Snowy Saturday

Here are some pictures from the first real snow fall Indy has experienced this winter. You'll note the picture of R shoveling with a bright yellow snow shovel. This is our second shovel, which we had to purchase this afternoon because someone stole our other blue snow shovel off our porch...

A Productive Evening...

It is a good feeling to come home after a day at work with three key goals in mind: work out, make dinner, and grade essays. It's an even better feeling when you accomplish not one or even two of these goals, but in fact you accomplish all three.
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My amaryllis has bloomed

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I read a really interesting article in The New Yorker this weekend entitled The Dime Store Floor by David Owen. It's all about how smells can trigger memories.

The author and his sister embark on a childhood "smell tour" where they visit their old childhood haunts and see whether or not they still smell the same. I loved this article because I'm always trying to impress upon my students how important sensory detail is in writing, and this essay explores that concept in a very literal way.

This essay also made me think about smells from my own childhood and the memories they trigger. I think Old Spice must be the staple scent of all American fathers because it is a scent I associate strongly with my dad. Apparently my dad's choice of deodorant resonated with not just the humans in the house, but also the animals. This became clear when he accidentally left the lid off of his Old Spice only to have our tiny tiger cat, Kit-Kat, knock it over and rub against it until she was slick with the scent.

Some of my other "smells" are also more common. For example, the smell of cinnamon, fresh cut grass, and lilacs. However, I also associate strong memories to the smell of Listerine. My grandfather always uses the mouthwash as part of his nightly routine. I also attribute the smell of onions to my grandmother and any sort of holiday. It's a fun exercise to think about what smells trigger what memories.

How to write a poem for Haiti part 2...

Last night I watched some of telethon Hope for Haiti which featured a variety of high profile actors and musicians. Morgan Freeman read a excerpt from this poem by New Orleans poet Kalamu ya Salaam. The poem in it's entirety is listed below. The bolded section is what Freeman read. A link to Freeman's reading can be seen here.

Tomorrow's Toussaints

this is Haiti, a state
slaves snatched from surprised masters,
its high lands, home of this
world's sole successful
slave revolt. Haiti, where
freedom has flowered and flown
fascinating like long necked
flamingoes gracefully feeding
on snails in small pinkish
sunset colored sequestered ponds.

despite the meanness
and meagerness of life
eked out of eroding soil
and from exploited urban toil, there
is still so much beauty here in this
land where the sea sings roaring a shore
and fecund fertile hills lull and roll
quasi human in form

there is beauty here
in the unyielding way
our people,
colored charcoal, and
banana beige, and
shifting subtle shades
of ripe mango, or strongly
brown-black, sweet
as the such from
sun scorched staffs
of sugar cane,
have decided
we shall survive
we will live on

a peasant pauses
clear black eyes
searching far out over the horizon
the hoe motionless, suspended
in the midst
of all this shit and suffering
forced to bend low
still we stop and stand
and dream and believe

we shall be released
we shall be released
for what slaves
have done
slaves can do

and that begets
the beauty

slaves can do

How to write a poem for Haiti...

I have yet to post about the recent earthquake in Haiti. The state of Haiti was already fragile at best and the recent disaster seems to have ripped the already wounded country wide open. It may seem frivolous to think about poetry during a time where people are crushed beneath broken buildings or sleeping on the street or starving or a half dozen other horrors that are occurring in Haiti right now. However, after the initial shock of the devastation, my first thought was, who will be the first poet to write about this event?

I had similar thoughts in the wake of 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina. My own personal need to write, to document was surprisingly strong. I wanted to write poems, badly, about all these events but they were slow to come. In fact, some of them are still coming. I finally wrote a poem about 9/11 more than five years after it happened. These events are thorny subjects for me when it comes to getting them down on paper in a form that even begins to do them justice. I know my biggest fear, and I suspect I share it with many other writers, is that I will not accurately portray the event. That the poem will offend instead of inspire or whatever else it was meant to do.

The New Yorker has published this poem by Aime Cesaire, "Earthquake" (translated by Paul Muldoon) and it is the first poem I've seen in direct response to Haiti:

Earthquake

such great stretches of dreamscape

such lines of all too familiar lines

staved in

caved in so the filthy wake resounds with the notion

of the pair of us? What of the pair of us?

Pretty much the tale of the family surviving disaster:

“In the ancient serpent stink of our blood we got clear

of the valley; the village loosed stone lions roaring at our heels.”

Sleep, troubled sleep, the troubled waking of the heart

yours on top of mine chipped dishes stacked in the pitching sink

of noontides.

What then of words? Grinding them together to summon up the void

as night insects grind their crazed wing cases?

Caught caught caught unequivocally caught

caught caught caught

head over heels into the abyss

for no good reason

except for the sudden faint steadfastness

of our own true names, our own amazing names

that had hitherto been consigned to a realm of forgetfulness

itself quite tumbledown.

