Alas…  One of my M.F.A. colleagues (on staff at Willow Springs) says that if I review a batch of poems that have been submitted and I provide reasons for it not to be accepted (or pursued further by my fellow editors), that must mean that my own verse is better.

Well, I’m not sure that it “must,” but for the time being at least, I am struck with how we rationalize by non sequiturs ad infinitum (and how we lapse into latin).  Nothing follows nothing:  good, better, best…  And the grand prize goes to… Subjectivity!

***

Jorie Graham has loads of fascinating things to offer about the poetics we practice, the poems we write and the poems we judge (ie., compare and contrast with other poems).  In this regard, the Poetess-in-Charge at Harvard U. even has her own rule named after her own controversial evaluation of various works in the University of Georgia’s 1999 contest.   The rule essentially stipulates that a judge must recuse her or himself if the potentially award-winning poems are penned by the aforementioned judge’s students, or her future husband.

With that contentious hullabaloo out of the way, consider what the author of the recently released collection, Place, has to say on the subject of narrative, which happens to be the pre-emptive- strike category by which prose (fiction and non-fiction) seems to hold poetry under lock and key in the literary basement.

Narrative, coupled with the block-form stanza, is the idol to which nearly every student of the craft must pay homage and bow down.  The only problem is–what if the stinking existence, which yawns before us like halitosis, what if the entire kit and caboodle of the space-time continuum, bears little resemblance to the storied-arc by which we’d like to float above it???  And so, Jorie Graham once told an interviewer at Lumina, the magazine affiliated with Sarah Lawrence College:

Consequence in narrative is illuminating, often morally instructive, moving, and surprising. But to privilege linear, temporal constructs over all other ones is to refuse to represent, as I began by saying, way too much of ordinary human experience. Everybody dreams. Leaping and associative progress is natural to the way time passes in everyone’s life. We are just taught to distrust those sensations of time as “irrational.” This is a much larger cultural issue. There is much power in the hands of the creators of the narratives, and the master narratives, by which we “recognize” our lives. So I’d say, yes, be intimidated, if you are, by non-narrative poetry. Experience is intimidating. But don’t be distrustful—choose to trust it, go along for the ride, see if it reminds you of anything.

How bleeping gracious is that!

And don’t you dare be intimidated by the phrase, “Experience is intimidating…”

And don’t you dare feel as if Graham is patronizing you (or matronizing you)!

Far from it.   What she’s doing, in her kind and gentle and intellectually-trying way, is warning you not to enter a contest that’s sponsored by “The Non-Profit Organization Dedicated to Story-Telling in the Digital Age.”   She’s warning you.

You’ve been warned.   Don’t say Jorie Graham didn’t try to get you to leap into the abyss before you caved and wrote a beginning, a middle and an ending.  Loser?

Peace–

Click here to view the embedded video.

Peace–

In mad excitement for my guests, I spilled coffee on my computer. Then in a series of stupid acts, I erased all the pictures of their visit except for this--saved by Facebook.

After a delightful and stressful month or so that included:

• two weeks of teaching Russian students English online
• losing that job due to my sporadic internet connection (I signed my first contract for DSL in early February and am still waiting for it to be connected)
• a two-week training that qualifies me to teach for Berlitz
• an eight-day visit from my parents (which included eating lots of cake, drinking lots of beer, seeing a couple castles, learning European history, visiting several cities, taking lots of walks, and having meaningful conversations over many a delicious meal)

I suddenly found myself alone with several days in a row of unstructured time. You know what that means. I had no excuse not to write.

Except that I’d spilled coffee on my computer and it wasn’t working. But, after backing up all my files and erasing the entire hard drive, the computer began to work again (except for the keyboard, which explains the auxiliary one stationed in front of my laptop).

It’s just that instead of copying some of my folders I copied “shortcuts” to them. My “novel” happened to be in one of these.

But that was okay because I needed to rethink it, anyway.

We all know that real writers don’t wait for inspiration. We know better than to believe in writer’s block. I held up my thumb in search of a lift, and I got picked up by the comments section of “Why Write Novels At All?” in the New York Times.

