“Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky, / the flying cloud, the frosty light; / the year is dying in the night; / ring out, wild bells, and let him die.”

To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee.
And revery.
The revery alone will do,
If bees are few.

(NOTE: I realize that I’ve probably quoted poor Emily Dickinson to death and back on this blog, but I could think of no poem better than good ol’ 1755 to encapsulate the feeling of this post.)

(NOTE THE SECOND: I’ll probably quote Dickinson elsewhere in this entry, too.  What can I say?  Were it not for Dickinson and LOLcats, I probably could not communicate at all.)

It’s the last day of 2009, the last day of the decade, and the last day of the first decade of the 2000s — to be sure, a monumental day.  On the last and first days of the year, I tend to find myself reaching for the “big”: the grand gesture, the grand re-count, the grand plan for the next year.  This year, however, I find myself concentrating on the small — the importance of moving from moment to moment, hour to hour, day to day; the importance of thinking — or, rather, appreciating — in the miniature rather than the grand, the big, the broad.

This seems exceptionally odd because today marks not only the end of the year, but the end of the decade –the aughts — of my 20s, and I thought I’d find myself thinking even more about the grand than usual.  The fact that the opposite has occurred might actually be explained by the fact that with the end of this decade comes the end of my 20s.  My 20s were, by and large, a decade of o’erreaching (Macbeth reference intentional there).  It’s an interesting thing to sit here, on this day, on the couch with Gertrude Stein, watch The Three Stooges marathon with my father, and think about where I am versus where I thought or wanted or dreamed I would be.  It’s an interesting thing to think about the goals I tended to set for myself in my 20s: the degree, the husband, the family, the book, the job — I was under the unrealistic illusion that I could reach my unrealistic goals.  When I think of my 20s, I think of sleep loss.  I think of working until my eyes closed.  I think of pushing and pushing and pushing myself, even when I needed rest, and even when things weren’t right, weren’t ready.  I think of pushing and planning past the reaches of reality.

2009, if anything, was a reality check.  This year, I’ve been brought to my knees in many ways, sometimes very much literally, mostly in relation to pain: my body has shown me, without question, how fragile I am, and how impermanent.  It’s as if, through pain and physical collapse, I’ve finally come to understand Dickinson’s line: “After great pain, a formal feeling comes.”  This year, I’ve realized that I haven’t really reached most of those goals, and that I was pushing myself towards futility.  This year, I’ve realized, finally, that it ’s okay for me to just do what I need to do.  When I think of how I pushed myself in this past decade, I think about how very much I’ve missed by concentrating on the grand and ignoring the little: how many of what I saw as small achievements were actually monumental.  How many of the small things I overlooked in my rush were beautiful beyond beautiful: the blur of hummingbird wings, the frayed seam of a petal, the way rust curves its fingers around a smokestack.   How life is a series of moments rather than a series of hurtles.  How achievement, after all, may be learning to live from — or for — moment to moment, and love each, however small it may be.

Perhaps, then, I’m choosing not to resolve for the new year but to re-purpose — to live in the moment and to love it.

“Essential Oils — are wrung — / The Attar from the Rose / Be not expressed by Suns — alone — / It is the gift of Screws”

As a girl who asked way too many questions, in religion class, I found myself more often than not sitting in the classroom’s corner and staring at the space where four whitewashed cinder blocks met, or otherwise copying the Our Father five times in my best hand (and, given that my students accuse even my most neatly-written note of being cuneiform, this was far from easy).  Needless to say, I was never overly happy when the bell rang and we trudged upstairs for religion class.  By the time I began confirmation classes, I’d learned to keep away from questions (or, at least, to keep questions away from my tongue), and I began to listen (though this, I admit, may’ve been the result of my switch from daily religion classes as a student at Our Lady of Sorrows [no, really, I swear -- the school was actually called Our Lady of Sorrows] to a once-a-week CCD kid).  And finally, something began to float in: the idea of gifts — both those which we receive and those which we give others based on what we’re given.

Christmas, of course, always sends me to think about this.  Granted, I have no problem with actual, physical gifts, and will happily sport my new scarf, boots, and jeans without a hint of guilt.  I do think that, perhaps, we (my Taurean, Anthropologie- and shoe-obsessed self very much included) tend to over-emphasize the importance of physical gifts and de-emphasize the importance of spiritual, emotional, and psychological gifts; the intangible gifts which can’t quite be plugged into the television in order to play Manning 10; the gifts which, even if unrecognized, allow us the glimpses of kindness and happiness that help us through lives which are often, let’s face it, far from happiness.

