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My Poetry and Commentary on Life

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  • Dipping into Stein

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    I have not come to mean
    I mean I mean
    Or if not I do not know
    If not I know or know
    This which If they did go
    Not only now but as much so
    As if when they did which
    If not when they did which they know
    Which if they go this as they go
    They will go which if they did know
    Not which if they which if they do go
    As much as if they go
    I do not think a change.
    -Gertrude Stein

    What meaning I have is questionable; I have not come to mean anything, rather I have become someone who makes meaning out of what is at hand, a bricoluer, if you will, rather than someone who knows what anything means. Someone who takes what is there and makes what she wills of it. My father, after he retired, opened a furniture repair shop in the garage at home. He had three children from 8 to 17 and he could not afford to retire even on social security, so he took what he had in his repertoire and made money. People would bring him their broken furniture, or their “antiques,” furniture they wanted to keep for some reason. Dad would fix it. He would find pieces of wood reproduce the original and fix it. I remember him staring at a piece of copper sheeting for an hour, getting up walking around the yard, cursing, sitting down and staring at the copper again, cursing some more, before finally cutting out a pattern for something he was trying to make in less than a minute. He was my Axe Handle.
    Much of what I write now, as far as essays go, are rambles, I start, then follow where the trail leads. Of course that does not mean a direction as much as a trail, impling a wake like a boat across a lake; I arrive somewhere, so in retrospect it appears as if I have followed a path, rather than cut my way through the tangle of my thinking. The turns of the trail are determined as much by what I do not talk about as much as what I do. I think of Mark Strand’s poem where he says, “I move to keep things whole.” He keeps the air apart in his bodily presence, so he moves allowing the reunification of air. I write to make things whole; I move through the bits of words I have been reading trying to get out of the way. I am not being coy. I look over the “texts” I have been reading, write down a few quotes, out of the slew of underlining I made while reading the books, then start to write. I would imagine that if I could pick different quotes from the same authors, I would come up with a different essay. Of course the quotes I pick are determined by what I am thinking at the time of the choosing, which is influenced as well by the quotes I pick as I am picking them thereby changing what I am thinking. Finally I create a story line that attempts to shape it all into a sense of meaning, or at least a sense of what I think I mean at the time.
    I wonder if I am shaped more by the writing than I shape what I write when I write.

  • Inner Speech, Deep Inner Speech

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    I read “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” by Jean-Dominique Bauby today. It is the memoir of a man who had a stroke and was left paralyzed completely. He was able to move his head and his left eye. He suffered from what they called “locked-in syndrome,” because he could still think, see, smell, and hear, but could not communicate with the outside. His speech therapist came up with the idea to rearrange the alphabet into the most commonly used letter order. Visitors would say this new alpha order and when they arrived at the letter of the word he was trying to spell, he would blink his left eye. Early in the book he wrote that he would think about what he wanted to write before someone arrived, because he did not want to waste time thinking about what he wanted to say when he was writing. It was a funny, say, moving story. It made me think about how much time we spend in our own heads, and Vygotsky’s inner speech. Jim Harrison wrote that most of the talk we do is with ourselves. Yes, community is important: Bauby’s amazing effort to communicate is testimony to that, but his book is also testimony to the depth of the world we live inside of our skulls.

  • transaction

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    Let me see if I understand?

    You have this image
    a picture, if you will , in mind
    perhaps more of a painting
    because of the layers
    and textures of nuance
    you have thought about
    but cannot articulate
    in any coherent, logical manner
    thus the image
    or did we agree on a painting
    to help out in the explanation
    a visual aid of a sort
    but a visual provided by a word
    which of course is a sound
    which represents something else
    which creates an image
    or painting to represent
    all of what you mean
    but cannot say
    which is there floating around
    in your head
    like snow flakes or fog.

    Is that it?

    (Fall 2007)

  • small talk

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    the tendency to provide an entry
    to give over some easily handled
    metaphorical line of thought to make
    the intent palatable for the time
    it takes to transform the former idea
    into the latter one: you into me – –
    long enough to allow the thought to form
    long enough for the talk to begin

    yet still what is there to say anymore
    that has not been said before by others
    we are constrained in the range of language
    how many ways can we say I love you
    not enough apparently, look around
    so many die with no kiss on their lips

    (December 2007)

  • Claws

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    worry over words
    a miser with his money
    turning and turning each phrase
    each nick and mar memorized
    memorialized and cherished
    like a prize newly won

    What did she say?
    What word stressed?

    Shades shade each shadow of nuance
    What light is cast on what wall

    (from Fragments of Water, 2003)

  • Contact!

