There My Be Ten or Twelve Things...

There Are Maybe Ten Or Twelve ...

I've always admired teachers.

My best moments with my grandmother, my mom's mom, were when she got caught up in old stories or listened with the interest of a [former] teacher. This didn't happen that often, but I remember those times when it did.

My mother, as selfless a human being as I've ever known, taught kindergarten for decades with all the kindness and compassion of a saint on the earth.

My two irreplaceable and irreproachable sisters, both now professional educators, sacrificed (or just spent) their after school time and summers playing ‘school’ with me until I was old enough to go there myself; I went straight to kindergarten—sister school being a good enough pre-school.

My father was a natural ‘doer’ but not a natural teacher. However, he did try. One of my last and most prized memories with him involved him ‘teaching’ me how to install a car stereo. He also taught me how to pray without anyone needing to know, how to be a loving husband, and how to be a reliable dad. He taught much more than he ever knew.

In finding the love of my life, I found another teacher. And I found her in school of all places: a course in World Religions. She still hasn’t let me live down skipping class on the day that she presented her biography of Gandhi, but I bet she can’t remember my favorite section of the Tao Te Ching either. Now, she dedicates her days to helping the youngest strugglers one by one by one with infinite love and kindness that never ceases to impress me.

So, I guess it is no wonder that I spend my days in a room full of books, and minds, and ideas hoping to inspire at least in a few a means to making a continuing and meaningful education.

At some point, in what must have been dire need, the educational bureaucracy decided that I was qualified to supervise future teachers, and the first go not ending in utter failure (long live Mr. Dixey!), they let me try again. Enter Ms. Amanda.

________________________________

Teacher

For writing—being a writer—always seems to the writer to be of dubious value. […] 

Teaching—even the teaching of writing—is altogether different. Teaching is an act of communication, sympathy—a reaching-out—a wish to share knowledge, skills; a rapport with others, who are students; a way of allowing others into the solitariness of one’s soul.

Joyce Carol Oates, "I Am Sorry to Inform You"

Schopenhauer was a pessimist but
he played the flute.

William Stafford, "Things I Learned Last Week"

I.

There were two nuns, two years apart, in two different towns, each taught me  something about what it means to read, to know, to speak, listen, and teach. 

If not for one, I'd be much less kind. If not for the other, I don't see a world 

in which I'd be writing this, having read that, or known any of you.

II.

Nearly ten years ago, I was the intern, twenty-five years old & rough around the edges. Mary was my mentor, without whose endearing example, along with her good word, I wouldn’t have landed this job. We don’t talk much these days, but I think of her often for the help that she gave.

It’s been a charmed ten years. I’ve made friends from colleagues, who remain close by even when they go. I wouldn’t be writing this without them, and because of the luck of the draw, or the hand of fate, this last twelve weeks we got one more.

III.

I’ve never been the type to say everything happens for a reason, but I know that things happening is the only reason I’ve ever found. Where we are matters much more than where we’ve been, even though we spend a lot of time thinking and writing about having been there. When it’s said and done, where we are going is never anywhere else than where we end up.

Though we can’t stay forever, we all ended up here, and that is all the difference that can be made.

IV.

Teachers are givers, and not just of tests. It occasionally hurts to put a version of you out there to face apathy or rejection, and sometimes it’s hard to recognize yourself in the bathroom mirror, but hours build into days and days somehow into years. The faces return without the names and the memories they carry (and they’re usually better than you thought) give back whole years you thought you might have wasted.

Some mornings a teacher remains alone when the crowd slumps in; some days they buoy you up like a much needed raft when you feel most tossed upon their seas. Afternoons can be devastatingly exhaustive, while whole evenings can be powered by a particular day’s educational highs.

Sometimes whole semesters are lost in a struggle for one lost lamb or one lion that you couldn’t  tame. This is unavoidable. It often hurts to care, but when you stop giving a damn, do everyone the favor of getting the hell out of the way.

After all, teachers are optimists; there’s no other way to make it through a year. When doldrums and disrespect start to drown out all joy, that’s when it’s time to pull out that flute and play the best Debussy you can muster. This is the gift you can give to all the friends you make along the way.

