Apparently, I knew I would like Sarah Manguso’s The Captain Lands in Paradise so much, I ordered one used copy and one new copy.  The used came days ago, and I loved it.  I just wrote all about it to my graduate advisor.  The new one came from Amazon today.

So the used copy will get shipped to whomever writes the most compelling argument for why he/she deserves a free copy of a Sarah Manguso.  Have at it in the comments section.

I also got One Hundred and Forty-Five Stories in a Small Box by Manguso, Dave Eggers, and Deb Olin Unferth.

A dream:

I am in my office wearing just pajamas, and I know I have a meeting coming up so I have to scramble to get dressed. A co-worker comes in and starts telling me about fish. I need to get dressed so I can meet with him properly. DB calls and tells me that there are two women to see me. It’s 9 AM. I walk downstairs. Seated in the waiting area is THE HAND. She has Eleanor with her. I enter the lobby to hug her and she does not stand or hug back.

“This is a wonderful surprise,” I say. “In fact, surprise doesn’t really begin to cover it.”

“I wanted to see where you work,” she says.

“This is the place,” I say. “What on earth are you doing here?”

“I thought I’d take a look around before we send you off to continue your studies.”

“Um, I thought I was almost done.”

“You are,” she says, “with us. You’re going to Sarah Lawrence next.”

The alarm woke me before I had a chance to ask how I was supposed to explain this to my wife or why I was shipping out to a girl’s school. But in my mind, once The Hand had told me I was going, I knew I was going to end up going, and I was in quite a panic, because I really didn’t know how I was going to break the news to Ladybug.

In real, waking life, we bought a new digital camera, since both of our old ones had broken. The idea of having one for the family is great, except the only time I can think of in the next year when I’m going to want to use a digital camera, she’s going to be in Turkey with it.

1. You feel guilty about the time you spent folding laundry even though you’re going to have to have something to wear tomorrow.
2. You start thinking that a poem about lo mein isn’t such a bad idea.
3. It’s Sunday night and you’re wearing the same shirt you woke up in Saturday morning.
4. You’re logged in to Instant Messenger, Gtalk, Twitter, and your e-mail account hoping that someone, even a spambot, will send you a message, the first three words of which will help you solve that difficult Mark Strand poem.
5. The ninth coffee didn’t give you the jitters, but it also didn’t give you the focus you were hoping for.
6. Being identified as a language poet wouldn’t bother you, because nothing you have accomplished in the last couple days makes a damn bit of sense.
7. You wonder what possessed you to commit to reading Lowell’s Collected Poems when you could have picked seventeen volumes no longer than Trethewey’s Native Guard.
8. Larkin doesn’t seem curmudgeonly at all any more. He was dead right about everything and everyone.
9. You avoid human contact. If your wife knocks on your door, you become furious that she had the audacity to interrupt to tell you she’s leaving you.
10. You feel a strange sense of bliss, because you know it won’t last forever.  You sort of wish it could.

The following is stuff that sort of bubbled up to the top when thinking about the essay “The Intentional Fallacy,” and while it speaks to the difficult of any evaluation of poetry, it’s not something I’m willing to stand by, just something I present for argument.

The idea of intentional fallacy seems to me inescapable in some ways, though the essay gives me some more context for how it might be better avoided in many of the annotations (and, moving forward, in the class). I think my problem stems from the constant talk about tone in any critical setting. We talk a lot about tone at WWC. I cannot see how any discussion of a speaker’s emotional state can be anything but subjective on the part of the critic and therefore subject to some of the same flaws as the intentional fallacy.

I recognize the difference to a limited degree. The intentional fallacy occurs when the reader supposes that the work’s merit is in some way tied to what the author hoped to accomplish. Tone is focused on the text and not on the author.

But it seems to me that judgment of tone is still wholly subjective. A poem which says “I hate cereal” could be judged by different readers to have wholly different tones. One might think that the speaker is dead serious, that his hatred of cereal is withering and consuming; another might think the speaker prone to hyperbole; another might think the speaker sarcastic. Of course, these interpretations are subject to context, but isn’t any interpretation drawn from the critic’s own experience, as applied to the body of the poem, and therefore suspect? Can’t we then throw out tone entirely as a measurable or observable element of a poem due to that suspicion?