[Novels] occur in the mind of the reader most of all and give people the space to consider people and situations in ways that even direct experience does not. (N123, Boston, MA)

I had been contemplating turning my “novel” idea into a play, but N123 reminded me how much I value the intimacy of the writing/reading exchange. I love the way reading a novel relies so heavily on the collaboration of the reader, and I love the care a good writer takes in order to guide the reader’s imagination just so.

I love how reading authentic representations of life allows us to mull over events, motivations, and results slowly, with the depth and care we can’t always offer experiences we witness first-hand. And I love how writing prose allows us to engage with the most interesting thing in the world: layered, intricate, and oftentimes inconsistent human thought.

For all of us who are ill-equipped to offer much to the world in the way of practical knowledge or skill, at least we can keep trying to offer alternate ways of thinking about this nutty world. And even if we utterly fail in that, we can live countless lives—meaningful and tragic—through reading (between stints of washing the world’s cars, floors, and toilets).

Are you mindful of the other driver?

Between home and work, those huge digital matrix signs loom over the interstate, the ones intended to keep you abreast of traffic situations. But, except during snowstorms, there are no real traffic situations between home and work. It’s not that kind of town. So, instead, the signs display helpful messages and driving tips. Usually somewhere between self-righteously bossy (“Texting and Driving Don’t Mix”) and winkingly practical (“DUI Patrols Tonight”), lately the DOT has turned more philosophical. The other day, all over the state, the signs asked, “Are You Mindful of the Other Driver?”

It is the word “mindful” that seems out of place in square letters above the interstate. I am used to the DOT being concerned about my driving habits and even about the more physiological aspects of my mental state (who doesn’t like rest stops with free coffee?), but this seems to enter another kind of territory, a territory that is normally the domain of poets and pastors (and—on a side note—of Dinty W. Moore’s new book). I’m not used to hearing about such existential stuff from the lower levels of state bureaucracy. Not that I mind. In fact, I kind of like the idea that they might have more to say than “Merge Left in 1500 Feet.”

But that “mindful” and the abstract “other.” The word choice suggests authorship in a venue that is normally dominated by anonymity. This is not, I think, language that could be produced by machine or by government committee. This language was created, composed. So, reading it, driving beneath this message, I imagine the DOT copywriter in his cubicle, the perfunctory fabric walls, the smell of canned air.

On his breaks, he walks outside. It is spring now. New grass is coming up around the ponderosas. He shuffles his feet, kicks at a cone half-buried. He carries a paperback in his right hand, his thumb holding the place. This week Pedro Páramo, last week that Annie Dillard book, slim volumes that feel to him more like companions. He also keeps a book of poems in the top drawer of his desk, and he steals moments with them between memos and newsletters. He has recently discovered Dana Levin and thinks he might be in love.

The DOT office is in an office park off the highway, so the cars zing past. Most of them don’t notice the little building, one-story with large tinted windows that the copywriter cannot see from his cubicle, buried among the other cubicles. Most of the drivers do not notice him walking there, paperback held loosely between his fingers. But he stops to watch them.

Unless they merge onto 184, they will see one of his signs 2.4 miles ahead. Today, they will see his “Are You Mindful” message, his favorite, the first one he created and the only one he’s created that has gone into the state DOT’s permanent Dynamic Message Sign (DMS) message library. He thinks of this as his opportunity to shape society in his small way: his words, present, glowing above the flow of traffic, sliding easily into the eyes and, thus, the minds of 64,372 commuters each day, on average (based on the December 2010 report; he did the math himself). More on weekdays, fewer on weekends.

Watching the cars pass, he tries to notice each passing motorist. The traffic is light in late morning, so he almost can. The woman in the new Hyundai, probably his own mother’s age, hands at ten and two, sitting up straight so her hair doesn’t press against the headrest and deform. The man in the wax-sheen 4-ton pickup, broad shoulders and short hair: a contractor, he thinks, not a laborer. The girl in the early-90s Honda Civic, a carseat in the back, too young and pretty to have planned for that. These are his audience, his readers, and they are legion. It is a kind of power. More people will read his words today than will read Dana Levin: 64, 372 readers. And that’s vehicles; it doesn’t account for passengers. How many people will read Annie Dillard today? How many people will read Rulfo? Shakespeare? 64, 372 people will read him. Every day he has something to tell them, and every day they hear it.

