Monthly Archives: September 2019

15 posts

Mirror, Mirror, in the Wood Chips

poetry reading poetry

Poets have a knack for universal mirrors. The adjective, in this case, is key. Yes, the poet sees himself in an ordinary object and writes about it, but he doesn’t forget the reader. If the reader, too, identifies, and sees HERself, then and only then is the Eureka! moment universal and thus, complete.

This truism struck home while browsing the Fall 2019 issue of Rattle. On p. 21, I came across old friend from the Midwest, Ted Kooser. The title of Ted’s poem is “Wood Chips,” and yes, Virginia, you’d better believe that even wood chips can serve as a mirror.

How so? Here you go:

 

Wood Chips
Ted Kooser

I kicked them up pruning a rose bush
at the end of October, just chanced
upon them because they were there, by then,

after thirty years there, grown over
by those grasses you find among roses.
You know how when high water recedes

in a pond that’s been flooded by rains
it sometimes leaves an intricate bed
of bark and twigs woven into the reeds?

Those wood chips were matted like that,
and were driftwood gray, gray driftwood,
although I remembered them fresh

from the chipper, the color and fragrance
of slices of peach, or of rose petals
fallen away. I often find myself now

picking up things and looking at them
both as they are and as they were,
as I am, also, both, both pink and gray.

 

 

Ted Kooser is one of those rare poets who can still get away with what I call “Frosties.” You guessed it. A “Frosty” is a Robert Frost-like poem where man meets nature, man sees self in nature, reader shoves man aside because she, too, sees herself in nature. It’s a “Hey, that’s me in God’s mirror!” moment that still works even though nature poems are not exactly the rage in our tempestuous times.

Now when I look at last spring’s wood chips out in the flower beds, I can think of myself first in the pink of life and then, inexplicably, in the gray of it (and you can bet I’ll be demanding some answers of my Maker because that was fast).

This is how poetry is done, Grasshopper. Or one way of thousands, I should say.

Football and Poetry: As Natural as Pepperoni and Pizza

poetry reading poetry

If you polled one hundred high school football players, asking how well football and poetry go together, you’d probably find unanimous agreement that they don’t. Emphatic agreement, even. Shut-up-and-pass-the-eye-black agreement, I dare say.

But sometimes youth has much to learn. If you polled one hundred 50-year-old men who played high school football “back in the day” (as everyone says “up in this day”), you’d find a more nuanced response. Some would better understand the poetry in hiking and hitting, rushing and passing, kicking and scoring.

In fact, I’ve traveled this gridiron before, sharing three football-themed poems, including one of my own. Then, upon receiving a copy of Al Ortolani’s new chapbook, Hansel & Gretel Get the Word on the Street, from Rattle, I found another good football poem.

The theme of this chapbook is high school in general, which makes sense when you learn that Al Ortolani taught English for 43 years (eclipsing my record by a whopping 18 years, bless him).

But it’s the 17th poem in the chapbook that gave me pause. In poetry, pause is good. It means a poem is on to something bigger than itself. It means the reader is thinking, “Hmn.” It means the reader is about to become that special being he likes to be — the rereader.

Thus, along with the three you can find via the link above, I’m adding Ortolani’s poem to the Super Bowl Hall of Poetry Fame. (I can because I own it.) In simple terms, it finds a simple truth about football and what the game means to boys who take it seriously. It originally appeared in Aethlon: The Journal of Sports Literature. See what you think:

 

Game Prayer
Al Ortolani

Maybe it’s the way boys
look at each other before the last game,
their eyes wet and glimmering with rain.

Maybe it’s that I catch them
in these shy moments of waiting,
turning the world like a pigskin,

flipping it nonchalantly, low spiral
drilling the air. Maybe it’s this
moment before the splash of lights

before the game prayer
before you run from the door.
If so, forgive me

for seeing you so vulnerable,
in that quiet moment
before the helmets.

 

True, football is a team sport and feeds off the energy and will of the group, but it’s bigger than that. It has individual meaning to each player, a meaning each kid would be hard-pressed to put into words. Because words like “shy” and “vulnerable” wouldn’t come to mind. Because they don’t seem to belong.

And yet they do.

Reading Ulysses: Now I Know How Odysseus Felt

humor poetry

Wait. What page am I on in Ulysses? Only 186 with over 500 to go?

You can never be too old for an Irish door-stopper, I realize, but what about the eyes? Here I have this Oxford paperback of the 1922 version, and my eyes are killing me.

What is the font, anyway? Four? I’ll be blind as Joyce himself by the time this is over!

And really. In the head of first one Bloomin’ protagonist and then another (the inventive young Dedalus)? Stream of consciousness can’t help itself. It’s bound to be penny-ante trivial now and again as it babbles through this thought and that. Almost like Twitter.

#whocares?

But, no. Repeat after me (and my English professors): This is clever stuff.

I know because I am co-reading The New Bloomsday Book, a guide to Bloom’s odyssey, if you will (or even if you won’t). It tells me what I should know before Joyce tells me what I don’t know.

Worst of all for bibliophiles who don’t dedicate 18 hours a day to reading (raises hand)? All the other books mocking me.

I see this 200-pager and that 250-pager, each flashing its wiles, each saying, “Hey there, Big Reader. You could be reading me, and you know it. Why don’t you just put down that there little big book and come over to my place?”

