Monday, December 31, 2007
Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Monday, December 24, 2007
Although It's Been Said Many Times...
Nothing says it quite like these three Christmas carolers!
I hope your holidays are wonderfully bewitching, and that old Sandy Claws is good to you all.
Peace on earth and good will toward poets everywhere, Pamela
Thursday, December 13, 2007
Q: How Is a Writer Like a Writing Desk? (Sincerest Apologies to Carroll/The Mad Hatter)
I have the answer. Thanks, Harvey!
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Morceaux--Baking Day
My house smells of cinnamon and apples, cider and sugar, cardamon and cloves. The Mixmaster is pinking away. Broomstraws are gathered by the oven in little bundles. Today we'll be eating cake, cake, cake (and maybe apple pies, but certainly not a fruitcake among them). My newest recipe is from my friend and office partner Janice, who's given me the recipe for Sylvia Plath Confessional Cake (it's German chocolate). I'll let you know how it turns out.
In the meantime, here are some morceaux for you, which I'm framing for my study.
I am terribly jealous of that wallpaper in angelfood and of the swan settee and teapot in tea for two.
In the meantime, here are some morceaux for you, which I'm framing for my study.
I am terribly jealous of that wallpaper in angelfood and of the swan settee and teapot in tea for two.
Sunday, December 09, 2007
All I Want for Christmas--The Whole Cover!
I have eight of the bangles pictured here. About 57 more to go!
Friday, December 07, 2007
Parting is such sweet sorrow...and revenge!
My classes have ended, and what a superlative semester this has been. In the capstone class (focusing on villanelle, sestina, sonnet, lyric, and narrative), we ended with "One Art" by Elizabeth Bishop and compared it to a poem by LaWanda Walters, found in Best New Poets (from The Antioch Review--see link). Entitled "Her Art," it's a sestina that responds to Bishop's poem, especially the (Write It!) parenthetical. Everything I'd wanted the students to learn--that poetry comes from poesis--the made thing; that the impulses of Dionysus (image and the body, wildness) and Apollo (ordering and rhythmic unity) are the conflicting muses and complementary music of poetry; that the poetic line balances breath and belief, syllable and stress; sound and silence; that the stanza shapes both pleasure and pain, desire and death/dearth of desire; that a poem on the page has a form like sculpture and conveys its shape into the world like sculpture(defined by what's chiseled away, as much as by what's left); that the poem spoken comes from the body through image and lives on past the body also through image (inspiration/expiration)--every one of the semester's goals has a place in this wonderful poem. Read it--you won't be disappointed. I've linked to Ms. Walter's sestina above, which definitely belongs in Best New Poets, and, in my opinion, next year's BAP.
This is my penultimate semester to teach, and I've been so incredibly blessed by the caliber of work I've been allowed to read and discuss. Four of the students this semester are so innately, so insanely talented and such hard workers that I am ready to preorder their first books from Amazon: J, the 2 D's, and S from Cyprus (who's writing in his third language, English)--Keep it up. I believe in you, in your work and in your hard work, and poetry's the one thing I never lie about. (There's another: If you have lipstick on your teeth, I'm the one who'll tell you BEFORE the group photo). Seriously, if these guys keep writing with this level of dedication and determination and damned disregard for anything but the musical imperatives of language--their books will be on your shelves in 10 to 15 years.
)))))))
Lest you think that I am a selfless teacher (and I am pretty generous with my students, even though I am a hardass grader of portfolios), I am very jealous of all the other CW professors at my school. Every one of them--all the the fiction and creative nonfiction teachers, the full-time poets, even the part-time magazine staff--are making the trek to NYC. I'm the only CW teacher NOT going to AWP this year. I'm disappointed but broke, and the trip is way too expensive this year for my adjunct salary. (I console myself--barely--with the fact that this year, I received a raise and a new computer).
My revenge? I've volunteered to sub in every one of the creative writing classes (fiction and nonfiction) for the week they'll be out, and I'm going to use that week to to make all students fall in love with poetry. Don't think I won't do it, either! I'll be armed with Elizabeth Bishop (poetry, fiction and letters!), chocolate cake, and STARBUCKS coffee. When everyone transfers to poetry class in the fall, the affluent professors will have only their travel vouchers to blame. MWAHH!