I tend to feel the same way when hearing people talk about the effects of syllabics. It’s wholly subjective; iambs feel no more aggressive to me, by design, than trochees or dactyls. But I feel like I hear statements like that all the time, and if the critic is careful to attribute those emotions to the poem and not to the poet, it passes as valid observation.

How are we to consider, to evaluate a poem without constant self-reference? And how are we to observe when we have first read the poem as a reader, a voracious entity with both an intellectual and emotional appetite, then later attempt to “observe and describe” as though we hadn’t already interacted with, loved or hated or been stymied by or fought with before acquiescing to, a poem? A critic attempts to be a scientist only after he’s had an affair with the subject. We do not, we cannot, read poems as objective scientists, not ever. And once committed to the work as a biased, human, and very fallible reader, it almost seems foolish to bother with a hierarchy of fallibility, where intentional fallacy is bad but emotional or presumptive fallacies are fine.

So that’s where I’m struggling; I feel like the annotation process asks me to be that scientist and I’m never going to be able; I cannot measure the effect of the work without some flavor of informal fallacy. (Obviously, my early annotations, which say “the poem does x to the reader” were poorly veiled references to what the poem did to me; I am the only reader who will ever be relevant to the annotations so it didn’t seem such a rotten linguistic substitution. But I see the necessity for the purposes of awarding credit to the exercise of removing those kinds of statements, and don’t have a problem doing so. It seems a bit askew to ask students to focus on an aspect of the work that they feel they need—and are therefore emotionally committed to—and then ask them not to engage with the work at that level. Beyond concatenating the words, counting the syllables, and observing pattern and deviation, there’s not much one might say without committing some level of autobiography to the page. And simple counting and observing doesn’t seem sufficient to address issues in the writer’s own work; word and syllable counts are hardly teaching tools. So some interpretive fallacy will be necessary to draw any creative fuel from the process, whether it be converse fallacy of accident, non sequitur, or consequent fallacy.)

I’m putting together a presentation with Bill Ferris on Virtual Mentoring for the 2008 Raising Achievement & Closing Gaps Conference in Greensboro, NC. (Info for stalkers: Bill and I have two presentations next Tuesday, at 9:15 AM and 2:30 PM.)

It’s been a while since I have created a presentation from scratch; David Walbert and I did one on Web 2.0 last fall, but rather than create a “presentation,” we threw up a wiki with some talking points, and then asked the group to explore and edit, and then we brought them back together for some discussion, during which we modified the wiki. We did the presentation a couple of times, each time using the most up-to-date version of the wiki, and it got better, I thought. It was fun.

Bill and I don’t plan to have participant computers (or even Internet access) for this one, so it was time to create a PowerPoint. I’ve heard about– heck, I’ve presented about– effective use of PowerPoint, but Dan Meyer’s repeated posts about transforming presentations got me thinking about how I could do better, and working collaboratively with Bill meant that I couldn’t be lazy about planning or I’d be making his life more difficult.

So I set a goal– more slides than words in this presentation. I was going to try to find images (using a Creative Commons search on Flickr) that would be more effective at presenting the information than any number of bullet points.

End result: fail. I found one place where it behooved me to include what looks a little like a tag cloud. But the presentation is a far more visual animal than I’ve ever used before, and while it isn’t going to change the world or make the listeners faint with glee, I think it’ll be more stimulating than the norm.

Photos from flickr by Creativity + Timothy K Hamilton, otisarchive1, woodleywonderworks, Del Far, and welshkaren. People who share with Creative Commons are awesome.

Despite having turned down the opportunity to do it ten days ago, I found myself thinking about NaPoWriMo all morning.

I am now resorting to the pros and cons list.

Pros

• I have produced only three new poems since January, and two of them were stinkers.  One was so bad I could not show it to anyone in draft form.
• My grad school advisor has challenged me to write three new poems for my next packet, which I will send in April 2.
• Emma wanted to revive our awesome, secret NaPo blog, which was great fun to work on because we had awesome characters.
• Clearly the exercise works– almost half of my graduate thesis will be poems that were first drafted in a poem-a-day grind.
• Our October grind group has grown and grown, and though people come and go in 29-to-31-day increments, I expect that April will have a healthy number of poem-a-day-ers.

Cons

• I’ve struggled to keep up with commitments the last couple months, and with various trips to doctors and some sick days, I’ve been having what I would consider my roughest semester thus far in grad school.
• Ladybug hates it when I could be spending time with her and I’m obsessing over a deadline for a poem that I know won’t be very good anyhow.
• I can’t get too focused on new work while I have so much revision to be done for my thesis.  And the poems which need the most revision are ones that came from the October and November grinds.

