So yes, we are still amid a global pandemic that has killed a few million people, but it’s spring, we have a sane president, I’ve had both my vaccinations and I’m feeling uncharacteristically optimistic. So I am working on a project, putting together some resources on poetry for university students and community.
So I have two questions.
1. What resources about poetry would you be interested in?
2. What common misconceptions do people have about poetry?
Let me know in the comments!
So here is what I put in my Canvas for today, the last day of classes at Northeastern University:
To-Do Date: Apr 19 at 11:59pm
Welcome to Week 14. This semester, you learned a lot of things. Some of it I might even have taught you. Some of it your peers taught you. Some, you taught yourself. That is pretty much how life works.
Learning Objectives
What I hope you got from this class:
* We write alone, but we can’t only write alone.
* The world wants to tell you what to think, and sometimes that is a helpful shortcut, but when it isn’t helpful, you don’t have to let it.
* Writing can be hard, frustrating, and boring, but it doesn’t have to be.
* You are not always in control of your writing tasks (assignments, audiences, etc.) but you are in control of your writing process.
* Don’t write to make enemies or to change anyone’s entrenched ideas. Write to make allies.
* Write to make the world a better place. You might have to make yourself a better person first. The work is worth doing.
* Much of what you got through your education will prove useful. Reject anything that doesn’t help you repair the world.
* Who you are will always inform your writing, but you are in control of which bits to put in and which to leave out.
* We are firmly integrated in the material world, for better and for worse. We can try to make it more better and less worse.
* Thinking about the language you use, and being more intentional about choosing words and guiding metaphors, will improve your precision and persuasiveness.
* Also, ethos, pathos, logos and kairos, because those old Greek guys were hella smart.
*AND FINALLY, sometimes you just have to go into your back yard and spit.* But then put your mask back on.
*This is referencing David Huddle’s amazing essay, “Let’s Say You Wrote Badly This Morning.” 10/10. Highly recommend.
This week, and really so much of January so far, has felt a lot like Passover, the Angel of Death passing over us and letting us live. Especially after the January 6 Insurrection, fittingly falling on the Christian feast of Epiphany (manifestation: the three kings recognized Jesus as God) just in time to manifest and show us the worst of our nation’s history, it has been a fraught few weeks. And so on Wednesday when I heard sane, rational people speaking in whole grammatical sentences, I keep feeling that, really, that would have been enough. After the last traumatic four years and four months, when we’ve been repeatedly battered by Tweetstorms, shitstorms, and the nuclear dumpster fire that was 2020, I really wasn’t expecting much or hoping for much.
This brings me to the Jewish Passover song Dayenu, It Would Have Been Enough. There are fifteen stanzas describing all the things God did for the Jews, freeing them from slavery, doing miracles and staying close to them, and at the end of each one, everyone sings, Dayenu.
From Wikipedia:
Five Stanzas of Leaving Slavery
1) If He had brought us out of Egypt.
2) If He had executed justice upon the Egyptians.
3) If He had executed justice upon their gods.
4) If He had slain their first-born.
5) If He had given to us their health and wealth.
Five Stanzas of Miracles
6) If He had split the sea for us.
7) If He had led us through on dry land.
8) If He had drowned our oppressors.
9) If He had provided for our needs in the wilderness for 40 years.
10) If He had fed us manna.
Five Stanzas of Being With God
11) If He had given us Shabbat.
12) If He had led us to Mount Sinai.
13) If He had given us the Torah.
14) If He had brought us into the Land of Israel.
15) If He built the Temple for us.
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu
Dayenu.
I don’t cry.
Twenty years of therapy and I still don’t cry too often, and I can pretty much tell you the day, month and year of the last few times I cried in the last 25 years. Late August 2008. Early December 1993. A few other times.
And then Eleven-Seven/Twenty-Twenty happened.
I am the Eighth Dwarf: Call me Weepy.
Before this, I have lived through a few Major Historical Moments.
I was just short of two years old when American astronauts landed on the moon. My father tried to convince me that it was happening in honor of my birthday, and even at one year and change, I was pretty sure he was putting me on.