He thinks of the sign past the 184 exit as his sign because the control box is in his cubicle. For the most part, each sign is controlled locally—normally by a sheriff’s dispatcher, but since this sign is so close to the main DOT offices, the duty defaults to him.

His fifteen-minute break is nearly over, so he dog ears the page in Rulfo and tucks it into his back pocket. He thinks he’ll steal another moment with Levin before writing the weekly road status update, a press release that no one in the press actually reads. If his supervisor were to catch him reading poems on the clock, he has decided he will explain that it is vocationally necessary. He will explain that, since he is a copywriter (a writer, really), he must keep language in his mind. If he does not keep the language fresh, he won’t be able to do his job well. His supervisor is the kind of person who believes in things like inspiration, and she already sees him as a creative type, so he thinks she’ll buy it. And, anyway, he hopes not to be at this job for long.

He fantasizes about his last day on the job, about how he will sign off. He’ll need to leave his readers with something larger than the normal fare. For some among his 64, 372, his words are the only thing they’ll read that day. He’ll need to leave them with something substantial. Like that line from Howard Nemerov: “The world is full of mostly invisible things,/ And there is no way but putting the mind’s eye,/ Or its nose, in a book, to find them out”

But that’s a bit pedantic, and it won’t fit on the sign.

Maybe this one, from Gerard Manley Hopkins, “And, for all this, nature is never spent”—But that’s too topical. Or, “For Christ plays in ten thousand places,/ Lovely in limbs and lovely in eyes not his”

Or this one he just read in Levin: “I know,/ I’m tired of the battle too”

It is his duty, he thinks, not sacred but nearly so, to reach into their lives for an instant, to remind them that, for better or worse, they are not alone.

Growing up I never liked to read.  Neither of my parents went to college.  Neither of them took the time to peruse much more than a copy of Popular Mechanics, or maybe, the Readers Digest abridged version of Alex Haley’s Roots, which they would watch on television anyway… But I can’t blame my anxiety about reading and writing well on them.

All I can say is that I love the capacity of words to inject emotional energy into a Tuesday afternoon with the drive-through traffic at Starbucks swirling around me.  I grew to love novels, short stories and poems, but first and foremost, I was impressed with the miracle of a well-chosen word.  And sometimes, even an poorly-chosen word would suffice and set me off.  Just the sheer effort of an individual to articulate his or her experience–that’s enough to make my hair stand on end.  Hence:  my apprehension!

What if I fuck it up?

Today I heard on National Public Radio a segment with Henry Louis Gates, Jr.   It dealt with “Roots Envy,” or the inability of some folks to trace their family ancestry back generation after generation like the legendary figure of the 1970′s best-seller.  Gates, around that time, became enamored with the possibility and discovered some things about his mother and father that were remarkable.  For example, evidently one of Gates’ kin had marshaled in and out of a Revolutionary War militia between the years 1777 and 1784.  For an African-American that’s especially intriguing.  Also, during the broadcast, Neil Conan asked the author of the Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Reader to revisit what he had written about his mother’s funeral.   (The audio of this reading, available today at 6 p.m., is worth listening to.)  He actually didn’t appreciate the stale, blue-blood service that they had back in 1997.  And so, with nothing more than a few words, he described the rowdy sermon and the swaying hymn-sings and the falling-down-in-the-aisle catharsis that would have been preferred.  It would have been a funeral like they had had for this uncle or for that aunt.  It would have been hot.  It would have gone on for hours.  It would have included those paper-fans, by which the mourners move the air about in vain…

I tell you, when I heard Gates read about this re-cast episode of his life, I wept like she were my own mother.  While driving through road construction barriers on I-90, I nearly couldn’t see that I’d be losing the left lane.  And I realized, while putting my foot on the brake, that I don’t have to be so nervous, that I’m not so much searching for that perfect word as I am searching for that intuitive trigger or that trap door that allows me to plunge into humanity’s collective subconscious.  Is there such a thing… such an ocean of dreams?

