A moment of crisis

Vis a vis diluvium

My heart is a modernist one. I like thinking all this knowledge will do me good some day, that Noah and his wife are on a trajectory that leads them to enlightenment, that all the languages of the world can swirl around each other into one clear symbol, that there is a (G)god who responds to the prayers of two people alone on an ark. My mind is a postmodernist one. I end up thinking that, as I put it in another poem, “knowledge is merely that / which is forgotten,” that Noah and his wife will end up landing in the New World and starting the events of El Oceano y La Serpiente all over again (or perhaps it will be one of the ships they create from their wants that lands on that shore and destroys the Aztecs or whoever it is in that dimension), that all the languages of the world swirl around each other and just create more language, that (G)god doesn't get his/her/its/their own font and is therefore everything and nothing in this poem from the very beginning.

Can I have both? Can I?

Are you looking for a song?

If you're a songwriter looking for a quirky love song, I've had this chorus bouncing around in my head for a few months. I've got verses to go with it, but am holding all but the first back as bargaining chips.

Verse 1, part 1

I was always straight-laced

You always liked to follow a plan

I was brought up in a flow-chart faith

You were brought up at your father's right hand

Chorus

We said we'd just get a little stoned...

Next thing you're wakin' up next to me

And I'm wakin' up in Mexico

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.

In case you Google your professors

Dear ENGL110 Students,

As I mentioned in class and an email, I'm going to push you fast and hard. Composition is not just throwing words on a page and hoping they stick; it's an entire mindset. That's what we're going to learn this semester - how to find the best possible mindset for yourself during your college career and how best to express that mindset through (primarily) words.

That being said...

I threw a lot at you on Wednesday. It was certainly more than most of you expected, and likely more than most of your other professors did. We didn't even get to meet each other properly, just dove into exercises and expectations. We'll fix that to a certain extent on Friday. If you haven't played Apples to Apples before, you're in for a treat. It's a good icebreaker game, a way to get to know people in a wholly unusual manner. It's also a good time to start practicing your argumentation skills, with little on the line but others' initial impressions of you (which is, of course, a lot). The lesson won't be a throwaway one, but it will pay dividends slowly over the course of the semester.

Be ready. Have fun.

Providence, Post Office, Publish, Perish

Thanks to the crowd at Blue State Coffee for a nice show last night. Witty hosting by Tony Brown and Ryk McIntyre. It was also good seeing Megan Thoma, Mike McGee, and David Perez read again. If you want to laugh your butt off, Megan's featuring later this month. I'll put up info when I have the exact date. If you want somebody else roaming the lines between slam and academia (in this case an MFA), check out David Perez tonight at the Cantab or Friday in Manchester.

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I'm about to send out a lot of stuff.

I've been bad in the last year about submitting work. I've been concentrating so much of my energy on producing that I've forgotten about the whole publish/perish dichotomy, which is especially important since I'm going on the job market this year. I look around at some of the MFA grads with whom I'll be competing and know that I'm competitive as far as total publication records go. I'm no Seth Abramson, in all the named journals (and probably never will be), but I've got a few decent journals under my belt and three chapbooks through real publishers. diluvium will of course be the big shot this time around, and I'm sending it to the major first-book contests: Yale Younger Series, Whitman, Bakeless, etc. But I'm also pulling out the individual poems that have until now been serving as fodder for the ocean in diluvium and sending them out to journals. I've gotten positive responses on them from some poets I greatly respect (and who would both know good stuff when they saw it and not BS me about whether or not what I'd just shown them was so). We'll see how the readers react. As usual, my big problem will be choosing work. That is:

I'm one of the few poets I know who doesn't quite have a shtick. Whether it's performance or written work, I write a wide range of material. On the one hand, it's great when you see it all together. These sets that I've performed at Worcester, the Cantab, and Providence have been like one-man variety shows in a sense. I've written before about The Icarus Sketches / The Icarus Series and how it forms a spectrum of Icarus poetry. But when I just have to choose 3-5 poems to send off to a journal, I get a bit lost. Do I choose the ones that have similar themes? Similar styles? Do I try to show off range and therefore pick three very different poems? Grouping by style is usually the safest bet, as the journals I've seen tend to choose this way. And yet it chafes me. That's another reason I haven't submitted much lately - it hurts to break pieces apart instead of letting them build up into a greater effect. It also hurts to say several things that are all very close to each other (though I suspect my "very" might be "somewhat" for others).

If you've read any of my stuff in the past year and have suggestions of places I can submit to, let me know. In the meantime, I'll be going through back issues, looking for similarities in style, and sometimes comparing to Jeffery Bahr's Publication Ranking list. I prefer to submit to places that I think look good, which is not to say I'm being shallow, but that I particularly like journals that have a coherent aesthetic that extends even to the production of said journal. I have to admit that some of my submissions this time around, however, will be based on the reputation of the journal, deserved or not.

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Lastly, I'll likely be blogging a bit more this month. Ironic, given that I'm starting an adjunct professorship at the University of New England as well as continuing work on my dissertation. If I'm going to have less time, I might as well have drastically less time.