Cities That Speak

Sometimes I sigh and simultaneously hear the tired murmurs of the blood in my veins softly whispering of my yesterhood years when I rested feet dangling along the banks of the Allegheny or of the Ohio - rivers who in turn whispered back to me of their yesterhood years when steel and whiskey flowed freely down on toward the great mouth of America. Pittsburgh, the work of your hands and of your heart has flooded this nation, and your mighty struggle to reinvent yourself breathes hope back into the land.

Backyard Poetry

Tomorrow I’ll Remember

These days I do not hear the poetry

Laughing in the spaces between my ears.

I sit at night, listening patiently,

And hear the musty house settle and creak

In its old foundations, and hear

My lungs emitting nighttime sighs

That would be silent otherwise.

Let It Move You

I wrote this last summer after spending an afternoon talking about life with a old man named Nick.  He passed away this Fall, and I've only recently recorded this.  Click the link below to hear it.

Let It Move You

Reading (?) in the Car

     Ok, so I didn't actually pick up that dangerous habit.  I have however finished the entirety of Seven Years in Tibet in spurts during my commute to and from work for the past few weeks.  A while back I was at a thrift store, and to my great joy I discovered, or re-discovered I suppose, books on tape.  Given that my car is a particularly old and junky piece and still has an old selectively-functioning tape deck, I decided that rather than listening to the same five songs on the radio for an hour of my life every day, I would pick up a few of these inexpensive bits of nostalgia (yes, cassette tapes are nostalgic for me) and expand the literary region of my mind that has recently gone into atrophy due to a severe lack of me-time.
      I'd recommend reading the book if you're at all interested in Tibetan culture or history or religion.  It was fascinating, and written in a style to which I am not at all accustomed - long, narrative prose with no dialogue at all.  It seemed odd at first, but after a few minutes of puzzled distraction, I settled nicely into the story and was transported to the unforgiving mountains of Tibet and the windswept plateau on which the capital of Lhasa sits. 
     I'm excited to start my next set of tapes - Medieval Jewish philosophy of Maimonides.  Light reading, as always.
    

Here and Now

It's a problem of our time.  The range of human knowledge today is so great that we're all specialists and the distance between specializations has become so great that anyone who seeks to wander freely among them almost has to forego closeness with the people around him.  The lunchtime here-and-now stuff is a specialty too.
Robert M. Pirsig Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

It Still Moves

     I just recently visited the Gene Autry museum of the American West, and I picked up a cheap book called "It Still Moves: Lost Songs, Lost Highways and the Search for the Next American Music."  I'm inconceivably thrilled to read it.

     The book starts with the following epigram: "A place belongs forever to whoever claims it hardest, remembers it most obsessively, wrenches it from itself, shapes it, renders it, loves it so radically that he remakes it in his image."  - Joan Didion

     In the meantime I am plugging through Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and The Chronicles of Narnia.

     Other suggestions??

Be Mine XOXO

Happy Valentine's Day! 

I bought flowers, dark chocolate, and red wine for my roommates today.  And I played Frank Sinatra while we were making dinner.  It was glorious.

Here are some snippets from my favorite love poetry:

SONNET 116

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
   If this be error and upon me proved,
   I never writ, nor no man ever loved. 
William Shakespeare

On Love

When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep,
And when his wings enfold you yield to him,
Though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams as the north wind lays waste the garden.

For even as love crowns you so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and caresses your tenderest branches that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and shake them in their clinging to the earth.
  Khalil Gibran

The Passionate Shephard to His Love

1 Come live with me and be my love,
2 And we will all the pleasures prove,
3 That valleys, groves, hills, and fields,
4 Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

5 And we will sit upon the rocks,
6 Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks,
7 By shallow rivers, to whose falls
8 Melodious birds sing madrigals.

9 And I will make thee beds of roses,
10 And a thousand fragrant posies,
11 A cap of flowers and a kirtle
12 Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle:

13 A gown made of the finest wool,
14 Which from our pretty lambs we pull;
15 Fair lined slippers for the cold,
16 With buckles of the purest gold:

17 A belt of straw and ivy buds,
18 With coral clasps and amber studs;
19 And if these pleasures may thee move,
20 Come live with me and be my love.

