Christmas as an Adult

I guess this could be my first adult Christmas. I say this because this year's holiday feels less like Christmas than ever before. No magic. No whimsy. Just stress and booze and crotchety old bitties to deal with. Christmas Spirit has left the building.

I was talking to my friend Will about this phenomenon last night at his family's Christmas party. He told me he feels the same way about Christmas, that when one becomes an adult, he must learn to find the meaning of Christmas in a different way. It stops being about presents and Santa and magic and wonder. To be quite honest, Christmas is a fucking nightmare most of the time, scrambling to get the right gift, say the right thing so as not to piss off Uncle Winky who was already 3 sheets to the wind before dinner, and hoping to God you can still fit in you svelte new coat after days of feasting on chess squares and egg nog. But I think Will is on to something. He always has been a sharp boy. Christmas is about something else now; it's about getting back in touch with friends and family.

Night before last, I went to Christmas dinner at my best friend from high school Robin's house. We had lamb and corn salad (not very traditional Southern fair) and bottles and bottles of Merlot. Now, I've been knowing Robin for years and I've been going over to her house since I was probably 15, so I know her family well. Her mom, Bonny, is a wonderful woman, but a bit over-bearing, a bit detached. Until she gets some red wine in her. Bonny was all over me hugging me, telling me she loved me, that I'm part of the family, and that she wants me to have my wedding reception in her backyard, no matter if I marry a boy or a girl. It was funny, really, and it was also heart warming. This is what I love about the South: people show their love in the strangest of ways. My daddy will haul wood for the old woman down the road. My momma will sit with old people in the hospital as they die, no matter how distantly related. My best friend's mom will decorate her arbor with roses and twinkle lights so I can say "I do" under it. It's wonderful.

Last night at Will's parent's party, I had a good, long discussion with his mom, Sue, about politics. She told me she was on the planning commission for 11 years (there's a story right there!) and in her time she saw how corrupt those politicians were. She told me they all took bribes under the table. When back in 1994 some Canadian company was going to build a medical waste disposal facility in the soybean field beside Walls and Sacred Heart Elementary schools, she got a permit to protest, and marched from Walls all the way to the courthouse in Hernando. The Canadian company pulled out and Sue Freiman was a hero, at least until the next election.

I love knowing that story. I wouldn't have been privy to that information as a teenager. But there sat Sue and I by the fire, me with my beer, her with her glass of Preseco, talking about the ways of the world. And I really enjoyed it.

So maybe that's what Christmas as an adult is all about.

Christmas in Dixie

I have too little bandwidth to upload my photos (as I borrow wireless from the neighbors when I'm back in Mississip), so rest assured that I will blog about New York very soon. As soon as I can post my photos, too. Until then, I'll share with you some struggles young people face at holiday celebrations with the extended family down South. Here we go.

My 18-year-old cousin is four months pregnant. She attends community college and works as a waitress at a restaurant in town. She has a boyfriend, he's 20, and he's a nice boy. She brought him to meet the family yesterday. While my family members were wonderfully nice to them, my aunt (the old bitty) kept working in passive aggressive commentary about "marriage," "gainful employment," and "the costs of raising a child." For my aunt, my cousin has two options in her current situation: marry the boy who knocked her up or "get rid" of the baby. What a dismally closed-minded set of imperatives.

I don't see what the big deal is. So, she's young, and pregnant, and unmarried. She doesn't even want to marry the boy. That doesn't make her a bad person. A baby sort of slipped up on her? Well, at least we all know she's human now, and human beings often experience blessings conveniently disguised as "mistakes" at the time. This baby is a gift, and s/he will be loved. That's what matters, right? A dozen more horrible things could have happened. She could have killed someone in a drinking and driving accident. She could have joined a terrorist cell. Or (hang with me for this one--I'll explain) she could be a lesbian. I think the whole family should just give her a break and support her. Sheesh.

Now, of course I have no problem with lesbians. Hell, I love them, because I love everyone. But my family--not mom and dad and step dad and brother, but those various aunts, uncles, and cousins who don't know me--can't handle the homosexuality. What I mean by that is they LOVE that there are gay family members, only because they have some pariah to constantly judged their morality against. So what if Hunter is in jail for drug paraphernalia and DUI again, at least he's not gay! It's sickening, really. Compound this with the fact that I'm the gay family member, and a handful of cousins my age have gotten married and are having babies. More power to them. Marriage and babies are events to celebrate. They seem fairly innocuous topics of conversation. Until busy body aunts and my dear, sweet, misguided grandmother turn the discussion on me: "Timmy, when are you gonna bring a girl home for us to meet? I know you will one day. You ain't a queer. I won't ever believe it."

Yep, that's what my grandmother says to be, nearly every time I see her. And I know she's not being mean. She's just concerned about me, because she doesn't know what a gay relationship or life look like. I think it's hard for her to love someone so much (I'm her favorite) and not know how to understand him because his life is so different from what she knows (my grandmother has been married since she was 14). I'm good at just shaking my head and changing the subject. But I wish the extended family would except the fact that I'm not going to bring home some pretty little girl, marry her, have babies, and live in a double wide on the 40-acres in Cedar View where all the other aunts, uncles, cousins live.

Don't get me wrong. I love my grandmother. I know she loves me. She's helped me out in a lot of situations, and I know I can call her for help any time. I also remember to call her and just chat with her a couple times a month, because I know she's old and lonely and a 10 minute phone call from her grandson makes her day. It makes my day, too. So I can look past her grumbling with my sexuality. She really just doesn't understand. So, this Christmas, as I'm sure will be the case in every holiday celebration for the rest of her life, I will smile, nod, and change the subject each time it rolls back around to marriage and babies. Then I'll go to the shop to drink beer and whiskey with the men of the family while the women discuss me. It's fine, though. When they're talking about me, at least they're giving someone else a break.

Update

Back from NYC much poorer and much more cultured. Great times, great pix, great plays. Will update about all of that later (note to self). Be prepared.

Finally Free and Paying It Forward!

Just finished up my out-of-class final for the 17th Century/Age of Milton course. Wrote lots about erotic desire in Donne's "The Flea" and "Holy Sonnet 10" (the 'batter my heart, oh three-personed God' one) and Milton's Samson Agonistes (much better than Paradise Lost, if you ask me). I'm beat, and I know more about Donne's and Milton's psycho-sexuality than any country boy should. I'm getting so good at the 17th century, I'd make it my focus if I wasn't so attached to feminist theory, modern drama, white trash studies (yes, this sub-genre of cultural studies exists), and poetry writing. Which takes me to my next point.

I am inspired by the seasonal generosity of Steph and Donna so much so that I want to participate in this paying it forward thing. Since I have no cool ARCs of Neil Gaiman books to give away, nor am I adept at knitting, sewing, and various other handicrafts, all I have to offer are my word crafting abilities. Therefore, following Donna's model (she's such a trend setter!), I promise an original Tim Sisk poetic creation for the first three readers to comment on my blog.* I promise I won't burden you with any surly teenage-ish "but why doesn't he love me?" rag. I think I grew out of that when I was 22 and a half (wink). Really, I'm not a half-bad poet, I swear. To sweeten the deal, I'll even throw in an NYC trinket.** So go ahead and comment....you know you want to.


*I fear I've opened up a giant can of insecurity: What will I do if I don't get three comments? (write a poem about it)
**This promise is entirely contingent upon how reckless of a spender the Big Apple makes me.

In the Home Stretch

All of my first graduate school papers are finished. Just took all my books back to the library, so if you've been looking for all the texts on Early Modern gender and Shakespeare feminist criticism, they'll be back on the shelves by week's end. Now, I must complete an outside of class final exam, and I'm 1-2-3 home free....Almost. I mean, I still have the NYC trip beginning on Thursday (that's right, THURSDAY). The small town boy is going places, yessir.

Just so you know, my final paper for the Renaissance Tragedy class, entitled "Gender, Agency, and "Witchspace" in Macbeth" is probably the best academic paper I've ever written. So, it could have been researched better, and I'm sure it's vague and tangential in places. But I have an interesting (and dare I say new?) reading of the text: I argue that the witches in the play are gendered female (the topic of their gender is highly debated among critics) and that they have agency to de-stabilize the patriarchal dominant culture (it's almost absurd to argue the witches have agency in some critical circles) because of their marginalized space, which I term "witchspace" (way to invent a concept!). Witchspace is a gendered arena in which destruction, disorder, and bewitching are enacted on the dominant culture through Macbeth. The witches have agency in this space because they project the social problem of what to do with women who don't fit into patriarchal gender imperatives back on society. In doing so, they undo patriarchy. Check out 4.1--the necromancy scene--where the witches create the brew that reveals the prophecy that ultimately undoes Macbeth and the state (the whole "none of woman born, Burnim Wood to Dusinane" thing) with body parts of marginalized persons--a Jew, a Tartar, a Turk, and a "birth-strangled babe ditch-delivered by a drab" if you want to see textual evidence of the power marginalized bodies in marginalized spaces have.

