Category Archives: gradschool

a propos of nothing, gradschool, poetry

We are seven

1) The last day of classes is Monday.

2) Of late, the writing of papers has gotten me into some silly situations – when you find yourself flipping through a Collected Poems and muttering all the last stanzas aloud to see if you can find hidden ballad meter, you may have gone too far. That’s not to say I’m not going to keep doing it.

3) Outside, it rains.

4) Fiction is all about quotation marks and how to display them. This becomes clearer the longer I have to teach it. I never would have thought they would be so problematic – but they are! You could spend the rest of your life puzzling over quotation marks.

5) I saw the moon move across clouds like ice-floes one night a few weeks ago, illuminating a small searchlight of a circle as it drifted (yes, I know, the clouds are moving, not the moon) after a graduate reading, and it occurred to me that, rather than attempting to capture the movement and the light of the moment in theatrical presentation, I now have to try to capture those things in words. The impulse is the same, but the method is different. If it is to be captured at all, of course. Delusional. The moon: observed in captivity.

6) Poetry is sometimes about taking out the words.

7) words

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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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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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gradschool

semicolons separate complete sentences

Blogging from this program is harder than from any production I have known before. It’s not the workload, it’s how engrossing it is. I find it hard to remove myself from the experience of it, to comment.

Suffice it to say that last week we had the first department party, and I think we are all still recovering from it.

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gradschool

who’s your syntax?

Read IFP drafts. Work. Go to class – first meeting, seminar, lots of Dickinson. We’re going to be writing imitations of poets who work with form for that class, which is very exciting. Meet IFP students. Come home. Cook proper dinner for a change. Come upstairs and come to the realization that there is still more work to be done. Come off it.

I feel like I have a lot to do, but it’s really nothing compared to the workload of the PhD students we meet. One of them I know is taking three graduate seminars, teaching a class, and auditing two undergraduate classes and a language class.

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gradschool, poetry

the poetic contraption

…the best poets who fought for the legitimacy of free verse in the early years of the twentieth century were not trying to make us choose between apparently different kinds of poetry; they were attempting to open our ears to a wider range of poetic possibilities. Following them, a poet like Justice learned as much from Williams and Pound as he did from Shakespeare and Keats, and one of the most important lessons was that the language of a particular poem may or may not demand the whole tool kit. If rhyme is jettisoned from a poem, what tactic must flex its muscles in order to keep the poetic contraption in the air? Meter. And if meter is foresworn? Line. And if line is abandoned? Syntax. And if syntax is abandoned? Diction. Sometimes it will be necessary for a poet to remember every tool in the kit; at other times it will be equally crucial to forget them, though nothing can be forgotten if it has not first been remembered.

– James Longenbach, “Line and Syntax,” The Art Of The Poetic Line, 24

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Baltimore, film, gradschool, poetry, writing

it must be some sort of diabolical mind control

On Wednesday and Thursday of last week, I had individual meetings with about two-thirds of the students in my class. I’ll meet the rest next week. We talked about their artistic tastes and their writing experiences. It took a lot of time to meet with all of them, but I hope it will be worth it in terms of establishing a good workshop relationship.

On Friday, we discussed Elizabeth Bishop’s “In The Waiting Room” and Seamus Heaney’s “Digging,” and got into a spirited discussion about enjambment.

And thus far I have obeyed the Department of Health and Safety mandate of taking at least 24 consecutive hours entirely off from all kinds of work each week: from Friday at 2 pm till Saturday at 2 pm, all I did was watch movies and hang out with friends. It was wonderful. We went to the Evergreen House, a very creepy museum and house belonging to a Baltimore railroad baron’s family, and saw screenings of the animated TELL-TALE HEART and the live-shmaction THE RAVEN projected outside, as part of a Poe exhibit. We also saw an old edition of Poe with illustrations, and one of his signed letters. The man’s handwriting had more flourishes than a fencing match.

And then I also watched TANPOPO, which I would watch again this very second. You couldn’t pay me enough to sit through THE RAVEN again, except for the magician’s duel section – which I would like to get an isolated clip of. Clearly, Dr. Scarabus’s powers extend far beyond the walls of the castle.

We were hoping someone would read Poe’s The Raven aloud, but no one did – so that situation was rectified later in the evening through recitation. I have never read so much poetry aloud as I have here, with these people. It’s great. The Raven, as a poem, is perhaps just slightly too long – but, my God, there are great lines in it.

Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!

I also read Annabel Lee last night, and, as usual, it blew what remained of my mind. Did you know it was one of the last complete poems composed by Poe? I did not.

I am now sort of back on the clock, now. I have a new first draft going. It has to use imagery – we have assignments for workshop – and, as you all know, imagery is my weakness. So this was good for me to try. In writing the draft, I found some stuff I would not normally have found.

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