Maybe

Maybe something good will happen. Has happened. Is happening. It is not impossible.

Blue sky, mobile office

Hurricane Bill seems to have blown over. My summer class has almost blown over--only 4 portfolios left to grade and they have, on the whole, been very good and I'm pleased.

I'm in what passes on Cape Cod for an internet cafe (O modern technology, my student portfolios are online and my grade submission is online too) but I'm looking forward to some internet-reduced detox time over the next week. Swimming, family time, reading books. An attention-span adjustment, I hope.

Kiss Me, I'm Falling

The red-eye's not made for sleeping, at least not when you arrive in NYC at 3 am Seattle time. In a daze I stumbled to the baggage claim, the air train, the Long Island Rail Road, the subway, and eventually found myself lying on my mom's couch with a phrase running through my head:

Kiss me, [something], I'm falling through darkness into [the world].

Nice phrase, isn't it? I had no idea where it came from, but as I lay there sleepily, I started playing a game with it, which was to replace the words in brackets with whatever came into my head. Like:

Kiss me, arugula, I'm falling through darkness into Long Island.
Kiss me, ordnance, I'm falling through darkness into green light.
Kiss me, nowhere, I'm falling through darkness into a taxi.

Fun, right? I recommend it for your insomnia. (The ones I was coming up with on the edge of sleep were better than these, of course, but I don't remember them.)

Partway through I remembered that it was a line from Theodore Roethke, which I now see that I got closer to right than I would have expected: "Kiss me, ashes, I'm falling through a dark swirl."

Ad hoc

I just met with a student who wants to "ad-hoc" my fall class, which apparently means doing more work and getting honors credit for it. I don't know what I think about an honors program that teaches students that "ad hoc" is a verb. I feel like kids these days have enough problems without introducing that kind of confusion. (It kind of reminds me of when my boss at the Atlantic was consulted by the American Heritage Dictionary on the issue of whether it is acceptable, despite the redundancy, to use "the" with "hoi polloi"--he said no--the whole situation of which, for some reason, kind of blew my mind.)

Also, in today's moment of bad form, when he turned his computer to me to show me the ad hoc requirements, I saw that he had been googling me (a totally useless enterprise, of course, given my name--maybe he found my double's Pulitzer prize!--but still).

I really don't like the last day of classes, which is today. Last quarter I had an actual panic attack while attempting to sum up everything they had learned. Today before we do evaluations, I am bribing the students with brownies and making them recite their favorite poems from the quarter. Then I'm hopping on the red-eye.

Funny Cause It's True

I gave this sample paper to my students today and I think they all recognized themselves in it. Imitating bad student writing is one of the major joys of my job.



What is Northwest Poetry?

Theodore Roethek was one of the most important poets of the Pacific Northwest. He moved to Washington in 1947 after having grown up in a greenhouse in michigan. His teaching was very popular with students including Carolyn Kizer, from Spokane, and Richard Hugo, originally from White Center, who became poets themselves. These three different poets wrote about different things, but also some of the same things. Northwest poetry is defined as a very influential kind of writing in the region where the poets thereby find out what is so important about the northwest.

Carolyn Kizer wrote the poem “Semele Recycled.” In this poem, a woman is split a part into different body parts because she loves the Greek god Zeus. Kizer writes, “comfortable odor of dung.” This suggests the earth and a determination to accept the less pretty side of nature.

Greenhouses sound beautiful but can also be unpleasant and full of rotting plants. “Dank as a ditch.” He even describes some plants “long evil yellow necks.” It doesn’t seem here like he likes plants very much, but actually it may be that his problem is more with his father, who owned the greenhouses. There is a clue to this when he says “battered on one knuckle.”

Alki Beach can be very pleasant but Richard Hugo doesn’t think so, despite having grown up in White Center, a suburb of Seattle. “Spray, / abandoned, falls from the statue / by the marked-off, unused picnic grounds.” Hugo was too busy with worries about what people are doing to have awareness of what is in the beauty of the space that is all around him everywhere his eyes can take a moment to find the time to look at what is in front of them. His poems are very depressing.

All in all, Northwest poetry means different things to different people, but it can also mean whatever you want it to mean.

Portland

So I pull into Portland with a little time to spare, navigate my way to an old haunt without looking at the map, instantly find a cute little coffee shop and one of the abundant free parking spots, pass a sign pointing to a "Free Pile," and am stopped for by a car with an "I love my library" bumper sticker. In the coffee shop, there are crayon drawings by adults and good-looking young people comparing indie t-shirts. Portland, could you be any more yourself?

My Day

This has to be one of the weirdest and most varied days ever:

1. Morning coffee and chatting with K
2. Work on op-ed about police brutality in China with sisterkins
3. Teach class on Pacific NW poetry
4. Meet with student, finish and deliver recommendation for former student
5. Teach class on how to perform a "man overboard" recovery in a sailboat (and then supervise and coach 10 kids attempting to rescue lifejackets: DON'T HIT ANOTHER BOAT EVEN IF IT MEANS YOUR BUDDY GETS EATEN BY SHARKS!)

and finally, why not,

6. Opera! 5 hours of Wagner, gorgeously staged and kind of a major change of gears from everything else.

The Triggering Tuber

I just wrote a poem about beets expressing some of my thoughts about relations between men and women.