Yessir, if I learned one thing at good ol' UCA, it's how to do a close reading of a text. Many thanks to Mary Ruth Marotte and Wayne Stengel for pushing me to dig in and do sound, interesting, and textually supported readings.

Tomorrow is the final exam in my 101 class. Last day with my kids. My mentor's bringing donuts, and I'm supplying the OJ. I'll miss those brilliant young men and women.

Off to pack. Can you believe it--I'm three days from New York City, and I'm three days from you.

Do It Like a Big Bear! Grr!!

Obviously, you can take us away from UCA, but you'll never UCA away from us.

Neglectful Blogger

Sheesh. I have had such a busy week, with almost nothing to show for my late nights and stressful days. Why is it that the end of the semester presents more opportunities than ever before to procrastinate? Case in point: on Wednesday at 2:00 pm, I ran into another first year in the library. He suggested we get coffee at a local shop and study. Sounded good to me. Flash forward 11 hours later, it's 1 a.m., and I'm stumbling in my door drunk and hoarse after an afternoon and evening of bar hoping then karaoke singing (my rendition of "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves" was the hit of the night). I won't even go into Thursday night except to say I finally got home at the time most people get up for work in the morning (5:30 am!) That's what happens when you don't take your own car.

Suffice to say, I will be in the library all day. I must write 8 more pages of my paper. Must. Then I'm sticking a fork in it. I'm excited by the prospect of being done with paper writing for a whole month in just 3 days. In 6, I'll be in New York.

Now, off to the library!

The Problem of People in Lyric Poetry

Working on an essay that situates my lyric poems into the broader concerns of lyric poetry. I'm writing about the relationship between poet and people and how (the issues surrounding relationships with) people appear in and behind lyric poetry, though they are ultimately filtered through the poet's self and experience. Anyway, found the best passage ever from Sylvia Plath's Unabridged Journals (of course I would quote Sylvia Plath) to support my personal ars poetica, and now I will share with you:

I love people. Everybody. I love them, I think, as a stamp collector loves his collection. Every story, every incident, every bit of conversation is raw material for me. My love's not impersonal yet not wholly subjective either. I would like to be everyone, a cripple, a dying man, a whore, and then come back to write about my thoughts, my emotions, as that person. But I am not omniscient. I have to live my life, and it is the only one I'll ever have. And you cannot regard your own life with objective curiosity all the time.

One paper down...

two more and a final exam to go.

I'm finished with my first real graduate school paper. It's a 12-pager for my 17th Century/Age of Milton class entitled "Heart Strings, Purse Strings: Longing, Landscape, and the Problem of Patronage in Aemilia Lanyer's "The Description of Cookham." And you know what, I don't think it's half bad. Tomorrow morning I'm going to finish up the works cited page and give it a final read through, so I hope I still feel it's a strong paper after that. I think I will.

I took some chances with this paper. I wrote about a relatively unknown female poet who doesn't have a large critical tradition. I argued that she flexes a subversive muscle and uses the country-house poem, normally a place where aristocratic patronage is celebrated, to critique the system. And I think my reading is insightful, intelligent, and textually sound. Let's hope my teacher thinks so, too.

Now, I'm moving on to the essay situating my poems within the lyric tradition, then finishing up the 15-20 pager on the witches in Macbeth. It's going to be a busy week, but I'm ready for it. As lame as this might sound, I'm actually excited to write these essays, show what I know, test out some new ideas.

Good luck to all you students, teachers, and student-teachers out there!

Tragedies of Paper Preparation: A Picture Post

I'm writing a research paper on the witches in Macbeth. I'm arguing that they do have agency in the play, even though most critics assert the opposite. Boo on them. I've had to read a lot of books to find support for my argument.



Sometimes I feel a little overwhelmed in my attempts to surmount the mountain of texts.



Last night I unwound by going to 80s night at a local bar with some folks in my program.



I didn't work on my paper, but I did shimmy until the wee hours of the morning.



So, tonight I'm violating my No Homework on Friday Night Rule and playing catchup. Good luck to my fellow students out there trying to make everything come together and maintain sanity before the semester ends.

Words Do Have Weight

Cash Advance Loans

Filched this from Donna. How does your blog measure up?

Heart of a Teacher

*Warning, gushing teacher story to follow.

I know this graduate student, who, like me, is teaching English 101. He's a pretty alright guy, a bit socially awkward, but brilliant and fairly kind nonetheless. The thing is, every time I talk to him, he's always complaining about his students. Not once have I heard him say a positive thing about them. Not once. They're all "jackasses" and "little shits," occupying a portion of his time that could be better spent pursuing more useful endeavors. I'm always struck by his negative attitude about teaching and his students. What's more important than teaching young people how to think for themselves? Who is more important than those little shits who will be our coworkers, colleagues, neighbors, maybe even bosses one day? I'm hard pressed to find good answers to those questions.

The truth is, I love my students. I have two more days with them, then I'll probably never see most of them again. And I'm sad as hell about it. As much as I grumble about cashing in on my WASP status, teaching a roomful of WASPS, I have really enjoyed working with and getting to know my kids. Today a few of them even thanked me as I walked around the room to check on each one as they sat at their computer terminals dutifully hunting down articles for their upcoming research papers. It made me feel like a million bucks, man.

I've had the pleasure of spending this semester with 23 vulnerable yet eager college freshmen, and I can't help but beam with pride when I read what they write now, here at the end. Okay, so a lot of the same errors still abound in their papers--run-on sentences, weak thesis statements--but by god they are thinking about bigger issues now, and I can see in their writing an engagement with the larger issues surrounding low wage work, gender in advertising, or technology in education. They'd got what it takes to think for themselves. I value each one of them, and I really feel confident that they are on the right track to becoming concerned and informed adult citizens of the world.

A month or so ago, I had them all research their careers of interest at the Occupational Outlook website and write about what they discovered about their dream jobs. Hands down, none of them expected how much schooling they'd have to endure to ultimately become the professionals they want to be. I tried to be positive about their goals, but I still wanted to be realistic: what are the odds of having 5 doctors, 4 lawyers, and 7 big time CEOs in the same first year college writing class after all? Still, I hope they all continue to dream big.

I know they're freshmen, and they'll change their minds about what they want to do and who they want to be. Look at me. I'm in graduate school still figuring out all that stuff. And as realistic as I am about what it takes to be successful in this world, I might sound quite un-Tim-like when I say this: I hope Andrew and Carrie become nurses, and that Eli is a sportscaster on ESPN. I'm rooting for Morgan in her pursuit of a career in landscape architecture, and if Megan doesn't become a psychologist, I don't know what I'll do with myself. Alex has the smarts to be an actuary, if he'd just focus a little more in class, and Gabby will be the best damned publicist Hollywood has ever seen. Here's to future veterinarian Chase, music producer Daniel, and power broker Jasmine. Here's to all of those kids, those smart, interesting students, as they pursue this great experiment called adulthood. I hope I never forget any of them.

Learning inside the box

I do not hate graduate school. I have surprised myself a number of times this semester by getting really engaged in class discussions about Paradise Lost, even though I loathe the epic on so many levels, developed an unexpected love for Shakespearean tragedy (he's so bawdy!), and have discovered that Thomas Middleton's The Changeling might be one of the top 5 raunchiest things I've ever read, which of course makes me love it. I've most definitely become a better poet, and I've finally learned to (or at least I've begun to learn to) read a poem. All of these things are good, and I'm glad I have learned them.

What I've also learned, or at least taken notice of for the first time, is how classist and vanilla higher education can be. I study literature, a discipline rich with so many important and interesting minority voices--the voices I want to hear, I want to study. So why am I hard pressed to find, say, a person of color in the English department, or a gender studies course, or another gay man in my program? I'm refreshed by the number of women in English at UT, working both as professors and graduate students, but I'm disappointed by the patriarchal structure that seems to have subsumed their voices, at least that's how it appears on the surface, because, while I respect anyone's research interests, I haven't found many people who seem really interested in studying--in hearing--the crucial voices of the racial, ethnic, religious, gender, sexual, etc., minorities.