This is my penultimate semester to teach, and I've been so incredibly blessed by the caliber of work I've been allowed to read and discuss. Four of the students this semester are so innately, so insanely talented and such hard workers that I am ready to preorder their first books from Amazon: J, the 2 D's, and S from Cyprus (who's writing in his third language, English)--Keep it up. I believe in you, in your work and in your hard work, and poetry's the one thing I never lie about. (There's another: If you have lipstick on your teeth, I'm the one who'll tell you BEFORE the group photo). Seriously, if these guys keep writing with this level of dedication and determination and damned disregard for anything but the musical imperatives of language--their books will be on your shelves in 10 to 15 years.
)))))))
Lest you think that I am a selfless teacher (and I am pretty generous with my students, even though I am a hardass grader of portfolios), I am very jealous of all the other CW professors at my school. Every one of them--all the the fiction and creative nonfiction teachers, the full-time poets, even the part-time magazine staff--are making the trek to NYC. I'm the only CW teacher NOT going to AWP this year. I'm disappointed but broke, and the trip is way too expensive this year for my adjunct salary. (I console myself--barely--with the fact that this year, I received a raise and a new computer).
My revenge? I've volunteered to sub in every one of the creative writing classes (fiction and nonfiction) for the week they'll be out, and I'm going to use that week to to make all students fall in love with poetry. Don't think I won't do it, either! I'll be armed with Elizabeth Bishop (poetry, fiction and letters!), chocolate cake, and STARBUCKS coffee. When everyone transfers to poetry class in the fall, the affluent professors will have only their travel vouchers to blame. MWAHH!
Monday, December 03, 2007
THE FAB FOUR--The Best Books I've Read in 2007
Here are my year-end selections:
Elegy for the Dying Dog--Daniel Anderson
Tomorrow he will die.
For now, though, see him drowsing in the shade.
A cardinal cracks the red whip of its flight.
Frail butterflies-the metalmark,
The spicebush swallowtail-are lobbed
Like painted tissue on the air.
The wind, as it might carve on fields of wheat,
Combs over his black coat. I've set him there
As water irises prepare
Their gold unfolding in the rain-fresh pond.
Last meal: Steamed rice. Grilled strips of steak.
Last lazy afternoon. Last hour
To watch the clouds drift like meringues,
To watch them blended into tones of peach
Then deepen to the dusky tints of plums.
One last command to heed or disobey,
But it's not me who's calling Virgil now,
It's Death who's calling, calling, calling,
And he comes.
(Book: Drunk in Sunlight)
_____________________________
Violence Against Women--Eavan Boland
Once in the West Pennines I was shown
the source of the Industrial Revolution-
the first streams harnessed to the wheels
which drove the mills which spun out textiles
which emptied out the cottages and hillsides
and sent men and women down to Hades.
(Fast water and mountains without lime
and greed all complicit in the shame.)
Real men and women, flesh and blood
and long dead and ready to be understood-
and not those abandoned and unsaved
women who died here who never lived:
Mindless, sexless, birthless, only sunned
by shadows, only dressed in muslin,
shepherdesses of the English pastoral
waiting for the return of an English April
that never came and never will again.
Wheels turned, the jenny worked, a plain-
spoken poetry was chanted by the flow
and finished them. They were the last to know
what happened in this north-facing twilight,
the aftermath I saw there, staring at
an old site of injury, a hurt
that never healed and never can. O art,
O empire and the arranged relations,
so often covert, between power and cadence,
tell me what it is you have done with
the satin bonnets and the pastel sun, with
the women gathering their unreal sheep
into real verse for whom no one will weep?
(Book: Domestic Violence)
_____________________________
Harvesting the Cows--Ellen Bryant Voigt
Stringy, skittery, thistle-burred, rib-etched,
they're like a pack of wolves lacking a sheep
but also lacking the speed, the teeth, the wits-
they're heifers culled from the herd, not worth the cost
of feeding and breeding and milking, let loose on a hill
one-third rock, one-third blackberry bramble.
And now, the scrub stung black by hard frost,
here come the young farmer and his father,
one earnest, one wizened, wind-whipped, sun-whipped,
who make at the gate, from strewn boards and boughs,
a pen, and park at its near end the compact
silver trailer, designed for two horses-
it waits at the mouth of the rutted tractor-trail
descending through trees, an artificial gulley.
Up goes Junior, hooting, driving them down.
