Gary Snyder, "Piute Creek"

Check out these poems from both Shields and Solomon Elementary written during the second week of a two part lesson involving eco-critical poetry.

This week, a complete turnabout. Stay tuned...

Robinson Jeffers, "The Beauty of Things"

This year, the Poetry Center received a grant from the NEA's Big Read program to work with the poetry of Robinson Jeffers. As a result, among the options for our residencies we were asked to devise a two-week lesson plan devoted to one of Jeffers' poems, as well as the work of another poet sympathetic to Jeffers' world view.

I first encountered Jeffers' poems while living in Northern California. Part of his obsession involves the Big Sur coastline, where he built his home, Tor House, which remains standing today. It's easy to sympathize with his love of that part of the country, which is truly breathtaking; but his poetry is far from easy, both stylistically as well as philosophically. (I have pulled the Random House volume of his Selected Poetry off my shelf many times before, attempting to find something suitable to use in my public school classrooms, but I always got stymied by the density and verbosity of his writing.)

However, faced with having to teach a Jeffers poem, I once again dove deep into his oeuvre, focusing on the shorter works. In the end, I decided on "The Beauty of Things," both for its adherence to his concerns over what he called man's unhumanity as well as its central evocation of what comprises "the sole business of poetry."

I'll have the follow-up lesson and poems next week. In the meanwhile, please read these poems by students at Shields and Solomon Elementary.

Short Story Reader

A quick (but BIG) thank you to Short Story Reader for the recent appreciation of my poem, "Be Your Own Boss." If I could blush in print, I would!

Stephen Dobyns, "The Street" & Langston Hughes, "Daybreak in Alabama"

This past week was my first full week of the semester. Between preparing for five classes and implementing my impeccable (ahem) lesson plans, it was a bit nutty, but things are off to a good (if exhausting) start.

Since I was unable to post anything about my Hands on Stanzas classes last week, I'll be succinct here and provide links to blogs at both schools, which include more detailed information about the poetry lessons and progress in the classroom. In each instance, as is usually the case, the same poem and plan was used, but of course the results are rarely duplicative between the 3rd, 4th and 5th graders at Solomon, and the 5th graders at Shields. Each school has quite different and dynamic social settings and diverse student populations, and that's without factoring individual idiosyncrasies into the mix.

The prior week's poem was Stephen Dobyns' "The Street." See what Shields and Solomon students created in response to Dobyns' ekphrastic verse. In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s birthday, this week's plan revolved around "Daybreak in Alabama" by Langston Hughes; peruse Shields and Solomon student responses, and hope you enjoy!

Wesley McNair, "Goodbye to the Old Life"

Last week, I returned to both Shields and Solomon for the second halves of my residencies. To commemorate the start of a new year, we read Wesley McNair's "Goodbye to the Old Life," a poem I first encountered as a subscriber to The Writer's Almanac email listerv. (Even though Garrison Keillor's taste in poetry can be maddeningly monochromatic, I have nonetheless come across many fine poems and poets this way.) Students and I discussed all the things McNair says goodbye to, looking more closely at a few of them to get at his particular intent. For example, when he writes,


Goodbye to the old life,

to the sadness of rooms

where my family slept as I sat



late at night on my island

of light among papers.

Goodbye to the papers



and to the school for the rich

where I drove them, dressed up

in a tie to declare who I was.



Goodbye to all the ties ...


I asked "what kind of papers?" (At least one student was flummoxed, thinking first of paper as a blank sheet rather than schoolwork, or perhaps drafts of poems.) Who (or what) is the them that he is driving? Why does he describe the rooms as sad? I also asked about the ties -- when does a person usually wear a tie? What does declare mean? Adding to the deceptive complexity of this poem is the manner in which McNair connects its stanzas, deftly using enjambment but also a certain chronology of thought as he considers each goodbyed item. It really is quite brilliant, yet in an offhand way. I also turned students' attention to the eleventh stanza, beginning


And to you there, the young man

on the roof turning the antenna

and trying not to look down


asking them who the young man could be, why McNair was speaking to him, and why at the end of the poem? They found the poem, and these questions to be very interesting. We had quite illuminating conversations in each of my six classes.

As for their poems, and an explanation for the prompt(s) based on McNair's poem, see blogs for Shields and Solomon.

Some winter-ings

As my semester starts off tri-tiered -- I've already returned to my Hands on Stanzas classrooms as of last week; I start a new rhetoric class next week, and two more sections of composition at a third school the following week -- thought I'd take a brief moment to mention some upcoming performances.