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    Teaching in the Contact Zone is a good cook book on teaching critically. Gaughan provides lots of activities to engage students in a curriculum of “Fight the Power.” Many students respond well to these types of activities; it gives them a sense of control over their lives and the world. There is something that can be done. There is a teacher down the hall who does a lot of this kind of stuff; she even started a club where the students collect funds for Darfur and similar causes. It is a great motivator for the students she works with. In addition to explaining the activities well, Gaughan gives good justifications for doing what he does the way that he does it. I totally agree with everything. However, I still am uncomfortable with such obvious attempts at shaping the thinking of the students. Pink Floyd’s “We don’t need your thought control, teachers leave those kids alone!” keeps replaying in my head. Where is the line drawn between social activism and social control? Is it ok when I agree with the political agenda? Or is it wrong and propaganda only when done by those I disagree with. Yes, there is always an element of manipulation and control: Power is inherent in every human relationship. I wonder how often Gaughan’s students simply gave him what he wanted to hear in order to get the grade they thought he would provide. They too know how to use the power to their benefit. Too cynical? Perhaps.

  • from "Primogenitive Folly"

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    And where does it lie, this belief in some . . .
    higher, something beyond our meager . . .
    for food, shelter, sex? What drive coaxes . . .
    out along the edges of our lives . . .
    to hunt for a definition that . . .
    satisfy, like a cat curled purring . . .
    a chair? But questions come too late for . . .
    . . . sense to make a difference between
    the words . . . speak to ourselves and others.
    Laughter breaks through the cracks in language; . . .
    failure propped up on fragmented nerve . . .
    . . . , an audacity which still cannot
    stand against the onslaught of the world . . .
    The sad remnants of the stories we tell.

    (2001-2003)

  • How to Teach Teachers: How to Know Everything

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    Reading Smagorinsky and Whitting, “How English Teachers Get Taught,” I become overwhelmed by the difficulty of reducing everything important, and everything is important, into a 15 week syllabus. There is no way everything a pre-service teacher needs to know before teaching can be reduced to a 15-week class. I agree with them that a focused class would be more useful in the long run than a survey course that touches on everything, yet my tendency is to want to include everything. I hope that last week in class a few parameters were laid down, like how many classes per week, how long the classes last, etc. so that I can get an idea about how much I can cram into the syllabus. I am already going to assume that the students will be willing to read quite a bit, but I am not sure what even that means. I remember vaguely my methods class, which was a short series of lessons on various techniques over a few weeks, prior to being thrown into the student teaching classroom. The class that helped me the most was the writing project I weaseled into in 1987 the year before I was first hired. The writing project gave me some things to do, and an outlook that has informed my teaching for the last twenty years. I guess that shows, as Smagorinsky and Whitting argue, for the importance of a balance of theory and practice.

  • In Abstraction

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    where we wander
    whether through wood or city street
    the words call us to task
    the very path
    the way we walk
    the slant of the sun we watch

    the air thickens – – we breathe out
    as we speak – -the world widens

    so talk to me see what we can see
    I’m willing to change my speech

    action beyond mere acceptance

  • Rereading the Texts in Our Lives; Our lives as Texts

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    ‘People have no idea what reality is like. Or they’re in their own safe reality.” (Alvermann 2006, p. 23) The problem is that there is no real reality. “Myth exists, but one mus tguard against thinkingthat people believe in it: this is the trap of critical thinking that can only be exercised if it presupposes the naivete and stupidity of the masses” (Baudrillard 1994, p. 81). We are all functioning in our “own safe reality.” Even if that safe reality is tainted by cynicism or blind optimism. The touchstone texts these two young people have inculcated into their being play out in both of their adult lives. Simply because one has started to see a text differently than before, does not mean one has any more a sophisticated understanding of the text. It still falls into the turmoil of hermenutical interpretation. If we are written as texts by cultural texts, we are also writing ourselves inside/into the cultural texts. In the Holland et al. text referenced in the introduction, one chapter discusses how people who join Alcoholics Anonymous, adjust the story they tell over time to more fully fit the model of “the story” of the others in AA (specifically the “Book” of the founder). This phenomenon is reflected in the stories El and David tell about themselves. Their stories contain common tropes for the kind of lives they have begun writing for themselves. I am reminded of the Piagetian “Identity v. role diffusion,” where adolescents try on different roles provided by the adult world as they search for their own identity. Identity formation never ends, yet somewhere in the ever changing dance, I believe, there is a core (soul perhaps?) where all the parts we construct rotate. The writing/reading/revisioning/rereading all take part in a ongoing never ending recurssive simultaneous pulse that is us.

  • 52. Checking the Map

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    And yet here I am:
    not much farther than
    where I was when I left:
    only the distance was great.
    It’s never an easy matter
    to stand still, listening close.

    from My Book of Changes (December 11, 1995)

  • Thinking about the Turmoil

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    Teaching Reading to Black Adolescent Males: Closing the Achievement Gap, while a useful book, brings up the question I had when I read Ladson-Billings’ The Dream Keeper. How is this just not good pedagogy? (Yes, I am aware of Ladson-Billings’ article that counters this question). Is it simply an awareness of the cultural differences in your classroom that makes the difference in the pedagogy? But shouldn’t a teacher be aware of where their students are coming from, the abilities they bring with them, as well as the culture (ways with words, ways of knowing) that determine how they react to the culture of the school? I know that too often the one method for all the students does little to serve any of the students. Also too often teachers who claim they teach all students the same, mean they teach all the students as if they are middle-class and white. Tatum drives home his point through the constant repetition of respecting the student, allowing them to learn to make meaning of a text, as opposed to telling the student what the text means; teaching them how to make meaning, as opposed to decontextualized “skills;” as well as finding ways to make what occurs in the classroom culturally relevant. I agree with all of these, yet I still have a hard time seeing how these are not just things teachers should do with all of the students. Yes, the crisis that exists with African-American males makes it imperative that teacher’s focus on them. I wonder however if we could have a larger effect if we could reconceptualize the way literacy is taught across the board. If we would stop the decontextualization of reading skills, and the constant testing of irrelevant disconnected texts, and focus on how to make meaning out of language/sign systems then we will be a lot closer to helping all of our students be literate in ways that will help them do more than survive in our world.