On Nine-Eleven, I was arriving at work at MIT and my colleagues were completely freaking out and we went across the hall to the ESL professor’s office, because she had a television, and we watched the playback of the New York attacks and heard the rumors of the attack on the Pentagon. Then we heard about Flight 93, and the passengers who gave their lives to ensure that the hijackers would not do even graver damage, and crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. MIT did not immediately cancel classes, but my boss sent us home. On my way home, I saw an airplane pass behind a skyscraper and held my breath until it came out the other side.
I have never since assumed that airplanes would necessarily pass behind skyscrapers.
On the night of the 2016 election, November 8, I was sitting in one of Boston’s last gay bars, with about twenty or so lesbians in a space big enough for eight or nine (because lesbians, like atoms, can squeeze down to fit into whatever space they are given; it’s science). And we were anticipating that the Woman in the Pantsuitä, Hillary Clinton, would wipe the national floor with DJ Trump’s racist, sexist, homophobic, failed businessman (etc., etc.)’s fat orange ass. And we watched as the TVs around the bar showed the map of the United States turning… redder… and redder… and redder…
And I watched a hundred or more gay folks as their body language got smaller and smaller.
And we realized… that the worst had happened. I saw people weeping in small groups. I saw young lesbians crying and older gay men telling them, “Well, we survived Reagan in the 80s and AIDS. We’ll survive this too.” And I didn’t believe them, because I knew that a lot of people had not in fact survived that, and that a lot of us wouldn’t survive this.
And here we are, four years later, with 235,000 or so Americans dead from Covid-19, in part because of the astonishing lack of leadership and reliance on science from this so-called administration.
I wasn’t wrong, alas.
But then… even though many of us were expecting a Blue Tsunami, repudiating 44.25’s hatred, etc., we waited and waited and waited. We persisted.
And we prevailed.
But I am having trouble processing it. I keep seeing memes and video clips from movies, relabeled with the names of politicians and with “mail-in votes” and I end up weeping. I went grocery shopping in Brookline, MA, which had 5% more votes for Biden/Harris than Boston did, and families with children are standing with signs saying, “Honk4Biden” and cars are honking and I am weeping into my mask.
And I thought I could get started on grading my students’ fourth paper of the semester, but, just, yeah, no.
So here it is. I don’t cry.
And yet.
No grading will occur today on account of how I keep seeing post-election memes and weeping. That is all.
I needed this poem by our friend at the Flannel Files.
I dreamt I saw RBG in the grocery store pushing a cart down the canned food aisle in a black Adidas tracksuit Her crocheted collar a white flower blooming in her chest I told her I was sorry we had asked her to hold on for so long She smiled and nodded then went back to work filling her cart applesauce sardines blackberry jam #RIPRBG
The writing stays. I wrap it around me like
A blanket, like a superhero’s cape.
Friends drift. Size doesn’t matter and
Sometimes is downright
Counterproductive. Age happens—and
That’s the soft option—bringing its own
Aches and pains. But through it all,
Beyond it all, the writing stays.
So I decided to make a list of things I’m grateful for in the current moment.
Keep Calm, Stay Well, Keep Writing.
So, after a few decades as an English teacher, and a few more as a serious reader, I am pretty blind. My glasses, which started out as readers, and then added distance, are now trifocals, with the middle range for the computer. And normally that’s just fine, although whenever I get a slightly stronger prescription, I have to be really careful (or just take them off) while going down stairs for a few weeks–because that can get wonky.
But yesterday, on my second day of exercisanity walking while wearing a bandana, I found myself 1) fogging my glasses and 2) having my glasses rise over the bandana, putting the mid/low bit of the lenses in front of me as I tried to walk on uneven Boston sidewalks. At first the problem was simply tripping slightly. But then I started to get eyestrain. Then nauseated. Then– Yeah, I cut my walk short so I wouldn’t throw up on the side of the street. Yes, Covid-19 is a respiratory disease, but vomit on a sidewalk in your neighborhood is just never a good look.
