So I’m sitting around at home this morning looking out on the kind of beautiful fall morning that would usually pull me outdoors. My favorite yard chores are autumn yard chores. But I’m sitting inside because I picked up a head cold & sore throat at school. Colleges are viral breeding grounds. I just don’t have the oomph to get out & transplant perennials. Despite the cold, it has been a good semester so far — across the board, my students seem pretty engaged, though I remain amazed at their meager abilities as readers. And by that I mean, just the ability to get the basic prose meaning of a literary text. “That’s weird,” they say immediately in response to a poem they don’t understand (Stephen Dunn’s “Men Talk,” hardly a difficult text), dismissing it before they have even tried to suss out the meaning of all its words and images. Reading poetry, they tend to not read sentences, even when there are perfectly clear sentences. I guess they are reading lines as fragments. Perhaps it is just a very weak sense of grammar. And by grammar, I don’t mean knowledge of the names of different grammatical entities, but a sense of the way the parts of a sentence relate to each other to create a meaning. I also found out yesterday that I was one of four members of my department who had been nominated to replace our outgoing department chair, though I immediately took myself out of the running. Five years ago I wanted the job & didn’t get it, but I don’t want it now. I’ve passed that particular fork in the road. All my ambitions are literary & pedagogical these days. Inspired by Stuart O’Nan’s visit to campus, I have begun working on a short story — my first attempt in 20 years — & I’m still struggling with my long poem, pieces of which are lying around on my desk, in my notebooks, and on my hard drive like flotsam on the beach after a storm.
Reading & Writing
Joseph Duemer's blog about reading, writing, politics, birds, food, & weather
WALL STREET VALENTINE
Under the pomegranate tree
I watched the death of capitalism
and my miniature roses spidery
mites agonizingly mismanage
the appropriation of money
is a spiritual science while
a rich man is a profoundly
impractical gardener
does he kill the mites
or watch the roses die
suddenly the pomegranate
tree rayed into me
all its dreams
of fairness.
Ah, Peter, that’s a lovely one! Especially since I was just reading the NY Times front page this morning! You really ought to pull a book of these together.
joseph, glad you turned it down. simplify. it’s later than we think.
FISH IN A NET
My life is your story.
The where’s and when’s keep turning.
A spinning plate half-dipping
into the Pacific Ocean here at Land’s End.
We are on this tilting/raked stage
where great ships foundered.
Their great sentences of life, death—
unfinished symphonies: the future
out there our audience
who’ve driven in to watch.
Ugly is a sharp paradigm shift.
Death an epistemological rupture.
Praise for a tractor, dancing
for chump change. Red armpits.
Earth jimjams a jungle, diamond skies,
long-nailed dogs cut bark, tree
rats scurry in canopies.
Telephone call, then a summary, a
sea change, playground happenings.
The wheel is round, life pushes.
Photography winds over time.
Over the mind a brown shale.
Everyone there is here.
It will take a lifetime to flower,
to fly, to sail this sea this thickening
light here where I hear voices
under the surface of consciousness
the bungled aspirations
with here now leprosy as a model.
Roomtone, mouthfeel,
reordering parts, rationing emotions.
Grim ire, harmony’s trigger, November.
Ripening memories pressing upward.
Death ship for new sowing.
Thickening light a sea scar.
Stardust a diminishing gusher.
Milk as it pinkens sunrise, sunset.
Roses silt down into a lake of sleep.
© Edward Mycue