subtext

My Poetry and Commentary on Life

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  • Silly stuff

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    I found this site on another person’s blog. You too can be a Simpson’s character. Just go to http://simpsonizeme.com and you can be yellow too.

  • Pickles

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    I am adventurous, I eat pickles on my hamburgers now,” my oldest son bragged this morning. He was being sarcastic, albeit honest, about his eating habits. His comment made me think about the importance of taking risks, unsettling the normative patterns of my life. A few weeks ago I bemoaned in this space about why I couldn’t make up my mind whether to continue in my Doc program or not. I am going to continue in the program; I will probably continue to whine and worry about it nonetheless. However, I do enjoy thinking about all the stuff that makes up my field. I also enjoy thinking about how all of the stuff that is tangential to Language and Literacy influences all the stuff that makes up Language and Literacy. In a recent article in the newspaper, the influence of friends on each other’s habits and life, ranging from smoking to depression to obesity to autism was recounted. It is not a surprise that we are influenced by those around us. I think everything and everyone we come in contact with, to a greater or lesser degree, influences us. This is not a one way shaping, we in turn influence everyone else. It is not a compromise, nor a consensus: “Superior learning lies in knowledge more widely distributed across units, with common rather than disparate interpretations. Huber, following Morgan and Ramirez, (1983), writes of such knowledge as “holographic” in that each unit carries at least a rough picture of the whole” (p. 13 Salomon and Perkins). I think it is more of a genetic metaphor rather than a holographic one, where the DNA for the whole is contained in each cell. The knowledge of the culture as a whole is determined by the mass of individuals acting together. It is not just individuals acting alone (as the Romantics were wont to say), but individuals acting in and as groups. In my class, again and again, a theme that comes up, in the literature we read, is the balance between being a part of the whole and apart from the whole. I don’t think it is an either/or binary, but rather an ongoing dance where the two parts merge and reemerge, changing and changed. “As pointed out by Damon (1991): Even when learning is fostered through processes of social communication, individual activity and reflection still play a critical role. Sometimes . . . individual activity may build on collective questions and insights. Other times, however, individual activity may need to resist the collective illusions created by a group . . any paradigm that assumes a one-way, deterministic relation between the collective and individual knowledge construction is over simplistic (Damon as cited in Salomon and Perkins, p. 17). My classes combined with all of the education books I have read, the literary-crit theory, the philosophy, and poetry, all combine to create how I have come to think about what it means to learn, teach and live. They are like the pickles on my son’s hamburger, perhaps leading to a larger view of what there is to be a part of in the world.

  • Champing at the Bit

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    The school calendar has dominated my life for the last twenty years; small changes disturb the pattern. We have an extended summer because of the Texas legislature’s decision to start school as close to September as possible. (Some push from the vacation lobby I never understood). As a result I am at the point in my summer when I am ready to go up to the school and set up my room. This normally happens a couple of weeks before we are to go back. I know, I am only getting antsy a week or so early, so it is not that big of a deal. I just find it interesting how structured and automatic our patterns become over time. Tomorrow I plan on going up to my classroom and setting up the room. They held summer school classes at my school, and my room was used. I had to take down all of my stuff, so tomorrow I will be sticking posters up and arranging desks. They normally give us a day and a half to prep for the beginning of the school year, the rest of the week is taken up by meet and greet activities and rah-rah professional development.

  • Incremental

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    there once was a shape
    made of wet sand
    it doesn’t matter what shape
    just that it was there
    and now it is not
    different people in different times
    saw different shapes
    yet still spoke as if it were
    the same shape contiguously
    now it is not except it is
    more so than previously
    because it holds its shape
    true to each who speak of it
    the past maintains the present
    the present invents the past
    to better to become itself
    together the mean of meaning
    is shaped then reshaped again
    so much sand in our hands

    (summer 2007)

  • Now What?

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    I turned in my last test for Ed. Psych earlier today. So now, except for reading ten more adolescent novels, I am through with grad school for the summer. Perhaps for good. While I love the readings and the class discussions, for the most part, I am still caught up in the question I had after my first semester: Why am I doing this? Every semester since I have started this, I go through this same questioning: why am I doing this? Perhaps my inability to come up with an answer is reason enough not to finish. The tests and papers, where I have to perform in order to prove myself, create stress because I am such an over achiever and obsess over my “failures” if I make a B. Then when I make my A, I wonder if I really deserved the grade and criticize the work I did do. What kind of sick psychology is in play there? I feel as if I am missing my children’s adolescence by spending my time reading the reams of articles required for each class. ( I was stunned when someone in class last week admitted to not having read one of the two articles we were supposed to read. This in a relatively light reading load.) It was interesting taking two classes this summer, because it seemed as if I had lots of time because I was not working full time teaching high school. Yet I had more than one classmate looked shocked that I was taking two classes in one summer session. I am acquiring debt at an alarming rate, just as my oldest child is beginning to apply to colleges, none of which are cheap, and all of which I will do whatever I can to help him go to if he gets accepted, which it looks like he will based on their student demographics. I don’t see a lot of benefits to finishing, other than I hate quitting anything. I like the idea of being able to say I am working on a Ph.D., and the idea that I will get one if I continue, but is that just my egotistic vanity that is at stake; my insecurity in my intellectual ability trying to justify itself with yet another piece of paper? One of the four truths of Buddhism is that suffering is caused by desire: perhaps I should rethink my desires? OM.

