Poetry and Basketball

i have a few male friends who i think unflinchingly understand the flirtation of poetry and basketball.

at first, i watched a few games at our retreat one year. i noticed the tensions between men who were poets with basketballs in their hands, sometimes a collection of Frank O'Hara in the back pocket.

i watched a few ladies shoot here and there mostly between games; seeing them always provide a new context through which to see their poems ... yes, before reading them.

i love basketball. i follow NBA FanHouse on Twitter. well, also, NBA ... and the Denver Nuggets. Carmello Anthonly. Griffin Blake (what a shame about that knee injury! Clippers' luck) .. and a few other game outlets.

there are a few different layers of game rooted in poetry, don't you think? there's kinesthetic harmony. the body's movement as a chord perfectly on key -- a musical simile on which poetry, too, depends. the orchestration of movement/physical/ precision and intent/ spirit/ will result in the most expected way and the least: a battle waltz of bodies made ready for war, or which at least explode with the warring spirit in their long limbs.

the feeling you might have of struggling through a paragraph, bouncing off words like trees in a forest obstructing your path-- the forward and the point guard on fire for their corner of the court. it is really brutal dancing, this sport. it is only the same repreformance that fireworks, spectacular, are in place of the canons and battle shot they stand for ...  the goal on the court is the same as the goal for a good line, a neat enjambment, an effective stanza break that lets the rest of the poem run free and unfettered to the paint ... the last line, the 3 pt shot.

and these men (and women ... you know i've seen 'love and basketball' a few times ...), kings, soldiers, knights, clutch of sage seekers - everyone, they make a more gentle battle now ... and to such battles we always lend our poetry. and the acrobatics of language. and the prowess of vowels -- the determinate wisdom of consonant dissonance. always.

the work of colleagues

... is not something i talk about or promote nearly enough, partly because it feels a bit like self promotion, and i'm lousy at that. but i have to remember that these poets are not only 'mine' ... they're yours too...


What is "To Tell"

Telling fell when the water did. It fell in broken bits and we watched it pretend toward whole. The bare backs of his legs, first on foot, then the other. I was extended or shaking, shook. The teller's mouth met the objects of her tale as red ink to the flower it becomes. And falling meant there was somewhere we were to be going.

from Mead, Julie Carr



If the function of the camera is to explain itself to the operator. If the page on which the wall appears does not allow for the casting of a shadow. If the sahdow is absent from the photograph. If abasence is operative. If the explanation of an envelope to a balcony is not an order. If one were to describe the mechanics of longing as a desire for oil. If an oblique reerence to photosynthesis fills the screen. If the wobbly dirge meets the elongated fugue. If sound is manipulated. If manipulation elicits the sculpted noise of its self-portrait. If this is a picture. If the primary function of representation is thwarted. If the operation is contorted ...

excerpt from Novel Pictorial Noise, Noah Eli Gordon


... one of the things i appreciated greatly about my own MFA program at Arizona State University in the early 90s was that i had 4 poets to work with, all of very different aesthetic and approach. the most difficult aspect of this grouping was that we needed to have 3 and only 3, faculty members on our committee. so, choosing your thesis committee was really a matter of choosing who was *not* going to serve on it, rather than who did. it pained me, to be honest and perhaps a little dramatic. but i do remember feeling chagrined at the choice.

the irony is that now, from my perspective as a professor in a writing program, i know that these things can sometimes seem more dire to the student than to the professor, that where a student labors over whether to ask one professor or another to head up a thesis committee, professors are often busy juggling various committees and responsibilities and feel less ownership towards individual students than students might think.

in line with that thought, i think sometimes students have a tendency to see professors as either more or less 'chummy' than they actually are. for the most part, the great disagreements and the great celebrations we all have in the course of doing our jobs, of serving on committees, of hosting events, of teaching classes, of authoring proposals, stay in the hallowed halls and we think not so much of each other when we're at home curled up in front of bill maher.

i think maybe it's exciting for students to imagine we toil, toss, and turn over who a committee might be headed by, or which student took which professor's workshop ... it might be a little academic - dramatic - mojo that gets them through a term ... and with some empathy, i remember the conversations we had as both undergraduate and graduate students about our professors, about what we surmised to be their personal lives and outlooks and alliances and beefs and departures from one another ... but i have learned over the years with my changing role and perspective, that much of that conjecture is best left to bedtime stories and satirical narratives about campus life.

i'm really happy to work in a program that offers students a variety of mentorship. regardless of our approach, we each support each other in the way we do what we do. in light of that, it occurs to me that i should urge you to go find the work of my colleagues and appreciate them like i do, if you're so inclined, and remember what a privilege it is to live the writing life with other writers to whom you can turn, everyday, and see those thanks reflected.