So much bigger than wolves, these sixteen cows:
head to flank or flank to scrawny flank,
they can't turn around; but what they know is no:
some splash over the walls of the small corral,
one, wall-eyed, giddy, smashes away
the warped plank that's propped on the far side,
crashing across alders and wet windfall
in a plausible though explosive dance, which prompts
another to aim herself at the same hole,
too late: the planks back up, she's turned to the clump
and soon swimming among them, their white necks
extended like the necks of hissing geese,
but so much bigger than geese. When the younger man
wraps one neck in his arms, the cow rears up
and he goes down, plaid wool in shit-slicked mud;
so then the elder takes her by the nose-
I mean, he puts two fingers and a thumb
inside the nostrils, pulls her into the trailer.
The rest shy and bunch away from the gate;
a tail lifts for a stream of piss; one beast
mounts another-panic that looks erotic-
and the herdsmen try guile, a pail of grain
kept low, which keeps the head of the lead cow low
as though resigned, ready for the gallows.
The silver loaf opens, swallows them in,
two by two by two, and takes them away.
Hams need to be smoked, turkeys to be dressed out
here in Arcadia, where a fine cold spit
needles the air, and the birch and beech let go
at last their last tattered golden rags.
(Book: Messenger)
______________________
Another fabulous book that I've read in 2007 is Peter Pereira's What's Written on the Body. If you'd like to read a fulsome review of this fine book, check out New Madrid: Journal of Contemporary Literature, available in January 2008, which will be prominently featured (i.e., free) at the Murray State MFA table at AWP in New York (which, unfortunately, I will not be (wo)manning this year). Copies are also available via mail and e-mail request.
This is a themed issue, entitled Mexico in the Heartland, and it also features a drawing by Harvey Parker, some artist I know (in the biblical sense). The guest editor for Spring 2008 will be poet Nicky Beer, featured in the 2007 Best American Poetry.
Please submit your work in poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction (online submissions only). The website's linked above.
If you'd like your book reviewed in this journal, please let me know and I'll see what I can do. I'm looking for another book to review, this time either poetry or fiction. Any takers? Any suggestions?
PS Next on my reading list for 2007 is Radish King which I'm saving for after finals. I know if I start, I will fall headlong into the world of brilliant, savage poems and won't resurface in time for Hart Crane and 40 student portfolios. (Well, 18--I've marked 22 of them already).
Elegy for the Dying Dog--Daniel Anderson
Tomorrow he will die.
For now, though, see him drowsing in the shade.
A cardinal cracks the red whip of its flight.
Frail butterflies-the metalmark,
The spicebush swallowtail-are lobbed
Like painted tissue on the air.
The wind, as it might carve on fields of wheat,
Combs over his black coat. I've set him there
As water irises prepare
Their gold unfolding in the rain-fresh pond.
Last meal: Steamed rice. Grilled strips of steak.
Last lazy afternoon. Last hour
To watch the clouds drift like meringues,
To watch them blended into tones of peach
Then deepen to the dusky tints of plums.
One last command to heed or disobey,
But it's not me who's calling Virgil now,
It's Death who's calling, calling, calling,
And he comes.
(Book: Drunk in Sunlight)
_____________________________
Violence Against Women--Eavan Boland
Once in the West Pennines I was shown
the source of the Industrial Revolution-
the first streams harnessed to the wheels
which drove the mills which spun out textiles
which emptied out the cottages and hillsides
and sent men and women down to Hades.
(Fast water and mountains without lime
and greed all complicit in the shame.)
Real men and women, flesh and blood
and long dead and ready to be understood-
and not those abandoned and unsaved
women who died here who never lived:
Mindless, sexless, birthless, only sunned
by shadows, only dressed in muslin,
shepherdesses of the English pastoral
waiting for the return of an English April
that never came and never will again.
Wheels turned, the jenny worked, a plain-
spoken poetry was chanted by the flow
and finished them. They were the last to know
what happened in this north-facing twilight,
the aftermath I saw there, staring at
an old site of injury, a hurt
that never healed and never can. O art,
O empire and the arranged relations,
so often covert, between power and cadence,
tell me what it is you have done with
the satin bonnets and the pastel sun, with
the women gathering their unreal sheep
into real verse for whom no one will weep?
(Book: Domestic Violence)
_____________________________
Harvesting the Cows--Ellen Bryant Voigt
Stringy, skittery, thistle-burred, rib-etched,
they're like a pack of wolves lacking a sheep
but also lacking the speed, the teeth, the wits-
they're heifers culled from the herd, not worth the cost
of feeding and breeding and milking, let loose on a hill
one-third rock, one-third blackberry bramble.