What interested — and still interests — me most about Confirmation is the idea of how gifts are gained.  As a sacrament, Confirmation initiates one as an adult in — and a mature member of — the church, and it is with this maturity that one gains gifts such as wisdom, right judgment, and courage.  Though I’m unsure as to whether or not I had or gained any maturity then (I remember wondering if it would feel like lightning, something sharp and electric, and I also remember joking with the tow-headed boy I had an almost unbearable crush on about how X-ray vision and the ability to leap tall buildings would be awesome gifts, too), the message was a ubiquitous but important one: with maturity comes wisdom and other great gifts.

What I did not understand then, and probably only partially understand now, is that it isn’t simply the swirl of time that grants us such gifts, but instead what happens in that time. Ten years ago, at nineteen, I was, in a word, haughty.  What I knew was what I knew, and what I knew was more than what others knew; now, I know that I don’t even know what I know.  I know that it’s possible to wake up to a life you never wanted or expected to live.  I know it is possible to wake in this strange and impossible life and to find that the people you always imagined would be in your life are missing, or that a limb doesn’t work.  Or else, you have the life you always wanted, and one morning, you’re spreading Nutella on a piece of wheat bread when the neighbor’s dog barks and you’re suddenly struck with thinking that this is not it at all, not what you wanted after it all.  I know that the one thing that’s permanent is impermanence — which may, perhaps, actually be the greatest of gifts.

Though I first encountered this idea through Catholicism, it seems to pervade all religions: we are born and then we die, and what happens between these two points, even if the religion holds that we are reborn in one way or another, is all part of our relationship with the impermanent world.  Though we — well, I — often concentrate on how this means that good will pass and suffering will return, there is more importantly the other side: suffering will pass, and good will always return.  It is when the world is filtered through this lens that it becomes most beautiful.  Because we know that life is impermanent, and because living means carrying on with this knowledge, the smallest things — speck of dirt on snow, the torn veins of a leaf, the clean edge of a piece of paper — the smallest, most insignificant things are almost unbearably beautiful.  A great deal has been written about grand spiritual gifts — prophecy, speaking in tongues — but I often wonder if the smallest gifts aren’t the greatest — or, at least, if the smallest gifts are not evidence of the greatest gifts, of some kind of grace: daily kindnesses that go nearly unnoticed, or even those actions we only rarely notice, like breathing or moving one leg after another in walking.

In fourth grade, we memorized the Beatitudes, which I loved for their language and for their mystery, which I spent a lot of time considering: how were the weak strong, the meek blessed? I wonder, now, if perhaps our moments of weakness, our moments when we feel we can say and do nothing, those moments from which it seems impossible to move on, are indeed gifts in and of themselves in that they allow us to see through suffering, to concentrate on the good — or, at least, to know good differently, deeply, and with greater resonance.

Dickinson, as always, puts this more aptly and beautifully than I ever could:

Come slowly—Eden
Lips unused to Thee—
Bashful—sip thy Jessamines
As the fainting Bee—

Reaching late his flower,
Round her chamber hums—
Counts his nectars—
Enters—and is lost in Balms.

Or, of course, there’s always this one (which may not be the correct version, but the “corrected” — my Dickinson’s in Georgetown!):

Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne’er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.

Not one of all the purple host
Who took the flag to-day
Can tell the definition,
So clear, of victory!

As he, defeated, dying,
On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!

So, that whole 12 days of blogging thing didn’t work out so well — but there’s always the epiphany!

And, in the meantime:

A Very Merry Modernist Christmas

Holiday Gator

Even with antlers on ...

... a cat is a cat is a cat is a cat.

Festive owl.

 

Holiday hedgehog.

 

Alice B. Toklas tries very hard to be very good.

 

And she was very good -- until she figured out how to take off the hat.

On the sixth day of Christmas, Emma slacks off on blogging …

… but only because, to use the words of the elegant and eloquent (not to mention perpetually fierce) Mr. Jay Immanuel, I’ve been working for the children like the rent is due tonight.  Perhaps, seeing as how I was heading into the semester’s final grading and averaging crush, I should’ve declared from the start that these were the twelve non-consecutive days of blogging.  Soon, I shall return, and I promise cats with antler hats.

