Random Update

I thought I would update, although I have no interesting questions in mind. Most of my questions are currently about teaching, poetry, or keeping up in school.

Speaking of which, what do people think of the phrase "the fan like a scope of a gun"?

Anyway, so school's started and I'm finally getting into the swing of things. Yesterday was a big day-- the poet Martin Espada read and I did his introduction. That should be Martin with an accent mark over the i-- MarTEEN. I don't know how to do the accent mark on blogspot. It's a big deal; I got an email before the intro that he won't get up on stage if you say Martin instead of MarTEEN. So I got irrationally but extremely nervous before the reading that I was somehow going to accidentally say Martin. Then I would be the white girl who said Martin. But I did okay.

Also yesterday I had to give a presentation on C.K. Williams' poem "The Dog," which you can read here. http://drake.marin.k12.ca.us/staff/doherty/personpoem.htm It's got a fabulously, disgustingly elegant description of a dog going to the bathroom in it. And that went okay too.

So now two big things I had to do are over and I can just keep up with normal work, such as investigating the question "Do poems think?" for my one real English class. Hmm.

If anyone has any ideas on that one, let me know.

I've been writing a lot more, getting up, having coffee, writing in my journal, reading some poems and some "theory," then sitting at the computer for an hour or two, sometimes more. If you are trying to accomplish something, let me suggest getting into a routine where you do whatever it is first thing in the morning. It's working well for me. Of course, it's a luxury to be able to get up and not have to rush to get ready for work. I guess that's why so many poets/artists/etc get up at 4 AM to do their work.

It's fallish here, which is nice. I like the fall smell and the clear sky.

We've been watching Desperate Housewives (DVDs from blockbuster.com, a Netflixish kind of system) and it's fascinating. I love it. And the next thing we get will be The Office Season 3! We got rid of our cable for this blockbuster.com thing. It's cheaper and better; we watch interesting things. The only bad thing is, no more Jon Stewart.

I've been reading Kenneth Koch...

Poem with Exclamation Points

M tells me someone at Hollins told her (quoting someone else?)
that every writer is allowed one exclamation point in all their writing career.
One! Can you imagine?
Someone forgot to tell Walt Whitman!
Also O’Hara, Koch. What about cummings? I’m checking. Does
!
by itself on a line count? In my (used) book
someone has drawn parenthesis around Death I think is no parenthesis. (How
many parenthesis are we allowed, I wonder?) What about Herrick?
Here’s: Alas for me! I don’t see another, but
I’m not really looking carefully anymore, I’m writing this poem,
the things I’ve exclaimed in poems already! Like, O, dead spider!
and stuff like that. I should ration exclamation points, then,
be careful, they’re dear, imported. But it’s spring!
I mean it’s fall! Suki’s sitting on my poems in the springfall breeze!
(We didn’t used to have a cat but now we do!)
D’s playing June Apple in the guitar room; later he’ll go get someone out of jail!
And me: blue ink, blue ink, all day (what luck)!
(How many parenthesis did we get again?) And what about
semicolons; what about colons? What about
the question mark?

Speak

I am always so surprised and grateful when I return to my last blog post and find all these insightful comments. Thank you!



I guess I'm still on the writing about poetry kick. So I've been trying, in my poems for class, to give more info, so people will stop saying I'm not telling the whole story, and when I do that, I get all these, "this poem is too emotional" comments.



So the only thing to do then, is to write how I want, and not worry about the rest.


Why is it so scary to do that?

Calm down, Nate! Eleventh graders will suffer through your writing for years to come.

“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash – and should be ashamed of myself if I did succeed.”

-Nathaniel Hawthorne

Supergeek Academia Time

So...

I'm taking this class about poetry and media. One of the questions for tomorrow is to come to class ready to discuss "poetry" and "media" and what those two words "mean" and whether or not poetry can exist without media.

So trying to answer that I was thinking about poetry on the Internet, and how anyone with a computer and a poem can publish it online. There's a snobby, academic part of me that thinks that's not "real" publishing, but there's an ever-growing, blogger part of me that thinks that's wonderful, like literally wonder-full, that everyone can be a published web poet.

In college a person (who tortured my soul, but that's parenthetical here) wrote a poem called "Everybody wants to be a poet and they can't." But maybe now they can.

