gradschool, poetry

no more rhyming and I mean it

The revision of the free-verse poem into metrical verse ended up just being blank verse – I couldn’t make it rhyme without sacrificing something else I didn’t want to lose. That surprised me, but I was happy to be surprised. This is the first time I have ever intentionally written blank verse (unrhymed iambic pentameter) – I have always made a point of having no use for it, out of my dislike of people always saying that “English falls naturally into iambs” and all that undemonstratable and inaccurate stuff – and I was glad to find out I could do it.

Tonight was also the first evening of our graduate reading series, held in a classroom on campus because the bar that was its former home has been shut down, hopefully temporarily. It was wonderful to hear people read their work.

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film

did you always want to direct?

“People say, ‘Did you always want to direct?’ or ‘Do you think you’ll ever direct again?’ I’m always very polite about it,” she said, adding, with good-natured defiance, “Do you really think I haven’t been preparing for this my whole life? And I’m just going to try it once and then never do it again? It baffles me. And then I just think, ‘Oh God, they just don’t know me.’ ”

I love you, Drew. I and every other woman I know. We all love you. Thank you.

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poetry

frimeter

I have an assignment, for one of my classes, to take a metrical poem I’ve previously written and revise it into free verse, or, conversely, to take a free verse poem and revise it into meter. It’s fun, except that the one I’ve chosen is one where I am really attached to particular wordings. Still, I think it’s the right one to use.

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art, quotes

get myself out of the way

“Sometimes the instrument tells you something after you’ve played it,” Sutherland says. “It’s never quite right until I let the instrument tell me what to say. I have to get myself out of the way.”

– an interview with Peabody organist Donald Sutherland in the fall 08 Peabody Magazine

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gradschool, poetry

pro:cess:or

Interesting discussion this weekend with some of the poets about process. One of our number throws away drafts after having written them, to not have to look back again and doubt. Another thinks about the poem, without writing it, for several days, and then writes it all at once at the end but does relatively few drafts. It’s good to hear about other ways of working.

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a propos of nothing, gradschool

and in the creepy,

Hopkins just put a new face on the website. Alternating different photos. Cool. The pictures show a lot of the school’s diversity both of people and programs. I think it’s a really nice front page. But – when I clicked on it the first time – I got an image of a man with – I don’t know, electrodes? – all over his head.

Really made me want to be like, “This is how we study poetry at JHU! With BRAIN MAPPING!”

I can’t link to it, but if you go to the site and click through the pictures, you will find the man with the electrode-head – fourth from the left, gazing out at you with a friendly face, and lots and lots and lots of electrodes. Honestly, it’s as weird as some kind of Poe story, the stuff folks do at this school. Science. Magic.

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gradschool, L'Internet, poetry

gymnasium

We had our first graduate poetry workshop yesterday. I obviously can’t say much about that in here, either, but I can say that we read this poem, Decorum, by Stephen Dunn, and that anyone who has ever been in a writing workshop or had thoughts about one should read it. It’s very funny.

Today we had another meeting of our other graduate poetry seminar. A point made in it that I thought was share-able with this blog is that some poets require more interpretation than others. We went on to discuss how this is not a judgment of quality; it simply means that the poets who need less interpretation tend to get assigned in classes less and get read by readers more.

This seems like an obvious point, but I am going to share it with my students tomorrow, as a way of explaining why the poems on our syllabus are all so thorny, and the poems which many of them already know and love – The Road Not Taken, or Directive, for example – are not included. (Although maybe it does need interpretation. Never speak too soon with Frost seeming simple to understand…)

Today I implemented an efficiency change I’ve been wanting to make for awhile – I shared all my class handouts, as Google documents, with all my students. This works so much better than me emailing everything to them as attachments. It’s fantastic.

Something else I would like to do for them, eventually – well, two somethings –

1) make some kind of online timeline of all the poets we study, so they can see the overlapping dates of publication and of existence. I think this is a project I could get the students to help me work on. I just have to start it.

2) start building a shared site of poems we love – me, them, everyone. That way they can share their favorite poems with each other even when we don’t have time to discuss everything in class. We could even do this across all the sections.
Hmmm. (I know it should be a wiki. I know. I am familiar. Really.) Sounds like more work. Maybe next week.

Today we (the grad students) were also paid for the first time, and there was much rejoicing. Finally, today, I am going to bed at a decent hour. Yes.

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