Stanley Kunitz

I just returned from a trip to the public library with my two little ones. Emmy and Nick have been obsessed with Silly Sally by Don and Audrey Wood for weeks now since they've been reading it in preschool. So, we took a trip to the library to pick up a copy and I indulged in some poetry reading. I checked out The Collected Poems of Stanley Kunitz and The Wild Braid. The Wild Braid is a book that focuses on Stanley Kunitz and his musings on gardening and writing. Genine Lentine apparently spent about two years with Kunitz just talking to him and walking around his garden with him. Marnie Crawford Samuelson contributes photography of Kunitz in his garden and the total affect is a book that helps readers connect with Kunitz as an artist and person.

Here is a quote from the opening of Kunitz's Collected Poems:

Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole -- that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.

I strive to remain compassionate and whole. I don't know about you, but it is often a struggle for me.

A New Start

I've been busy today:

1. grading essays
2. grading tests
3. teaching at Cincinnati State
4. cleaning my house
5. mowing the lawn, helping my wife decorate the porch for Autumn
6. Emily asked me today not to read her a story, but to tell her a story...so I was also telling stories to Emmy and Nick for about an hour.
7. exercise (bike, lift weights, bike, run)
8. watch SNL
9. sleep
   

Poetry

On this Friday afternoon, I just want to share a poem that I enjoy. Once you finish the poem, read over line 4 and "borrowed" is such a fascinating example of diction. Also, the line "Everything is easy but wrong" resonates strongly with me and it often comes floating into my mind from my subconscious...that, and a line from Charles Olson: "I have had to learn the simplest things / last. Which made for difficulties."

Enjoy!

Old Dominion by Robert Hass
The shadows of late afternoon and the odors
of honeysuckle are a congruent sadness.
Everything is easy but wrong. I am walking
across thick lawns under maples in borrowed tennis whites.
It is like the photographs of Randall Jarrell
I stared at on the backs of books in college.
He looked so sad and relaxed in pictures.
He was translating Chekhov and wore tennis whites.
It puzzled me that in his art, like Chekhov's,
everyone was lost, that the main chance was never seized
because it was only there as a thing to be dreamed of
or because someone somewhere had set the old words
to the old tune: we live by habit and it doesn't hurt.
Now the thwack . . . thwack of tennis balls being hit
reaches me and it is the first sound of an ax
in the cherry orchard or the sound of machine guns
where the young terrorists are exploding
among poor people on the streets of Los Angeles.
I begin making resolutions: to take risks, not to stay
in the south, to somehow do honor to Randall Jarrell,
never to kill myself. Through the oaks I see the courts,
the nets, the painted boundaries, and the people in tennis
whites who look so graceful from this distance.

Get Your War On

I will admit that I am addicted to humorous websites that unabashedly support my view of politics and/or the world in general. Get Your War On is hilarious! Here is a link to the most recent segment: http://www.236.com/video/2008/get_your_war_on_news_cycle_1_9305.php

Today, in my College Prep classes, I modeled how to complete a Dialectical Journal while reading. We just started The House on Mango Street and since the novel is made up of vignettes, I decided it would be a good idea to push my students to quote sentences/passages that really hit at the essential info. readers should take away from each vignette. We read a few vignettes out loud and I modeled how to choose a specific sentence/passage, why I chose it, and then explained its importance. We had time for students to take over and I wrote down their quotes on an overhead. It was a good class - all 4x I taught the lesson today.

The Raw Shark Texts is still keeping me interested. Apparently, the "new" Eric Sanderson meets the "old" Eric Sanderson, who looks flawless at first but then begins to literally melt before his eyes. Weird, but well-written and Steven Hall pulls it off. It only sounds weird when I write about it and summarize it for people who say they're interested in the book. Maybe I should work on my summarizing skills...

Oh, and completely unrelated, but worth mentioning, Robert Hass is my favorite poet. Praise is my favorite book of poetry. If anyone hasn't yet read anything by Robert Hass, look him up or check one of his books out of the library. His book Time and Materials won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. For the same book, you say? Oh, yes, I say. What a beast.

Politics and the Funny

I am already wincing, waiting for John McCain's new attack ads. Apparently he has decided to take a "new" approach in his campaign ads...which, by the way, already seem pretty negative. So, if these new ads are going to be the first real negative ads, I'm actually bracing myself for them.

Now, on to the funny. Stephen Colbert has a hilarious segment about the presidential candidates and their Shakespearean connections. You can check it out at: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/186547/october-02-2008/shakespearean-candidates---stephen-greenblatt

I've been reading English-As-A-Second Language (ESL) Teaching and Learning (2006) and was interested to find out that over the next twenty years, second-generation Hispanics will make up a majority of the Hispanic population. This is really interesting if you consider that second-generation Hispanics are mainly bilingual in Spanish and English, whereas first-generation Hispanics are mainly Spanish-only. That makes a big difference in terms of ESL students and education. Also, native-born Hispanics are more likely to go to college and earn higher incomes than first-generation Hispanics.

My Honors students just finished reading and explicating "Courage" by Anne Sexton and tomorrow they'll be working on "Tonight I Can Write" by Pablo Neruda.

My College-Prep students begin The House on Mango Street tomorrow. We've been reading a selection of short stories out of the HRW Elements of Literature series and I've found that "American History" by Judith Ortiz Cofer and "Exile" by Julia Alvarez are great examples of multicultural literature from that textbook that connect well with the issues in The House on Mango Street.

The Raw Shark Texts

This is the start of year 7 of teaching HS English. I have six classes of Freshman, two Honors and four College Prep.

I'm currently reading The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Here's an excerpt: "Maybe it's natural for questions to outlive their answers. Or maybe answers don't die but are just lost more easily, being so small and specific, like a coin dropped from the deck of a ship and into the big deep sea" (108). Questions are essential to this story because Eric Sanderson is piecing together who he was, who he is, and what happened to his girlfriend Clio Aames in Greece. Not to mention there is a lodovician, a metaphysical memory-eating shark, that is pursuing him. I know, sounds like a stretch, but Steven Hall makes it work, makes it believable, and creates enough suspense to make me want to keep reading and thinking about his characters constantly.

I'm listening to Everything All the Time by Band of Horses and Magic Potion by The Black Keys.