the many costs of education

i woke up this morning to an email from a colleague referencing a Times interview (http://j.mp/4wld47) with the president of the University of California in which he commented on the unprecedented upcoming increase in In-State tuition which is coming on the heels of a promise that In State students wouldn't see a tuition hike through 2010. the unprecedented tuition hike will be the turnstile that welcomes those students, or other incoming students, until the terms of 'said promise' expire.

i also posted a Times article on my Facebook page this week, detailing that "The price of a college education rose substantially last year, despite a 2.1 percent decline in the Consumer Price Index from July 2008 to July 2009."(http://j.mp/1pbh8Q).

the bottom line is that the price of tuition wont stop rising in universities and colleges around the country, not only at UC, and has been rising steadily.

since i went to college as an undergraduate in the 80s the actual price tag, even for state school In State tuition, is staggering for me to hear.  Deborah Solomon of the Times asked UC Prez Mark Yudof "As president of the University of California, the most prestigious of the state-university systems, you have proposed that in-state tuition be jacked up to more than $10,000, from $7,788. Are you pricing education beyond the reach of most students?" his answer was "In 2009, U.C. adopted the Blue and Gold Program, guaranteeing that no student with a family income below $60,000 would pay any fees, and this guarantee will continue in 2010. That’s the short answer."

the short answer? ouch. is that like the real url you paste into the tiny url web page and get an abbreviated string of code that takes you to the very same page the larger url would have taken you to anyway, and the efficacy of the tiny url (or j.mp or bit.ly) is that it saves you the trouble of seeing the details of the larger url address?

when i went off to college, i was going from a 4 room housing project apartment where i lived with my three siblings and my parents. i had nothing but good intentions, student loans, and a few welcomed grants. i went to one of the 'public ivy' state schools and while there, for the first time in my life, met students with money, real money, as in trust-funds and bmw's. but those students were still a minority on campus, despite the fact that their presence was so visible. most of the students i know were kids from working middle class families.

i distinctly remember a student protest on a proposed in-house aid program that proposed to cut or eliminate financial aid coming directly from the university to students whose families made more than $36,000 a year. at the time, i didn't understand. my family was on welfare. 36k seemed like a luxury. but all of these years later, as an aspired member of the middle class, it appalls me that those students found themselves in that situation. from what i can see now, those regan-era limitations on the poor and working poor have forged a path where universities can, year after year, make it more difficult for those who are not dirt poor or filthy rich to get a decent education after high school.

student loans! that's the retort. tuition hikes and cuts in financial aid simply mean students must borrow more. but at what cost does this borrowing come? i'm a 44 year old woman and the price for my social mobility was a stack of student loans that i have paid for my entire life until now. i still have a few payments to make. and for most this seems perhaps an apt price to pay for social mobility. it's the american way. but my 'legacy' of education does not extend to my child, and so she will begin all over again. even as the child of a tenured professor with vested time in the CU system, her tuition cut will be just 25% a semester. and even as a tenured professor with vested time in the CU system, my salary is such (after 12 years of higher ed) that i wonder how i'll pay for it all. and if i'm wondering how i'll pay for my child's college education, you know that most of middle class america is too.

i have no answers at all. i do wonder though about the money and where it's going and how it's being used. every time, say, a speaker comes to campus who garners a reading or lecture fee of 4 or 5 figures, i wonder about the money. every time i see another university sponsored event that speaks to a very small demographic of the university community, i wonder about the money. and every time i see another announcement about the state cutting funding to higher education, i wonder about the money. where is it all going?

www.diigo.com

i've had one of those days where i've had so much discovery there's a slow burn in my scalp. a synopsis that focuses on the most important of the constellation of epiphanous stumblings must include, if only, www.diigo.com

diigo as a graduate student would have been something to have. i thought, immediately, at the way i felt so privileged to be able to do electronic searches as opposed to the short-spaced generation of ph.d candidates just a few years before me who were working through micro-fiche. no, i'm not that old. we're just moving swiftly. i envy candidates now who have use of this tool but i'm happy to be able to share it with my students.

diigo allows you to create a library of the articles, web pages and information streams you find online, but in addition to archiving and organizing through tags or lists, it allows you to also annotate web pages. yes, annotate, as in highlight and add sticky notes to pages you can then hold in a library of information which you can then (are you giddy yet?) also share with a personal learning network of other users. this is the scene in the blind melon video where the little girl dressed as a bee finally finds a park with other people dressed as a bee and feels as though she's found her 'kind'. enabling a collection of people researching cola nuts, or jean toomer, or better, something like 'digital poetry' which splinters into so very many electronic searches not only facilitates collaboration but it's like sneaking into the files of all the other information junkies you know and assimilating the bibliographies of their knowledge (aka information) one by one.