V.

Lastly, a little advice to our newest friend.

Write on the windows; tell questionable jokes.

Make plans and then change them; teach a lesson you’d never tell anyone about. 

Make up nicknames for the ones you love as often as the ones you can’t stand, and try not to neglect the ones in the middle.

Tell them when they let you down, but remind them that you’re not giving up.

Don’t take professional development any more seriously than you take yourself.

Most important of all, find a way to laugh in each class every day, even it’s you that you’re laughing at and even when they refuse to notice.

No Shuffling, No Rune Reading, Just Music

New Brit Pop from The Lodger

Have A Little Faith In People ...

Great bass line and saxophone, and lyrically smart.
_______________________

A good friend and colleague of mine gave me The Lodger's 2007 album Grown-Ups, but he didn't give me this track he recorded in 1989, but I found it here anyway! Here's a J. H. composition with his late 80s/early 90s band The Wilmas: Do Me A Favor from Songs About Girls 7" vinyl ep (1989).

That's a great, self-effacing pop song--just the way I like 'em.

_______________________

Ten year's before Mr. H. & Co. were rocking The Bottleneck, these Irish lads were the top of the pops.

(I don't think the similarities are accidental, and that is NOT a bad thing as far as I'm concerned.)

After Schuyler: Three Poems

I. [1.28.2010]

I am writing again.

I am writing because

Schuyler wrote about

Korean mums.

Because I found him

at a garden table

in October near

where an owl was

dead.

I am writing because

another bird, smaller,

flew across me with

two bands of white

flashing, a shaded

stripe between.

As the owl returned

minutes or days

or months later,

(one cannot tell in a poem)

so returns the urge

to put things down.

To collect, like feathers,

days’ floating news,

fear, dependences.

Birds scratch,

at the rich soil,

knowing & not-knowing

which places have

had seed and might

again, here, where

I start scratching,

too.

II. [For Jeff]

A highway of birds,

not for birds,

(they are the way they go)

knowing as much

by instinct as by sight,

or memory.

It’s  rush hour,

each evening in late March,

while you sit  or stand

smoking, before or after dinner,

front stoop or back yard,

wife & dog near or not near,

(the details not mattering)

you, at least,  there

being in one place,

below them like a

single ant as a jet

takes its cargo home,

standing & looking,

smoke rising up,

but never reaching them,

as they move towards

whatever next rest they

need.

When you tell me

about them through

miles of invisible wire,

or bouncing off  orbiting satellites,

I have just seen a highway too,

as I and the boys played

insect family to a vee of

Canadian geese,

52 miles North

of your street,

as the crow flies.

It is something

to be stationary

while other things

move, to be reminded

of the impossibility

of staying still.

To remain connected

to an earth that

won’t stop turning,

knowing that if it did,

we’d all fall.  And yet,

those highways of birds

must sense that motion,

seeing us spin so slowly,

like tiny ants marching

almost in place, as they

glide looking down at

our continuous failure

to achieve lift.

III. [Lawrence High School East Lawn, Tuesday, April 20^th, 2010, 11:15 am]

The fact that birds are singing is must likely lost on them, because they are not birds and neither are the others they are looking at, listening to, thinking of, and there are cars passing, and the faint echo of loud music, and they are barely alive.

The institutional walls still hold them, even as they take five to ten steps outside the heavy, glass door propped open by a flat rock.

They were asked to write. To go outside, find a solitary spot, and to describe what could be a harmonious place, thinking about how the space surrounding them could come together in such way that things go right: tree, bug, house, road, bird, wall, rock, wind, cloud, humanity.

I suspect that their restraint has as much to do with confusion as it does disdain.

All the while, a wren is still singing.

Morning Fog, U.S. Highway 59

In the morning, before the sun is high and hot enough to burn away earth's excess water, I slide my way south, following the bends of the road, watching the curvature of the eastern horizon as the orange disk slowly ascends allowing day to ease me out of my temporary monasticism and back into a world of needs & gives.

