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.

10 reasons to love rilke...

...as if you needed any more:

1. beauty is nothing/ but the beginning of terror, which we still are just able to endure,/ and we are so awed because it serenely disdains/ to annihilate us. Every angel is terrifying.

2. fling the emptiness out of your arms/ into the spaces we breathe; perhaps the birds/ will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

3. O smile where are you going? O upturned glance:/ new warm receding wave on the sea of the heart...

4. Oh the Neptune inside our blood, with his appalling trident./ Oh the dark wind from his breast out of that spiraled conch./ Listen to the night as it makes itself hollow.

5. There wasn't a creak that your smile could not explain,/ as though you had long known just when the floor would do that...

6. how could you know/ what primordial time you stirred in your lover. What passions/ welled up inside him from departed beings. What/ women hated you there. How many dark/ sinister men you aroused in his young veins. Dead/ children reached out to touch you...Oh gently, gently,/ let him see you performing, with love, some confident daily task--/ lead him out close to the garden, give him what outweighs/ the heaviest night...Restrain him...

7. O trees of life, when does your winter come?/ We are not in harmony, our blood does not forewarn us/ like migratory birds'.

8. Who makes his death/ out of gray bread, which hardens--or leaves it there/ inside his round mouth, jagged as the core/ of a sweet apple?.....Murderers are easy/ to understand.

9. Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited ones,/ to whom neither the past belongs, nor yet what has nearly arrived.

10. O Earth: invisible!/ what, if not transformation, is your urgent command?


(all excerpts from Stephen Mitchell's translations of the Duino Elegies)

hearing the poem in the body

this is a picture of me reading at city college in sacramento. it's a photo referenced on the blog the great american pinup... a really wonderul literary space that you should all go look at. well, this photo of me touching my chest as i read has me thinking lately of the sound of poetry as it lives in me.... literally, lives in me.

but first, if you've never read saphho's gymnasium, the book of collaborative poems by olga broumas and t. begley, it is certainly worth a peek. i read it many years ago and have been looking for my copy for a week because i want to come back to that sense of the poem as utterance, the poem as fragment, the poem as movement. there is something here that also speaks of the idea of body memory and verbal memory as they intersect...

i'm craving this lately because of my thoughts about the poem and the body. the way we feel the poem come across our tongues, the way it reverberates in our chest, hums in our ears, even lays itself down in the landscape of our mouths. i notice, often, when i am being very physical, at a time when some people say their minds become most clear, mine is absolutely muddled with an orchestra of thoughts and voices and ideas. when i'm at the gym, i barely hear what's going on around me because it's so noisy in my head.

donald hall's essay "the psychic origins of poetic form," which i've mentioned here before, echoes this affect of the poem, of the utterance, and how it is also a palpable thing for us. someone pointed out to me at a reading in sacramento last year that when i read poems aloud i often have my hand or fingers on my chest or throat (which you can see in the picture i've pasted in here) and i knew immediately what it was i was doing (feeling the reverberation of the word, the utterance) but i couldn't for the life of me understand why i did it... why the need to physically feel the word as it is expelled from my body...

i've been homesick for poetry lately because there is a great silence in my head. i'm without the murmur. i'm without the creeping uneasiness of it as i lie in bed, without the thick comfort of it as i'm reading a book. this silence isn't foreign. it happens from time to time as though my body, for some reason, refutes poetry. kicks it out of the house. says, not you again. not this time...poetry lives in me but like any resident, is not always happy with co-habitation.

and so i find myself doing the strangest things to occupy time that used to belong to poetry, as it's on hiatus, maybe in the same way that a parent turns the child's room into a sewing studio when he or she goes off to college. for example, i've been playing a lot of scrabble. it gets me a little giddy to cheat and ask the computer what the best next word will be since they are so much better than my own words... hejira...loamier...etui...xylenes...or, perhaps, a strategically placed 'carp' for 26 pts. and the giddiness and these odd words fill in my silence.

or, i watch the television on mute with the closed captions turned on. sometimes i play music in the background and then also read or work on the computer at the same time, so there are words coming at me in every way they can. this fills up my silence, too.

i was talking to my 9 year old about what it means to have certain 'intelligences' according to the educational philosopher Howard Gardner, that we are all genius in our own ways, so that one person might have a 'bodily kinesthetic' gift (an athlete) and another an interpersonal gift (a social worker) and another a linguistic or verbal gift (a poet). she said to me, 'i'm not verbal. that's not my gift' and i began wondering what it must be like, then, in the mind that is not verbally preoccupied. what does it sound like... how does language enter the body... what does language feel like in the body, on the tongue, in the ear of someone who doesn't examine the textures of a long A sound, or the hollows of OOOOOOooooooooooooo...... is the silence i hear at my silent intervals, their silence all the time? or is their silence filled with equations and postulates, or the sounds of birds (naturalist), or the anticipated notes of a passing bus (music)... yes, i suppose this is all about the mind, maybe even more so than the body, but i think it's almost impossible to separate the two when you speak about something as abstract as music or language or a love of nature in a way that makes it truly a visceral thing, a substantial thing that we imagine feeling, or tasting, or experiencing physically.

i'm really wondering about what kinds of things people have written about the intersections of language and thought and body... that i'm as yet unaware of. what have you read? what are your suggestions? i'd love to make a little reading list of essays and books that might be useful, helpful to anyone with this curiosity... maybe as another distraction to fill the silence in my head as i wait the cacophony of poetry to return from it's unscheduled time away... thanks in advance for responding.

a poet in the world

i'm a 41 year old woman. i teach at a research institution. i've published a few books of poetry. i have poems in literary journals. i love poetry, even when i hate it. i love poets, even when...