Here’s a excerpt from a chapter of Gates’ book:

Where Daddy shied from debt, Mama was intrepid, at least until the change. She could leverage Daddy’s two salaries like a Wall Street financier. But Miss Pauline wanted a house, and that was tantalizingly out of reach. She started buying house books and magazines. Dozens, for research. She and I would look at them, just as I would study the pages of the three or four mail order catalogues we’d regularly receive: Ward’s, Sears, Roebuck, General Merchandise, Mayer’s. (Almost all of our Christmas gifts came from General Merchandise.)

At one point, Mama’s plan was to build a house, on land near her mother or brothers on Erin Street. The first time I ever saw Mama really angry at my father — much angrier than when she’d accuse him of flirting with Miss Noll or Miss Mary — was on the day when he killed the deal that would have let us build a sort of family complex with two or three of Mama’s brothers. We had the plans, the land was picked out (just below Big Mom’s, near where Miss Lizzy’s dogs barked at night when the Sneakin’ Deacon made his rounds visiting his parishioners), and Mama was all excited. Radiant, in fact. She loved to dream, like all the Colemans, and she loved to make things happen, which was more Gates than Coleman. (When it came to finance and risk, Daddy was more Coleman than Gates.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

Non-Fiction’s tether to the facts has always been frayed.  And we’re just now getting nervous about it?

A federal judge in Montana has saved the non-fiction writer’s proverbial ass.  (Not really!)

He has, for the foreseeable-future, allowed the authors of memoirs, essays and sundry ‘aboutnesses’ to ostensibly do what novelists and poets do all the time.  That is, tell little fibs.  That is, craft big ones through which we can see, but the gist of which we want to believe so desperately, we pretend there are no holes.  That is, fabricate the truth.  That is, construct a world in which the center may not hold.  That is, present the narrator as the legendary hero he, or heroine she, always imagined him or herself to be.

Yes, we have Sam Haddon to thank for the barrage of mythic forays to come.  The U.S. District Gavel-Swinger has thrown out the suit filed on behalf of a million (alright, four) non-fiction readers, a suit that may have required author, Greg Mortenson, to pay damages to those who understood his Three Cups of Tea bestseller to be entirely factual (and cough up $15 per disillusioned reader), a suit initially brought to bear by another writer, Jon Krakauer in Three Cups of Deceit… (Boo!  Hiss!  What a party-pooper!).

And so, where do we go from here?

I, for one, am not going to take this lying (down).  To my credit I have an entire half of a graduate course with Natalie Kusz, and the topic of embellishing on the events and adventures of our lives has been raised every Tuesday.  Tonight we’ll do it again.   We’ll say that we can’t make stuff up.  But what puts the Creative in the genre of Creative Non-Fiction is how we beautify the gory details of our fragmented days, weeks, months and years.   Then, of course, someone will wrinkle his brow and it will be assumed that in streamlining the crap of our experience we, as writers, have made everything up.  This is as it should be.

Does every member of the Oprah Winfrey Book Club assume that Homer could comprehend the geographic peculiarities of each Aegean coastline?   Wasn’t Odysseus himself a blatant bullshitter?   And, if we dare take on the rubric of the writers of the Four Gospels–Matthew, Mark, Luke and John–isn’t it fair to say they failed to collaborate on the pertinent dialogue?  I mean, come off it!  Does the esoteric redactor expect us to believe that “I am the Bread of Life” is authentic chit-chat for a Galilean carpenter?  And why is any card-carrying Palestinian Jew doing within a five-mile radius of a herd of swine?   It’s mighty shady if you ask me, and I’m an ordained clergy-person.  Moreover, if eastern literature is more to your liking, it’s unclear whether anything Siddhartha says, or Buddha says, or Confucius says, hinges upon the historic facticity of specific life-events.   Does it matter whether the Four Noble Truths were first uttered on the road into or out of Varanasi, India?  Are Muslims more attuned to the timelessness of the Koran’s teachings or must they ferret out the temporal conditions under which the prophet received the angelic dictation?  Religiosity aside, the scientific method may be misapplied to history and to one’s experience of history; but isn’t that like using a butter knife to cut through overcooked steak?  Rene Descartes, to be sure, wanted to remove as much doubt from nearly all inquiries into truth (as we know it).  But he couldn’t stomach the possibility of truth that knows us.   And he posited the very mechanics of the soul in the pineal gland without proof at all…

No, neither folklore nor faith relies upon brute literalism we frequently foist upon them.   Likewise, neither rhyme nor reason is meant to track down supposed facts without the subjective interpretation of facts that we bring to all sensory objects and persons who are perceived.