“The Soul unto itself — / is an imperial friend — / Or the most agonizing Spy — / An Enemy — could send –”

When I signed up for my first self-designed conference course at Sarah Lawrence, my proposal was at first rejected — I’d titled the class something like “Poetry Conference Class,” and the rejection form stated that the title wasn’t descriptive enough.  Too boring.  I then began to plow the fields of my brain for a more exciting title, thinking all the while that such a process was ridiculous.  It became a bit of a joke, as I took more conference classes and began to challenge myself to think of the most ridiculous title possible — something which, to this day, makes me a little squeamish when I order my transcripts.  I think that the title I finally chose that first semester was something like “Unconscious Associations: Poetry and the Mind.”  Though the title may have been a joke, the study I undertook that semester, with the amazing and brilliant Kate Knapp Johnson, was far from a joke, and what I read of poetry, philosophy, and psychology (Jung especially) was, in fact, the basis of what I do and believe as a writer to this day.

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how living as a writer has as much to do with what one does know as it does with what one doesn’t know.  It seems to me that in order to be a good writer, one has to be comfortable working in the dark, with ideas that are not yet clear, with the faith that there will be light, there will be clarity.  These thoughts relate to Keats‘ idea of negative capability, something which I admit not understanding for years — I probably still don’t totally understand the concept, but it does shed some light on the dark field which we as writers wander.  In a letter to his brothers written on the 21rst of December, 1817, Keats describes a conversation he had with a friend after he saw Richard III; in the letter, Keats describes an idea which occurred to him:

…at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously – I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason-Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. . . .

In one of those grand moments of synchronicity, I happened to pick up Alice Fulton’s Feeling as a Foreign Language yesterday, and began re-reading “Screens: An Alchemical Scrapbook” (ah!  And there is my good man Jung again — a coincidence?).  In this essay, Fulton describes the moment of writing in a way that seems to dovetail Keats’ idea: “When I’m lost in the Thou-art-That of composition, the membranes dividing each from each dissolve; the separate self vanishes into an undifferentiated state.”  What all of this means, for me, at least, is that in the moment of writing, of creation, the self in some sense dissolves, or must dissolve, so that the creature can become the creator, so that we can put our “irritable reaching[s] after fact and reason” to the side and dwell, for a moment, in what Dickinson spoke of as “possibility” — unknowing, unseeing, uncertainty.

What this means in the real world is this: I worked for nearly a year and a half on my manuscript about the witch trials, drafting and doodling and furiously reading and researching, without knowing that I was working on a manuscript about the witch trials.  I’ve been writing essays for nearly a year and a half now, but it was only a few weeks ago, in conversation with a dear friend, that I realized what the essays are really about: the undefinable moments of human experience which are beyond our control, experiences which, I must now say, seem quite like the very process of writing itself.  We do, but we do not know what we are doing; we move, but we do not know where we are heading.  It’s at these times that I think back to that first conference course at Sarah Lawrence, and how, upon reading in Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections his idea that the subconscious itself is a process, that I was greatly moved, though I didn’t know why.

I’ve been part of a number of conversations about how poetry classes don’t impart skills that can pass on to classes in other areas, and I’ve fought passionately against this idea, using language as my weapon and claiming that poetry teaches concision, rhythm, composition, attention to detail — that poetry is an argument unto itself.  I’ve never argued what I feel most deeply, which is that it is exactly the mystery that makes poetry seem devoid of skill that is most instructive.  The dark field in which the poet wanders is really the field in which we all wander: the world, the body, the self — all are, in the end, unknowable.  The heart goes on with its work, and then one day quits.  The mind churns like a happy machine, and then suddenly breaks down.  We marry or don’t marry.  We are hired or laid off.  We find ourselves in station and locations, and don’t understand the process that lead us there.  We love the person who can’t love us back, or we can’t love the person we should love, and we don’t know why.  We wake and say to ourselves, without knowing how we’ve come to the conclusion, that this is not what we want.  The soul and the self and the world move, and we do not put these things into movement, nor do we understand how or why they move.  It seems that the greatest skill one could ever learn is to navigate this darkness — or, rather, to learn that the darkness is not navigable, not understandable, and to learn how to live in it nonetheless — and, moreover, to learn how to love it.

