I Can't Stop

Great moments from student poetry reading responses:

"I recall trying to spell "eland" in my head as she read her piece, "E-L-I-N-D?" or "E-L-A-N-D?" I was sitting next to writers, and I couldn't even spell."

"She [Alison Benis] certainly is not one to be parsimonious about using imagery."

"Andrew Winer really stole the show in my opinion. Though I believe he used the words "F$%K" AND F$5KERS" approximately 5 times. Juxtaposed to those $50 words that he couldn't even pronounce in his piece, the profanity seemed to stick out more. For the better? Maybe. For the worse? Probably not. I know this for certain. I am never fishing with James McMichael. I am a Coffeepot pimp."

"At the poetry journal launch reading in the UCI bookstore the first poet Diane read a poem that had a child's imagination with animals having tea and so forth. She made jokes about lesbianism at first and then she began to speak about it in a much more political way with a different voice." [This was about a short story. Animals having tea? What?.]

"Zach the final poet could probably be described as the urban street poet type who had a very distinctive style and whose words seemed to have a many levels of meaning. Everyone seemed to be stressed out about his lateness, but I was happy for the time to grab a cookie."

And from my math genius student, a paper entitled "Donald Justice Knows Fourier Synthesis." It concludes, "Men at Forty" is a short poem. But these "men at forty" were able to make their way around a wide emotional, spatial and temporal map. I would defintiely say Fourier played a part in that." If D.J. were still alive I would send him a letter about this.

Writing 30. Such a fine line between brilliance and insanity.