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I've spent the afternoon reading The Metaphysician in the Dark by Charles Simic. Last night I taught three poems by Simic in my creative writing class. The poems were "Watermelons", "Coal", and "Fork," and my students responded very well to all three. The essays I read this afternoon are a lot about art and its relation to poetry, which is something that's always interested me. I teach ekphrastic poetry in my classes and I like reading about how different poets are influenced by painters, sculptors, and photographers. Simic speaks of this triptych by Bosch:

He also mentions the photographer Abelardo Morell. His website can be found here. A few of his photographs below :

Some of my favorite quotes from the essays I've read today:

"Much of lyric poetry is nothing more than a huge, centuries-old effort to remind our immortal souls of the existence of our genital organs." "In the Praise of Folly"

"Empty space makes us discover our inwardness." "The Power of Ambiguity"

"I, too, wish to make contact with some unknown person's inner life. Out mutual hope is to bequeath a phrase or image to the dreamers so that we may live on in their reverie." "The Power of Ambiguity"

"The alchemy of turning what is visible to us into what is visible to others is what all the arts are about." "Verbal Image"

Bread

The fruits of my labor yesterday afternoon/evening...

A Week in Review...

While I think it's kind of silly to end the first full week of classes with a three day weekend, I'm not going to complain. The first week of classes was uneventful and that's just the way I like it. My students seem relatively enthusiastic, and I have eighteen enrolled in my creative writing class. My online class had a few small hiccups early in the week, but they were resolved quickly.

I've continued with the working out and eating at home. Right now I'm making some bread for the week and some bread to freeze. I haven't had a chance to fire up the bread machine since we moved into the new house, so today seemed like the perfect time. I also put the first coat of paint on the bookcase that's going to go in the dining room. It's definitely going to need two coats, but the painting itself went pretty fast, so I plan to have it in the dining room by next weekend.

I'm in the process of making plans to travel to Erie in February to see Michael Pollan at Allegheny. I'm pretty excited and it will give me something to look forward to that month. Sometimes the spring semester has a tendency to drag, so I'm constantly looking for things to break up the monotony.
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Thursday night I went to Starbucks for about two hours to read before my night class. I left Ominovre's Dilemma at home, so I pulled The House on Mango street off my shelves and read the whole book while I was at Starbucks.

I really like this book and it is a fast read. I was reminded at how the pacing and description are so prefect in how they fit the narrative. The section "Hair" is perfect when it comes to showing students how important sensory detail and image are in writing of all types:

But my mother's hair, my mother's hair, like little rosettes, like little candy circles all curly, and pretty because she pinned it in in pincurls all day, sweet to put you nose into when she is holding you, and holding you and you feel safe, it is the warm smell of bread before you bake it...

Also the section "Red Clowns" always disturbs me. Part of it is the subject matter and part of it is that I've always found something seedy and garish about the circus and don't even get me started on clowns:

Why did you leave me all alone? I waited my whole life. You're a liar. They all lied. All the books and magazines, everything that told it wrong. Only his dirty fingernails against my skin, only his sour smell again. The moon that watched. The tilt-a-whirl. The red clowns laughing their thick-tongued laugh.

Sunday Musings

This week was spent mostly between work and home trying to get organized on both ends. Tomorrow is the first day of the spring semester and I expect it will be hectic, but the first week of classes is always a gradual ease into routine. This is also helped by the fact that we have a three day weekend right after the first week of school.

Winter hit Indy in full force this week. We had snow all week and while it wasn't nearly the blast that the north east received, it coated out backyard with a couple of inches. Time to break out the boots.
This week I began a journey that I suspect most people begin after the holidays are over. I started back to the workouts and the cooking at home. All this week we ate at home including all weekend (except for the salads we had for dinner last night). Saturday morning I made breakfast wraps and butternut squash "hashbrowns." It was pretty darn good.


I'm about 150 pages into Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma and it is fascinating. It's a lot denser than Animal, Vegetable, Miracle but talks about some of the same basic issues. I like the more in depth look that Pollan takes at the food industry and how it impacts Americans. If you care about what you eat and where it comes from, you should read this book.


A favorite passage from today's reading came when Pollan interviewed Joe Salatin who owns Polyface Farm in Virgina:

Me and the folks who buy my food are like the Indians --we just want to opt out. That's all the Indians wanted--to keep their teepees, to give their kids herbs instead of patent medicines and leeches. They didn't care if there was Washington, D.C., or a Custer or a USDA ; just leave us alone. But the Western mind can't bear the opt-out option. We're going to have to refight the Battle of Little Bighorn to preserve the right to opt out, or your grandchildren and mine will have no choice but to eat amalgamated, irradiated, genetically prostituted, barcoded, adulterated, fecal spam for the centralized processing conglomerate.