No News Has Meant Good News

Two months. Quite a stretch. I can't honestly say I haven't been blogging during that time, as I've kept up with writing Geeking with the Wife for Team Covenant. However, my electronic poetry hat has been on the shelf.

Things you should know as I get back into this:

1. Kate got hired as an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee - Martin. This is very big news, and I'm incredibly proud of her. I'm picking up 2-3 classes as an adjunct and quite look forward to them. We're moving in early/mid July, with a house picked out and to be closed on in mid June. We're going to have a big yard again, which the dogs will love. We're both going to be teaching, which we will love.

2. The creative portion of my dissertation appears to have been satisfactory to all members of my committee. I'm now working, more slowly than I'd like but nonetheless deliberately, on the scholarly portion. The current realizations/fears - I'm writing about an aspect of several poets that I've never seen discussed. I can't find literature on it in their work, specifically. There's the first-level fear of the researcher, which is to wonder if I've just missed something, a conference paper, a dissertation, an interview. The second-level fear is that my committee will have a fit if I have extended tracts of my dissertation that are just me, a little bit of theoretical backing, and a whole lot of original analysis. Tradition has been stressed to this point, hence the worry.

3. I've thrown my hat into the slam ring once again, and most likely for the last time (due to the logistics - Martin is three hours from any major city). I've made the team from Manchester, NH, and I'm in the finals to qualify for the Providence, RI team on June 3. The semifinal bout in Providence was particularly skin-of-my-teeth. If you think you'd be interested in hearing about it, let me know. I can make it the topic of a post.

New Camera, Part 1 (The Bad Part)

My old Canon Rebel 2000 inexplicably died at some point in the past year. I hadn't taken it out much, mostly because buying and printing film, especially given my proclivity for shooting a lot of film at a time, was just going to be too expensive. When I finally did go to start it up with a new set of batteries, it didn't turn on. When I took it in to a camera store for repair, it was going to cost me as much to fix it as to replace it with a new version of the same camera. With some money I'd received during the holidays (and in advance for my birthday), I decided to upgrade to a decent DSLR (Digital Single Lens Reflex). After a lot of research, I determined that the Canon XSi was the camera for me.

This is not a cheap camera. It is not a professional camera, no 5D or whatnot. But it would do what I wanted - give me a reasonable amount of control of my photographing process, let me use my old lenses (an f/1.8 50mm and an f/4.5-5.6 55-200mm), and have enough of a megapixel count to let me blow up the photos to a nice size (we hang some of my better work around the house).

The camera was not inexpensive, so I looked around for the best deal. Here's where the problem starts. I found the camera for $475, body only, at US1Photo. After ordering it, I received a phone call from Ken to upsell. That means that he tried to get me, quite rudely, to purchase additional accessories over the phone. When I kept saying that I didn't want anything else, he went so far as to raise his voice to me and accusingly say, "That's a great deal" (it wasn't). I wanted an extra battery anyway, so when he further lowered the price on one, I finally agreed to include it. He also offered to speed up the shipping on the camera for free. The experience was obnoxious, but I didn't anticipate anything particularly wrong.

When I received the camera, I didn't have a line-item receipt. Instead, the entire purchase, tax included, had been grouped under a heading of "Executive Package." Shady dealings #2.

When I turned on the camera to do the initial format of my new memory card, it wouldn't work. The camera turned on just fine, but it wouldn't interact with the memory card. OK, I thought, perhaps the card is bad. Tried a new card. Same problem. Tried both cards in another digital camera. Both worked.

Knowing that some cameras will come off the line with problems, I called Canon Tech Help to see if they could offer any. Troy ran me through a number of potential fixes, none of which worked. He took the serial number so that I could send the camera in for repair. He then told me his computer has crashed, and he would be back in a moment after restarting.

He came back to tell me his computer had not, in fact, crashed. Rather, my serial number was already in the system under another name, and he had to see if he was allowed to tell me this. I was infuriated. I'd been sold a used camera, one that likely had been returned for the very problem I was experiencing.