Mornings when the fog hovers the road & ponds & puddles, I am reminded of the final stanza of Poe's early poem, "Spirits of the Dead". Before his twentieth birthday Poe penned these words:

The breeze, the breath of God, is still,
And the mist upon the hill
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken,
Is a symbol and a token.
How it hangs upon the trees,
A mystery of mysteries!

These lines have always haunted me, as does this particular farm pond, sunk down below a dead end road that leads somewhere that will never be known. This morning I could not drive past without stopping to capture the haunting mist before it disappeared into its own mysteriousness. 

Music: Tiny Desk Concert & Two Bonus Tracks

Just missed these guys (Wye Oak) in Lawrence. They were in town with Shearwater and Hospital Ships. Shame, but here's a taste before next time.

Horse Feathers, Thistled Spring out this week.

• 
  

Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) sings John Prine.

If

Frida Kahlo, The Dream, 1940

In dreams
begin
responsibilities,
then this
wakefulness
exhausts
like six days
on the road,
and sleep
settles only
the smallest
arguments
between
id & ego.

If what I am
is  product
(too)
of my own
unconsciousness,
then imagination
should weigh
down
as much as
it uplifts.

 Edward Hopper, Boy and Moon

If responsibility
wakes from
nightmare
as often as
dream,
then there is
a heroism
afterall
in this
waking fear
of failing
to protect.

If in dreams
begin
responsibilities,
then this
prayer before
bedtime
should be
as much
for memory
as forgiveness,
as forgetfulness,
as for going on.

In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, or Jordan Catalano learns Irony, sort of... (but that's not the most important thing)

"In dreams begins responsibility."
                   Old Play.

The above is the inscription to W. B. Yeats' 1914 collection of poems Responsibilities. Try as I might, I have never been able to locate the actual 'Old Play" that Yeats is referencing (but that's not the most important part).

This inscription, slightly revised, "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities", is used by the inimitable Delmore Schwartz as the title for his story published in the inaugural issue of The Partisan Review in 1937. It became the eponymous story of Delmore's first collection of poems and stories in 1938. The story is not available in full online that I have found, but I have a copy if anyone wants it. In it, the narrator tells the story of a nightmarish dream in which he watches a date between his parents some twenty-plus years previous from his seat in a movie theater. He is dismayed by their treatment of one another, both when gentle and when harsh. Knowing what will become of their marriage, including his own existence, he is dragged out of the theater for screaming out... I will not spoil the story by telling more, but let it suffice to say that the story ends thought-provokingly.

This leads to part three of this triptych: the final episode of My So Called Life, an episode I had forgotten I remembered so well. That episode's title just happens to be "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities". The episode begins with Angela's dream and proceeds with several other characters' dream references, but the episode quickly moves into the realm of dream as hope or hopefulness.  It is an episode full of personal tensions, temptations, and irony. In one particular case, an irony so obvious that even Jordan Catalano understood (finally picking up on his tutoring from "Brain").

At 18 or 19 years old when the show first aired, I found myself caught up in the Angela plotline--seeing a bit of myself in the hopelessly awkward Brian, much more so than the annoyingly awkward (yet handsome) Jordan. As a much older person watching the episode again now, though Brian's plight still resonates, it is the marriage drama that strikes me in a way it could not have then, though I recognized that then too.

(Feel free to watch the episode below before finishing reading this post--be my guest. But note the thumbnail I chose; I couldn't resist.)



So what does all this have in common, the Yeats, the Schwartz, and the teen/family drama? Well, besides me, and the shared title, it seems that it is a coming to terms with hope and with loss. For Yeats it is a coming to terms with what is gained and lost in continuing to tell (re-dream) the Irish stories. See, for example, the fifth poem in Responsibilities, "September 1913":

WHAT need you, being come to sense,
But fumble in a greasy till
And add the halfpence to the pence
And prayer to shivering prayer, until
You have dried the marrow from the bone;
For men were born to pray and save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet they were of a different kind
The names that stilled your childish play,
They have gone about the world like wind,
But little time had they to pray
For whom the hangman's rope was spun,
And what, God help us, could they save:
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Was it for this the wild geese spread
The grey wing upon every tide;
For this that all that blood was shed,
For this Edward Fitzgerald died,
And Robert Emmet and Wolfe Tone,
All that delirium of the brave;
Romantic Ireland's dead and gone,
It's with O'Leary in the grave.