the only problem with the potential mecca this application-web page combo offers is that it's most interesting feature, sharing, can be muted by the fact that none of your colleagues know about it. yes, it's a great tool for the individual, but the 'massing' potential here makes me salivate with cravings for a cocktail party of other biblio-geeks. come, join. then, pass it on.

dear god, digitize me please

there are times, really, when i feel just outright dumb. for instance, i haven't been able to access this blog for some time. i came here last in early september, posted saying 'i'm back. i'll be back' and then, couldn't log in again.

now, it's not that it was really such an insurmountable issue, but my brain hurt. my brain literally hurt ... like, a burning running along the right hemisphere and a shooting sharp pain in the left. how do i get into my blog? how do i get facebook to recognize that i am the owner of my blog? how do i get my blog to recognize my gmail profile? how do i synthesize my blog with my other networks? how did i ever collect so many network(s), plural?

i wish i were a product of the next small skip in human evolution, and that my brain better incorporated the navigation necessary in this newer digital world. but when i feel bombarded, it's like the creaky old mechanisms and cogs come to a halt and i need a chimney sweep to climb into the lighthouse to clear out the debris. owie. see the resulting mash of mixed metaphor that comes from such intersections?

well, that aside, i've figured it out whilst traversing 3 email accounts, two profiles, a blog, and a dream.

for those of you not as challenged as i am, i'm twittering now, also. or trying to, effectively, as in 'wow. time magazine, poets & writers, and artsbeat twits back to back. yay! you can find me at twitter.com/ruthellenkocher

did i say that my head hurts? anyway. blog on.

resurrection post: the elusive myth of the crazy professor

[i haven't been here in 1 year, 7 months, and 15 days ... i return to an empty room, but that's okay. i returned for reasons other than audience ... that doesn't mean you're not welcome. :-) ]

where DOES it come from? and why is it perpetuated. and worse than the crazy professor is the crazy poet, and the crazy poetry professor. i don't know ...

i had one of my brightest undergrads, who aspires to a life in academia, tell me today, 'i don't know what i want, but, i don't want YOUR job ... ' i nodded, instinctively, before i realized that i was actually agreeing with him. when he left, i thought, 'now, why did i do that. i love my job.' and i am pretty sure that i love my job ... mostly.

but i understood what he said somewhere down deep, understood that he was commenting on my 'job' not my 'career' that as one of the silent sets of eyes i see peering at me twice a week, he knows how difficult he and other students can make my 'job,' how the room before i walk in is weighted down with the talk of midterms and exams and work schedules and dates and papers due ... until i bolt to the front of the room and have the audacity to address them as though they are caught up in the spell of poetry i imagined i left them in two days ago, and that they might have also, like me, burned themselves this morning trying to remember the cover of dana levin's last book while pouring coffee or left keys on the kitchen table because they were thinking of roethke and all of those poor little plants ...

i understood also that he was saying, my job is a JOB ... as in, dang. that doesn't look too easy. as in, you get paid what? as in, you went to school for how many years and you walk back and forth from where to where, and how many students? theses? committees? editorial boards? councils?

and you say, you're a writer? ... who writes?

i believe i heard him say, quite clearly as his voice emphasized first YOUR and then JOB that my task is actually impossible, that somehow in the midst of subsidized capitalism and all spin presidential elections, and schools of business, and homecoming games, that i had the onus of making not just poetry matter, but the writing of poetry ... his writing of poetry. my task was to make his poetry writing somehow matter to him ...

and quite frankly, i believe this is why i agreed. i cannot, and do not know how to, make his poetry writing important to him ... i CAN show him, though, that his poetry writing is important to me.

i can also, and this is really a personal choice i've made, show him that my poetry writing is important to me ... i can show him how i exist and live and teach in the world as a poet. i can share with him, by reenacting the causal chain of events that led me to discover a busted vent fan under the floor boards that support my desk, insight into my serendipitous inspirations. i can demonstrate the way poetry enters me and assumes navigation, so when i talk to them in class, i am cutting swiftly through the water, steam rising ... i can share with him the mournful but necessary act of cutting a line i love but which is bad for my poem. i can show him what my poetry means to me, how it keeps me up at night, how i search for new ways to read it, hear it, and see it, and i can share with him the way a certain emotive verb, or a nicely crafted stanza that he brings me, turns my day just a little on it's side ... gives off just enough murmur to stir me, maybe even to thank him for it ...

maybe there are some ways that i am supposed to also show him how poetry doesn't matter at all, that if it can be a great thing, it can also be nothing ... that the pages over which we struggle in and of themselves do not wrap wounds, or fill stomachs, or unhinge explosive mechanisms strapped to the chest our someone's last hope. and in imagining this world where poetry means nothing, he is somehow moved to bring meaning to it ...