Greg Mortenson has a response to the disputed chronology that had him stumbling and bumbling into a remote village:  “the time about our final days on K2 and ongoing journey to Korphe village and Skardu is a compressed version of events that took place in the fall of 1993.”  There you heard it…   A compressed version of events!  Mystery solved!

Case closed!   Or, shall we say, opened to wild and wondrous interpretation!

Peace!  PS–I must confess that I heard Greg Mortenson speak at Gonzaga a few years ago, prior to this scandal breaking, and remember being thoroughly impressed by his humility!   I was also totally inspired with the possibilities of educating the young women (especially) and young men of Pakistan and Afghanistan–with the notion of barrage of classrooms, rather than a shock ‘n awe bombardment.  Of course, that’s just my interpretation.  Add it to the mix.

In previous classes (for previous courses) I’ve done things like play Jenga (analogies TBA), arm wrestle (to illustrate dialectic), role-play a Greek tragedy (to flesh out the human condition), and lastly I’ve hurled a hard boiled egg into the throng of a crowed lecture hall.   “Poetry differs from prose,” I proclaim with this latter demonstration… “Everything is coming at you — and potentially it’s going to be messy.”

You may, of course, call that a gimmick, or the hobgoblin of an inexperienced college professor’s tortured mind, but I love to see the bodies scatter, while others cover and duck.

And yet, with Tuesday’s educational schtick, my hope is to play things a little more close-to-the-vest.   The exercise will consist of a free-writing response to five poems and will hopefully allow the students (ages 18 to 20) the opportunity to resonate with an image.  An image or two…  I’ll let you know how it goes.   My thinking is that many of these first-generation freshmen have never encountered the likes of Denise Levertov, Gary Snyder, Sharon Olds, William Stafford and Anne Sexton, and that some of their word-explosions might shower down body-parts into the blend-in style of dormitory prose.

You see, thus far, we’ve muddled through one Essay Exam and assorted supportive gigs in which I’ve asked them to harangue the system in which they’re all clamoring to become a cog.  How to write a thesis statement... How to identify key words, indexical concepts, supportive evidence… This is the standard fare of what every incoming neophyte should learn about academe.   Later in the quarter, we’ll marshall our skills of mimicry in the service of a Persuasive Essay.   Whoopee!   Potential research foci may include The Decline of the Hipster In What Used To Be Pop-Culture, The Resurgence of Dallas and Other ’80′s Nighttime Dramas and Snooki:  The Femme Fatale of A Post 2001 Generation.   And, for all the fantastic insights these papers may elucidate, I’m not expecting that the full-throated ‘second naiveté’ of Paul Ricoeur has caught up with the budding intellects.   That is to say, I trust the wounded hearts of these students more than I do the reductions of rationalism we often require them to make.

They have hunches that institutions, upon which they rely for future well-being, are hurtling forward with no competent soul at the helm.    I’ve heard them.

They have carefully-concealed broken spirits–concealed for fear being swept aside and broken by a dubious Protestant work-ethic.  I’ve broken them (or at least backslapped the ol’ boys who have).

And ultimately, they have an imagination that we have morally and cynically pounded with enough advertising wit and charm to tame the bravest of the Brave New World consumer.   I’ve seen their attention-spans snap back like a braid of tired rubber bands around copious deliveries of the Spokesman Review.

***

Again, I’ll let you know how the exercise goes.   But the poems to which my 101 cadre will respond do come to us like organic, free-range-chicken-eggs, eggs that have  been acted upon by a force, a force stronger than my middle-aged and wannabe-bottom-of-the-ninth-strike-out pitcher’s arm.

Dean Young, in his book, The Art of Recklessness, makes this provocative remark on autobiography and poetry.  He says, “MY POEMS ARE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL, I JUST DON’T KNOW WHO THEY ARE ABOUT.”   Coincidentally, as the impressionable minds in my care launch into their Autobiographical Essay (Due April 30th), may they find comfort in the heroic ignorance.