but i've been thinking lately how difficult it is, sometimes, to claim myself as a poet in my world. people ask me, what do you do? and i never say, 'oh. i'm a poet' or more exactly, 'oh. i'm a poet who teaches because no one pays me for being a poet'.

and there's that little twinge when i say what i say...'i teach' or 'i'm a professor'... and an even bigger twinge when i'm asked what i teach... 'poetry writing' is the oil that floats to the surface, but as it's gathering and forming and slow rising to the top, i inevitably and more quickly qualify its appearance by preceding with 'literature and...,' 'literature, creative writing, mostly...' and so on.... i anticipate the uncomfortable moment that i'm assessed and stared at... the slow nods. the unblinking eyes... a poet, huh. hmmm.

in my past, i always claimed to be a poet without thinking about it-- even before i really was a poet. some of those drunken nights of my youth riding around in metallic gold monte carlos drinking pabst blue ribbon with guys named sol, and eddie, and lerch... i easily claimed my identity. i'm a poet! i yelled as i reached for the stereo and turned up the music (no quarter/flirtin' w/ disaster/highway to hell) a little louder. and later, in college, meandering around campus in my hemp weave smock and birks, my skin glowing both from my vegetarianism and steady diet of krishna food between packs of ramen noodle, i gleefully claimed my identity... i'm a poet. i didn't even blink, even though i seldom wrote anything and what i did write i could barely comprehend the next day.

i met up with an old friend last summer from the krishna eating days. he has taken another route in his life. his hair is still long. he works in a bookstore. poetry for him is still underground, still city lights, still and he said, so, you've made a career of it and i swear, just then, some wind came up and smacked me in the back of the head so hard i felt a sting. and so here, in the middle of my life as a 'career poet,' in the middle of an unfolding of the life i've wanted... i can barely speak the words. i suppose once i started 'proving' i was a poet, the matter became more and more difficult to really prove, like an unwieldy theorem that sprawls from one black board to another until it circles the lecture hall and seems infinitely larger than the mind(s) that could have created it. the more i write into my life as *poet* the more i feel my life needs to justify that which i claim, despite the fact that it, as in poetry, has undoubtedly claimed me.

those days of certainty were the days before vocation, before entering into a community of like minds who 'understand' who you are... who share that awkward moment in the the rest of the world with you. i have moved so long in this community that it offers me this strange sense of normalcy, really. a sense that the world is a world of poets and among each other we are typical. so typical we are that when we step outside of ourselves, when we stick our toes in that larger pool, it's frosty cold. it's a great chill reverberation that makes us understand that even among each other, really, we are alone. maybe this comes because the stares ask us, silently, and so what is that? what do you *really* do? have you built a building lately? have you made some cash? have you stopped a war.... or tried to?

this is what i am caught up in as of late. trying to figure out what it is that i *really* do.. or maybe more appropriately, what is it that i do that does something else? what is my project in the world... what glue am i? what kind of glue are we? what do we hold together? i ask more of poetry than the young krishna food eating woman who claimed it. i think i want more from it, too. and i understand the way that i can't really claim poetry in the way that i once did... the academic idea of poetry as a static and containable 'thing' is elusive to me. perhaps to ask what poetry does itself is academic (as my friend ross gay says) but what do i say when i say i'm a poet? i say i'm neruda, i'm whitman, i'm lorde--is that what i say? and so do i say i have an onus then to not be silent? do i say i have to feel the smallness i feel in claiming to be part of that continuum and then own the project to earn it, to not be small in it... not in the sense of largness and 'fame' but in voice, growl, roar, song, hum, and scat....

i say, i'm a poet. when i say that, i say, this matters... and that, without me, without us, something in the universe will in fact become unglued. a poet in the world fastens one disperate thing to another... a car to a tree, a yellow sweater to an oil field, a gun to a lover. clover to asphalt. shit to cloud.

i say, i am a poet ...and i say, i am a poet in the world and the world must hear me that i am a poet-- and so what... what is that? i say all i can really say right now: i am a poet in the world ... and, i think most, a poet in the world is the world making itself.

the gigan, revisited.

hello all. i've been so caught up in my transition to boulder, my personal life, and my teaching, that i've been absent, though i come back and check all of your blogs from time to time, silently. i'm trying to decide whether my manuscript of gigans is complete or not. i have about 64 surviving poems, numbered, but not placed in chronological numerical order. this last gigan has a sense of finality to it, and yet, i am really not sure whether i am done. i'll paste it here for all of you. a reminder of my gigan form: 7 stanzas. couplet, triplet, couplet, couplet, couplet. line 1 repeats nearly as line 11, line 6 repeats nearly as line 12 and the ending couplet is a volta.

63.

if you killed me now, my legs would walk to another country
happy for their journey away from the hips’ locked carriage.

my eyes would roll into glass, reflect first all we have ever
forgotten about the creeping westward blue that hovers above,
and slowly, then, roll from my skull into the distant green horizon

tired of all they’ve seen. at the moment of my death, my body would
cascade into four thousand ripples as though remembering the water

from which it came, remembering your hand, the vortices’
swirl of each imprint you made on me, waterfall and white foam

come together again, belly heave and fraction of each touch.
if you killed me now, my face would become your face, brother,

soldier, shop-keeper, nurse, and at this moment of my death, this moment
crisp with the smell of smoke that circles autumn, know this: the blue
scarf tied around the head of the old woman at the bus stop is me, her square

hands, her clenched jaw, me, and within her an animal outline, deltoid curve under
soft sagging flesh, an animal fanged within—all me, in her skin’s perfect folds.

_______

be back soon.