first independent reading list

My first independent reading list is done for the semester.  I do six reading assignments throughout the semester (though this time they’ll all read the same book for the third assignment), and students are expected to write about the books they read four times. There were a couple of books I was hoping to assign…

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Look on my works, ye Mighty, and snicker

Though you hardly notice a difference, I’m now running a more advanced version of WordPress, which is pretty great on the back end. In my Intro to Poetry class, we spent some time last week on Shelley’s “Ozymandias,” giving it a close reading and looking for ways that the sonnet form provides some tension with…

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This is Just to Say

One of the first poems I teach in my intro to poetry classes is William Carlos Williams’s “This is Just to Say.”  It’s a short poem with an amazing amount going on, though at first glance, many students dismiss it as slight or unworthy of being a poem. My favorite thing about teaching it is…

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one more

Thirty seconds after receiving one acceptance, another came in.  I figure that if I blog this one, too, more will arrive before the end of the day.

Shorty Get Loose

When successful, a short poem immediately launches into its lyrical potential; any narrative grounding happens in service to the lyric. (I don’t think there’s such a thing as a successful short narrative, at least not one in less than ten average-sized lines or so. That’s just not enough to tell a complete story in verse.)…

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Ten Sure Signs That You Have “Packet Fever”

You feel guilty about the time you spent folding laundry even though you’re going to have to have something to wear tomorrow. You start thinking that a poem about lo mein isn’t such a bad idea. It’s Sunday night and you’re wearing the same shirt you woke up in Saturday morning. You’re logged in to…

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Thoroughly unconsidered thoughts on intentional fallacy

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…

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Give me some time, I will revise this entry, too.

I got a response (a super-fast one, at that) from my advisor, Mr. A. Van Jordan, today, and folks, I have assembled the first version of my petition to graduate. I’ll have another look at it tomorrow, just to make sure that after sleeping on it, I don’t freak out about any of the selections.…

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from <em>The Unsubscriber</em>

We are lucky to have to the occasion and desire to write poems… RELICS WITH OLD BLUE MEDICINE-TYPE BOTTLE: TO X This old blue medicine-type bottle, unburied From your garden last year’s the perfect centerpiece To suit our supper—the totem-trope we need Across this kitchen table, to show how dangerous It is where we sit…

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Logical Games for the Unbeliever

Here is a poem that have been wanting to share with you for a few days: Logical Games for the Unbeliever All night I kept solving for G. Now, through this dark morning, the equation escapes at the set speed of light. There are so many things I don’t understand. The future comes and it’s…

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