a good merlot.
An afternoon thunderstorm cooling off

The city as I sit listening to Ella
Sing “Spring is Here,” so the air goes lyrical
And perhaps a stray bolt of lightening

Strikes my ex-wife as she steps from her car,
Setting her on fire, to the unqualified delight
Of the friends she has come to visit,

Who are thoroughly sick of her self-aggrandizing stories.
I want to spark a bowl of Maui Wowie
And spend the entire afternoon in my dorm room

*   *    *

With Corrine Spellman, trying to remember
What we were talking about, wondering
Whether, in fact, we had had sex yet.

I’d like to sit at the little outdoor restaurant
By the lake in Forest Park, talking with my aunt
In the humid summer twilight, as the hot

St. Louis day expires upon the water
And the moth-eaten Chinese lanterns
Glow like faded Kodachrome.

We would argue about the great tenor voices
Of the century, or causes for the dearth
Of poetry about the Gulf War,

Or why my father drank himself into an elegy
We never stop revising,
While couples on their paddleboats come in

From the darkening lake, as they’ve done
Since the beginning of time, and children
Call each other across the shadowy fields.

*   *    *

Yes, that would be nice.
I want a good woman
With a sweet bosom

And a wicked sense of humor.
I want to wake up in London on a spring morning
And read in the paper that my ex-wife

Has received a lethal injection, courtesy of the state
Of Ohio, as part of a citywide program aimed
At improving the civic pride of Cleveland,

But something went terribly wrong
And she’s been left in a persistent
Vegetative state

Which everyone agrees
Is nonetheless an improvement.
And it would be wonderful

To sit down with Maria
At our favorite restaurant in Madrid
With some good red wine

*   *    *

And listen to her Spanish
Caress the evening.
I want to read that a new manuscript

Of poetry by James Wright
Has been discovered in someone’s attic,
And someone I haven’t yet met,

In some future I have yet to despoil
Has bought it for my birthday,
And after the kids are asleep

We sit out in the backyard,
A little drunk, and read it
Aloud to each other,

Something we often do
In summer, before climbing upstairs to the bedroom
In the big old house we love so much.