January 15th is my first Folk You! show of 2010. We are now officially in our ninth year, continuing the third Friday of every month at The Horseshoe. Here's the poster for next week's shindig:

On January 28th, my band, The Injured Parties returns to the Double Door for a free Rock 'n' Roll Bailout show, which begins at 8 PM.

In three weeks, I'll once again be reading at Woodland Pattern Book Center. Every year, on the last Saturday of January, over 125 poets, writers, and performers show their support for Woodland Pattern by participating in its Annual Poetry Marathon & Benefit. Each writer presents five minutes of work to a packed house and raises pledge money benefiting Woodland Pattern programming. I'll be participating during the noon hour.

Finally, on February 3rd, I'll be one of two featured readers for series A at the Hyde Park Art Center. The event begins at 7 PM.

Hope to see some of you at these events!

Robert Hayden, "Those Winter Sundays"

When I create my Hands on Stanzas syllabi for the year, I start by identifying certain dates around which I might be able to design a lesson plan -- holidays, of course, but also birthdays, remembrances, daylight savings time beginning or ending, and sometimes even more tenuous ephemera -- whatever works as a jumping off point for a particular idea. I had earlier noted December 21st as the official start of winter, and while I've previously done lessons that were explicitly winter-related (such as on Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man"), going through my brainstormed list of possible poems to use for the year, Robert Hayden's brilliant 'American' sonnet, "Those Winter Sundays" struck me as ideal for the seasonal theme, as well as for rounding out the halfway point of my residency.

Like James Wright's poem from the week prior, Hayden's has an emotional potency that I think makes it ideal for young people. My students, for example, needed little prodding to make the connection between the father's unsung efforts on his family's behalf, and their wanton disappreciation of them. (We also talked about possible meanings of "the chronic angers of that house." I know from Hayden's bio about his contentious upbringing, but rather than telegraphing that information to students I am more prone to ask them what the line might mean, based on what we have already deciphered in reading the poem closely.) I also thought here was an ideal situation where I could stealthily introduce the concept of a sonnet to students, without taking them down a perhaps precarious pentametrist path.

For their writing idea, I gave students the sonnet's limitation of fourteen lines, and encouraged using more than a single stanza. (Many, in turn, emulated Hayden's three stanzas, but that's fine; prompting said emulation is another stealth method for teaching basic construction tenets of poetry composition.) I said that family should be the (perhaps loose) theme of their poems. Finally, I told them that their poems needed to be set during winter, but asked that they not use the word winter in the poem itself -- they could describe winter weather, or other facets of wintertime, or incorporate details about winter instead. (I did allow the use of 'winter' in the titles of those who asked.)

Here are poems from my three 5th grade classes at Shields. Enjoy!

James Wright, "A Blessing"

I've had James Wright on my shortlist for teaching since I started with Hands on Stanzas in 2003. However, as I tell my students each year, while I may return to certain poets with some regularity, I try to avoid bringing in the same poems, even if I have students in classes unfamiliar with them. (While the temptation is there to repeat particular poems -- call them favorites of mine, those with an addictive kind of resonance -- and/or poems that 'work' in the classroom, it's outweighed by the sheer number that get bumped from syllabi to syllabi.) I'd rather try out a new lesson and have it nosedive (or it's luminous alternative -- succeed beyond my wildest expectations) than pull out the same hoary poetry idea, albeit one that gets proven results. Teaching is a two-way affair: I am lecturing, after all, especially to younger children, as far as giving them the tools to begin working with and deciphering often intricate literary works, but their responses give me new insights into, and methodologies for teaching those same poems.

So I've finally gotten to Wright, and his poem, "A Blessing." Certain people have a strongly negative reaction to it (some are even professed fans of Wright), attacking its adroit melodrama and purple prosiness, but its intense earnestness could be what makes it such a teachable poem. An argument could be made that its intensity of feeling is a kind of naivete that works well with inspiring kids, but I think its unguardedness is a quality, an emotional plus, that transcends age barriers. Navigating its narrative to reach the poem's startling denouement -- its last three lines -- was a trek well taken, and while the concept that initiated the students' own poems might have been deceptively straightforward (and some of the resulting work superficial), the depth charges that combusted during our discussions of the poem itself were well worth it.

Once again, please read these Shields and Solomon student poems, and enjoy!

John Haines, "The Sweater of Vladimir Ussachevsky"

The impetus for last week's Hands on Stanzas poem idea was the change in seasons. We've had a mild (and lengthy) fall here in Chicago, and only recently did winter begin to make itself known and felt -- while no snow currently clings to the landscape, just a few days ago we had our first serious flurries which transformed seemingly instantly into a full-fledged whiteout. Temperatures have also dropped into the thirties; my ritual morning check of the Weather Channel's Local on the 8s offers, as of this writing, no surcease from winter's chill.