I can give the UT English department this much--it's chock full of wonderful people who seem interested and often helpful when I introduce myself as Tim Sisk, first-year MA interested in Feminism, queer theory, and poetry. But it seems like the buck stops there, and I'm left with a nebulous list of authors to read and people outside the department to consult, and I've yet to find a professor in English who teaches these topics I'm interested in researching. In all fairness, I may not be looking in the right places or asking the right people, but in a conversation with the graduate director about the suspicious lack of even a women's lit course (I got that much at UCA), he agreed with me on the importance of such classes and said perhaps in the next five years they'd hire a gender studies person.

What I'm getting at is this: I can make do with the education I'm receiving. I love learning, and on most days I love literature, so nearly any class in any genre from any period (besides maybe 18th century English novels) would offer something I find interesting and important. The problem is, though, I sometimes feel like I'm stuck settling for what's canonical, what's safe. In an English department that painfully lacks diversity in the professors and the students, I sometimes feel like I'm part of the problem and not the solution. I'm a white, college-educated male spending another two years, getting another free degree, taking classes with and teaching classes to middle and upper-middle class white people about largely middle class white concerns. A large part of me feels like I'm buying into an out-dated and repressive patriarchal system, that I'm not living the change I want to see in the world.

I'm not religious. These days I don't believe in much of anything as far as a higher power is concerned, but I really do buy into the old aphorism, "to whom much is given, much is expected." And I've been given lots, y'all. So many people have sacrificed and believed in me to get me to where I am today. I am grateful, and I'm not lying when I say I want to show my gratitude by changing my little corner of the world the best way I can. I sometimes wonder if being in graduate school is doing that.

I can convince myself that getting this masters will make me a more experienced, more knowledgeable teacher for my future students. I'd really like to do Teach For America in the future, or at least work in an at needs school district. Those students deserve a well-educated teacher just as much as the rich kids at, say, Webb or Pulaski Academy. What really scares me though is that I'll lose this sense of duty I have to the kids who need a leg up in this world, that by May 2009 I'll chalk this notion up to youthful idealism. Higher education has a way of changing people by claiming their priorities and their voices, and I'm resistant to losing my ideals and forgetting who I am and why I'm here. My moral compass is askew enough already.

I guess I won't do anything drastic like cause an insurrection or drop out of grad school. I am here for a reason, after all. I'll just wait (must I always be waiting?) until I can be the teacher and person I want to be. In the meantime, at least I can write papers about under appreciated 17th century female poets.

Taking the Right Way Home

I got a little weepy when driving through Memphis back to Knoxville yesterday. At the I-240 interchange past the Brooks Rd. exit, the right lane takes you to eastbound I-40 towards Nashville, and the left lane takes you to westbound I-40 towards Little Rock. After resisting the temptation to give UT, my final (unfinished) papers, and the assistantship the finger and hightail it to Central Arkansas for better or worse, I chose the right lane, followed I-240 around to the the Nashville exit, and once again was presented with the same choice: West to Little Rock, East to Nashville, then on to Knoxville. I lost my bearings for just a second.

See, I'm one of those people who (halfway) believes in the power of signs. Not like stop signs, but signs from above (which is problematic for me because I really don't believe in god) that lure me toward a certain....something. Usually when confronted with the same decision more than once, I freak out a bit, nearly convincing myself that something out there is giving me another chance to make the right decision. However, I invariably stick with the choices I've already made, signs be damned.

I guess I can convince myself that choosing the Nashville exit, which was the right lane after all, was the right decision. I did make some significant progress on one of my papers today, and would have made more had I remembered to dress appropriately for the arctic environs of Hodges Library. Besides, I'd stand to lose a lot by giving up and going back to Conway: free school, teaching experience, newly budding friendships. And all for what? A memory of a perfect time in a perfect place with perfect people when I was perfectly happy. Only it wasn't, they weren't, I wasn't. I was a basket case for most of my undergraduate career, over-extending myself with classes and RSOs and student publications because I learned a long time ago that if I keep myself impossibly busy, I don't have time to think about what's bothering me. Repression has been a key factor in my coming of age, I tell you, and it took me getting away from what I know to realize that.

But nostalgia has a way of skewing the truth of matters. For a little longer than a split second, I thought I might actually go AWOL from McClung Tower and back to a time that will not exist again in a place with people that surely have changed since I made my departure that weepy day at the end of July 2007. Of course they've changed. I've changed. And I'm glad I had the good sense to realize these facts before I merged left.

thanks-giving

Even though the Thanksgiving holiday is much more stressful than it should be for those of us taking class--what with the seminar papers and poetry portfolios due the week we come back--I'm still grateful for the holiday, not only as chance to play catch-up on school work, but as a time to re-evaluate, re-assess, and give credit where credit is due. Therefore, I submit to you, in no particular order, ten things I'm thankful for this year.

1. My family. They may be trashy, and they may drive me crazy, but, by god, I wouldn't be who I am or where I am today without their sacrifices.
2. Friendship. I've more than learned this Year of Irrevocable Change that friends don't stay friends forever, but the moments their lives overlap are magic. And I'll always be grateful for the magic moments.
3. College scholarships and graduate assistantships. Honestly, I'm not sure I'd have gone as far as I have in school if I hadn't received so much funding from the powers that be. I'd definitely not be in grad school. As much as I try to stick it to the man, I must thank him (though I'd much prefer to think of the Scholarship Bestower as an earth mother-type) for taking a chance on a kid like me.
4. Poetry. I always liked it, but it wasn't until I was actually reading it and discussing it as an art form that I realized it can save the world.
5. Interlibrary Loan. Don't do research without it!
6. The All-Mighty MP3 Player. Every day I walk across campus, it's like I'm in a music video, and I love it.
7. My English 101 mentor. She's a wonderful teacher. She's a helpful classmate. She's a smart cookie, a good friend, AND a native Mississippian. What's not to love?
8. Graduate school. I have grown up more in a semester than I possibly did in four years of college. It was tough to leave Conway, to leave a life I was quite happy living, but I don't regret it. This train is only moving forward.
9. The University of Central Arkansas, the place where I came of age, where I found my voice, where I hated, then loved, myself enough to move on. More fond memories than not for UCA. Doin' in like a Big Bear since 2003 and still counting!
10. You, friend, classmate, mentor, reader. I'm thankful for your readership and your comments, for helping me along this part of Tim's Great Adventure. You're awesome.

And just a side note, I'm grateful for any author/poet who has a character named 'Tim' in her work, because I'm just narcissistic enough to love it when I see my name in print. :-)

Happy Thanksgiving.

Dishwater

(because I'm heading back to the old homestead on Wednesday, and I'm thinking about my grandmother, whom we affectionately refer to as Muffy.)

Dishwater

Slap of the screen door, flat knock

of my grandmother's boxy black shoes

on the wooden stoop, the hush and sweep

of her knob-kneed, cotton-aproned stride

out to the edge and then, toed in

with a furious twist and heave,

a bridge that leaps from her hot red hands

and hangs there shining for fifty years

over the mystified chickens,

over the swaying nettles, the ragweed,

the clay slope down to the creek,

over the redwing blackbirds in the tops

of the willows, a glorious rainbow

with an empty dishpan swinging at one end.

From Delights and Shadows by Ted Kooser

Found poetry

What do you guys think of found poetry? I'm skeptical about most of it, because I don't think it can stand on its own without some crafting. I'm fine with using found grocery lists in Kroger shopping carts and flirtations written on receipts and five dollar bills as inspiration for something, but I don't know how often these things function as poems on their own.

Still, this one is funny and inspiring. It sort of reminds me of something I found Friday night at the Restaurant of Unconscious Fork Dropping: A shopping list written in an unsteady hand with on two items listed--pads and denture cleanser. It was paper clipped to a torn off opening flap for Equate denture cleanser.

My mind is still circling around exactly what kind of pads the denture-wearing mystery shopper intends to buy. Maxi? Heating? Oxy? This is just what I need, another distraction.


Now, back to Macbeth!

The Geritol Diaries

Goddamn. When did I get so old? Moving to Knoxville and starting graduate school has instilled such grandmotherly ways in me, I'm not sure what to think about myself anymore.

I am 22-years-old. I am single. What I lack in the looks department, I more than compensate for with my razor sharp wit and general knowledge of a few interesting subjects that enable me to engage someone in sustained conversation. I like people, I'd much rather go out that stay home, and in my past life, I was known to be quite the life of the party. But it seems like all of those qualifications have been nullified, specifically this weekend.

Here's how I spent my Friday night.