  • Babbling After Beers

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    “The less we depend on programs the more we depend on our own knowledge – -informed by practice and research- – the less likely we are to be controlled by politically driven mandates, expensive programs that appear and disappear from our classrooms without rhyme or reason, and federally funded (or not funded) programs.” (Beers p.37)

    I like Beers’ focus on the differences between independent readers vs. dependent readers. What a concept: look at what good readers do, and then coming up with ways to teach dependent readers how to do what good readers do. Explicit instruction on specific techniques, which over time should become more automatic as the dependent readers practice doing what we are asking them to do. Read. Sometimes I wonder about my constant, albeit brief, babbles as I move about the classroom concerning the how and why of reading and writing. I am constantly telling stories, in which I try to embed what it is I do, or someone else does when they read or write. I want them to think about the process, to think about their thinking when it comes to reading and writing, while at the same time not belaboring the process nor breaking it down to such minutia that they forget about the big picture (reading) by becoming lost in the details of the craft. Yes, reading like writing is a craft. There are so many students at so many different levels. I constantly tell them, one is never finished with becoming a better reader. One of the problems I have now with my own reading is that seemingly benign sentences will send me off on tangental strands of thought (not that they are not connected, because ultimately I come back to the text and the text is made richer by the connections I am making, ala Rosenblatt); this tends, however, to cloud (trouble/interrupt?) the meaning I make of the text in my hands.

    “I’m going to propose that each time a reader rereads, she revises her understanding of the text. The first read of a story, a chapter, a poem a novel, a web page, a letter – -any sort of text- – yields the first draft of understanding. Readers revise that draft through every rereading.” (Beers p. 118).

    An easy example of this was when my own children were small and I would read and reread books to them nightly. I barely had to pay attention to the text after awhile, which was a good thing considering that sometimes “The Cat in the Hat” would cast a spell upon me, sending my thoughts all over the place from Joseph Campbell to people who protest certain books because of what they read into the text. It was not just me thinking about stuff I was interested in, but the Dr.Suess book that would send me to a deeper understanding of what I was thinking about. This also makes me wonder about the teachers who argue against letting the students read free choice books, because they are afraid the students will not select “difficult enough” books. In my experience students move on to “more difficult” books when they are ready to move on. Sometimes it takes a little prodding, but never very much. They get bored with the formula writer’s (all writers) use to put their texts together. Over time I noticed that I will go through periods where I read a lot of one writer: twenty years ago Faulkner and Hemingway, as a child everything by Robert Heinlein or Roger Zelazney, more recently Jim Harrison, Sherry Tepper, and Dashiel Hammet. What always happens is that I will suddenly stop, usually after I have identified common themes, tropes and plot devices. As a teacher, being there ready to make the next suggestion, kind of like Amazon’s “other books purchased by those who bought this book” suggestions, will send a student off in another direction. Even if it is only a matter of a shift of one or two degrees, in the long run it will make a difference.

  • Surroundings

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    I impose all of me
    the oblivious and the obvious
    I mean nothing
    but what I say
    and what I say
    without me as well
    congruence is reflection
    flipped to gain parallax

    Depending where I am in the field
    different flowers burst into bloom.

    from Fragments of Water
    (April 2006)

    Nothing to do with class at all.

  • Pushing through Push

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    I finished “Push” by Saphire last night., a sad horrible good book. My emotions were played like a piano. I remember as a child wondering about my dad crying at sappy movies; now I just wonder how I can be so much like him when he died when I was seventeen. Of course this thought makes me think of Precious in Push overcoming her wretched parents: is that possible considering how abusive and destructive they were to her. I know the redemtive ending is heartwarming and all, but is it really a reality? Can literacy and a few caring people really become so transformative? It would be nice to think so. Rosenblatt seemed to think that reading could change the world; while I agree that literacy can be life changing/affirming, I am not sure it can save someone so quickly who had been crushed down so completely. I did enjoy the contrast between the positivist therapist using the test score data to catergorize and marginalize Precious, as oppossed to Rain Blue focusing on the individuals in her class and the power of the word. Made me happy, after reading a memo from central office about a workshop on how to teach the students to write higher scoring short answer questions. One final comment for this entry. When I mentioned to one of my students that I read “Push” last night, she got excited and wanted to talk about it. She had read it over the summer, and has been loaning it out to friends since then. She was surprised that I had read it for a “college’ class; that seemed to legitimize the book in a “school” way to her.