When I called US1Photo to ask how to get my camera replaced with one that worked, I got the runaround for several minutes as Kevin tried to insist that whatever had gone wrong was my fault. Maybe I bent the pins in the camera by forcing the memory card in, he said. I was having none of it, and told him that I wanted them to replace the camera. He told me to call back on Monday (this was a Friday), and we'd work it out. When I called back, he again tried to get me to send the camera in to Canon, implying that I'd done something wrong. When I confronted him with the information that Canon already had the camera registered, he told me, "We sometimes register the camera for the customer." When I told him it was under someone else's name, it was the first time in two days that he hadn't tried to cut me off mid-sentence. He finally acquiesced, gave me a code to put on the box when I sent it back, and hung up abruptly.

I ended up getting a replacement camera. It works just fine. I've taken a few pictures with it that I'll post tomorrow. I'm calling Canon shortly to make sure this one hasn't been registered with them yet. So the story ends on a somewhat happy note. Given my experience, however, I highly recommend that you do NOT use US1Photo for your camera needs.

Pardon the long post. I've been pissed.

Two Steps Forward...

Sometimes as a professor you have a good idea. Sometimes it's a really good idea. And sometime the version of that idea that you've used successfully in one place simply doesn't hold up in another. That doesn't mean getting rid of the baby and the bathwater, just admitting to a class that you have to re-tailor an assignment.

In this particular case:

At Texas A&M, I always began a composition class with a research assignment. Visit the university archives and find an event or tradition, give it a context, and offer a brief argument as to why a current student should know what you now know. It played particularly well at A&M, given the culture of tradition there, but I stand by my thoughts that it should work at any institution of higher learning. This is the first time (most likely) in a student's career that s/he has chosen where to learn. By that very fact, some part of the student's identity is wrapped up in the university's identity, either aligned or opposed. Finding out about your college or university is finding out about yourself. It also means working with primary materials, not just going online and bopping around until you get something that looks kindasorta helpful. There's a respect for the material, for libraries, that comes from working with old things. When you look at a photograph that's 70 years old, it's very different than looking at a copy of that photograph in a textbook. Finally, it teaches students how to work with librarians, one of the most helpful things I teach them in the entire class. Librarians are a sorrowfully underused resource, and often a maligned one. I want my students to respect them, to learn from them, and to use the help they so gladly offer in most cases.

This semester, my first at UNE, I wanted my students to do the same kind of research. I met with the archivist at the Westbrook College History Collection, Bobby Gray, and worked out some meeting times. We talked about potential research topics. Everything fell into place quite nicely. Then came the first couple of days of class, and the discovery that most freshmen here don't have cars. The WCHC is about a 35-minute drive from the Biddeford campus where I teach. I tried to arrange carpooling. It started, then stalled. I tried to access a student driver or drivers and a university van or vans. On such short notice, it was going to be very aggravating. In short, this field trip, and the subsequent individual/small group research trips, not going to happen.

I found an alternative in town. There is a free bus that runs very close to the McArthur Library in downtown Biddeford, which also contains archival materials. The librarians there have offered their assistance to all 40 of my students (in fact, they seem overjoyed that we'll be taking advantage of the collection). The assignment will be modified, but should still benefit my students in most of the ways I want it to.

Now I just go into class on Wednesday and tell them all of this. I don't mind setbacks - it gives me a chance to talk about them. I'm very open about my pedagogy in class, often explaining precisely why I do something, and if something doesn't work, explaining to the class why I think it failed. No matter what, there are valuable lessons to be extracted here. Given that the overall theme of the first quarter of class is "context," my misunderstanding of the context of UNE (transportation-wise) should be a lesson in and of itself.

MIT Tongues

The other week I went to the MIT Museum. There was some great stuff, and even an exhibit that will be useful for my dissertation, amazingly enough (the folks involved produced visual "poetry" like 2D busts formed by terms used in a blog). My top takeaway for the day was a child's contribution to the "Wall of Ideas" in the second floor robotics area. While most other children had drawn some kind of boxy robot equipped with laser beams or nigh-magical rocket boosters or some other kind of high-flying-no-practicality inventions, this child had simply written, in all capitals, "TODAS LAS LENGUAS!!"