So, some questions:

a. Does anyone out there READ poetry at all?

b. If no, why not?

b. If yes, from where? Books? Or mostly the Internet?

c. Online publishing-- "real" or not? (I guess this kind of relates to whether self-publishing is real, in the end...)

Headache

I've had a headache since school started. It has to do with having a to-do list that I can't complete by the evening as well as having professors quote poetry at me, then look at me expectantly, and not knowing what the poem is.

The MFA "orientation" is tonight and I said I'd make a spinach lasagne. (Lasagna? Which one's the right spelling?) So I had to get up and make a lasagne. Usually I love to get up and cook but the to-do list is floating around me in an irritation, ghostly way. I should have said I'd bring something easy, since I teach Friday afternoons, but I wanted to show off my lasagne-making skills.

Also, today I am showing my classes An Inconvenient Truth, so I have to watch An Inconvenient Truth twice this afternoon which I should be reading the poetry of Martin Espada.

I thought I was going to do a better job of maintaining my peacefulsummer self.

Pie Recipe and Honesty

Wow, it's been a long time since I've posted. Something about school starting and trying to remain calm has prevented me from posting, as though writing a blog entry takes hours or something. One of my goals for the semester is to try not to get obsessed with what I "don't have time" to do. When things get busy with "work"-- in this case school-- I tend to start neglecting things like keeping in touch with people I love and reading and writing for pleasure, and that's not a good life.

Anyway, thanks for your comments on the housewife entry. As requested, here's the recipe for spinach and red pepper pie:

1/2 tbsp butter

1/4 cup dry bread crumbs

1 tbsp olive oil

1 red pepper, cut into thin slices

4 cloves garlic, minced

2 med. yellow squash, quartered vertically and thinly sliced

1 10 oz. package frozen spinach, thawed and drained

3 eggs

1/4 cup milk

1/4 tsp salt

black pepper

1 and 1/2 cups cheese (cheddar, swiss, or your favorite)

Heat the oil in a pan over medium heat. Add the red pepper and cook for about 3-5 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for a minute, then add the squash. Cook until the squash is tender, about 10 minutes. Add the spinach and cook for another minute to let any water evaporate. Remove from heat and let cool.

Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 375 degrees. Slather the butter on a pie place to coat it, then sprinkle on the bread crumbs and spread them over the butter by shaking the pie plate. This is the "crust." Put that aside and beat the eggs in a large bowl.

Stir the milk, salt, pepper, and cooled veggies into the eggs. Spoon half of the mixture into the pie plate, then sprinkle on half the cheese. Spoon the other half of the mixture on the cheese, then sprinkle on the rest of the cheese.

Bake about 30-35 minutes, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Let the pie cool about 10-15 minutes before cutting into it.

This is delicious and goes well with mashed potatoes. It's from a great cookbook called Vegetarian Classics by Jeanne Lemlin.

So that's that.

On another topic, I wanted to write about honesty. Is anyone ever temped to lie or stretch the truth in their blogs? What about not telling the whole truth? It's be interested to know how others approach telling the "true story" of their lives to an on-line audience.

Why? Well, it's not because my blog is a bunch of lies. Actually I have an easy time with honesty on my blog. The question stems from my attempts to write poetry. In my first meeting with a professor last week, I turned in a poem, and the prof said he thought the poem did not tell the whole story, that it left something out, something important. My professor last spring said the same thing about two of my poems. And it's true.

I am not leaving stuff out on purpose, but I realized that in an attempt not to be "confessional" or "sentimental," I've been sort of tempering my writing, tying to say things in a kind of slanted, muted way. I seem to be afraid of telling personal details, which is interesting because I never used to be afraid of writing personal stuff. I also seem to be afraid of telling too much about myself in workshop, which is interesting also. I am realizing I have made up a "teacher/MFA student" self that I want to keep watch on. I am kind of worried about what people will think if I write about certain subjects.

It's odd to realize this, because like I said, it's not on purpose, not a conscious decision. In fact, realizing that I have "safe" material has made me spend the last week writing very long poems full of confession and sentiment. So we'll see how next week goes.

How do all you bloggers share so much with the world? Is it ever scary?