  • flux

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    are you the you you are
    when you change how much
    of any given time are you
    what you are or are becoming

    an amoeba absorbs
    what it moves through
    changing its surroundings
    and its self into itself

  • reduction

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    the onslaught of random thoughts
    which crush past during the span
    of time it takes this sentence to end
    would take a life to document
    if only i could recall them all

    to gather them at pen’s nib as they occur
    like athene fully formed from zeus’s head
    would be to write the world in a word
    the chaos compacted into a syllable
    with no ambiguity to slip over my horizon

    (summer 2007)

  • horizon’s edge

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    sense lives outside
    along a perimeter

    an inability to maintain
    within articulated bounds

    what worlds words open
    as many unsaid close

    on approach it grows no nearer
    a reproachment to hubristic control

    in possibility extant only in
    ossified remains of meaning

    (summer 2006)

  • Waiting on the Rain

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    I’m sitting in the PCL waiting for the rain to stop so I can head over to the Erwin Center to participate in the graduation ceremony of my students. I like doing this, the kids are excited and proud. They are oddly happy that I am there which makes me feel oddly happy. I guess we all want to feel wanted and loved. I have been reading lately entries on the blog’ “Rate Your Students.” I think I will stop however because it is the equivalent of listening to my fellow teachers gripe about the students at lunch. Yes, there is a need for venting to someone who has a clue what it means to teach; yet there is something to the old saying : “You are what you talk about.” It is easy at this time of year as the semester is coming to a close to be bitter, to focus on what went wrong; after all teaching is emotionally and mentally draining work. So, I go to watch my students “walk” as they call it. It ends my teaching year on a positive note and sends me off in a happier mood to recover my own positive attitude about the world, teaching, and the importance of public education in the building of a better world.

  • Get Your Story Staight, part II

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    The real battle is not about the facts, facts as the band Talking Heads sang, “all come with points of view, facts won’t do what you want them to.” The real struggle is which story will become the one through which we see our world. “What I have to say does not answer the question, ‘This is how things are,’ but rather, ‘ This is how they are to be understood,” wrote Leo Frobenius.
    Which story line we come to believe is not merely a difference of opinion. The centuries of religious wars sparked by the Reformation, as well as the philosophical and very real blood letting between various religious sects from the Shia and Sunni in the Middle East, to the more benign Baptist and Episcopalian squabbles here at home, have hinged on which version should win out of the same story one group espouses over another. My mother and oldest sister have not spoken to one another for twenty years because of differing versions of the same story: their life and relationship together. Neither one will surrender control of their version of the narrative to the other, nor accept the difference. Another sister and I argued several years ago over how we treated each other. “Then there was that time you… and then you. . .” Followed quickly with, “No, that is when you did. . .” We have not gotten along since then. No one likes an editor.
    When my students spin their stories off of each others stories and the stories we read, they bring a divergent set of tales and beliefs. Rather than relying on their own narrative to determine the meaning of a text they begin to welcome the deepening of their own stories brought by others in the class telling their tales. The divergent personal narratives bring a universality to the common text; while the “canonized” text gives a significance in return to their personal stories which the students did not recognize before. When something one has to say is similiar to what one finds in Shakespeare more than a boost to one’s self-esteem occurs, one takes part in a conversation, as Mortimer Adler remarks, that has been going on for centuries.
    In a graduate class, which ostensively was a survey course of Medieval English Literature, called English Identity and Cultural Formation, the professor tried to make us ask the question: Why these texts? What did the canonization of these texts create? Being a simplistic person I said they are the stories we tell each other. They are the stories we share. I once heard a story about the philospher, George Santayana. At the turn of the last century, Harvard was re-evaluating the literature they were having the boys of the American elite read. They came to Santayana and asked him what the students should read. He told them it didn’t matter as long as they all read the same books. By reading the same texts, no matter what they were studying or what they went on to accomplish in their later lives the students would have a base from which to conduct the conversation required of a democracy. Daphne Key quotes Robert Scholes, “What students need from us now is the kind of knowledge and skill that will enable them to make sense of their worlds, to determine their own interests, both individual and collective, to see through the manipulations of all sorts of texts in all sorts of media, and to express their own views in some appropriate manner.” The skills they learn from making connections between the stories the students read and the stories the students tell are a means to this end. The students own stories allow them access to the techniques and manipulations which authors use to tell their tales. Or as Richard Rorty writes, “ What a human being is . . is largely a matter of how he or she describes himself or herself. We have to take seriously the idea that what you experience yourself to be is largely a function of what it makes sense to describe yourself as in the languages you are able to use.”

