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.