“Powder exists in Charcoal — / Before it exists in Fire.”

There’s a beautiful story about Emily Dickinson — and forgive me, as I’m telling this from memory (nearly every page of

My favorite Emily Dickinson poster -- Penelope Dullagan got her hair color down!

my copy of Richard B. Sewell’s The Life of Emily Dickinson is dog-earred, and, testimony to my love of Dickinson that may be, it’s not good for locating stories — though I think this one also appears in Adrienne Rich’s “Vesuvius at Home,” now that I think of it –).  When her niece visited, Dickinson took her upstairs and pretended to lock her bedroom door, saying something to the effect of “Martha (or Matty — perhaps Matty), this is freedom.”  And so in one simple phrase the cultural mythos surrounding Dickinson dissolves: it was Dickinson’s choice to stay in the attic, and it was a choice that she had to make for her own freedom.  Had she not, and had she taken on her expected role as a woman in the Dickinson household, she wouldn’t have time to write — by locking herself away, she gave herself the gift of freedom.

It’s a refrain that’s been sung time and time again, from Dickinson to Virginia Woolf (whose A Room of One’s Own has been sadly languishing on my bedside table, abandoned for Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, which was so terrifying I had to speed-read to the finish): in order to create art, one must have money and time.  Money and time.  Though there are, admittedly, many downsides to the academization of poetry, there is also one significant upside: the poet’s place in the academy ensures them time — or, rather, the promise of time.  Though the swirling Dyson-vacuum-esque chaos of the semester may send the poet scrambling for time to scribble down even just a line or two, there is always winter break, and summer break, and the promise of sabbatical, if one is lucky enough to make one’s way up the academic ladder.  Sometimes the promise of time is enough.  But the other thing — money.  How to solve that?

The usual argument reads as such, nearly a neat little syllogism: art is an activity of leisure.  One must have money to have leisure.  Therefore, one must have money to make art.  When I hear this argument, I can’t help but make the same response: Okay.  That might be true.  But, why? It seems that in our culture, the act of making art and the state of being moneyed are inextricably linked.  A simple glance through the AWP Chronicle or Poets and Writers or, really, any writing-related magazine or Website shows this to be true.  There are workshops which will help you to strengthen your work, often in exotic locations, near beaches and tiki bars: but there’s a very high cost for admission.  There are conferences where you can hear about aesthetics, meet others who’ve taken the same route in life as you, make necessary connections for furthering your career and your craft: but there’s a prohibitive cost for admission.  And on it goes — even the colleges known for their creative writing programs, from Bennington to Middlebury to Sarah Lawrence, have prohibitive tuition.  Even the thing artists most need to climb that academic ladder and achieve that grand promise of time — a book published with an academically-accepted press — is prohibitively expensive: many poets spend upwards of $250 a month in admissions fees.  To make art, this all seems to say, one must make money — or have money — and a great deal of it.  Okay.  That might be true.  But why?

It seems, to say the very least, unfair.  It seems like an incredibly unfair assumption that only the moneyed can make good art — and that good art must be done in leisure.  And it seems, most of all, that this is an incredibly dangerous assumption, treating art as something extra and unnecessary, an extravagance, like foie gras or Beluga caviar or some delicate and decadent desert.  If art is an extravagance, then it can be eliminated, and without a repurcussion — again, an incredibly dangerous idea.

The thing is that this worldview doesn’t include or accept the idea that art can — or should — be an integral part of life, that art should be accessible to the masses, not just the moneyed few.  The mere history of poetry supports this idea.  Yes, there were patrons and payers, and people who paid for poems, and paid artists to work for them.  Yes.  But these were not the only people who made poetry.  Some of the most beautiful and complicated forms of poetry originated as work songs.  The villanelle originated with farmhands — the word itself meant something like “country song” for a very long time.  Most cultures developed work songs for different types of work, from weaving to harvesting to bee-tending.  The mere fact of this proves that art shouldn’t be limited to the rich — and that art has a use, an importance, and a very great one at that, outside of the upper classes.

The question — and one I’ve been thinking a great deal about as of late — is how to break our assumptions and our cultural mode, how to bring art back into the world, where it belongs.  The steps I’ve thought up so far are small.  Very small.  But I have hope in small steps, and hope that others will take similar steps.  Dickinson herself, of course, said it best:

A Man may make a Remark—
In itself—a quiet thing
That may furnish the Fuse unto a Spark
In dormant nature—lain—

Let us deport—with skill—
Let us discourse—with care—
Powder exists in Charcoal—
Before it exists in Fire.