After a long (and wonderfully tiring) day reading, coffeeing, and lunching with friends, I got home at 6:30. I was beat. Usually I catch a second wind after a few minutes to relax, so when my friend Jenny called around 7 to see if I wanted to go have dinner with her and some other first years, I accepted. I figured being around people would energize me, like it normally does.
Man, was I wrong.

Though the conversation was good and lots of laughs were had, I found myself nodding in and out of consciousness. I'm not exaggerating. Get this picture: me and three other people roughly my age in a not-so-crowded family style restaurant, Friday evening, around 8:30. The group of twentysomethings is laughing and eating and thoroughly enjoying each other's company, when BAM!, the balding one of the bunch drops his fork to his salad plate with a rapturous clank. His head jolts up, and he rubs his eyes. Uproarious laughter ensues.

That's right, I fell asleep while eating last night. It wasn't deep sleep, mind you, and I immediately recovered my fork and wherewithal, made a joke of it, and resumed my meal. But I was so tired I nodded off in public. Old men do this at bus stops. My grandmother does this in her recliner while watching Divorce Court every afternoon. Spunky 22-year-olds who are out with their friends, however, do not.

I was home by 10 last night, much to my friends' dismay because they wanted me to go out on the town with them, in bed by 10:45, and slept through the night until I bolted wide awake at 6:30 this morning and couldn't go back to sleep. Believe me, I tried to doze off again, knowing full well that Saturday is my only day of the week to sleep past 8 a.m., and by god, I was going to do it. I have principles.

Well, principles be damned this morning. I gave up my struggle, got up and put on a pot of coffee and one of my wide assortment of ugly thrift store cardigans, read the blogs and the news, ate a piece of toast, all while muttering curses at myself for not being able to stay out late and sleep til noon like I used to.

Of course, because of the interruption in the normally scheduled programming of my life, today has been a total bust. Instead of using the extra 3 hours this morning to do anything productive, I lazed about and sipped my coffee, waiting for the used bookstore to open so I could go by B.H. Fairchild's Early Occult Memory Systems of the Lower Midwest a friend gave me a hot lead on yesterday. (hardback, only $5!) Wonderful poems, y'all. I really haven't been disappointed with any of them (and I've read them all, instead of working on my Shakespeare paper...), but the whole book is completely worth "The Follies Burlesque, Market Street, Kansas City."

This afternoon I decided to go for a walk in the cemetery down the street from my apartment (procrastination is an evil, evil bastard), convinced that some exercise would inspire me to write my paper. Instead, I want to write about some of the things I saw. Some doosies were to be had, including a section of the cemetery called "The Garden of Crucifixions" (yes, more than one, and I'm hoping its the place where those criminals so heinous to be crucified by the Knox County Department of Corrections are interred), a sign reading "Special Price Mausoleum Limited Time!", and this name I lifted off a child's tombstone who died in September 1993: Alexandria Samoan Gass. If any of you writers want to borrow one of these bits of inspiration, feel free. Just let me read what you write after you're finished.

I'd like to tell you that I'm going to publish this post, girt my loins, and work on the paper whose deadline is menacingly staring me in the face. But it's after 6, almost my bed time. And to be honest with you, I am pretty tired.

For the Wordamours

Or just the language usage Nazis.

9 Words That Don't Mean What You Think.

I'll admit (because, in the eternal words of Annie Lennox, "Would I lie to you?"), I'm guilty of using irregardless, probably in the last week or so. Looks like from now on, I'll think before I speak--novel idea, I know.

Any words on the list you use incorrectly?

In other news, I got a notice in my mailbox at school about a new organization for trans-awareness at UT called Gender Defiant. They're showing the documentary Southern Comfort next Tuesday night. The flier says the film is "about the life of Robert Eads, a 52-year-old female to male transsexual who lives in the back hills of Georgia." It sounds really interesting, but I have class when they're screening it. Anyone seen it?

AND, it's *snowing* in Knoxville. Yesterday the temp was in the high sixties. Try and tell me global warming is a myth.

Two Cents on a "Dollar Bill"

I kind of like this little Chitwood poem. I mean, it's not the best poem I've ever read, but I've certainly read worse (particularly in Best American Poetry 2006--Billy Collins, what were you smoking?). Anyway here's the poem--

Dollar Bill

Small-town AM station,
morning show,
still doing a gospel number every hour.
Who's listening?
Bacon tenders, baby sitters.
He yucks it up for the insurance office crew,
the stop-in, mini-mart gas shacks.
He's on the counter at The Hub,
talking coffee cups up and down.
A clown, a daily goofball,
regular as sunup and death,
he reads the obits from the local paper
and sometimes adds a personal note.
Even the disembodied here have an anecdote.
Dashboard and countertop,
new tunes and same old same old,
beer on sale, car tires, paint,
link sausage, the grind and groove
of tune. We're coming up on noon.
Outside, in the parking lot, sparrows bathe
in the dust. Empires rise and fall. He'll notice
and say nothing of it on the air.

The "regular as sunup and death" bit kind of annoy me. While they are distinctively Southern colloquialisms, I think Chitwood probably could have avoided the pitfalls of cliche and still maintained his Southern voice. Still though, I sort of like where the poem ends up, the d.j. noticing the wrongs of the world but saying nothing about them on the air. It's his job to entertain, not inform. So he'll do his job and do it well. I could stand with a little more culpability on the speaker's part, but I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

This guy, however, is not. A scathing critique, but interesting nonetheless. I'm intrigued by what the critique says about the next to last line: "Empires rise and fall." He's right; it's a politically charged statement. Somehow, though, I think the critic misses the point. He implicates Chitwood for aggrandizing imperialism in a global world, a writer who's perched in his ivory tower in a country that rapes all the others. I don't think that's what Chitwood does. I see the poem functioning as commentary on small town life, on the ways in which people are blissfully ignorant and intend to stay that way. That's really the way it is, y'all. Don't believe me? Come to Thanksgiving dinner with my extended family. While I'll agree with the critic that Chitwood's d.j. is anesthetized--that the poet should make the d.j.'s voice more immediate and inviting for the reader--I'm not willing to go so far to say Chitwood is pushing an imperialistic agenda. In fact, I'm inclined to think that's a pretty ridiculous over-reading of the poem, but hey, what do I know?

In any event, you should all read Chitwood's "Talking to Patsy Cline." Here's an excerpt (all I could find online, disappointingly) from Google Book Search.

It's a sensation

This is interesting. I stole it from Steph's site. It's the latest Arkansas Literary Forum with three non-fiction pieces by Damien Echols, a kid sentenced to death after the West Memphis 3 murders 14 years ago. Man, I was 8-years-old when that happened. I grew up in a town that bordered West Memphis, Arkansas, to the west, and I remember the flood of new students who came to my elementary school, their parents hoping twenty miles and a Mississippi address would save their precious babes from Satan-worshiping goth teenagers on the prowl for small children. It's crazy how sensationalism works in the small town South. Mention the word "Satan" or "Wiccan" (or "Muslim" or "homosexual") and people lose all capacity for reason and throw their good sense out the pick up truck's sliding cab window.

Maybe I'm being too hard on my beloved South. I've never lived anywhere else (though, if you ask me, Knoxville's not the South), so I don't have any experience to offset my opinion of the way the Bible belt tightened its hold on the media and refused to paint those boys, especially Echols, any other way but downright evil, all because they were some underprivileged and confused teenagers who liked to wear black and probably smoke a little dope. If that's grounds for the death penalty, a handful of my buddies from high school should be up for an appeal pretty soon.

What's done is done, I guess, though I hate to take such a lackadaisical stance. Check out Echols's story about living on death row. Not the best writing I've ever read, but interesting nonetheless. While you're at it, check out the stories by the dynamic duo, John and Stephanie Vanderslice. They were my teachers for many, many classes.

Does anyone know (Steph, Monda?) if one has to be a current Arkansas resident to publish in the ALF? If we can get around the residency issue (and the fact that I'm not Arkansan by birth, but by choice), I'm interested in submitting some of my stuff.

The Case of the Unidentified Text Messager

Yesterday afternoon after playing frisbee golf with some first-years for a few hours in the most beautiful park I've ever seen, I got home and checked my cell phone to find a text message I'd received from a number I did not recognize. With my phone's caller ID feature, usually a name and not a number appears in the from line of the text message. However, this number was not in my SIM card's memory, but I recognized from the 870 area code, my messager was from Arkansas.

The message informed me that unidentified Arkansan would call me once s/he was finished eating. Now, I'm not one of those people who doesn't respond to unknown texts or calls. I have friends who won't answer if they don't recognize the number, but I'm too anal for that. I answer, and if I see that I've missed a call, I call back. You never know if the call might be an important one.

