Month: June 2003

Giving Credit Where Credit is Due

It’s time to plant out the seedlings that I started months ago, so I haven’t had a lot of time for blogging. Just because I haven’t had time to start reading Wallace Stevens doesn’t mean I haven’t had time to visit various sites and read what others have written, though.

Today I was reminded, once again, why I have been reading Riley Dog and Whiskey River longer than any other web sites.

Here’s a poem found at Riley Dog, and the original link, which is also well worth checking out:

What Teachers Make, or
You can always go to law school if things don’t work out
He says the problem with teachers is, “What’s a kid going to learn
from someone who decided his best option in life was to become a teacher?”
He reminds the other dinner guests that it’s true what they say about
teachers:
Those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.

I decide to bite my tongue instead of his
and resist the temptation to remind the dinner guests
that it’s also true what they say about lawyers.

Because we’re eating, after all, and this is polite company.

“I mean, you’re a teacher, Taylor,” he says.
“Be honest. What do you make?”

And I wish he hadn’t done that
(asked me to be honest)
because, you see, I have a policy
about honesty and ass-kicking:
if you ask for it, I have to let you have it.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids work harder than they ever thought they could.
I can make a C+ feel like a Congressional medal of honor
and an A- feel like a slap in the face.
How dare you waste my time with anything less than your very best.

I make kids sit through 40 minutes of study hall
in absolute silence. No, you may not work in groups.
No, you may not ask a question.
Why won’t I let you get a drink of water?
Because you’re not thirsty, you’re bored, that’s why.

I make parents tremble in fear when I call home:
I hope I haven’t called at a bad time,
I just wanted to talk to you about something Billy said today.
Billy said, “Leave the kid alone. I still cry sometimes, don’t you?”
And it was the noblest act of courage I have ever seen.

I make parents see their children for who they are
and what they can be.

You want to know what I make?

I make kids wonder,
I make them question.
I make them criticize.
I make them apologize and mean it.
I make them write.
I make them read, read, read.
I make them spell definitely beautiful, definitely beautiful, definitely
beautiful
over and over and over again until they will never misspell
either one of those words again.
I make them show all their work in math.
And hide it on their final drafts in English.
I make them understand that if you got this (brains)
then you follow this (heart) and if someone ever tries to judge you
by what you make, you give them this (the finger).

Let me break it down for you, so you know what I say is true:
I make a goddamn difference! What about you?

Taylor Mali

And here’s another pearl of wisdom from Whiskey River:

“The alchemists had an excellent image for the transformation of suffering and symptom into a value of the soul. A goal of the alchemical process was the pearl of great price. The pearl starts off as a bit of grit, a neurotic symptom or complaint, a bothersome irritant in one’s secret inside flesh, which no defensive shell can protect oneself from. This is coated over, worked at day in day out, until the grit one day is a pearl; yet it must still be fished up from the depths and pried loose. Then when the grit is redeemed, it is worn. It must be worn on the warm skin to keep its luster: the redeemed complex which once caused suffering is exposed to public view as a virtue. The esoteric treasure gained through occult work becomes an esoteric splendor.”
– James Hillman

No wonder I appear so virtuous to my readers :- )

Pardon My French

Despite the fact that my daughter is a high school Spanish teacher, it has long been a personal prejudice of mine that for most Americans it’s a waste of time to learn a foreign language even though, if the Northwest is typical, it may be wise to learn Spanish in order to be able to communicate with the people doing much of the real work in our society.

Perhaps this prejudice against taking foreign languages merely stems from unpleasant personal experiences. Despite the fact that I put more effort into my French class than any other class I took in college, I received my only “D” in college in a second quarter French class. Ironically, my pre-college tests showed I would earn one of my highest gpa’s in foreign languages. After all, I had straight A’s in three years of high school Latin, a class that has left me with little more than the arcane ability to actually read and understand slogans on the back of coins.

Some blame for this poor showing must reside with a university that failed 50% of their freshman class in the first year and employed far too many graduate students to teach undergraduate classes that lacked enough prestige to justify a real professor. Somehow I managed to get a Canadian graduate from Toronto in my first quarter class and earned a “B” largely because he spoke slowly and emphasized reading, not speaking, French.

The second quarter, however, was taught by a very pretty graduate student from Paris who shifted the emphasis almost entirely to spoken French. To complicate matters, I was taking ROTC at the time and was required to wear my uniform and name tag once or twice a week so I was one of the few students whose name she ever knew. And for better or WORSE, A LOT WORSE, the instructor flirted with/teased me and called on me time and time again.

Now if I’d been a junior, I would have had sense enough to just skip class and show up on exam days. As a freshmen, though, I actually thought you had to attend class, so I returned daily, only to be embarassed one more time. It’s tough going from “class genius” to “village idiot.” The only thing I learned from this class, a powerful lesson I don’t regret learning, is never to call on a student to purposely embarass them in class. I never ignored them, but I only called on some students when I was pretty sure they would know the answer.

Now I wouldn’t be purposely revealing my most embarassing academic moment if I didn’t have a point in mind. Recently while checking out my referrer logs I discoved that a French site, Kill Me Again, had linked to my site’s Kerouac essay. When I went to the site there was a line saying “this page in bad english,” in other words a google translation. While it was obviously poorly translated, it did give me an idea of what he had to say, and it didn’t hurt that part of it was already English quotations.

First, this has got me to wondering if there are any decent Macintosh French-to-English translating programs out there that I’m not aware of, and, if so, what they are. I’d be in the market for one, at least until I’m able to brush up on my French skills to the point that I can actually read the pages by myself.

Coincidentally, today, I read
Themes as recommended by The Obvious,
via Woods Lot, which states:

This is an attempt with an open end ? an attempt to openness. It is an attempt to cross boundaries, to provide space for exchange and contact, space for a philosophical polylogue .