Yet could we turn the years again,
And call those exiles as they were
In all their loneliness and pain,
You'd cry "Some woman's yellow hair
Has maddened every mother's son":
They weighed so lightly what they gave,
But let them be, they're dead and gone,
They're with O'Leary in the grave.

In Schwartz, as well as in My So Called Life, it is a coming to terms with the recurring patterns that we as clan-collecting people face, that families face: the unavoidable irony of repeating one another's mistakes. A part of the sharing of dreams is the sharing of responsibilities even if we didn't know we were already doing both. Perhaps this sheds some light on the dream I shared a few posts ago. Maybe the room I am always looking for isn't mine after all, but a shared room where responsibilities can be meted out once and for all. Heck if I know, I'm only sleeping.

_________________

As a side note, one of Delmore's pupils was a young man named Lou Reed. Here's one of Lou's best. Oh, and it has to do with TV, too.

Satellite Of Love - Lou Reed

Sunday Shuffle #1: 18 April 2010

I realized that I haven’t written about music yet. I do not intend for this to be a music blog, but, music being a central part of my life—one I get to share with family, friends, and students, I should come up with a way of getting to write about it here.

Enter the Sunday shuffle.

A friend recently accused me of getting esoteric, so I decided to go whole hog. One way of reading runes is to “throw”  three runes and do a past, present, and future reading. There are as many ways of reading runes as there are crazy people pretending to be rune-reading, thought-healing, super-prophets.

Enter the iPod shuffle feature.

On any given Sunday, starting today, I may call upon the iPod oracle to cast a reading. It’s important to remember that the three throws/tracks are a package deal; they only make meaning considered together; a theme must be seen before reading each track individually. The first track explains the past: where you are coming from; the second track interprets the present: what’s going on now; the third track predicts the future.

Here goes the first throw:

Track #1: “That Teenage Feeling” by Neko Case [from Fox Confessor Brings the Flood]

And nothing comforts me the same 
As my brave friend who says, 
"I don't care if forever never comes
 'Cause I'm holding out for that teenage feeling
 I'm holding out for that teenage feeling"

That Teenage Feeling - Neko Ca...

Track #2: “Living of Love” by The Avett Brothers [from Emotionalism]

Say yes we live uncertainty 
And disappointments have to be
And everyday we might be facing more 
And yes we live in desperate times 
But fading words and shaking rhymes 
There’s only one thing here worth hoping for 
With Lucifer beneath you and God above
 If either one of them asks you what your living of 
Say love, say for me love

Living Of Love - The Avett Bro...

Track #3: “Better Things” by The Kinks [from Come Dancing With The Kinks]

It’s really good to see you rocking out 
And having fun, Living like you just begun. 
Accept your life and what it brings.
 I hope tomorrow you’ll find better things.
 I know tomorrow you’ll find better things.

http://lala.com/zEtII

___________________________

Well, I can’t help/hope but think this is a good omen—a good first throw. It seems the theme is set by track two, by those brothers who write/sing of little else: love. Going backwards from there to Ms. Neko Case, spins her often bitter but not hopeless ballad toward hopefulness. When I met my wife I was no teenager, but I started to feel like one as we got closer and closer to one another and decided to drop the just friends. That was a dozen years ago.

As far as the brothers Avett are concerned, they have been the house band around our place for a year or so. We have grown to love their sappiness, but we prefer it with a healthy dose of banjo. Mr. iPod picked a good one to stand for today.

That leads us to track the last: an old standby, The Kinks. “Better Things” is not one of my favorite Kinks’  tunes, but the message of hope and happiness works great as a predictor of futures as far as I’m concerned. Ray Davies is now 65 and still “rocking out”. I hope that I and mine will be too, and music like this (truly “pop” music, that is) never goes out of style.

___________________________

I decided to add a fourth track. One that wasn’t selected but that is on the iPod right now and is on my mind this weekend. That song is: “However Many takes it Takes” by Vandaveer [from Grace and Speed].