Tomfoolery and sheer idiocy, in bullet format:

• The list of people I’m following on Twitter has swelled from 15 to 34 in the last couple weeks.  Twitter is infinitely more satisfying now.  If you’re reading this, and you’re on Twitter, and I ain’t following you, let me know.  Perhaps you interest me.
• This is kind of amazing.  You cannot help but feel absolutely terrible for the guy.  You cannot help but feel absolutely terrible for anyone who’s going to have to return the stuff they hauled away.  You cannot help but wonder how anyone came up with it.
• Spent most of yesterday moving furniture. We now have the corner cabinets that Ladybug’s grandfather made.  And some other crap.
• I’m headed back to the classroom!  Well, for a day.  I’m subbing for a colleague’s poetry workshop next week.  I have missed being around poetry students.  Badly.  I realized it once more when I was writing a recommendation for a student and I read over his creative sample.
• I’m currently badgering Tom McHenry to make me into a cyborg.

I know that grad school asks me to write papers about craft so that I can learn from what I am reading, but sometimes, when you really, really love a poem, you don’t want to look under the hood. You know it works. You wish you didn’t have to think about why. As if knowing would take away from your appreciation. Critial study always seems like a “destroy what you love” proposition for me. I rarely come back to those poems disgusted with them. I generally feel a heightened appreciation for them. But there’s always that sense of apprehension before starting. I think it’s because I want to believe it’s magic. I think I wish I had some of that.

The Distance

Two women are hugging each other goodbye
On the sidewalk in the tree-shadow
Of a late spring afternoon. It is not
Sexual, though both are beautiful.
And thought both are tall and lithe
Under their dark hair, the differences
Between them are infinite
And support one another. Behind them,
In the distance, buildings
Tangential to the sun catch fire a moment,
Then darken. A young man, hands
In his pockets, is coming toward them.
The women are crying.
They are not yet ready to part.
And it is not sexual.
Even the young man, who is surely lonely,
Slows as he approaches them,
Feeling a sudden reverence
He wouldn’t have thought himself capable of.
He stops half a block away.
The women part. They part
Like drapes drawn open
To catch the last light.
One of the women gets into a car
And drives away; the other
Waves, then turns back across the grass,
Perhaps to her apartment. And the young man
Walks on into the gathering
City twilight, which will be
More beautiful and lonely for him
When he looks up. His whole self is focused
On the precise spot of the women’s
Parting. When he reaches the spot,
He stands there. Just stands there
Transformed in the vivid air of their absence.

–Joe Bolton

Today was a state holiday, and I was planning to work most of the day on my MFA. I woke up at 7:30, puttered around a little bit, and then read Auden for a while. Then, I came downstairs to assemble the first draft of my manuscript. I’ve had a running order for the poems for a while but hadn’t actually assembled it all into one file and started reading them together. It’s now 6 PM, and I have accomplished nothing other than some handwritten notes on a table of contents. I stared at it all day. I don’t usually count days like this as productive time towards the degree, but it really was.

Lee posted the other day about how he wishes that one day someone would come into his office while he has his feet on the desk and is staring into space, and the person would say to him, “Oh, I’m sorry to bother you while you’re working.” That was my day. But no one disturbed me.

I was just upstairs reading, and had one of those satisfying moments. My iPod served up Oasis’s “Live Forever” (mp3) and I flipped to Auden’s “The More Loving One.”

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total darkness sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

Both the Oasis and the Auden cover essentially the same topic, albeit in different terms and different media. Auden essentially acknowledges the impossibility that we matter in any reasonable cosmic scheme, but at the end of his poem, he outlives the stars and comes to appreciate the universe changed. Oasis rejects the natural order of things and achieves immortality for their daring.

Run these through the filter of my last few days, and you come up with one irresistible conclusion: being alive in the moment is the only immortality one needs. You can look at the world, littered with the walking dead, and conclude that you’ve bested it forever by enjoying it now.

***

Of course, the possibility exists that when Auden looked at the stars, knowing”That, for all they care, I can go to hell,” he was simply prophesying the inevitable existence of Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, and Paris Hilton. Yes, devoid of them, we might all come to appreciate the world. But it would take a while. It would take a while indeed.