the vocation itself is crazy. who, in the world, becomes a poet? and who, by choice? they must be crazy to imagine there is such a place in the world that they can tack down and make their own. but the JOB is, very, very much an endeavor that seems not likely to be taken up by those wholly sane or reasonable. make poetry matter? i've read numerous essays on how poetry may or may not matter ... i am not always moved to become part of the regime of optomistic wordsmiths who 'do the work' of the universe when write. i do not always believe myself that poetry matters. and i wonder on many of those mornings before i storm into the classrroom, 'how do i do this' ... 'how do i do this again?'

yet we do. every day in every state of this country ... in countries adjacent to ours ... in communities opposite us in another hemisphere. for all the great ambiguities in life, for the complications and differences ... the subject, the act of writing, the practice of poetry, in some form or another, is a human utterance most traditions share, regardless of country or culture. somewhere, somehow .. through the ages, men and women and children have been able to successfully perpetuate the crazy idea that, in the end, poetry means something to someone somewhere much of the time ... nuts, huh?

i'm a sentimentalist...dramatic? yes, terribly.

i get hung up on a word sometimes. i wrote a twenty page paper once on the use of the word 'will' in tennyson, which impressed the dusty old white professor enough to write me a letter which may be responsible for me being admitted to a ph.d program, given that my unconventional mode of study didn't impress the rest of the committee. so, perhaps i have a degree and a job today simply because of 'will'... simply because of a focus on will, as in, she had such will she could endure the pain, or he will hurt someone with his recklessness, or it is the will of god that we are compassionate with one another... what will she do? will she ever amount to anything with or without a degree... you know how *those* people will squander every opportunity, even when one wills them great prosperity. can sheer will ever save them?

and today, i think, not about tennyson and guinevere, or about will and the crumbling columns of the roman ruins he wrote about, but my more salient and visceral present... and the way that present spirals away from me like great webs cast from my heart. dramatic? yes, terribly. but i've been emotional lately... and touched so easily. that is, i have been so easily moved by kindness, so near tears at the sight of it, at the experience of it. that is, seized by both its presence and it's absence, very much by its absence, and perhaps even most, by the ways it is lost to us and consequently, the ways we find it.

sweet la la, my formerly mohawked beautiful friend with the wild call of loons in her heart.. today, la la made me cry. just a small thing, a box that came to me through the mail because the last time we spoke she heard the moon in my voice. dramatic? yes, terribly. and so she sent me a box that when i opened it, smelled like the sun, but most, it smelled like my kind. it smelled like the heart open, the friend embraced. it smelled like me saying to the boy up the street, 'i'll beat you down if you touch my girl again'... it smelled like my brother coming home with a black eye cuz someone called me nigger again.. it smelled like hope and light.. and kindness.. that fucking unbridled small kindness that fills a room. it smelled like la la, and she is my kind. she is the kind of person you decide to wake up for, to not jump in front of the bus for. she is kind with light... dramatic? yes, terribly.

i meet all kinds of people. people who are my kind, so very obviously. i meet people i want to be my kind, who i believe are my kind. and sometimes, when one reveals a terrible heart, i think, he is not kind. she is not my kind. but the truth is, we all have terrible hearts. we are all deeply despicable, and rancid, and full of will that turns us sour before we can bring ourselves to give, or before we can accept what someone else gives... or before we are willing to settle with what we have given and not take it back....

some of us have figured out a way to beat that down, to cast it out with light (no, i'm not going to apologize for this sentimentalism), to grow into the kind of person we have outlined for ourselves so early on, to reveal the way we foster a kind of revelation with each movement, in the way, each time, we slice our bread, or in the way we close a window slowly and deliberately, with some confidence that the collective ways we will ourselves present and beings in the world, the way we navigate our daily spaces, kills our rot with a kindness that spreads like virus.

some of us do this... i suppose i can only hope that to be the kind of person who understands my rot and consequently how to overcome it, how it moves through me, through us, all like a virus, to understand that we are all the kind of people who can if we choose so clearly see: yes, this is how i move, this is how kindness can move through me, how i can be the kind of person who understands what saves us... dramatic? yes...like i said, no apologies.

jack, my heart...

Tear It Down
by Jack Gilbert


We find out the heart only by dismantling what
the heart knows. By redefining the morning,
we find a morning that comes just after darkness.
We can break through marriage into marriage.
By insisting on love we spoil it, get beyond
affection and wade mouth-deep into love.
We must unlearn the constellations to see the stars.
But going back toward childhood will not help.
The village is not better than Pittsburgh.
Only Pittsburgh is more than Pittsburgh.
Rome is better than Rome in the same way the sound
of racoon tongues licking the inside walls
of the garbage tub is more than the stir
of them in the muck of the garbage. Love is not
enough. We die and are put into the earth forever.
We should insist while there is still time. We must
eat through the wildness of her sweet body already
in our bed to reach the body within the body.