Well, step outside into the sun 
Let it dry your eyes and run 
Around, feel the warm underneath your skin 
The clouds will soon move in again 
You can't expect to always win 
You've got to take it as it comes 
The marching bands and beating drums 
Play familiar songs for the alum 
We've all got scars, but we don't like to show them 
Sometimes it's better to be strong 
We all got to be moving on 
You've got to walk a million miles 
Ah honey, go walk 'em with a smile

However Many Takes It Takes - ...

Past, present, or future, that’s a damn good song. 

[If my Lala embeds are wrong, sorry, and if you don't have a free Lala account, get one.

The Triggering

I forget the names of towns without rivers.
A town needs a river to forgive the town.
Whatever river, whatever town –
it is much the same.
The cruel things I did I took to the river.
I begged the current: make me better.

The above lines comprise the opening stanza of Richard Hugo's poem "The Towns We Know and Leave Behind, The Rivers We Carry with Us" written for his dear friend and fellow poet and struggler James Wright.


Two years after publishing the above stanza (which was also the year of James Wright's death), Hugo published his conversational poetry manual: The Triggering Town; he defines the title in following paragraph:

In this case I imagined the town, but an imagined town is at least as real as an actual town. If it isn’t you may be in the wrong business. Our triggering subjects, like our words, come from obsessions we must submit to, whatever the social cost. It can be hard. It can be worse forty years from now if you feel you could have done it and didn’t. It is narcissistic, vain, egotistical, unrealistic, selfish, and hateful to assume emotional ownership of a town or a word. It is also essential.

We blogging poets or, in my case, poetasters know all too well this narcissistic obsession of following the triggers and getting the words and images, arriving like recurring dreams, down and dealt with. Here is a new poem (perhaps one day to better revised--I'd appreciate honest feedback) triggered by Hugo, my blogging friends, and mostly a recurring dream.


________________
The House


If I could smell in dreams (and whose to say that I cannot),
I imagine I would smell a river, train smoke, and fermenting barley.


A large plot is scattered with children's playthings:  trucks,
balls, a sandbox, and an aging but solid, metal swing-set painted green.


The grass, green & wet as mid-spring, gathers in neighborhoods
scattering the yard; clover & dandelion roads crisscross throughout.


But these I notice last, if you believe the waking imagination,
the thrust & grasp of memory after the dream's disappearing act.


It's the tall & wide, white house rising in the middle of the yard,
where the dream begins, inside, in any of a hundred rooms, all somehow familiar.


Always slightly different than the previous slumbering inhabitance,
once a vaguely yellow kitchen with nook and spiraling wooden staircase.


In another, a library of unmarked books, Victrola, console radio, miniatures hung upon the walls; an endless hallway's walls are perfectly spaced with black & white photographs:


Never a face I recognize, but each door, each room branching off has 
obvious inhabitants: brothers, sisters, roommates, friends but never mine.


I never make it to that room I'm searching for.  Stairways leading up, end back 
at the ground, steps turn to slides, secret passages open to whole new wings.


A green chair changes patterns in front of my eyes, a friend's suitcase packs itself and leaves.
A window opens, a breeze enters and a fraying feather floats in and I chase it through the house.


The house shrinks and I find myself on a patch of green looking back & forth between swings
and now the house sinks: a white window half in the ground takes the last bit of light down with it.


The dream ends before I decide what to do. Birdsong intervenes. 
My own house, small and less than quaint, lightens for morning.


Nothing is lost in dreaming, and yet a subtle haunting remains through the day.
Somewhere, a looming white house rises above a green yard and children's playthings.


There, in the half-light, another version of me considers the magnitude of making a move.

Birds (Three Stories)

Bird # 1: Clare's Hawk


The adjacent image is a selection from the text, The Poetry of Earth, New York: Atheneum Press, 1966. This selection pictured here (click to open larger copy) is from the "Nature Notes" of 19th century, rural English (no, not Irish) poet John Clare. Clare's first book of poems, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life and Scenery, was published in 1920 by John Taylor, also a publisher of Keats. An article and readings of one of his most remembered poems, "I Am" can be found at The Atlantic's Soundings page. More Clare poems can be found at The Poetry Foundation including one of my favorites, "The Skylark." Sadly, Clare spent the last twenty years of his life in an asylum, which was the location of his death in 1864.