So that's what I did--texted back. I didn't inquire about the identity of the unknown texter, though, because, well, in the same way it's embarrassing to ask someone her name when you know she's told you more than once before, I feel the same way about not knowing phone numbers that have potentially been given to me numerous times previously. Therefore I responded to unidentified Arkansan texter that s/he should just call me when his/her meal was over. I'm much better at voice recognition anyway.

I was pleasantly surprised when a half hour later I received a call from now unidentified caller and answered to discover an old Arkansas acquaintance on the other end. (It was Jarred Kibbey for my once-Honors Collegian readers). He was in town for the Arkansas-Tennessee game, and he decided to give me a holler since he remembered I live in Knoxville now. I met up with him around 7 last night, pleasantly surprised to discover he had Phillip Worley and Brandon Walser in tow. We visited for a couple hours over at Caitlin's apartment, and it was nice to reminisce about the Conway years and discover what each of them are doing with their lives now. Kibbey's married and enrolled in an MA program in bioethics at Loyola-Chicago. Phillip's in law school at UVA, and Brandon's a second-year med student at UAMS in Little Rock. Looks like kids from the small-town South can really be somebodies.

The kicker to my story is this: While I knew all of those guys when we were at UCA, I wasn't necessarily friends with any of them. Acquaintances, yes. Bosom buddies, no. None are people I'd go out of my way to visit on a school break. But it's really nice to know that they'd make time for me when they were in my neck of the woods. I'd been missing Arkansas a bit for the past couple of weeks, so spending time with some familiar faces talking about familiar places was nice. Next time I'm in Virginia or Central Arkansas, I might have to give them a call.

Dance like you never forgot where you came from

Today on campus, I saw a girl breaking it down by the Eupora fountain in the concrete landing strip called McClung Plaza. Man, was she moving, stomping her feet, twisting her middle, jolting her head from side to side. A boy sat on the fountain's lip reading a newspaper like he didn't see this blonde Rockette dancing out her inner choreography a few feet away.
She had headphones in, moving to the grooves channeled into her ears. I even heard her not so much singing but aspirating her lip sync. She was playing that ever necessary but dangerous game-- dancing like no one was watching.

I envy her lack of inhibition.

In other news, I spent the evening having happy hour beers and free-range chicken sandwiches with some MA friends at the Tomato Head. While waiting to be seated, I saw a group of older folks in Razorbacks sweatshirts leave the restaurant. These my people, I stopped them to ask where they hailed from, and guess what? They were from Conway. Small world, huh? They asked me if I knew a bunch of people I don't know (never was big in the Central Arkansas social scene), but I loved running into people from my old hometown. Reminded me of when I lived in Conway, how I could go anywhere--the coffee shop, Target, the movie theatre--and run into at least one (but usually more) people I knew. I miss that part of small town life.

I'm also nostalgic for my rural roots, but not so much I'm willing to go back to them anytime soon. Until then, Michael Chitwood can tide me over--

From cutting the nuts out of a bull calf's bag with a Barlow,
from laying case knives on a dress pattern,
from running a trotline and baiting the hooks with gone liver,
from mashing a tobacco worm into a green blot,
from crimping dough at the piecrust edge,
from whisking an egg,
from whipping a boy with a switch he fetched,
from doffing a bolt of taffeta,
from working the one arm of the adding machine,
from beating the answers out of the erasers
Oh Lamb of God, they come.

from "The Saved"

"Come into my world, I've got to show, show, show you"

A month or so ago, my friend Michelle posted about her memories of traveling Europe with her best friends while sharing headphones on trains to listen to a Rilo Kiley CD in a walkman. For her, those songs will always take her back to that time, when she was a younger, different self, seeing new things with good friends, and she can't help but feel nostalgic for that old self when she hears the music.

Her post struck me, because she was so dead on about the problem of time. Time is something we discussed in my poetry class on Tuesday night after reading an essay by David Baker in Radiant Lyre. For Baker, time is something constructed by people, but also something we are inevitably opposed to. This opposition is evident in lyric poetry when you think of John Donne chiding the sun to leave him and his lover to their love making. But the role of the lyric (or in this case, the pop song) also has to be to work within the parameters of time. It encapsulates a moment that we can always go back to and reinfuse with time, with memory, and understand again why the lyric is so powerful.

That said, I want to take a cue from Michelle and share a song that stands in my history and always reminds me of wonderful things, but particularly an amazingly debauched Spring Break camping trip with my Writing Center compatriots back at UCA. God, I miss those crazy kids some days. Anyway, the song is Regina Spektor's "Hotel Song," and I remember it being the theme song of our trip. Eight tipsy (and a few stoned) twentysomethings piled into a red Jeep Cherokee tearing up the gravel roads of podunk Ponca, Arkansas, singing out the windows, "a little bag of cocaine, a little bag of cocaine, so who's the girl wearing my dress?" It was one of those moments when you can't possibly wish to be anywhere else, that time could end then and you'd know you felt really alive at least once. God, the Ozarks couldn't offer us enough that day. Here's a video of Regina Spektor for those of you who are unfamiliar with the song (shame on you!)



Hey, it's Thursday. That means the weekend is almost here. Godspeed, friends, making it through the last two days. Can you believe the end of this semester is within sight?

"locking me to you/ As if we were still twenty-two"

Remember those 6-10 lines? Well for the past five days or so, the strangest images have been popping up in mine: emo (girl-jeans-wearing, chain-smoking, angsty-poetry-writing) boys and (this is outta nowhere) Toad Suck Park. Last night I tried to write the emo boy poem. I used a picture to inspire me. I got some good language on the page ("a close rubbing-up-against in the mess of my generation dancing like a pow wow on X), but the poem still needs direction. I woke up this morning thinking about who I could read to give me a model for where to go, and I automatically thought of Thom Gunn.

Gunn approaches homoerotic desire and situations in his poetry very directly, but he's not as crass as, say, Allen Ginsberg (no Howl-ing images of "angel headed hipsters fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists" in Gunn's work). I thought I'd check out some of his poems to see how I can deal with the similar theme going on in the poem I'm writing.

What I discovered is I don't like the way Gunn does what I want to do. I don't like his use of heroic couplets and ABAB rhyme scheme. I do, though, like how he manages to expand the situation from one erotic moment to something larger, more affecting. That's why I'll share this poem with you:

The Hug

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

Set backs and soul-searching

Boy, was it a rough Monday. Allow me to list a few things that have got me soul-searching:

After spending all weekend reading tons of essays on Jesuits, witchcraft, queer theory, and female agency in English Renaissance drama for a paper I'm trying to write on Macbeth, I met with my professor and gave her a working bibliography and thesis statement that she said weren't, uh, working. We came up with a better paper idea and she even recommended a few articles and books, but, wow, I'm back at square one with this 20-page paper due in four weeks.

Said professor informed me that I have very insightful ideas about the plays we're reading, but I have a tendency of confusing myself and my audience in class and in my writing by using theoretical ideas and vocabulary incorrectly. And here I was thinking I knew what de-stabilized agency meant. (Hey Donna, remember when you told me the exact same thing when I was a freshman in your Honors Core II class? Guess I'll never learn).

A PhD student sent a nasty email to all the grad students in English because someone recalled a book she had checked out from the library. See, here at UT, grad students can check out books for much longer than undergrads and lots of people take out books for months, which is fine until someone else needs them. Now, I don't know if it was me who recalled her book (she didn't give the title), but I was very put off when she said "it's rude to recall someone else's book," especially since, last time I checked, library books were for everyone to use. Makes me think academia can bring out the worst in people.

I'm dangerously uninterested in my Milton class. The only other time I was ever this uninterested in a literature class was when I took Milton as an undergrad. I worry what I'll write my research paper about (maybe what a jerk God is in Book 3 of Paradise Lost), especially since today in class I seriously thought about how maybe taking a semester off would be refreshing at this point, or at least remind me of my priorities.

But then what would I do if I did take time off? Move back to Mississippi? Work at Subway? Been there. Done that. Not a fan of doing either. Looks like I'll suck it up, do the reading, write the papers, and hack it through grad school. I may move back home one day, but for the foreseeable future, this train is only moving forward.

I hope you had a better Monday that I did. Here's to making the week better!

The times, they're a-changing

Come Daylight Savings Time each year I can't help but think of my daddy.
My daddy, sitting on his couch with his blond yippy pooch in his lap fumbling with his cell phone, calling me (usually more than once) to remind me to change my clocks. He's done it ever since I've been an adult, or, if that doesn't work for you, ever since I haven't lived at home.