Public Like A Frog: Part One

If my somewhat hazy memory serves me right, back in the day when I was an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence

Smells Like Teen Spirit

College, we had cheerleaders for one event and one event only: the poetry slam.  Granted, these weren’t your ordinary cheerleaders, looking more like the anarchist cheerleaders in the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” than those at your average college football game, but I still think that this shows the raucous enthusiasm the student body showed for, of all things, poetry.  I know that there is a great deal of debate about the place of slam poetry in the literary world, and a great deal of denigration of its worth.  I also know that the atmosphere during SLC’s poetry slams, especially invitationals including our rivals from NYU and Bard College, was electric, and that the feeling of being in an auditorium packed with people cheering and whistling for poets was nothing less than amazing.  (I also know how many people, myself included, harbored huge crushes for the NYU student who would be crowned champion, based upon his shy, self-effacing, and flat-out hilarious poems which ranged from losing a fire truck in a sandbox to how his problems with women began on the playground when a girl kicked sand in his face.)

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how to re-create that atmosphere, or, at least, how one gets a group of people as excited about poetry as they might be about a basketball game (or, at Sarah Lawrence, about a midnight showing of The Rocky Horror Picture Show).  It seems to me that if not everyone, then nearly everyone writes poetry.  It also seems to me that most people, though they write it, or have, at least, written it, are also completely and totally terrified of poetry.  I often feel as though somehow we’ve ended up with this tremdendous split, a schism between what poetry means to people in their private lives and what it means in their public lives.  Poetry so often seems to be relegated to two diametrically opposed realms: the private journal or notebook whose pages are bursting with poetry the author feels somehow ashamed to show anyone, and the public classroom, in which poetry is, to borrow T.S. Eliot’s words, “formulated, sprawling on a pin.”  Perhaps the classroom is the cause of the schism; perhaps, after years of formulating and pinning poems, those who spend time writing privately don’t feel that their poems will hold up, or see the act of creating a poem as somehow drastically and dramatically other than the act of reading a poem, or having a poem read.  Perhaps they see themselves as set up not for a celebration of honest and intense personal expression, but to be “pinned and wriggling on a wall.”  In the classroom, we so often look at a piece as an artifact rather than art, ignoring the sheer fact of process, the hundreds of crossed-out and crumpled papers which preceded the poem now preserved in an anthology or textbook, and the thousands of poems that preceded that one — the sometimes-brutal fact that poetry is process, poetry is work, and very hard work.  Perhaps these private writers fear that their work will, before it is ready, before they have worked to the point of a Prufrock, be examined microscopically for errors and psychologically for slips; perhaps these writers choose to hide before they must see the moment of their greatness — the beautiful moment, the upwelling of emotion and the wrenching need for expression which called the poem into being — flicker, and, in short, be afraid.

Lately, my thoughts have swirled around this dilemma, and the idea of bridging this gap by finding ways to celebrate not just poetry but also the work of poetry, to make the process less intimidating and create an atmosphere in which writers of every level can feel a kind of solidarity, a happiness in the fact that they’re all working together, and working together to do something which is, after all, pretty darn important: creating art, which can help unify us by helping us to understand not just each others’ experiences but our own.  I’ve been looking at public poetry events, and been thrilled with what I’ve seen.  Here in Lexington, the Alltech Fortnight Festival, which runs during the two weeks which will next year be the time of the World Equestion Games (only 356 days to go, as the count-down in downtown Lexington reminds me), features not only such amazing acts as The Decembrists (why, why must you play on a Tuesday night, sweet Decembrists?!), but also Marc Smith, founder of the International Poetry Slam movement.  I’ve also been fascinated by the Gumball Poetry project, beautifully described by Mike Chasar on his Poetry & Popular Culture blog — Rachel Dacus‘ contribution is also particularly stunning.  The day I can get my hands on a gumball machine for Georgetown College will be a happy, happy day — if you have any suggestions for places to find cheap gumball machines, please let me know!

