Carte du Tendre

Carte du Tendre published on Poetry Project as cover of e-zine “To hear all the sky and the map”: Lines of Mapping.

Eco Poetics / Ecopoetics

Thinking about ecopoetics all the time, as we do now, I came upon this from Stephanie Strickland's collected works, How the Universe Is Made. I was struck still by the conflation of language, string data and enormous amounts of information with a glacier. From her V: Wavetercets / Losing L'Una (which is itself a reformulation of V: Waveson.nets / Losing L'Una) are tercets 223 and 224:

223
Words of others.
Lists and strings are fluid data structures.
The Glacier calving, enormous roar 

224
into a gray silent sea,
turquoise
lining.

Does a calving glacier destroy information?
I'll give that a gray, but not silent, yup.

"Delphi" on Missing Witches' Beltane Episode

I sent my old poem "Delphi," about Vestal Virgins, to Risa and Amy at Missing Witches and they clapped it on the end of their Beltane May Day episode. Nice to have it in a magic feminist realm, though it was published long ago on a site.... Check out the episode here--and visit the fantastic back catalog. Missing Witches are doing the goddess' work. 

Poetry Month Sez Who

Ralph Emerson:

The one thing we seek with insatiable desire is...to be surprised out of our propriety...to do something without knowing how or why; in short to draw a new circle.....The way of life is wonderful; it is by abandonment.

Teaching, Not Teaching M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!

The first time I assigned NourbeSe Philip's Zong!, a book for which I practically needed a trigger warning the first time I heard of it, I did not want to get it wrong. 

I'm hardly a perfectionist as a professor. My pedagogy hero is Count Leo Tolstoy, who once wrote:

To teach, to bring up a child, why, it is a chimera, an absurdity, for this simple reason, that the child is much nearer than I am, or any grown man, to the true, beautiful and good to which I undertake to raise him.

I take comfort here, especially when discussing complex texts that are meaningful to me with a room of nineteen-year-olds. I was never confident about explaining Emily Dickinson and James Baldwin and James Joyce and Helene Cixous, anyway. In my class, you don't have to like anything, but you have to know the general facts and you have to have a grounded opinion on what a text is, have to be able to connect it to a few other things you know. 

Still, back in 2017, considering the teaching of Zong!, I conscientiously gathered my notes and proceeded to read the truth to the youths. I got the students to read, then made them write to several prompts that would turn into a -- yes -- a paper. They had to get it, and they had to get it my way. 

But at the end of the semester, a few of the students who came to my office hours regularly were still puzzling over their papers -- or simply trying to ensure As. One afternoon, four of them had gathered and we began reading the poem together. We were in a large adjunct bull pen at the Bronx campus that sits in the middle of the Economics department. One fellow read, then another, then we decided to read it in pairs, then to split it up and read it in columns, overlapping, singing, really. An athlete, a musician, a philosophy major, and a senior who just needed an English credit to get out raised their voices. There were no adjuncts around, to my dismay, because the result seemed to me very beautiful, but when a few of the Economics folks peeked over the safety glass that encaged us, I was proud.

This semester, I'd learned my lesson. Rather than "teaching" Zong!, it's been all reading. Little chunks at first, then larger chunks, and, yesterday, the passages at the end, the part from the printer foul-up. 

At first three of them were reading downward--one for the left column, one for the right, and one for the center. Some admiration, some complaints. (Fine.) Then we were all reading--one third of the room to the left column and so on. After we'd done a page it was as if we'd emerged on a new beach. Some of the students still were not happy with the text--not clear, not connected--but others were joined to it, intrigued, excited. when I suggested we record ourselves and send it to MNP herself, they were thrilled. 

Et voila. 

The next morning, I'm not sure this is good enough for her. Not yet. But posting here and will start digging around to reconnect to her on Twitter, where we once followed each other, or to get her email another way. Maybe we will revise--I guess, a la Tolstoy, I should let the class decide.  

Hey! Upon receiving a hilarious email from a student last night, some notes on how to discuss rhetoric, discourse without resorting to a phrase like "good manners."

NOTES. 

Late last night, I received this email from a student:

Hey,I'm looking at my schedule and trying to determine where our class will be meeting. Under the tab on the scheduling software labeled "schedule details" it says: "Location: None Building: None Room: None"

One bad email can get a person thinking. Even one not-so-bad email can wreak havoc on relationships. Considering the new freshman's words, written hours before embarking on his college career, I remembered James Paul Gee's famous line, "All discourse is like an identity kit." My student's identity kit might make him come off as sloppy and rude to a mean(er) professor. And, since the student's style was not at all unusual, I was hoping to use his words as a lesson. Hey.