The Nude Swim

On the southwest side of Capri

we found a little unknown grotto    

where no people were and we

entered it completely

and let our bodies lose all

their loneliness.

All the fish in us

had escaped for a minute.

The real fish did not mind.

We did not disturb their personal life.

We calmly trailed over them

and under them, shedding

air bubbles, little white

balloons that drifted up

into the sun by the boat

where the Italian boatman slept

with his hat over his face.

Water so clear you could

read a book through it.

Water so buoyant you could

float on your elbow.

I lay on it as on a divan.

I lay on it just like

Matisse’s Red Odalisque.

Water was my strange flower,

one must picture a woman

without a toga or a scarf

on a couch as deep as a tomb.

The walls of that grotto

were everycolor blue and

you said, ‘Look! Your eyes

are seacolor. Look! Your eyes

are skycolor.’ And my eyes

shut down as if they were

suddenly ashamed.

[by Anne Sexton]

***

ENGLISH 101.10 POETRY TO SHAPE PROSE

Traveling Through The Dark
 

Traveling through the dark I found a deer

dead on the edge of the Wilson River road.

It is usually best to roll them into the canyon:

that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.

By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car

and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing;

she had stiffened already, almost cold.

I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.

My fingers touching her side brought me the reason–

her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting,

alive, still, never to be born.

Beside that mountain road I hesitated.

The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights;

under the hood purred the steady engine.

I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red;

around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.

I thought hard for us all–my only swerving–,

then pushed her over the edge into the river.

[by William Stafford]

***

ENGLISH 101.10 POETRY TO SHAPE PROSE

A Time Past

The old wooden steps to the front door

where I was sitting that fall morning

when you came downstairs, just awake,

and my joy at sight of you (emerging

into golden day—

the dew almost frost)

pulled me to my feet to tell you

how much I loved you:

those wooden steps

are gone now, decayed

replaced with granite,

hard, gray, and handsome.

The old steps live

only in me:

my feet and thighs

remember them, and my hands

still feel their splinters.

Everything else about and around that house

brings memories of others—of marriage,

of my son. And the steps do too: I recall

sitting there with my friend and her little son who died,

or was it the second one who lives and thrives?

And sitting there ‘in my life,’ often, alone or with my husband.

Yet that one instant,

your cheerful, unafraid, youthful, ‘I love you too,’

the quiet broken by no bird, no cricket, gold leaves

spinning in silence down without

any breeze to blow them,

is what twines itself

in my head and body across those slabs of wood

that were warm, ancient, and now

wait somewhere to be burnt.

[by Denise Levertov]

***
ENGLISH 101.10 POETRY TO SHAPE PROSE

True Night

Sheath of sleep in the black of the bed:

From outside this dream womb

Comes a clatter

Comes a clatter

And finally the mind rises up to a fact

Like a fish to a hook

A raccoon at the kitchen!

A falling of metal bowls,

the clashing of jars,

the avalanche of plates

I snap alive to the ritual

Rise unsteady, find my feet,

Grab the stick, dash in the dark -

I’m a huge pounding demon

That roars at raccoons -

They whip around the corner,

A scratching sound tells me

they’ve gone up a tree.

I stand at the base

Two young ones that perch on

Two dead stub limbs and

Peer down from both sides of the trunk:

Roar, roar, I roar

you awful raccoons, you wake me

up nights, you ravage

our kitchen

As I stay there then silent

The chill of the air on my nakedness

Starts off the skin

I am all alive to the night.

Bare foot shaping on gravel

Stick in the hand, forever.

Long streak of cloud giving way

To a milky thin light

Back of black pine bough,

The moon is still full,

Hillsides of Pine trees all

Whispering; crickets still cricketting

Faint in cold coves in the dark

I turn and walk back slow

Back the path to the beds

With goosebumps and lose waving hair

In the night of milk-moonlit thin cloud glow

And black rustling pines

I feel like a dandelion head

Gone to seed

About to be blown away

Or a sea anemone open and waving in

cool pearly water.

Fifty years old.

I still spend my time

Screwing nuts down on bolts.

At the shadow pool,

Children are sleeping,

And a lover I’ve lived with for years,

True night.