Until I can find a gumball machine to fill with poetry, I’ve started another project on Georgetown College’s campus in the hopes of getting students interested in both reading and writing poetry: the Pawling Poetry Project, or P Cubed.  I have a class of eight wonderful writers in poetry workshop this semester, and the Poetry Project started as a way to celebrate their very strong work outside of the classroom.  I also wanted to celebrate the fact that poetry is work, and work which needs a supportive community to improve and to thrive.  And so, with the help of my amazing department chair, who gave us space in the hallways and a brand spanking new bulletin board (which is the fanciest bulletin board I’ve seen in a while), the Poetry Project began.  It’s an interactive poetry exhibit of sorts, and each week I post not only my students’ (and my) responses to an exercise, but also the exercises themselves; students are encouraged to stop and read, and take an exercise, and post their own response, anonymously or otherwise.

P Cubed, an interactive poetry exhibit

It’s a small start, I realize, but it’s a start, nonetheless — and even if one student passes by and reads the poems, and takes an exercise, and starts thinking that maybe, just maybe, they can free their poems from their journals, it’s worth it.

“I, too, dislike it.”

When I first began teaching, eons ago, my least favorite part of pre-semester prep was crafting class policies.  In particular, the part of pre-semester prep I dreaded, avoided like all manner of plagues, and generally kvetched about to no end was writing the all-important “course objectives” part of the syllabus.  It seemed so painful, so impossible: how to describe your goals for the class, what you think is important for your students to learn, and what you want them to think is important?

Now, entering my eighth year in the classroom, I’m really not sure that the process of creating a syllabus has gotten any easier — in fact, I think it’s probably more difficult now that my brain has to churn through so much.  However, the process has become more enjoyable — and even — in fact, particularly — the previously-dreaded “course objectives” section.  I’ve found myself turning these sections into manifestoes of sorts, which helps me to get a grasp on what I’m thinking about for the class — and for the art.  I’m not sure that they’re the most successful manifestoes, but they are from the gut, and, if there’s one thing I believe about poetry, it’s that it needs a little gut in it.

Here’s the current manifesto, from my poetry syllabus, which probably resulted from my thinking a great deal about Marianne Moore’s masterpiece, “Poetry,” after it was mentioned on the Wom-Po discussion (I’m offering a link to the poem, as WordPress and I tend to disagree about formatting):

Course Objectives:
Let us remember … that in the end we go to poetry for

one reason, so that we might more fully inhabit our lives

and the world in which we live them, and that if we

more fully inhabit these things, we might be less apt

to destroy both.

– Christian Wiman, editor, Poetry magazine

Poetry.  Some are polite and call it difficult: others, impossible, or, at worst, irrelevant.  Many claim with sincere conviction that poetry is dead.

In our time, poetry is often relegated to the madwoman in the attic, furiously scribbling away at verses incomprehensible to anyone but herself, or else to dusty books pounded by fusty professors who claim they’ve found the key.  But poetry is as far from dead as it could be.  Historically, poetry has told us who we are – the Greek poet Callimachus’ Aetia, or Causes, explained Greek culture, customs, and festivals; Hesiod’s work explained everything from agriculture to astronomy; and most of what we know of Greek theology comes from Homer’s Iliad – as well as how we are to relate to each other and our world.  From Milton, we derive what we know about Christianity; from the Brownings, we learn how to love; from Dickinson, we learn how the mind works in solitude; from Coleridge and Wordsworth, we learn what we can learn from nature; from Eliot, we learn how to navigate the treacherous reaches of the psyche and the modern world.  Poetry may be a foreign language, but it is a language that explains the landscape of the human heart and of a human’s relationship and responsibilities to the world; to say that poetry is dead is to kill much of what we know about ourselves, and the way to express what we know.  In our times, in this battlefield where we are bombarded by promises of instant gratification and entertainment solely for the sake of entertainment, in a world of YouTube clips and reality television and a whole host of what T.S. Eliot would call “broken images,” in a world where mindless entertainment threatens to wash away our minds, we as human beings must fight to keep what is most human about us: and poetry can be the key to preserving and expressing this.

In this class, we will keep poetry alive by reading and examining the works of poets both ancient and modern.  We’ll learn a number of different techniques and forms from various cultures and language systems, from the 1^rst century Japanese renga to the 13^th century Italian sonnet to the 20^th century French transliteration.  We’ll strengthen our skills at analysis and scansion through the study of sample poems, and we’ll strengthen our craft by writing a wide variety of poems, both in formal and free verse (and some forms in between!).