Doubter that I am, I think that the internet might actually help us as individuals to see beyond boundaries, something America, now more than ever, needs to do. My attempts to read Kill Me Again every day, while still refusing to eat “Freedom Fries” when French Fries are still available is just my personal attempt to open my mind to new possibilities.

If I were to advise high school students today, I would probably urge them to really learn a foreign language and spend time on the internet actually using the skills they have learned.

The Poetry of Gerald Stern

Right after I finished my blog entry “The Wasteland of My Heart,” I received a NY Times Tracker poetry alert. Upon opening the link, I was introduced to Gerald Stern, A Poet Raging Against Pretension (and Princeton). Nothing too unusual about that, I receive these updates regularly. However, once I read:

Mr. Stern loves poetry, not for its deftness or technical structure but its ability to transmit the deepest human emotions, “passion, anger, love, justice and fear.”

I knew that I was obliged to spend the next few hours running down his poetry and checking him out on the web. I certainly wasn’t deterred by the final quote in the article:

“Poetry should be passionate and outrageous and political and most of all revolutionary,” he said. “I am a radical, although as I get older sometimes I get too soft and am just a liberal.”

Of course, I don’t consider myself radical, though some might, but I hope I’ve let it be known that I am liberal, and judging from what I found the same kind of liberal that Gerald Stern is.

In the old days I would have had to get my lazy ass up, get myself dressed and travel miles to a book store, and probably not my local B Dalton bookstore, either, because it’s poetry section has been shrinking and shrinking ever since it opened a few years ago. This morning, though, after a minimal search I was confronted with a virtual cornucopia of Stern poems, and a number of revealing essays at the same time.

First I went to pbs.org and found an interview with Elizabeth Farnsworth and Stern. For those already satiated with reading, there’s even a real audio interview, with the added advantage of getting to hear Stern read two of his poems, a real treat for those of us who believe that all poetry really has to be heard to be fully appreciated.

For me, the most revealing part of the interview came in the following exchange:

ELIZABETH FARNSWORTH: You have – in your poems there are many poems about the Holocaust. This is something – there’s a great sense of loss in all of your work, which I think comes from that partly.

GERALD STERN: It partly comes from that. It comes from personal matters – the death of my sister. It comes from family matters – one is not altogether sure. But, of course, loss and the elegy remain the most typical poem of our period.

but there are certainly other insights to be found here.

Seven of his poems can be found at Norton poets online,
where, naturally enough, you can find a listing of all of his poetry books, while another three, and an excellent mp3 recording, can be found at http:/The Hapless Dilettante. Another link to eight poems, some of which overlap the above, can be found at Gerald Stern

At The Academy of American Poets you can find three poems and a reading of “The Dancing,” my favorite poem from the selection of poems I have found:

THE DANCING

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a post-war Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop–in 1945–
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing–in Poland and Germany–
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

With all these opportunities to meet new poets and to read samples of their work online without having to find them in a college library perhaps poetry can still be relcaimed from the universities and brought back to the general public.

The Wasteland of My Heart

I’m not leaving T.S. Eliot without at least personally coming to terms with his masterpiece “The Wasteland.” There’s no denying it’s an impressive piece, surely Eliot’s “tour de force.” Even if, like me, you’re unwilling to explore the literary allusions as extensively as they demand, you immediately feel the despair implied by the title.

Nor is it as exhausting and time-consuming as it used to be to explore the allusions in the poem because you can go to an
Extensive site on T.S. Eliot’s poem, a nearly 600 page exploration of Eliot’s masterpiece. Of course, if you don’t have a life to live, you can study the poem on your own.

Still, it’s one thing to understand a poem and something quite different to love it. It seems to me that whether you love “The Wasteland” or not depends to a large extent on whether you agree with Eliot’s definition of poetry, as explained in
American Poetry from T. S. Eliot to Allen Ginsberg

The dominant figure in modern poetry from the 1920’s through the middle of the century, in part because of his stature as a critic and publisher, was the poet T. S. Eliot. In his landmark essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” (1919) Eliot defined poetry as an escape from emotion and personality–a definition that subsequent American poets have alternately embraced, argued with, and denounced in such a vigorous fashion that it may be useful to consider it as a linchpin of modernism.

The article, a remarkable short history of modern poetry I heartedly recommend to anyone interested in that sort of thing, goes on to trace the reaction to this remarkable statement through a discussion of some of America’s greatest modern poets.

As I read the essay, it became perfectly clear to me why I have the reaction I do to Eliot’s poetry. When I think back, I suspect that the five pages of footnotes at the end of the poem, not just my initial confusion, are what immediately turned me off to the poem. This is a poem of the “mind” not of the heart.

Now, I admire rational thought as much as anyone. I am, after all, an INTP, and “the central goal of the INTP … (is) …to understand
and seek truth.” But it is really the N, the intuitive, not the T, the thinking aspect, that truly attracted me to poetry in the first place.

It was Thomas Hardy’s vision of an unjust world where pure happenstance and societal restrictions doomed men to unhappy lives that first attracted me to literature and poetry. Hardy’s poetry is many things, but it is not “intellectual.” Of course, I also attended the UW where Theodore Roethke was holding court, and his “work was possessed of a romantic sensibility and vibrant, deeply lyrical language. In fact, at times I have wondered if I had begun my poetic studies in the East instead of the at the UW whether I would have had a totally different attitude towards poetry. Or would I have dismissed it entirely and pursued a career in physics as I had earlier intended.?

For whatever reasons, I am still drawn to the poetry of the heart. It is the emotional appeal of the poetry to my own heart, not any logical argument, that is most likely to convince me of the authenticity of the poet’s vision.