One cannot stay too long awake

In this dark

Dusty feet, hair tangling,

I stoop and slip back to the

Sheath, for the sleep I still need,

For the waking that comes

Every day

With the dawn

[by Gary Snyder]

***

ENGLISH 101.10 POETRY TO SHAPE PROSE

Once

I saw my father naked, once, I

opened the blue bathroom door

which he always locked — if it opened, it was empty —

and there, surrounded by the glistening turquoise

tile, sitting on the toilet, was my father,

all of him, and all of him

was skin. In an instant my gaze ran

in a single, swerving, unimpeded

swoop, up: toe, ankle,

knee, hip, rib, nape,

shoulder, elbow, wrist, knuckle,

my father. He looked so unprotected,

so seamless, and shy, like a girl on a toilet,

and even though I knew he was sitting

to shit, there was no shame in that

but even a human peace. He looked up,

I said Sorry, backed out, shut the door

but I’d seen him, my father a shorn lamb,

my father a cloud in the blue sky

of the blue bathroom, my eye had driven

up the hairpin mountain road of the

naked male, I had turned a corner

and found his flank unguarded — gentle

bulge of the hip-joint, border of the pelvic cradle.

[by Sharon Olds]

ENGLISH 101.10 POETRY TO SHAPE PROSE

Peace–

Here are some of the remarkable things that I’ve found while wading:

1. An expository essay on how to cook, cut, and sell meth. Among the helpful tips: a paragraph on how to not get caught. The trick, it seems, is never to tell anybody your name, never to sell to anybody you know personally. Also, it helps to own a business in the industrial district that refinishes bathtubs. The smell of the chemicals used to re-enamel the tubs hides the smell of the chemicals used to cook the meth.
2. A brief personal narrative involving a camping trip, some pickup trucks, a fight, a shotgun (loaded?) being used like a baseball bat in said fight, and an extended visit to the hospital. (I teach in North Idaho, by the way).
3. A profile of some VP at Google. My student drove across the entire state of Washington and across a snowy Snoqualmie Pass to get this interview. I was impressed at his initiative. I was less impressed the time he showed up to class visibly drunk with his also visibly drunk buddy who wasn’t in the class. Apparently it was his birthday, but he just couldn’t stand the idea of missing class even though he had been drinking since 10am. (It was a late afternoon class). I’m still not sure whether or not I should be flattered by this.
4. This sentence: “I would like to know her perspective as a member of the Church of Ladder Day Saints.” Actually, there are lots of semi-comical malapropisms, and this one, like most of them, isn’t anything special. But it’s a little glimmer of humor in the bleakness. Whenever we read essays collectively as a department (a process known as “norming”), there are spontaneous recitations of the funnier malapropisms. Only English teachers could possibly enjoy this. And even we only enjoy it in moderation.
5. A smart but more-visceral-than-rational indictment of Idaho’s lack of a distinction between statutory and felony rape. The argument is based entirely upon the student’s own experience. He was charged and convicted of felony rape after being caught in flagrante in his car with his 17-year-old girlfriend. He was 18 at the time.

In some cases, the genius is clearly incidental. But in some cases there is some wonderful bit of brilliance there, however unpolished. One more example: In my English 101 class, I assign a profile, asking students to conduct an interview with someone who is an “expert” on some interesting subject and to profile that person. Last year, I got one in which a student had decided that she would profile time. That’s right, time. Nevermind that time isn’t a person and, thus, is not really available to be interviewed. She didn’t quite get the idea of the assignment, but the resulting essay is actually kind of amazing. She interviewed a bunch of people, and she overlaps these weird micro-narratives of their lives at a precise moment (8:15 some random morning) with material from her conversations with them. One of them is visiting his mother in a nursing home before work; one is trying to navigate the chaos of seven adults and small tribe of children, all of whom she shares an apartment with; one is the writer’s own hairdresser, doing the writer’s hair. And they’re all trying to answer the writer’s nutty questions about time, and time travel, and whether time is linear or circular, and they all come off sounding like nerdy kids at a sleepover. It’s weird, funny, surprisingly meta. Grading her essay, I found myself laughing out loud several times and giving her an A despite the fact that this absolutely was not a profile and did not meet the criteria of the assignment. (I never do that, by the way. Strict adherence to a rubric is one of the small handful of tactics I’ve learned for navigating the 300-500 essays I grade each semester with anything approaching fairness and objectivity, not to mention efficiency). Of course, such sparks of real genius are not things I can take credit for. I teach writing, not awesomeness. If awesomeness happens too, great, but I was teaching topic sentences.