Which, of course, translates as this.

“As the very least / Were infinite—to me—”

We’ve passed the halfway point here at VAMPY, and I’m sitting here watching as my students write short one-acts based on the characters they created yesterday from the six random objects each student brought to class.  They’re crafting costumes, props, and backdrops from multiple colors of duct tape and newspaper, and will be performing their plays later, at which point I’m sure that I’ll still be sitting here, wondering how I ever got so lucky as to work with this amazing group of kids.  This, of course, leads directly to my wondering how I ever got so lucky as to spend my life working with amazing groups of kids, and hearing them talk about about poetry and creative writing and language and different ways to see and name and change the way one sees the world.

And this, I think, or, at least, I think I’ve realized while at VAMPY, may be the key to education (for both the students and the teacher, really) and to poetry: both, it seems, have the ability to alter the way one sees the world, for the better.  For instance: I’ve complained quite a bit, I realize, about my physical issues, at least in terms of my leg, on this blog.  Then, a few days ago, I left the building to make my way to lunch, walking slowly, as I tend to do these days, and watching the ground for potential obstacles (though, really, my own feet have always been my biggest obstacle, sciatica or no sciatica).  We’d spent the morning writing waka and discussing the power of the image, and, upon leaving the building, I saw this:

Cicada and chrysalis

Some kind of insect — a cicada, I think — coming out of its chrysalis — and a sight I’d never have seen had I been walking quickly.  This small sight reminded me that even the things we see as negative can, in fact, have a positive and transformative effect upon our lives — and, for the rest of the day, I noticed all of the things that I would never have noticed had I been walking quickly across campus: the glint of sun off caution tape, persimmons fallen and plopped below a tree, two students helping another across the crosswalk.  I was struck by the way that life transforms itself, and also the power we have to transform our own lives — how we can change our experience by changing the way that we view our experience.  There is sorrow, there is terror and despair, but there is also the ability to rise from the terror and sorrow and despair, and there is the ability to allow one’s life to be transformed by it, and informed by it, and there is growth, and there is, more than anything, the possibility that, through transformation and growth, one can work at what is perhaps the most important work we can do as human beings, which is to be kind to others, informed by the knowledge that their experience falls and rises as does ours.  There have been several times in the past year or so where I thought that my life was over.  And then something happened — even if it was as small as seeing a cicada crack its chrysalis, or watching as the kitten who showed up at the house learn how to face her fears and jump on top of the bed — and I realized, again, the amazing regenerative power of human life.  In these moment, I feel once again connected to the infinite — call it God, Brahman, the collective oversoul, the great spirit, the general theory of relativity, call it whatever you will — and calmed, somehow, by the fact of my own smallness, and the fact that, no matter how small I may be, I am connected, in some way, to that infinite spirit.

I’m trying to keep this in mind, especially when it comes to my actions.  Being around such astoundingly bright and brilliant kids, who have so much to teach me, helps a great deal with this practice.  Also, being back at VAMPY helps as well, as it is, in a way, like viewing a microcosm of how the world works, and how even our smallest actions, even given how small we are, can have a lasting effect.  It’s been amazing to see how many traditions have survived since my time at VAMPY.  Even though most of my students were born the year I first attended VAMPY, it’s still very much the same place.  The kids still look forward to the annual Paper Theater show and the annual Magic tournament.  They still refer to Big Red as Schmoe.  There are still dances and crushes, and there’s still Cry Fest after the Talent Show, during which all of the students hug and cry and tell each other how much they mean to each other.  Perhaps the happiest discovery has been that “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)” is still the theme song.  There are new traditions: the newly-built clock tower which belts out showtunes every few hours, and the monocle game, and various card games with elaborate and secret rules.  And there are some not-so-good traditions, such as the Blue Burrito, which sounds pretty awful.  But it’s nice to be reminded that, no matter how small of a part you may be, you’re still a part of something, and something which evolves and progresses and proceeds.