Except he didn't call to remind me this year. Must have slipped his mind. Daddy's mind has been slipping more and more in the past couple of years. He's nearing sixty. He's got liver trouble. Alzheimer's runs in the family.

I'm expecting him to call in an hour or so, though, after he thinks he's given me enough time to shake the sleep off. He's good about letting me get up and around before calling on Sunday mornings. He'll tell me all about the Ole Miss game yesterday, how my high school's team isn't going to make it to the playoffs. He'll tell me who we know that went to jail over the weekend--Daddy's an avid paper-reader and police scanner-listener--and who's in the funeral home (because to say Ms. Francis died just isn't polite).

I will listen. I will nod, and he'll know I'm nodding even when he can't see me. I'll say yessir, and then, when he's finished not talking to me as much as talking at me, he'll tell me he has to go and hang up without saying goodbye. And my feelings won't be hurt, because that's just how he is. For some reason or another, goodbyes are too hard for my daddy.

This Robert Hayden poem has always reminded me of him:

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he’d call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love’s austere and lonely offices?

Remember to set your clocks back an hour.

Marriage and the lyric problem

I know two twenty-year-olds who plan on becoming engaged, but they aren't engaged. Essentially, they are engaged to be engaged. Am I missing something? I'm not engaged, nor do I plan on becoming engaged any time soon (that would require a willing party to consent to my marriage proposal, after all), but I think if I were looking toward the future, I might think about asking someone to marry me. I might plan it out and weigh my options, and I might even discuss marriage with that person. But announcing to the world--and expecting cheers and congratulations--for planning on promising to marry someone but not promising yet? Give me a break.

My thinking about marriage comes as a result of class tonight. My mind wanders, even in classes I really enjoy (looks I've incriminated myself to my past teachers who read this blog), and as I gazed around the room, I realized something: I was the only non-married (or long-term committed) person sitting at the table. Not that that changes how I perform in the class, but it's something to think about. I wonder how marriage informs my classmates' writing. Husbands/wives/significant others have appeared in at least three people's poems that I can remember. I also remember really liking those poems, the ways they dealt with the problem of people. If living in the world with with other people is an issue that complicates the lyric, I wonder what living in a house with another person with whom you share life, love, and a last name does to the writer of the lyric.

My poetry, not surprisingly, is self-interested. I write a lot about what's going on with me, how other people's words and actions bear upon my life. What's at stake, in my life and in my writing, is something internal, like a struggle to find and voice a meaning for who I am as an individual. When I write about other people, like my mother or my grandmother or a woman I over hear spouting anti-feminist rhetoric on the street, what I'm doing is working through how they affect me in some way. I'm not sure I've yet written about how my life acts as an agent to affect change in another's. I wonder if marriage makes the writer understand more clearly her role in a community of selves with power to influence another. I sure have heard enough people talk of the ways becoming a parent informs their identity and their writing, and I wonder if being married does something similar.

All that said, I don't think my voice is self-serving, nor do I think only married poets write the best lyrics. I'm just interested in the lyric mode and its function of dealing with the self in relation to others and how someone in a committed relationship with another approaches the problem with people differently than a single person.

Any ideas, recommended reading, or "stop thinking so much, Tims" would be greatly appreciated.

Teaching at Tennesse--Day 2

Wherein technology almost foiled my lesson plan.


My mentor sent me an amazing YouTube video created by an introduction to cultural anthropology class at Kansas State University. It's about the failings of the current post-secondary education curriculum for Gen Y students, essentially. I thought it tied in beautifully with article on Gen Y attitudes about work I'd assigned the students Monday. My plan was to come in, have them watch the video (and also pass out some candy, because it's Halloween, after all), and have them respond to these questions: In what ways is school like a job? What are your motivations for being in school? I wanted them to see that they are self-interested, goal-oriented, financially aware young people, as the article I had them read suggested.

My technology mishap occurred when I couldn't get my mentor's lap top to access UT's wireless Internet. She and I both worried with the computer for a few minutes before I decided I'd have the students just respond to the questions and dive straight into the article. The video was a wonderful supplement, but I could work without it. Fortunately, in the 6 or 7 minutes I had them write, my mentor was able to access the wireless and the video went off without a hitch.

I quite shocked myself by being on my toes enough to have a plan b (though I hadn't initially prepared a plan b). I felt really comfortable altering my lesson plan, and I didn't freak out by the thought that (my god!) I might have to spend an extra five minutes blabbing away instead of having the students watch the video. I'm learning to be more flexible.

The greatest part of my teaching experience today was the students' responses to questions I had them write about. These guys, man, they are smart, they think critically, and they know what they want in life. It makes me wonder if I was so pulled together when I was 18...

In other news, I've been writing, writing, writing about all that stuff I don't want to write about for the past couple days (sorry for the angsty post, btw), so poetry class, beware. I'm reading Paradise Lost and realizing, yet again, how much I don't like Milton. I understand how influential his work is. I can agree that his text is culturally and historically important. I'll even go so far to say I understand (slightly) why people should read (parts of) it. Still, that doesn't make me enjoy it anymore.
I think I finally decided on a topic for my Renaissance Tragedy seminar paper. I want to look at the division and measurement of love in King Lear. I'm interested in Lear's preoccupation with hearing he possesses (but not really needing to possess) all of his daughters' affection, why Cordelia refuses to tell him what he wants to hear, and, essentially, why so much in the play (especially Act 1, Sc. 1) rests on the assumption that a person's capacity for love is finite, and that love only exists in one manifestation. Indeed, I want to explore the economic quantification of love in the play. My God, I'm becoming such a Shakespeare nerd.

I'm going to remain tight lipped about the Democratic debates last night and Obama's allegedly anti-gay rhetoric that's been burning up the blog world (Atrios, anyone?). Still processing all the info into an informed opinion.

I realized yesterday upon hearing some classmates talk about veganism that I haven't eaten meat in a good while, and I should just switch to eating strictly vegetarian. But, then, I don't like doing anything strictly. Plus, Thanksgiving, my favorite holiday, is coming up, and what's turkey day without the turkey? So, I ate a chicken sandwich and moved on with my life.

I Have A Hankering

I went to hear poet Michelle Boisseau read tonight with some of the wonderful people from my poetry class, and I was moved by her meditations on borders, boundaries, and state lines. I started thinking about my own home, and the borders I've crossed since leaving there. I grew up at the tip top of Mississippi, in a town that's no more Mississippi than it is Tennessee or Arkansas. Five miles north is Memphis, ten miles west is the Mississippi River, Arkansas just across the bridge. The funny thing about Arkansas, though, is I never went there until I was 18-years-old, when I moved smack dab to the middle for college. I remember that first semester. The weather seemed much colder there than at home, and I didn't have a coat. My daddy had to send me money so I could buy one. I saw my first real mountain that year, when I went up to Fayetteville with the Young Democrats for something or another. The bluffs overlooking Highway 61 were the tallest things I'd seen until then.

I want to write an Arkansas poem, but I'm scared what it will show me. I discovered lots of things there--cheap beer, Ani DiFranco, liberal politics--and even more about myself. It wasn't until I moved here, to Knoxville, that I realized what a pro I am at repressing. At giving a little, then pulling back and wishing to God I hadn't.

Let's just leave it at this: I think of that place fondly, and I miss it sometimes, when I'm driving home from school and I see a changing leaf. Arkansas in autumn could be my favorite place. I carry the landscape deep inside somewhere, in the sinews between muscle and bone.

Teaching at Tennessee--Day 1

(I'm unsatisfied with the title of this post, but it beats what I had originally called it--"Adventures in Teaching." Sounds too much like an 80s teen movie to me).

At the NWPCA Summer Institute back in June and July, I read an article by an English teacher who'd kept a journal of his classroom experiences over the years. He even included some excerpts from the journal as he discussed how reflecting on his days in the classroom made him a better teacher. I thought his idea was brilliant, and I vowed then and there to keep a journal of my teaching experiences once I began working as a way to reflect on my strengths and weaknesses in the classroom. Besides, who doesn't love a good teacher story? I suredo, and I hope you do, too. Here's the rundown of my first day:

I woke up extra early this morning so I wouldn't have to rush around my apartment pulling up my pants, searching for my keys, and eating a bagel simultaneously while racing the clock to make it to school on time (like I do every other morning). In the chaos, I invariably leave some essential book or assignment behind, realizing its absence from my heavy black bag only after I've already made it to campus. (Man, if you only knew how many times I've had to run back home for a textbook this semester...) The extra time was a good idea. It gave me a cushion to run back home if I needed to (I didn't), and also to pump myself up for the day by jamming out to electronic dance music in my underwear while I fixed my coffee.