Thinking of the line from Gee, I began kicking around the identity/discourse angle. Blogger Natasha Wickenheiser has clearly done some work in this area. Here she rounds up these excellent quotations from Gee’s Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics. Wickenheiser, an English prof in Bloomington, can be found discussing Discourse and many other cool topics on her Wordpress blog, Scrapbooked Inquiries.

1. “[Language] is not just about how you say it, but what you are and do when you say it” (525).
2. “At any moment we are using language we must say or write the right thing in the right way while playing the right social role and (appearing) to hold the right values, beliefs, and attitudes. Thus, what is important is not language, and surely not grammar, but saying (writing)-doing-being-valuing-believing combinations” (526).
3. “A Discourse is a sort of ‘identity kit’ which comes complete with the appropriate costume and instructions on how to act, talk, and often write, so as to take on a particular role that others will recognize” (526).
4. “Discourses are not mastered by overt instruction…but by enculturation into social practices through scaffolded and supported interaction with people who have already mastered the Discourse (Cazden, 1988; Heath, 1983)” (527).
5. “After our initial socialization in our home community, each of us interacts with various non-home-based social institutions–institutions in the public sphere, beyond the family and immediate kin and peer group” (527).
6. “I believe that any socially useful definition of ‘literacy’ must be couched in terms of the notion of Discourse. Thus, I define ‘literacy’ as the mastery of or fluent control over a secondary Discourse” (529).
7. ““Classroom instruction (in language, composition, study skills, writing, critical thinking, content-based literacy, or whatever) can lead to meta-knowledge, to seeing how the Discourses you have already got relate to those you are attempting to acquire, and how the ones you are trying to acquire relate to self and society” (532).
8. “It is sometimes helpful to say that individuals do not speak and act, but that historically and socially defined discourses speak to each other through individuals” (539).
9. “Children from non-mainstream homes often do not get the opportunities to acquire dominant secondary discourses–including those connected with the school–in their homes, due to their parents’ lack of access to these discourses” (541).
   
   

My student was telling me an enormous amount about their identity--family and immediate peer group--as well as their confidence in their discourse--as well as where their composition professor falls in this realm. The only problem? Their assumptions are wrong. They're playing on university turf now. As Gee intimates, there's no half-way mastery of a discourse.

On a related note, Wickenheiser has a blog post on Lisa Delpit, an education theorist grappling with student identity and the politics of teaching the "dominant" discourse. In Other People's Children, Delpit writes that teachers 

“must understand that students who appear to be unable to learn are in many instances choosing to ‘not-learn,’ as Kohl puts it, choosing to maintain their sense of identity in the face of what they perceive as a painful choice between allegiance to ‘them’ or ‘us.’ The teacher, however, can reduce this sense of choice by transforming the new discourse to that it contains within it a place for the students’ selves.”

The thought of a student rejecting arcane prescriptions that have nothing to do with their lives today fills me with as much pain as it does admiration. I'd do the same thing, of course. There are discourses I've said hell no to. But when money and class come into the equation, as they generally do, race is along for the ride, and this white lady has been painfully conscious of the conundrum (and not terribly articulate about it) on several campuses. Forcing my white-lady discourse on others was most concerning, especially when I was teaching creative writing to a few fabulously creative kids with rotten grammar in New Jersey. 

I think of the kids still. All the Yeats I gave them. Ugh. Hey.

In speaking of the earth, a poet beats the New York Times (again)

This week The Times devoted their Sunday magazine to a single article, which I only scanned, about how we (they?) didn't address climate change last century. Now some of my Facebook friends are arguing about the essay and about the real (real) cause of our failure to fix. I think it's too late for all of it, and maybe impossible anyway, and our only recourse is poetry.

Fortunately, poetry is quite a recourse. Poets.org has just published a brill pair of stanzas on and around the topic from Marcella Durand. Read from The Prospect here; below are a few lines that work like a surgeon on the situation, opening its ugliness cleanly to take stock.

                                                          I finally understand

what we’re doing, in this moment of glowing darkness I understand 

       what I put in the water I drink the water and if together 

       we are all getting hot we are making it hot and I must find 

       my way to the water