But the metaphor holds. My attempts at personal safety and at protecting others made it kinda hard to see clearly. It made me self-isolate even though I really felt the need for exercise.
I’m not sure what else I can get from that, but it seemed worth thinking through.
Keep Calm, Stay Well, Keep Writing.
I got an email from Kickstarter a few days ago that spoke to the current moment:
“In times of crisis, some might feel selfish pursuing creative work. It might be hard to imagine why your art matters in the midst of a pandemic. But think of the book that shaped your childhood; the movie you watch whenever you feel sad. Creative work transports us. It recharges and renews us. And in order to experience it, someone needs to make it—to get that strange, unprecedented idea out into the world.” (No author cited)
But a few hours earlier, for the first time in a long damn time I started writing a poem, which I will find tomorrow and finish and post here. But in the meantime I wrote this for a prompt on one of my Facebook groups. It is dedicated to Musashi, who is now the Teaching Assistant for my now-online classes.
Love in the time of plague is this black cat
walking over my keyboard because he knows
attention is love, attention to what your loved one
attends to is love, and also when she doesn’t yell at you
for making all the M’s run across the screen
that reticence, the soft voice calling you
a goober, that most of all is also love.
And yes. That is my rollbook he’s sitting on.
So last Tuesday, one of my lesbian friends, who teaches 5th grade science at a nearby school, texted me for a poem that she could read at the school assembly. They have been doing a poem a week, and she had asked if she could do something for Pride, which has just kicked off in Boston. I said sure.
I spent two days writing, working on a sestina, my favorite form, since it would give me a way to look at the idea of pride over the years, which would be educational and supportive for the kids, and also reflect some things I’ve been learning from my friends and other queer role models from over the years.
So this is what I wrote.
What We Mean, Now, By Pride
a sestina
Years ago, people always said that pride
Was bad, that it and humility were night and day,
That proud people thought only of themselves.
Being proud meant being vain, and that was a no-no.
It meant that you loved only the person in the mirror.
For centuries, folks used “pride” in that sense.
And if you think about it, that probably made sense.
Ancient Greek playwrights warned of the perils of pride,
How heroes saw themselves as gods in their mirrors
And overestimated themselves on the day
Of battle. That’s a good way to get killed, no
Doubt about it. Heroes need to know themselves
Accurately, what they can do and be. Knowing yourself
Can be difficult. We change as we grow, gaining a sense
Of who we are and who we might become. To know
Who you are is wisdom. To accept who you are is pride,
The good kind of pride, the one that says, “Today
I will be myself in earnest! When I look in the mirror
I will see the good I can do, and those who see me will mirror
That goodness back.” Sometimes we change one self
For another, learning to be better and love better every day.
And it’s true: there will be dark, rainy days. There’s no sense
Denying that. There will always be days it’s hard to feel pride
Or joy or accomplishment: this is a fact we know.
So we must stand up, let the rain run off us, take no
Notice of those who cannot see us as we see ourselves mirrored
Back. We stand tall, proud of our good selves and our good pride,
Proud to be who we are, love who we love, and accept the self
That God or the universe gave us, with a clear sense
That we will give our gifts to the world, now and someday
In the future, when we’ve dreamed and worked our way to a day
When everyone is accepted for who they are, with no
Exceptions. This is not a utopian dream in any sense.
Change happens; the world expands, and then mirrors
Become kinder to those who look at themselves
And smile because they finally know this pride.
Let us begin this work today, start by looking in the mirror
Accepting what we know, accepting our truest self
And our sense, finally, of deep and lasting pride.
I sent it to my friend and she expressed shock that I had written the poem. She had expected me to send her some good gay poem I knew about or found online. But because I knew that she had read my poetry in the past, it never occurred to me that she had meant anything other than that I should write one.
Today was the assembly. Afterwards she sent me a text saying, “I want to thank you for putting the time in and writing that beautiful poem about Pride. It was a huge success….! I even heard there were some tears.”
Success.
Happy Pride Month!
buildingapoem 