Light Blogging Here / Heavy Blogging with Students
I’m spending quite a bit of time blogging with my students, which means that I am not often moved to crack open the WordPress editing window and write anything here. I use blogs with students for a number of reasons: 1) It’s more efficient that copying handouts for them to read, at least for some [...]
DeKalb
Sincerity: David Brooks as Concern Troll
It’s always nice when David Brooks takes time to offer advice to Democrats, It always seem so . . . sincere. Brooks writes that if either Clinton or Obama are elected president, “the left” will demand a quick withdrawal from Iraq, leaving either candidate to face “. . . irate opposition from important sections of [...]
Voting, Etc.
I voted for Obama last Tuesday in New York’s Democratic primary despite the fact that I distrust his rhetoric of bipartisanship & especially his habit of framing the debate on economic issues in right-wing terms. For example, accepting as given that there is a “social security crisis.” I also think his health care plan, lacking [...]
Collage No. 3
Considerably more subdued than the earlier ones in this series. You can see the stitching holding the book together on the left. It seems odd, but I have been using this series of collages to think about how to complete & organize a sequence of poems I have been working on for many years. All [...]
Project Challenge Weeks 3 & 4
I’ve been reporting on my experience teaching Project Challenge, my university’s Saturday morning program for high school students. We live in a rural area & high school students don’t get the same opportunities for “enrichment” they might get if they lived downstate. “Enrichment” is, I suppose, the approved educator’s word for cultural capital. On the [...]
Josh Corey on the Post-Mainstream
This is the smartest thing I’ve read about the cultural politics of American poetry in a long time. Maybe ever.
So the notion of the post-avant as a “third way” is indeed subject to the same criticism that the political Third Way is open to: that it’s really just the “first way” (i.e., hegemony) with [...]
Election Day Birds
More birds at the feeders in my yard this morning than I have seen all winter: starlings, goldfinches, huge flock of sparrows, grosbeaks, the usual chickadees, a couple of nuthatches & my regular woodpeckers, a downy & a hairy. We’ve had a lot of rain, freezing rain, snow & sleet, which has left a packed [...]
Teaching Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening”
I almost didn’t include Frost’s most famous poem on the Modern American Poetry syllabus this semester. It is nearly impossible for me to read the text outside of a kind of Thomas Kincaid penumbra of sentimentality. Frost was of course a very canny operator & assiduously cultivated his image as a simple New England bard, [...]
Spiral Jetty
Robert Smithson’s monumental work of landscape art is being threatened by oil-drilling interests. On the one hand, I agree that this is a travesty & a threat to the existence of a pure & beautiful work of art. Anyone with a shred of aesthetic consciousness ought to contact Jonathan Jemming in Utah (801-537-9023 jjemming@utah.gov) referring [...]
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