I dressed up for the occasion, which if you know me at all means I just wore khakis instead of jeans, a polo instead of a t-shirt. I'm not one for ties, jackets, etc. I did, however, wear my black dressier (but not quite dress) shoes, because they make me about half an inch taller. Even though I have a good rapport with my class, I still felt power shoes would boost my confidence, and, at 5'6'', I'll take any help I can get in the height department.

I got to class early and went over my notes for the Rose and Ehrenreich readings I assigned. I borrowed (because 'stole' is such a maligned word) your idea, Josh, of writing questions on the board, dividing the class into groups, and having each group respond to a different question. It went pretty well. I did have to walk from group to group and clear up some points of confusion, but that may be because they are freshmen and because I tend to ask complicated questions. We did, however, have a great discussion on low wage work.

I think what made the discussion work so well was the fact that our readings--which dealt with waitressing and working at Wal-Mart--were easily accessible for the students. Half of them currently are or in the past have been servers. Another few have experience working in retail. When I realized the wealth of first hand information sitting at the desks before me, I ran with it. Today I learned that Alex is a waiter at a Mexican restaurant, where a table of 6 left him a 15-cent tip Friday night, and Dallas works at Wal-Mart, where everyone hates her job but can't afford to quit. I also shared some of my tales of low-wage job woe, specifically about my stint working at Subway, where one learns there is no creative license allowed when making a sandwich: 3 tomatoes on a six inch, no more than 2 cheese triangles, etc. In my description of the job, I actually said "sandwich artist, my ass!" which, of course, made my crowd of 18-year-olds giggle gleefully. (Note to self: drop a curse word or two into class discussion and you'll have the students eating out of your hand).

The thing that is most exciting about my teaching experience is that I got kids who never talk in class to come out of their shells a bit and participate in discussion. I really don't know how I did it. Maybe by asking questions. Maybe by sharing my work experiences they knew they could be comfortable with me, that I'm one of them (though this notion worries me, because I don't want to be too much like them. I don't want to be their friend). But anyway, in a moment of serendipity, two students who never talk in class spoke up, and they made really interesting comments. I was quite impressed with them.

I learned a great lesson today: students don't respond the way you think they will. I was so sure that they would find Ehrenreich's piece too polarizing, especially since she talks about Wal-Mart employees' need of a labor union (dirty words down South), but they really connected with the reading. I think it was her tone, her harsh matter-of-factness. Teenagers love to be jarred. I'm actually quite excited they liked the excerpt so much, because next year I plan on teaching Nickel and Dimed in my 102 course, and I have hope that maybe my students will really take to it.

On the schedule for Wednesday: Gen Y work ethic and career outlook. Here's to hoping it goes as swimmingly as today's class!

Attack of the Zombie Nerd!

As you can see, I opted for cheap (costume and beer) for last night's Halloween party. The irony of my costume--everything I wore, I normally wear. Even that garish red cardigan. God, I love that thing.

On (Not) Getting By in America

Tomorrow begins my week of teaching 101 all on my own (well, I have taught on my own twice already this semester, but not for a week straight). I'm really looking forward to it, so much so that I'll probably spend too much time preparing to teach and not enough time preparing for the classes in which I'm a student. At least in Milton we're starting our "Paradise Lost Month" this week, and I've read that monstrous poem in its entirety fairly recently. I think a lot of it will come back to me when I look back over it. Anyway, back to teaching.

We're going to discuss low-wage work tomorrow. I had the students read an essay called "The Working Life of the Waitress" by Mike Rose and an excerpt from Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed (it's the chapter on working at Walmart). The Rose piece is really interesting. He builds a case of the complex cognitive and physical skills one must master in order to be a waitress and objectively, but convincingly, argues that much of the work deemed "unskilled labor" is actually highly skilled work. He uses a mix of personal interviews, scientific data, and current literature on the topic of work to make a really compelling case. I want my students to see how he utilizes different types of research and maintains an objective tone throughout his essay. These elements make the piece credible, and I want them pick up some of these writing tricks for their upcoming research papers.

The Ehrenreich, I must say, doesn't impress me from an argumentative standpoint. Her argument is inductive, she has an agenda, she doesn't pull back from her goal of exposing the seedy underbelly of American low-wage jobs. And I appreciate that. I love Nickel and Dimed.
I think the immersion-investigation Ehrenreich does is interesting, important, shocking, and horrifying. But I don't think she's fair enough in letting the facts speak for themselves or letting her audience come to terms with their own opinions and ideas. In a lot of ways, her argument brow beats you into agreeing with her-- Absolutely no one can be happy working at Walmart, all middle management is corrupt--and I don't think taking from your audience the power to choose what they believe works to establish credibility. Call me old fashioned.

Regardless of my criticism, I still love the book, and I agree with a lot of what it argues. I've worked many (many, many) low wage jobs, and I have seen first hand what it's like for someone with adult responsibilities struggling to make it on $7.00 and hour. And that's the point I want to drive home to my students: that there are so many people in the workforce, especially in service jobs, who we depend on daily, and they aren't making a living wage. There is a gross discrepancy between the value of ones job and how much one is valued at their job.
End moralizing teacher talk.


P.S.--Hey Amanda, remember the time we saw Barb speak in Pocatello and she said "if you're against gay marriage, then I urge you, do not marry a gay person"? Those were the days :-)

Stay with me. Go places.

Well, I'm officially going to New York. December 13-21, 2007. Flying out of Memphis nonstop to Laguardia. $340 roundtrip.

I feel this trip will mark some sort of milestone in my life. It will mean I'm becoming cultured, I'm going places. Two years ago I went to San Francisco. Now I'm going to New York City. Growing up poor in a small Southern town, I always entertained ideas of seeing California and New York about as wholeheartedly as I pursued notions of being an astronaut or runway model. These places seemed just so foreign for me, so out of reach. Had I been asked five years ago if I ever thought I'd go either place, I'd have said no, that I never figured I'd make it to a city bigger than Memphis. And I was content with that, too. I didn't know any better. My family doesn't travel, short of a trip down Highway 61 to the casinos in Tunica, or a little further south down to Vicksburg to see the Civil War battle sites. I come from practical people, who spend their money on car insurance and new glasses, not whirlwind tours of Broadway.
When I went to college in Arkansas, my momma and daddy didn't know what to think. Neither of them had ever been there, so for them I might as well have been packing my bags for China. Three hours from home is much like going halfway across the world for people who have never lived anywhere except the same small town. Since then I've spent a summer living in New Brunswick, and now I live in Knoxville. Seems like I've become more adventurous. Here I am, forever a Mississippi expat, girding my loins and gathering my bearings to see the Big Apple.

It's an exciting time, folks.

Two or three things I know for sure

(My apologies to Dorothy Allison for blatantly ripping off the title of her book for this post)


I'm still working on those 6-10 lines per day I wrote about earlier this semester. They seem to be paying off in poems. Recently, though, I've been writing a lot about my mother, and my efforts to construct a poem from these lines are taking me nowhere. (I'm considering seeking professional help for my poem and my psyche). I decided to mix it up for tonight (and share with you, reader) my lines. Taking my inspiration from a classmate's wonderful poem entitled "More On What I Don't Know," I thought I'd try my hand at writing some things I do know (which, as graduate school/adult life teaches me daily, isn't very much). Here's my short list:

• Knowledge will get you so far. Knowing how to treat people will get farther.
• When baking cookies, grease the pan even when the recipe says not to (I'm anxious to hear your response to this one, Jenn!)
• Love a sappy song well aware that you can't make someone love you with a song.
• Eating breakfast makes me hungrier by lunch.
• Once upon a time, my parents were people, too (making all the mistakes that personhood requires)

So that's not quite six lines, nor is it quite poetry (too sentimental, no movement), but maybe it's a start.

What are two or three things you know for sure?

Gen Yers Care

In my English 101 class, the students are doing a unit on work, which will ultimately lead to a research/observation paper about some aspect of working. Since I'm a GA, I don't teach every class, but I am teaching all next week. While browsing around the net for some teaching ideas, I found an interesting Time article about Gen Y work ethic.

Some of the stuff reported in the article surprised me. While I'm well aware of the tech savvy workforce Gen Y has created (and I feel as if I betray my generation by not knowing HTML), Gen Y's trends toward opportunistic job seeking, working with friends, and volunteering is very thought provoking. I can see how members of my generation are primarily self-interested (and thus less loyal to companies which we assume will screw is over in the end), but the volunteerism is interesting. Perhaps Gen Yers are padding their resumes with volunteer experience as a self-interested way of getting ahead in the work world.