And now, the scrub stung black by hard frost,
here come the young farmer and his father,
one earnest, one wizened, wind-whipped, sun-whipped,
who make at the gate, from strewn boards and boughs,
a pen, and park at its near end the compact
silver trailer, designed for two horses-
it waits at the mouth of the rutted tractor-trail
descending through trees, an artificial gulley.
Up goes Junior, hooting, driving them down.
So much bigger than wolves, these sixteen cows:
head to flank or flank to scrawny flank,
they can't turn around; but what they know is no:
some splash over the walls of the small corral,
one, wall-eyed, giddy, smashes away
the warped plank that's propped on the far side,
crashing across alders and wet windfall
in a plausible though explosive dance, which prompts
another to aim herself at the same hole,
too late: the planks back up, she's turned to the clump
and soon swimming among them, their white necks
extended like the necks of hissing geese,
but so much bigger than geese. When the younger man
wraps one neck in his arms, the cow rears up
and he goes down, plaid wool in shit-slicked mud;
so then the elder takes her by the nose-
I mean, he puts two fingers and a thumb
inside the nostrils, pulls her into the trailer.
The rest shy and bunch away from the gate;
a tail lifts for a stream of piss; one beast
mounts another-panic that looks erotic-
and the herdsmen try guile, a pail of grain
kept low, which keeps the head of the lead cow low
as though resigned, ready for the gallows.
The silver loaf opens, swallows them in,
two by two by two, and takes them away.
Hams need to be smoked, turkeys to be dressed out
here in Arcadia, where a fine cold spit
needles the air, and the birch and beech let go
at last their last tattered golden rags.
(Book: Messenger)
______________________
Another fabulous book that I've read in 2007 is Peter Pereira's What's Written on the Body. If you'd like to read a fulsome review of this fine book, check out New Madrid: Journal of Contemporary Literature, available in January 2008, which will be prominently featured (i.e., free) at the Murray State MFA table at AWP in New York (which, unfortunately, I will not be (wo)manning this year). Copies are also available via mail and e-mail request.
This is a themed issue, entitled Mexico in the Heartland, and it also features a drawing by Harvey Parker, some artist I know (in the biblical sense). The guest editor for Spring 2008 will be poet Nicky Beer, featured in the 2007 Best American Poetry.
Please submit your work in poetry, creative nonfiction, and fiction (online submissions only). The website's linked above.
If you'd like your book reviewed in this journal, please let me know and I'll see what I can do. I'm looking for another book to review, this time either poetry or fiction. Any takers? Any suggestions?
PS Next on my reading list for 2007 is Radish King which I'm saving for after finals. I know if I start, I will fall headlong into the world of brilliant, savage poems and won't resurface in time for Hart Crane and 40 student portfolios. (Well, 18--I've marked 22 of them already).
Saturday, December 01, 2007
Rex and Rosa and Scarlet Ribbons
Intelligence Guided by Experience: Nero
Experience Guided by Intelligence: Rosa
From today's Writer's Almanac/NPR: Two of my heroes are featured.
It's the birthday of American detective novelist Rex Stout, (books by this author) born in Noblesville, Indiana (1886), who was a hack magazine journalist for a while and then developed a popular savings-account scheme for schools that made him a great deal of money. So he retired to Paris and at the age of 46, he wrote his first detective novel featuring Nero Wolfe, who solves crimes even though he weighs more than 300 pounds, collects orchids, and never leaves his house. The first Nero Wolfe novel was called Fer-de-Lance, and it was published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1934. It was a huge success, and Stout went on to write another Wolfe novel almost every year for the rest of his life.
On this day in 1955, Rosa Parks broke the law by refusing to give up her seat to a white man on a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, resulting in her arrest. At the time, she said that she was just too tired to stand that day, but she later admitted that she'd challenged the law on purpose, because she thought it was wrong. Her protest worked, sparking a yearlong boycott of the buses by blacks in Montgomery that helped lead to the end of segregation.
___________
Today's also World Aids Day. I urge you to remember and give. Many of the most important people in my life died of AIDS--one more was a suicide whose HIV status he took as a death sentence. D--I'll never forget your humor, your crooked-man smile, your dancing. J--Your poems, which survived you, will live as long as I do. S--We met 38 years ago on this date. You will always be my first love and best friend. I'm so glad this date is World Aids Day. I will never forget and I will continue to give and remember you, not just today but every day.
Here's the inspiration for the quilt I made for you:
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