Capital Fs

Yes, I capitalize the Fs in JeFF. I do this in publications (journals and chapbooks, even in my one scholarly publication so far), on my syllabuses, when signing off to family members in a letter or email. Sooner or later folks ask about those capitals. I've got three reasons.

1. The capital Fs were spawned from the way I make my signature. It looks like the Fs are uppercase, which is just a quirk of my writing. But a gentleman by the name of John Greenwood started printing them capitalized in a writing workshop we took as undergraduates.

2. I liked the look. There's a balance to JeFF Stumpo that I don't find in Jeff Stumpo. Somehow the weight at the beginning just looks right to me.

3. It makes people ask. On the downside, somebody might wonder if I made a typo in my own name. That's a rare event, as the two capitals make it appear pretty darn intentional. It's silly and vapid, but it gets me a second look from time to time. Sometimes (submitting poetry without a guardian angel comes to mind) that's needed.

Sorry that the story doesn't involve going through demon trials to upgrade the letters of my name one at a time, and if only I can defeat seven dancing genii by midnight tomorrow I'll get all the letters capitalized. Or a horrific typewriter error at the hospital when I was born, the ramifications of which later trickled into the internet and the untold millions who can't type properly. Or that time I was approached by [insert famous artist/musician/puppeteer here] who granted me a new name in exchange for one of my poems.

Signing off,
JeFF

Will I always wonder?

Competed at Slam Free or Die last night. It was the last qualifier for the semis, which in turn lead to the finals, which in turn determine the team that Manchester will send to the National Poetry Slam in August. I like the poets here, so I was actually quite interested in making the team. Not so interested that I didn't be my contrary self - I have a couple of poems that would have worked the judges a little more directly, but that's not my game. I'm not cut out for slam because I still want to stretch all the boundaries instead of playing them to my advantage.

In any event, I went first. For those of you not familiar with slams, pole position is not a good thing to have. As the audience and judges warm up over the course of the evening, scores tend to rise - an effect called score creep. When we're only slamming for two rounds, and only five of eight poets will go on to the second round, you don't want to be the guy/gal who doesn't benefit from score creep. However, I ran with "ADD TV" because the sacrifice poet was fairly ADD in her own performance - I'm still not sure how much of it was actually planned - and was in fourth place at the end of the round.

In the second round, I performed "Sign of the Turtle" and, due to another poet going over time, pulled into overall third place. Only the top two would advance to the semis. But hark, my ears detect a clamour! The second place poet can't attend the semis, so I get to advance! Oh frabjous day! Oh wait. You're telling me that instead of a month from now, when the next slam would normally take place, the semis are on April 17? When I'll be in Texas at the Poetry at Round Top Festival? OK, fourth place poet, back-patting time!

Will I always wonder what might have been? Would I have given in and performed crowd-pleasers in the semis, and perhaps even at the finals, attempting to get on this team? Unlikely. I really like the Manchester poets and would love to work with them. But I'll just have to arrange that on the side. In the meantime, you get an entire draft of something I've been tweaking - found it in an old journal and am making changes to it for potential performance.

Spanglish/Grunting

I just spent 20 minutes being reduced to gestures and grunting. This is thoroughly embarrassing.

Walking home from the bank, I passed a Latino couple whose car was stalled in the street. I discovered that my Spanish has deteriorated so badly that we had to communicate primarily through hand motions. That meant the guy and I were pushing on the car for a full minute before I walked up to the driver's side window and discovered she'd had it in park the entire time. Attempt to gesture on how to shift into neutral. She gives up, gets me into the front seat. I get it in neutral, but they don't have the force to move the car now. I put it back in park, hand-explain again, and we get the car in the parking lot. Unfortunately, it's not where they want it. Of course, I've offered my help, and my Spanish sucks, so I can neither just take off nor quibble. We spent twenty minutes putting the car into something approximating the place they wanted it.