Also, note the trend among recent college graduates who move back in with their parents while they search for jobs. This provides a cushion between rent-and-utilities-paying adult life and mom-does-my-laundry student life in which twentysomethings can take time to find higher paying jobs without taking the financial risk of moving out on their own. Personally, I'd sooner live in a cardboard box than move back in with my parents, but I can see how the comfort and stability of living at home until something better comes along is appealing to some my age. Being an adult is scary sometimes.

Last Shopping Trip

Jenn tagged me. Get ready to hear about my grocery shopping excursion yesterday!

Here are the rules:

The purpose of this meme is to inspire some reflection about how we shop and what we purchase. The idea isn't that consumption itself is somehow bad, but that we all could probably stand to put a little bit more thought into what we buy. And, of course, it's supposed to be fun. So here goes!

Pick a recent shopping trip -- for clothes, shoes, groceries, doesn't matter. The only guideline is that it will be easier to play if you purchased at least a few things. Now tell us, about your purchases:

1. What are you proud of?
I went grocery shopping with my friend Jenny yesterday. We went to the vegetable stand right across the street from my apartment complex. I knew I had to use up some carrots and chicken broth in my fridge, so I decided to make soup. I bought lots of veggies, but I guess my proudest purchase is butternut squash. I bought one a couple weeks ago and had no idea what to do with it. I searched recipes online and found a great one for roasted butternut squash soup. It was delicious, but I wanted to put my own spin (and make a lighter version). So, that's what I did.

2. What are you embarrassed by?
Nothing really, though I am wondering why I bought such a large bundle of fresh parsley. Looks like I'm going to be parsley-ing it up this week!

3. What do you think you couldn't live without?
Well, I guess I couldn't live without anything I bought since it was food, and I've got to eat. But really, besides the parsley, I think I was a smart produce shopper this week. I used almost all of my ingredients in the soup. Usually when I by produce, it spoils before I use it all up, like the tomatoes and cucumbers wilting away in my crisper drawer even as I type.

4. What did you most enjoy purchasing?
I guess the parsley, just because it made me feel so gourmet.

5. What were you most tempted by? (This last one may or may not be an actual purchase!)
I almost bought a jar of locally produced honey and some pastries from a local bakery that were conveniently displayed beside each other. But then I remembered that I'm on a very fixed income, I have honey, and I had all the ingredients to make a sweet treat (I'm a sucker for sweets). So I skipped those items and came and made brownies.

Now tag 5 others!

Dear, I don't think I have anymore regular readers of my blog that Jenn hasn't already tagged! Um, Laura, you haven't updated in a while. Maybe tagging you will give you an incentive!

For the Harry Potter fans

In a move much unlike that of Larry Craig, J.K. Rowling publicly declared that Hogwarts Headmaster Albus Dumbledore is gay. Any thoughts?

Prose Poems

I had a great crash course in prose poetry tonight in class. I'd wondered for the longest time what is the distinction between a prose poem and a piece of micro-fiction .

Here are some distinctions my classmates offered:

• -Prose poems are tighter and less elliptical
• -Their emphasis is less on the details of the poem and more on the leaps between ideas we don't see on the page
• -They avoid the emphasis of certain images line breaks create
• -They serve as vehicles for unwritten tenors
• -They provide a form in which the poet can juxtapose different ideas that work to elucidate on a bigger idea

For a prose poem to work, it must:

• -Be driven by metaphor
• -Have rhythmical language
• -Speak to a larger concern
• -Have movement from individual to universal meaning

Now, I don't pretend to boil poetry writing down to a check list of rules one must abide by. Art is not that formulaic. For me, though, these guidelines help make sense of the distinction between poetic language and descriptive language. Also, they give me a way of writing effective prose poetry (something I'm dying to try).

Here's an example of a prose poem by Gary Young we discussed tonight that I just loved:

When I was five, I knew God had made the world and everything in it. I know God loved me, and I knew the dead were in heaven with God always. I had a sweater. I draped it on a fence, and when I turned to pick it up a minute later, it was gone. That was the first time I had lost anything I really loved. I walked in circles, too frightened to cry, searching for it until dark. i knew my sweater was not in heaven, but it could disappear, just vanish without reason, then I could disappear and God might lose me, not matter how good I was, now matter how much I was loved. The buttons on my sweater were translucent shimmering, pale opalescence. It was yellow.

The sense of loss in this poem, and the unknowing of things the poet once knew is quite stunning. I appreciate the lost sweater as a metaphor for a God who may not be so benevolent as we have been taught. I think, as my teacher recommended, Young's poem works well with Robert Frost's "Design":

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white, On a white heal-all, holding up a moth Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth -- Assorted characters of death and blight Mixed ready to begin the morning right, Like the ingredients of a witches' broth -- A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth, And dead wings carried like a paper kite. What had that flower to do with being white, The wayside blue and innocent heal-all? What brought the kindred spider to that height, Then steered the white moth thither in the night? What but design of darkness to appall?-- If design govern in a thing so small.

Maybe one day I'll teach these poems together as an example of the different forms poets use to get at similar ideas.

I think I'm going to play around with writing a prose poem for next week's poetry workshop. Let's see how that goes.

Larry Craig, do you think anyone believes you?

After class tonight, I flipped on the TV while I ate a bowl of cereal and discovered Larry Craig, Republican Senator from Idaho who was arrested in a June 11 gay sex sting in St. Paul, proclaiming his innocence and heterosexuality before Matt Lauer and the world.

Here's a short clip.

The interesting thing about the whole scandal is that Craig pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct back in August. And he admitted to keeping his arrest secret from his family for six weeks. (His wife, Suzanne, sits to his right and affirms her support of his innocence in the interview from their living room in Boise). However, now, two months after the guilty plea and amid cries for his resignation from Republicans in the Senate and in Idaho, Craig says he's innocent, he is a victim of entrapment, and, most definitely, he is not gay.

Now, I was not in the airport bathroom when the sex solicitation allegedly occurred, nor do I know exactly what the arresting officer deems as a sexual proposition when he affirmed the senator "signaled by hand and foot gestures that he wanted to have sex with him."

What I do know, though, is this:

The bathroom was a noted gay haunt (Craig frequented the St. Paul airport on a weekly basis, according to the interview)
The Senator plead guilty to disorderly conduct (a lesser charge than arrested for)
He did not want his wife and kids to know about his slip up

Given these simple facts, it seems pretty clear to me that the man, regardless of his sexual orientation, is not innocent in this crime. Craig claims in his interview his a fighter and he never walks away from a challenge. Well, Mr. Craig, it certainly seems you initially didn't try too hard to fight this battle. A guilty plea to a lesser, though related charge. An almost two-month cover up. Looks like somebody knows he was in the wrong and tried like hell to keep the scandal from going public.

But Craig failed, and now he must maintain his innocence, another politician adding to the ranks of politicos who refuse to take responsibility for their actions. (At least Bill Clinton went through unwarranted impeachment for his sexual slip up).


What bothers me most about the entire Craig ordeal is what it communicates about homosexuality. Now, I'm liberal. I'm open-minded. I can believe that a man who has an isolated sexual encounter with another man is not gay. God knows I've had my fair share of encounters with these types of men. However, Craig was caught soliciting sex in a public restroom with a reputation as a hot bed for gay sexual encounters. He says in his interview he flies through the St. Paul airport almost weekly, and his track record shows him to be a strong opponent to gay rights. Well, it seems to me, then, that he'd know what went on in the airport bathroom, and if he's so averse to homosexuality, he'd have avoided the john altogether, or at least been on the prosecuting end of the sex sting. Therefore, I have a feeling the guy had solicited gay sex in the bathroom many times before, June 11 being merely the first time he was caught. I can't prove my theory, but I'm willing to bet many Americans can see my point.

So, what does his fervent denial (and dare I say back-pedaling?) communicate about homosexuality? Well, my that is this: that a gay lifestyle (for lack of a better term) involves sneaking around and denying who you are. It's all about risky sex, and it's a private identity that should be shielded from the public. It short, homosexuality is something real and ugly, something that must be kept in bathroom stalls and out of American politics.

Looks like Craig's sex scandal does exactly what his legislation tried to do: further villianize homosexuality. Sure, it may cost him his career, or the Republican party some brownie points while the story's still in the headlines, but I think scandals like this only reinforce conservative ideas about the shamefulness of homosexuality. Let's hope airports don't beef up security against queer travelers as a result. Just what the country doesn't need is a "code pink" added to its broad rainbow of color-coded terrorist threats.