Clare's "Nature Notes" (to my knowledge and the aid of Jonathan Bate's biography of Clare) were from his personal journal around the year 1824. In this passage from the journal, which contains little punctuation, variant spellings, and the grammar of rural speech, Clare tells the story of a particular hawk that he describes saying: "not quite so large as the sparrow hawk their wings & back feathers was of a red brown color sheathed wi black their tails was long & barred with black & their breasts was of a lighter color & spotted their eyes was large & of a dark piercing blue their beaks was very much hooked with a sharp projecting swell in the top mandible ..." Clare's striking description of the birds is interesting in both its knowledgible birder's detail and its awkward, almost manic, syntax.  


However, what is most interesting in this passage from the journals is what comes next:

Clare's depiction of the relationship between the hawk and himself is quite compelling in that the hawk is both interested in and seemingly wary of Clare, in the end both are for good reason: Clare is exceedingly kind to the bird and yet it is the friendship with Clare that leads to the bird's demise. One can see in passages such as the above evidence of both Clare's potential as a different sort of English Romantic poet and his eventual mental disintegration and ultimate committing to an asylum.

________________

Bird # 2: St. Benedict's Raven

According to St. Gregory's Dialogues, Book II, Italian monk, later to be known as St. Benedict, writer of The Rule of St. Benedict, a raven that frequented the cave where Benedict lived, was charged by Benedict to remove a loaf of poisoned bread and take it "where it cannot be found." Eventually the bird did as he was told and returned. There is another story in which the bird rids the cave of a chalice of poisoned wine. Here again, a bird and an eccentric man are friendly and  engaged in a form of communication--and in both cases these hermetic men leave a written legacy behind them after their cloistered deaths.

________________

Bird # 3: Dad?

My father was an amateur birder, very amateur. In fact, actually, he liked looking at birds, owned binoculars (I now own them), and several bird-books (those are mine now too). He never went on outings, took notes, or did extensive research, but he passed on to me a real respect and interest in the feathered flyers of our neighborhood. In fact, just today during dinner I located our neighbor, a still-red male cardinal perched in one of the highest branches of the tallest tree in our back yard. I took a picture and made my oldest son look for him too; he found him more quickly than I thought he would. 

I do this a lot: look for birds. 

My dad died, fairly young (63), in 1995. I have been looking for him ever since: in dreams, in pictures, in letters, in hidden manuscripts in desk drawers ( I did find one once.). But mostly in birds. Interestingly, since January, I have had several interesting bird related experiences, three of which have involved bald eagles that are currently nesting North of Lawrence. 

The first had just captured a meal on the east side of 59 highway and allowed me to pull my car to the side of the road and watch him secure the prey, spread his wings, and fly, low above a still snow-glazed stubblefield before rising quickly to a perch in a far cottonwood. 

The second eagle was noticed by one of my creative writing students during class one afternoon flying circles above Lawrence High School, a very odd and rare sight that far into town. 

The third experience was a couple of weeks ago on my morning commute, again on 59 highway, heading south towards Lawrence and the eagle swooped across in front of my car and behind me, slowly gliding as I pulled the car over and turned around to follow him. He landed in a bare maple on the east side of the highway. There was a convenient farmers drive-in that allowed me to pull my car in off the highway and watch him sitting there in the tree, the still-winter sun rising, nearly white, behind the tree and above the pasture that stretched for miles to that place on the horizon where, eventually my two rivers (The Missouri and the Kaw) finally meet.

Though I spend a lot of time, alone, in my movable cell of a car, I am no eccentric, ascetic monk, and I have most of my sanity, most agree, but there is something about the continual connection that I feel with these birds that seems to to suggest that their closeness to me is important. That they carry some meaning or message that might just be the same thing that Clare and Benedict found in their birds and that I am always looking for in little legacies my father left behind. 

Maybe I am little more crazy that I give myself credit for. For now, I'm not too afraid, and I'm going to keep reading the bird signs that flutter and fly my way.