As a 22-23 year old, I wrote a chapbook in both Spanish and English. Not only that, but the Spanish was nuanced, genuinely poetic. Now I'm miming steering wheels and ending up in the wrong space.

Advertising drove me to Poetry

The gap between my last post and this one is perhaps the longest since I've started blogging. I have several things I'd like to post about, but the "20 books that made you fall in love with poetry" game that's been going around the blogosphere has been weighing on my mind. Once I get this off my chest, I should be able to write those other, probably more interesting posts.

Here's the thing: I don't have 20 books that made me fall in love with poetry/Poetry. It only took three authors to make me fall in love with it. One, Shakespeare. Two, EE Cummings. Three, an ex-girlfriend who wrote a lot. This was all in high school. Anybody I read after that added to my knowledge or gave me new ideas or became a particular poet whose work I loved, but it only took these three to give me the bug.

More importantly than that, even, is why I decided to become a poet. I wrote, as many children do, ditties and song lyrics as a young'un, rhymes to sing-song in time with a swing or teeter-totter. They were crap, as most of these things are. In high school, influenced particularly by Cummings, I tried to blend form and content. If I wrote about two people from opposite sides of the tracks, I'd have the lines going in different directions on the page, mirroring each other. But this was just something to do in my free time, to show one or two other people. Even entering and winning a poetry contest (READ magazine) my senior year was due primarily to the encouragement of my English teacher, Mr. Murawski. I had no intention of BEING a poet.

The summer after my freshman year of college, I interned at a major advertising firm. I worked with words every day, copywriting. In a set number of words, we had to influence people, create a particular emotion or association, a longing for a product or lifestyle. I learned far more than I contributed during that time, and when I was done, I was no longer a historian who happened to like words. I was a poet who really liked history. This was as much a rejection of the advertising world as it was an embrace of Poetry. I (somewhat naively) made a decision that I did not want to use any verbal talent I had to get people to blindly accept what I was telling them. That's propaganda, advertising, reducing consciousness.

I chose poetry because it did the opposite of what we were doing as a firm - it forced people to think, to question. Sears, Jim Beam, Pokemon, Star Wars, Taco Bell. These are the things that cemented my love for Poetry.

AWP Day 2

Started the day with two great panels. Slam / Academia had some good thoughts from the panel (I was particular struck by several phrasings from Jasmine Cuffee that connected biracialism to the slam/academia divide and a potential marriage of the two to produce, as she put it, a beautiful baby). A woman in the audience named Treasure offered up a very smart comment regarding racial assumptions and presences as they play out in this debate. Several audience members offered uninformed/non-useful thoughts afterwards, but it was still a great session all in all.

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The Reconstruction Room performers were awesome. Awesome. If you live in Chicago and can go see a show, do so. Just do it.

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Bookfair shmoozing was productive. I picked up my copy of Sentence, saw people at various magazines to which I've submitted work and whether published or not have some kind of email relationship (hi again Rhett over at Cave Wall), and saw Logen get a few requests for work. Much yay.

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No sketches today. Though Logen and I did have a two-page conversation consisting largely of puns during the one boring panel of the day. I will not share it here. Think of the children.

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Larry Heinemann tells great stories. He obviously writes great stories, what with the National Book Award and all. But I love a good storyteller. A&M, I'm glad you're hiring him for a more permanent position!

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I'm tired. Grammar is failing me. I have to be energetic to feature at the Afterhours Slam tomorrow night. Plus: visits to the Art Institute, at which Herr Doktor Professor Heinemann, Mick White, Logen, and I will pose provocatively in front of famous works of art and have our pictures taken.

Fact > Fiction

Kate's grandparents are farmers, and we asked them if a pig would really eat a corpse. If you've watched Deadwood, you know why we asked.

Joe's friend Paul once accidentally put his tractor through a pig pen. The jostling dislodged him, and he fell into the mud. He was pinned below one of the tires with a cut on his leg, sustained during the fall. The pigs took notice of the bleeding, upon which they began to eat him alive.

He got away, but was crippled for the rest of his life.

And now you can't sleep either.