Like the Sirens, they are.

My kingdom for two gobs of bee’s wax! Plugs for the ears! Here, here! (vs. Hear, Hear!). Now, now!

But I can’t let myself get distracted. If I do I”ll never make it to the final page (or, as I call it, “Penelope”).

And I admit it.  I’ve peeked — Joyce signed off on that page, writing “Trieste-Zurich-Paris, 1914-1921.”

Seven years, he took to write this thing! And probably somewhere in the many inches of pages that remain to be read, I’ll learn that “7” appears 735 times in the Bible, 54 in the Book of Revelation alone (duck!).

I guess this means I soldier on. In honor of Jimmy’s seven years. In honor of God’s seven days. In honor of the seven months it might take out of my reading life!

(As the Jesuits would say: Pray for me.)

When Blog Tanks Near Empty…

poetry

sherpa

If there’s one thing I’m good at, it’s being behind the curve.

You have a cellphone and have for years? I still don’t. You been blogging so long that you finally gave it up? I’m still working the mines. You moved on to the next, great thing — podcasting — by launching your dulcet voice over the Internet? I bought a mike last year and it’s still in the box.

Which, when you do the math, leaves me with no cellphone (blessed be!), no podcast (voice still boxed), and a blog becoming root-bound in its pot (it germinated with this inaugural post on April 3, 2016, making it 3 1/2 years old — downright ancient by blogging years).

Why slug on after all this time in a world where blogs have become a tad anachronistic? It’s a question I ask myself often.

The rationale is both sound and suspect. It keeps me writing, and it keeps me reading (so I can write about what I’m reading). All good. But it also detracts from time that might be better spent on “real” writing.

Uh-oh. That old bugaboo. What’s “real” and what’s not when it comes to writing? Some say all writing is real. Others say no — it has to be creativity for the sake of art or, better yet, art you can market.

Not that marketing is the be-all. Royalties are insignificant, especially for poets. But readers? They’re significant, indeed!

That leads to another problem. What if more people are reading your blog (which, to you, is a mere incidental) than your poetry (which you care about because it mixes creativity with craft)?

As a certain Prince of Denmark once said, “That is the question!”

So when I get the occasional compliment about this blog from someone via e-mail or the comments section, saying how much they appreciate the advice or inspiration or sharing of great poetry, I always say the same thing: If you appreciate it and want to show it in real terms (ones that speak to all artists), read my work by clicking the titles of one or both of my poetry books (The Indifferent World and Lost Sherpa of Happiness).  They’re in the righthand column under the words “Available on Amazon.” Then follow through: add to cart and Amazon Prime the book’s tank!

Intimidated by price? That’s three ice coffee lattes (or whatever it is people are drinking — being behind the curve, I’m still quaffing HOT coffee… black, yet).

Such actions would make you a truly appreciative reader, both of blog and poetry. And that would be the best gift any behind-the-curve poet slash blogger could ask for.

To Teach Poetry, Get on the Cycle!

poetry teaching poetry

cycle

As a teacher of literature, I was never a big fan of “units.” In teach-speak, a unit is a collection of lessons that feature skills, strategies, and formative assessments leading to a final goal (the summative assessment), which can take many forms (traditionally, however, a paper or a test).

The problem with units is, quite simply, they have a beginning date and an ending date. Or, to be more specific, a hard ending date.

The thunk of hard ending dates is particularly felt when the unit is on topics such as grammar, essays, or poetry. The message to students? We will study grammar, essays, or poetry for these four weeks and then we will move on.

It’s the moving on part that’s a knowledge killer. If a teacher’s focus on something like poetry is compartmentalized by a unit in September, never to be seen again in the course of an academic year, the students will of course commit poetic terms, skills, and practices to short-term memory, spit them out on a summative assessment, and promptly forget everything as they move on to the next “compartment” (the short story unit, say, or the novel unit).

Alas, life doesn’t work that way (though the game of school too often does). In fact, our long-term memory is built on lessons that continually circle back, reminding us of skills and practices we learned in the past. It’s the seemingly inconsequential “Oh, yeah!” a student makes when seeing a poetry term again or experiencing the practice of reading or writing poetry again that makes a difference. Of such small bricks, spread throughout the academic year, are long-term memory walls built!

Bottom line: Thematic units work much better than units by genre. Grammar, vocabulary, poetry, short stories, essays, etc., should never “go away,” disappearing like an obscure Route 66 motel in the rearview mirror. No. Each should continually reappear, the compartmentalized curriculum map be damned.

In a similar vein, the practice of drilling a skill until “mastery” (big time quotation marks!) is achieved is suspect if you never return to that skill again. Students can lose patience if the classroom topic goes on and on like a Charles Dicken paid-by-the-word novel. It’s much better to teach a skill, practice it, move on to another, and keep circling back to it, ensuring that the group of skills you are teaching are related and support each other while at the same time providing some variety.

Such a practice is a microcosm of the thematic over genre unit concept. Big ideas are learned over big stretches of time. This is similar to a carpenter, who employs many resurfacing skills in building a house. Various tools and various strategies are used over and over as challenges and tasks come and go, sometimes in different guises, sometimes requiring a degree of problem-solving.

This interesting and ultimately rewarding practice should be reflected in the learning process as well, as students learn in similar, lifelike, cyclical patterns, bit by bit, hammer to nail, foundation to roof.