  • End of Year

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    My students concluded their performances of Macbeth today. For the last two weeks, after working through the play using the Folger Shakespeare Library’s “Shakespeare Set Free,” and other stuff I have made up, my students break into self-selected groups and choose a scene from the play. Earlier in the week I video taped their “dress rehearsals;” they were terrible. Each year, they always are. Three days later after seeing themselves on tape, they performed in front of 40-60 peers in my classroom. They were nervous and pissed at me, but they were great. They did it all: blocking, interpretation, how to say the lines and react to what was said. They knew their characters, the motivations from line to line, even the minor characters. The audience applauded, and my students finished the year with the feeling that they had done something difficult successfully. Maybe I am deluding myself, but for the last decade I have ended my year with my students doing, really doing, Shakespeare, and it works. They are engaged to the last day they are in my class, and they are thinking through a difficult text making meaning in a social context. What more can an English teacher want to happen in her class? Success on a standardized test? Affirmation from some outside testing service? Are we, after years of being good students ourselves, such grade whores, that we as teachers willingly sell our students as commodities so we look good when they come back with good AP scores?

  • Two Haiku

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    1

    With what word will I
    wake, walking into the world?
    The wind whispers, “Why?”

    2

    The fog dissipates;
    trees in the creek refocus,
    momentarily.

    (summer 2006)

  • words, story, quotes

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    . . . you must say words, as long as there are any, until they find me, strange pain, strange sin, you must go on, perhaps its done already, perhaps they have said me already, perhaps they have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my own story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.

    Samuel Beckett from The Unnamable p.382

    In the beginning was the word, the always already there of the world we are born into. The story we are and are to become does not begin neatly with a question in French like War and Peace. Yet the novel does begin, as does our own story as well. What were they talking about before the topic of Napoleon, the quality of the tea, the taste of the madelines? Language is ongoing, yet simultaneously new. Eliot wrote that we only know how to say something when we no longer need to say it; is life a quest to to find the words we need to tell our story? Jimmy Britton said that reading and writing float on a sea of talk; language is the ocean we are flung into at birth. Who’s up for a swim?

    I’ve thought for several years, at least since I was working on my Master’s , in the early nineties, that it would be interesting to write an essay that was comprised of only quotes. No linking bits of prose from me, just straight quotes; the reader could make the connections herself. It would be like Mortimer Adler’s great conversation except that I would be in control of who was invited to speak and who could say what when. A dinner party where I could pause and delete the conversation at will. A bit micromanaging, but then what writer isn’t an anal retentive control freak at heart. At least if they are honest. The necro-beat attitude espoused by Allen Ginsburg fans, “First thought, Best thought,” is true only if the first thought can lead to another and
    then another in an endless chain of overleaping like dolphins in front of a ship’s bow.

    This is where the quotes come in: I will be reading and a line or a phrase, or a paragraph, jumps out at me from the flow of prose sending my own thoughts in directions not followed by the rest of the passage. I used to be bothered by this, upset that I could not concentrate long enough to follow the complete thought pattern of the author, but I have grown accustomed to the tangential nature of my mind. It is not that I cannot follow other’s thoughts it is just that what they have to say makes me think of something else someone other than the original writer has written, or I think of something on my own. Although I am never sure if what I come up with is all that original. I must have stolen it from somewhere else; I felt a compulsive need to provide foot notes to my own thinking. Synthesis was not a virtue for me for many years. I remember wondering in high school how I could avoid plagiarizing when everything I wrote was not my own idea. Now as I have reentered academia the question comes up again as I read research articles where authors are cited seemingly at random since the writer’s themselves are never quoted. Perhaps I read too much, or have read for too many years, because I can’t remember where I read the idea I am pursuing. Like now, I am sure I have stolen this thought of stealing thoughts without knowing from where from somewhere but I do not know from where I have stolen it.

    Of course nothing is original since the words I am using have all been used by someone else. The language is always already there, but at the same time it is always already changing to something else otherwise we would still speak like the Beowulf poet. My students, every year, when we start on a Shakespeare play complain about how they can’t read “Old English.” I tell them they are right, but Shakespeare is written in modern English. I show them Old English, Middle English, then a passage of Shakespeare: we do speak differently, but not enough. The language is still the language we speak, the language we were born into, the language in which we tell our story. You can quote me on that.

  • Werewolves Live Close to the Border

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    It’s as if;
    Metamorphosis:
    in probability,
    improbability
    to transformulate.
    Translate the form;
    refine, define
    the infinite:
    cross boundries- – –
    land to land a step,
    the word changes.
    Is metaphor logic,
    being different,
    irregular when compared
    like it’s as if?
    Similiar to, yet
    dissimiliar enough
    to a simile to
    name names like
    It’s as if.

    (Fall 1990)

  • As if

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    your own words are different
    products of some other world
    not the soft decadence slumbering
    in the suburban streets

    you speak of such important matters
    full of precisely correct phrases
    a discourse most unnatural
    to those who talk to one another

    have I been gone so long, so isolated
    that the simple seasonal patterns
    have lost the neighborly charm
    of small talk upon the lawn

    (summer 2006)