Rather than have students write a weather poem -- a reliable and flexible idea unto itself -- I used the onset of winter to have them consider a favorite (or unfavorite) article of clothing. I asked them to describe it using as much detail as possible: color, size, shape, condition (old/new), material (cotton/wool/leather/fur/denim/rubber). How does it feel when you wear it? Warm, safe, (un)comfortable? Did it belong to someone else before? If so, who? Does it have an emotional component then? For the purposes of this poem, I defined "clothing" as anything they could wear, which would also include jewelry, glasses, hats, gloves, etc.

The poem I chose to read and discuss for inspiration is an interesting one: "The Sweater of Vladimir Ussachevsky" by John Haines. Haines is not a poet I was familiar with, and I found this particular poem by searching using a variety of different terms and databases. While there were others on my critical radar beforehand (Neruda has some terrific clothes poems, especially "Ode to My Socks"), I like how Haines begins his poem, focusing on the borrowed sweater and the more or less contemporary sense of place (New York City), and erodes reality through the first three stanzas to find the speaker, by the fourth (and longest) stanza, "in Siberia or Mongolia, / wherever I happened to be." Students reacted well to this slippage of time and place; even if the geographical layout was unclear to them, they knew something had happened to transport the speaker from urban New York to a mountainous terrain elsewhere. I also gave them some background on the poem courtesy of the poet himself, including information about the titular sweater-lender.

A poem such as this really opens the door to multiple interpretations and ideas, and at both of my schools we enjoyed discussing it as much as possible in what time we had. Here are the poems from Shields and Solomon students.

Allen Ginsberg, "A Supermarket in California"

In last week's 3rd, 4th and 5th grade classes, students wrote their first group poems of the year, inspired by Allen Ginsberg's "A Supermarket in California." I chose the poem because of its imagery -- a blend of the everyday and the mythic -- and for its serpentine, oratorical lines; we have mainly been reading poems with more constricted language, and I wanted students to get a look at something quite contrastive, seeing (as well as hearing) the difference. After talking about who (and what) is in the supermarket, I asked what "shopping for images" might mean, and how poets can find inspiration in sometimes unlikely places.

More on the group writing process itself can be found at Shields' and Solomon's blog entries. Hope you enjoy these as much as I do.

Alberto Blanco, "The Parakeets"

In my classes this week, we read and discussed Alberto Blanco's "The Parakeets." The focus was on personification and to what extent Blanco uses it in the poem, but we also delved into trickier territory, for example, asking how exactly does one talk to their shadow, or converse with silence -- isn't silence the opposite of talking? We also discussed Blanco's use of repetition in the poem -- what exactly he chose to repeat, possible reasons why, and what ultimate effect was achieved by doing so. Finally, we focused on the last two lines and why they were important. (I actively endorse good closure in a poem -- not necessarily simply for effect, nor for the sake of a contrived epiphany, but as a methodology for leaving the poem with a sense that you as reader have made a trek, from the equally-important opening, through the mysterious terrain of its body, to a predetermined destination. Admittedly, sometimes in a poem it's the journey and not the destination that matters, but more often than not a good ending gives the reader information that prompts them to re-explore the poem anew, and see it afresh, starting again at the beginning.)

Here are student poems from Shields and from Solomon schools. Enjoy!

Rapid Poetry Reading at Series A Mini Conference

On September 19th I was honored to be asked to participate as part of this rapid poetry reading, culminating the afternoon's special mini conference on poetry and poetics. Also featured here are moderator (and Series A founder) Bill Allegrezza, Tim Yu, Kristy Bowen, Srikanth (Chicu) Reddy, Abra Johnson, Ray Bianchi, Kristy Odelius, Garin Cycholl, Chad Heltzel, Simone Muench and Nick Demske. I'm actually first on this amazing bill, reading "My Biology of Louis Pasture," "New Age Baby Names" and "My Penis," but I encourage listening to the whole reading for some sense of the incredible range of voices and material assembled for this undertaking.

Series A is dedicated to showcasing experimental writing in the US and the Midwest through readings, discussion and performance. Organized by Indiana University Northwest faculty member, William Allegrezza, this series brings exciting authors to the Hyde Park Art Center to share their work.

It looks as if I'll be back early next year for a feature at Series A. Stay tuned!