I was reminded of this Emily Dickinson poem, which says it far better than I could:

I tie my Hat—I crease my Shawl—
Life's little duties do—precisely—
As the very least
Were infinite—to me— 

I put new Blossoms in the Glass—
And throw the old—away—
I push a petal from my gown
That anchored there—I weigh
The time 'twill be till six o'clock
I have so much to do—
And yet—Existence—some way back—
Stopped—struck—my tickling—through—
We cannot put Ourself away
As a completed Man
Or Woman—When the Errand's done
We came to Flesh—upon—
There may be—Miles on Miles of Nought—
Of Action—sicker far—
To simulate—is stinging work—
To cover what we are
From Science—and from Surgery—
Too Telescopic Eyes
To bear on us unshaded—
For their—sake—not for Ours—
Twould start them—
We—could tremble—
But since we got a Bomb—
And held it in our Bosom—
Nay—Hold it—it is calm— 

Therefore—we do life's labor—
Though life's Reward—be done—
With scrupulous exactness—
To hold our Senses—on—

“Feel like letting my freak flag fly / Oh I feel like I owe it to someone”

After spending an hour and fifteen minutes making phone calls to increasingly hostile insurance representatives, I found myself inspired to write an entry about one of my favorite activities: fighting The Man.  How can one fight The Man, you may ask?  Well …

1. Subscribe to a literary magazine. Due to increasing postal rates, the down-the-toilet-and-through-the-pipes economy, and the general difficulty of getting people to subscribe to literary magazines in the first place, the literary journal is in trouble.  A group of poetry-loving people on Facebook laid down a challenge to subscribe to at least one literary journal a month.  At first, I thought, as you may be thinking, that there’s no way I could afford this.  I then realized that if I didn’t buy a Diet Coke a day, I’d have the subscription fee, and as Diet Coke is really and truly a tool of The Man (who else could cause my shameful addiction?), the literary journal wins.  And, as a start, may I suggest a subscription to the Georgetown Review? Five dollars for more fun than you can imagine — and, though it won’t clean your soap scum, as Diet Coke will, it will not give you kidney stones, as Diet Coke does.
2. Make your second subscription a subscription to OR. This Otis College of Art and Design journal is on the front lines of the battle against The Man.  In refreshing rebellion against traditional publishing, which so often considers not so much what is good as what is marketable, OR is a “literary tabloid” distributed nationally — and absolutely free of charge.  And the content?  The list of writers published, from Laura Moriarty to Martha Ronk to Ray DiPalma, speaks for itself.  Sign up for a free subscription and give The Man a kick in the pants.
3. Start visiting online poetry mags. For years, people warned against the online poetry magazine: they’re not legitimate!  They’re just blogs!  They’ll do nothing for your CV!  Think of your CV, for God’s sake!  Think of your CV! However, back in 2005, Bob Creeley told our workshop class that the online poetry magazine was the way of the future — and, due to #1 and a host of other issues, I think he just might be right.  Many online journals are pretty amazing, to say the least, and, most importantly, they take risks which many print journals can’t, especially when it comes to composition.  Some of my favorites include Waccamaw, the Country Dog Review, DIAGRAM (though I continuously send the wonderful Mr. Monson poems, which are promptly rejected, much to my great sorrow), and 5_Trope.
4. “Carry on!” Those of you who are as obsessed with Project Runway will recognize this as the right honorable Tim Gunn’s catch-phrase.  Those of you who are as obsessed with Project Runway as I am will also feel as torn to shreds as I do about Pro-Run’s departure from the Bravo network, its subsequent existence in some terrible between-stations limbo, and the absolute disappointment that is Bravo’s erstwhile replacement, The Fashion Show (seriously.  The challenges on this show are not challenges.  I bet that next week they’ll have to make a pot holder from scraps).   Thankfully, Dustin Brookshire has found a way to fight The Man and fulfill my need for Pro-Run with his Project Verse.  I admit that I’m cheering on Emari DiGiogio, who just may be the next Austin Scarlett.
5. Become Abnormally Attracted to Sin. Though this doesn’t technically fit under the category of “literary stuff,” I must give a type-out to Tori Amos, who has been fighting The Man since her 1988 debut with Y Kant Tori Read.  Her new album sucker-punches The Man, though the punches aren’t as low and dirty as the classic that’s gotten me through more break-ups than I care to mention, Boys for Pele.  Tori’s new sound is ambient, and low and creeping, and her voice is higher than usual.  Here’s where I must make an embarrassing admission: I have never been to a concert.  Ever.  Seriously.  I’d planned to make my first concert a Tori Amos concert — however, Tori Amos didn’t plan to come anywhere near Lexington on her tour.  I’m absolutely certain that The Man is somehow behind this, and shake my fist at the heavens and at him.