Dogma

A stone eye
never blinks
maintains a single view
sees nothing
behind

a poem prompted by seeing my own face:


When I was young

my mother said
I reminded her of wading birds--
and gave me herons:
one of colored glass,
another of sculpted onyx,
one carved by an Ojibwe
out of wood that darkened
as it aged, though so slowly

decades passed before I noticed.

CrustyProfessor is feeling very crusty today. He's feeling lucky. He forgot to go to his eight o'clock class and they didn't leave. They sent a class member up to fetch him. He was left feeling as fetching as his students looked.

A former student and current high school teacher dropped in and went to his class with him. He got to watch her talk about teaching. He likes listening to excellent, committed teachers talk about what they do. That's more fun than listening to himself.

Another former student and current high school teacher sent him a piece of writing about teaching that gave him similar feelings, even though that student wasn't in the same room. He felt fortunate that student thought to send the piece.

He went to his next class where he heard pieces of writing written by students read aloud by students. Good writing. Good students. Wise responses. He heard a student say "these people blow me away." He felt the same way.

CrustyProfessor is really SentimentalSlob.

I continue to find TerriJo hysterical. I am glad to encourage her to stay out of those size 14's. I'm also very pleased to see Rene's daughter is following her mother's example.

I'm wondering about this blogging stuff. I find myself checking my classmates' blogs fairly often and find that not much has happened. Perhaps the better approach would be to set aside a time for blogging once a day or every other day, and then not check at other times. I'm wasting a lot of time looking at unchanged blogs, and I'm not really much of a surfer to start with. I hate waiting for the machine to access the next site. I read quickly--very quickly--so the wait between sites is impatient-making.

TerriJo is 44 and has gone from a size 14 to 12 jeans size. Read all about it.

I found a blog by an Australian journalist named Tim Blair. Its latest issue has poetry about Iraq and ruthless Americans and counter-poems by conservatives parodying the British leftists writing the first poems. To check it out, click here.

Here's the latest draft of my latest poem.

to feel and be
cold;
envy the absence of
heat
sealing me to you
like copper to brass


if only we could dissolve
and cool into clear glass
chill and solid,
and clean

better,
you and I,
to be a window
than a weld

I just finished writing four letters of recommendation for one person. One was aimed at teaching secondary school English, one was aimed at admission to graduate studies in English, the third was aimed at graduate studies in English with a teaching assistantship, and the fourth was for admission to law school. The four pieces differ greatly, though the person is the same.

In all four I tell the truth as I see it about this person, but I tailored each piece to my perception of the situation in which the letter would be read. I colored each piece with an internal overlay of audience consciousness, adapting to show off the qualities she has particular to the demands of each setting. An intriguing exercise in audience adaptation.

This makes me wonder, how am I conceiving of an audience for this blog? What am I tailoring?

Today in class I saw the Forest of Dean turned into a childhood enchantment, a family habit of over-caution turned into a comedy, and a student's mother turned into a cancer-ridden pain-wracked lovely person losing control of her bowels.

I also saw students who think research writing is done as an exercise of form, of reproduction of format. How on earth could I reconcile these two mindsets?

I've found someone who seems to know about Macs, software, and to have political opinions. might be worth a look

So I tried to find her blog myself, and now I can't. There are lots of tequilamockingbirds.

I just found a blog called "tequilamockingbird." Since To Kill a Mockingbird is one of my favorite books--in fact, the only book that has worked with every class I presented it to--the blog title caught my eye. "Somebody has a sense of humor," I thought. I was right. She is very funny, and in only a few entries I found myself liking her. Try it out. I don't know how to form links yet, so all I can provide is the blog name.

I've been thinking this could be a venue for writing about writing and getting commentary about that writing about writing. I wonder, for instance, about the intersections of writing creative nonfiction and writing poetry. My insides say the two modes come from the same place in the brain.

This is my first entry. I'll get better. Really I will.