This raises questions for me about the nature of literary “success,” the same kinds of questions I had when I was working as a reader for Willow Springs, trolling the slush for hidden marvels with only my half-formed aesthetic impulses to guide me. If I found something that struck me as brilliant, how would I know if it actually was brilliant? Someone else would tell me that it was, that’s how. And then we’d sit around the table, lobbing back and forth our radically idiosyncratic experiences reading (or not reading) the piece, and that would be that. There is no rubric for artistic success. It is wholly subjective.

So, when I hear my creative writing students in workshop praising to the skies a piece that I know is weak, what can I say? And when they complain (rightly, really) that the workshop is an exercise in finding fault, that it is a tool incapable of acknowledging success even when it’s right in front of our faces, how do I respond? I usually say something like, “True, but that doesn’t change the fact that this piece is flawed.” Or I say something like, “These are all works in progress. They can all be improved.” But what I’m really thinking is: What do I know? These are mostly matters of taste, and taste is infinitely changeable.

To be clear: I don’t actually think that true literary genius happens by accident, or that literary success (however we define that) is more a product of readers than of writers. Certainly, thoughtful readers can find a great deal of consensus, but beyond that consensus, we venture into this vast gray area. And in that gray area, there is both hope and despair for the beginning writer. We can hope that, despite the ever-growing pile of rejection letters, our work has merit and it’s just a matter of finding an editor who sees that intrinsic worth that everyone else is missing. Or we can despair of having any real control over the success or failure of the piece: It’s simply a matter of it striking the right reader in the right way at the right time.

I take consolation in the example of my comp students. Most of them wouldn’t write if I didn’t make them, but I do make them. And so they do write. And when they really give themselves to the task, sometimes, cool stuff happens.

Poet and human rights activist Marjorie Agosín will read tonight at Gonzaga University. While she might be more wildly known for her poetry and activism, I recently read and enjoyed Agosín’s nonfiction book Of Earth and Sea: A Chilean Memoir, which I bought from the University of Arizona Press.

I was quickly absorbed by Agosín’s lyrical imagery and her unique relationship with Chile’s stunning landscape. However, what most intrigued me about the book was its unusual structure. Agosín crafts a flowing series of intimate vignettes reminiscent of Sandra Cisnero’s House on Mango Street. Beginning in the south-central city of Osorno, she travels through the country’s narrow geography, using important dates, locations, people, and objects to tell the story of her double exile–daughter of Jewish immigrants and Allende supporter. She skillfully layers her personal history with the political climate of her family’s adopted country and her own search for identity and belonging.

Tonight’s reading will be diverse in content, and its language will be rich and memorable. For more information about the event visit http://news.gonzaga.edu/2012/celebrated-human-rights-activist-gonzaga-u.

It’s like seeing your favorite band for the first time live. Leading up to the event, you’re a manic wreck, sporadically blurting out the band’s name in daily conversation, listening to their records over and over again, making sure that you’ll know all of the words so you can sing along and not miss a beat or a word. You become what Steve Almond calls a Drooling Fanatic. You start to lose your grip on time. The closer the event comes, the faster time goes. And then it’s here. Your favorite authors, the people who inspire you, the books you owe something to, they’re all around you and it’s tough to take in. You don’t realize what’s just hit you.

And then it’s over. The rock stars have left the building. Life returns back to normal. You wipe the drool off your gaping mouth, and you’re left with the books you’ve purchased and the words they’ve shared. You leave a better person. Literature rules.

I would be more forlorn if I didn’t know that next year we get to do it all over again. Who knows who will grace our presence next year, who will share their wisdom, who will make us laugh, make us think, make us get a little misty-eyed; bring out our inner Drooling Fanatic. This makes the sadness sweet because it’s only a waiting game now. Next year may be even better (if that’s even possible) and we’ll be as ready as we can be. Because this year, Get Lit! surpassed any expectations I could have had. And next year I’ll be ready. Until then I’ll be waiting.

Bring it on.