Larry Levis, "In a Country"

I am the poet-in-residence in two Hands on Stanzas schools this year. So far, work by students (grades 3-5 in one school, all 5th grade in the other, representing a rather wide demographic overall) has been pretty amazing.

I'll try to post their poems here regularly. In the meanwhile, take a gander at Shields and Solomon student work regarding Larry Levis' "In a Country." The prompt's genesis was Election Day this past week, and by its title you can see how this poem might apply. But it goes much further than that, and I was especially pleased by how readily and eagerly students responded to the poem, as well as to each other in our discussion of it. I always come well-prepared with questions and particulars to help them navigate the poem in question, but here they dove right in. Enjoy!

Window Washers

They're doing the semi-annual window washing for our building today. In honor of that -- and the brave folks whose job it is -- here's a poem from my Brief Nudity manuscript, currently circulating among potential publishers.


Window Washers

Stunt men of the air

swinging by a string,

water buckets dangle,

brushes soak inside.

Boots bang window

panes, steadying

descents. Squeegeeing

smudges with Zorro-

esque swirls, black

droplets spatter forty

stories down, dirty

tears

falling

from gratified glass.

Bucketfull of Brains

The good folks at Bucketfull of Brains are having a subscription drive.

For those unfamiliar with this fantastic music (and more) magazine, I suggest you check out their blog, Facebook, and/or My Space pages. Like many other labors of love, BoB has encountered severe financial handships the last couple of years, and even stopped publishing for a while. The last few issues have been one-offs, but now they're looking to begin publishing again on a regular schedule; however, in order to do this they need 400 new subscribers. With print magazines going under at an alarming rate, it would be a shame to see a terrific magazine like BoB suffer the same fate.

For more info on how to subscribe, see the pages, above. You won't be sorry if you support this amazing, one-of-a-kind publication!

Orange Alert Reading Series

Please come to The Whistler this Sunday, October 18th at 6 PM. I'll be featuring as part of the Orange Alert Reading Series, along with Micah Ling, Nathan Graziano, and Simone Muench.

The Whistler is located at 2421 N. Milwaukee Avenue in Chicago, (773) 227-3530. Hope to see you there!

babysue/LMNOP review of Fun with a Purpose

Thanks to venerable pop culture magazine babysue/LMNOP for the swell 5+ review of Fun with a Purpose!

September Mourn

OK, the title of this post is a pretty lame Neil Diamond pun, but it seems to work given the last few weeks.

For one thing, September's arrival pretty much puts a nail in summer's coffin, and while I'm an avowed non-fan of humidity, shorts and volleyball, since I started teaching full-time I've become accustomed to a summer vacation -- or staycation, such as it were. Even though mine was busy in its own right, I welcomed the break from the spring semester's routine, and managed to get a few items crossed off my never-ending to do list.

With September peeking around the corner, my various ducks are beginning to fall into their myriad rows...

A recent bit of good news was getting hired to teach two sections of English composition at McHenry County College. Though I was retained in the eleventh hour (the university has been swamped with a third more incoming students because of its Promise scholarship program) and had to scramble to get my syllabi together in time, everyone has been very supportive and gone out of their way to help me get settled even while juggling their own craziness at the start of a new term. Every English classroom comes equipped with computers and smart electronics -- a luxury I'm not quite used to, but plan to exploit as much as possible. And the students themselves are terrific. Both of my sections are full, and I'm excited to see how this semester goes.

I'll also be tutoring at Northeastern Illinois University, working one-on-one and in small groups with students. Classes start tomorrow. While I'm sorry not to be teaching my own section(s) again this year, I'm curious to see how this flagship tutoring program develops and pleased to be a part of it from the ground floor.

Mid-September I should also begin a new year of poet-in-residence work through The Poetry Center's Hands on Stanzas program. More to come on that front.

Continuing the onslaught of Fun with a Purpose-related news, here's another review and a link to Japanese distribution for our album. The Injured Parties will also be playing this week at Beat Kitchen; the poster, below, is self explanatory.

Finally, the reading celebrating the release of the bilingual Chinese-American anthology, on the no way road to tomorrow, to which I contributed two poems, was held on Friday. It was a great success, and I'm honored to have been a part of this ongoing cultural exchange and experiment.

This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio

Thanks to the good folks at This Is Rock 'n' Roll Radio for playing "American Comfort" on last Sunday's show.

Bill's Music Forum review of Fun with a Purpose

Thanks to Bill's Music Forum for the nice review of Fun with a Purpose. With comparisons to They Might Be Giants, The Hoodoo Gurus and Material Issue, how can you go wrong?