21 The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
22 For thy delight each May morning;
23 If these delights thy mind may move,
24 Then live with me and be my love.
Christopher Marlowe

Hope

There could be love.
     Jonas, The Giver

Teaching Literature Ain't For Wimps

     I just spent the day at a professional development meeting with my entire thirteen-school organization.  There were well over a hundred teachers present, all of us trying to figure out how to become better teachers.  I went to a workshop on teaching writing. 
     While the workshop I went to wasn't entirely riveting (it was actually pretty dry), it did get me thinking about how and why we bother teaching literature and reading.  Why does it matter what happened in Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry, or in The Giver.  I mean really - is it essential to the development and job readiness of these children that they know the details of plot and setting? 
     No, maybe not, but literature is about far more than learning stories.  It's about learning to think, learning to analyze and synthesize information.  In an age when information is readily accessible by a million and a half venues, some credible, many not, we have to find a way to teach students how to analyze information critically.  And that process starts in literature.  We learn and teach how to see and express the big ideas, how to find and support with evidential details.  And those aren't skills that get lost once students leave the classroom - critical analysis (not just literary) is a life skill.  The responsibility is daunting, but the necessity is irrefutable.

America's Heart

     I sat in with some of my 8th graders in their history class, and I discovered this gem from the past in their history textbook: 

Wherever the standard of freedom and independence has been or shall be unfurled, there will her [America's] heart, her benedictions and her prayers be. But she goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will recommend the general cause, by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself, beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force. The frontlet upon her brows would no longer beam with the ineffable splendor of freedom and independence; but in its stead would soon be substituted an imperial diadem, flashing in false and tarnished lustre the murky radiance of dominion and power. She might become the dictatress of the world: she would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit.
John Quincy Adams Fourth of July Oration 1821

     Is Mr. Adams right?  Did America become the dictatress of the world, at the loss of ruling her own spirit?

Jack Kerouac, The Virgil to My Dante

This was written shortly before graduation last May:

So here I sit, thinking of Jack, my friend, who knows my heart better than anyone here.  Thinking in French, longing to curve my lips around la langue francais.  It is so beautiful, amorous. Compassion drips in the cave of my heart.  Drip drip drop stop.  Oh God.  I don’t know where I’m going and it’s scary a little, to sit and feel the heat against my skin.  I want to live again. Please God I want to live again. To scream tonight. At the top of my lungs if only you would hear my broken voice. I used to sing of you, and now I find that I have to remember the notes, struggle to push them from my throat until it’s raw.  Unnatural.  It is too much.  This life. These times when bombs go off and the world might end at any second.  Are we ready? We who sit in awe of natural creation. We who wander around this earth, with our shopping bags full of useless trash, on to the next thing already. We forget so quickly.  Haiti. Chile.  Turkey. China. We forget you.  You are gone. Only us. Only me. Only me.  Here we are, we humans, are we ready? For the end? Maybe. Together we will wait, and only together can we be ready.  We were made for each other.  Oh God, show us how to love.  Teach us how to comfort each other and teach us how to live, for life is precious and every moment holy.  Jack said that once.  He was right, that sage who drank himself to death.  But, God, how he loved life.  To the bitter end.  He savored it.  Not just tasted here and there.  God, he knew every nuanced flavor, and he savored them all.  Life is, God.  Life is good.  Life is.  Life is beautiful and tragic and we are here to feel it all and feel each other and give each other our lives.  I love.  I love you.  I love. 

The Giver

     I've been thinking quite a bit recently about the idea of giving (in many different senses and for various reasons), and then it occurred to me that I should perhaps pick up a copy of The Giver since my students have to read it this year anyway.  Apparently I made it through American public schools never having read it.  How bizarre.
     It's rather different than John Steinbeck - no extravagant prose, no broad sweeping biblical themes, just simple, straightforward storyline that makes you question everything you know.  It's a quick read - I read for maybe an hour and am almost halfway through it - but it obliges concerted thought about how society functions.
     Pick up a copy and reread it if you get a chance.

On Commodities and Language

I woke up early a few days ago and picked up a book of Emerson that sat next to my bed.  I had forgotten how much I used to love him. 

The useful arts are reproductions or new combinations by the wit of man, of the same natural benefactors. He no longer waits for favoring gales, but by means of steam, he realizes the fable of Aeolus's bag, and carries the two and thirty winds in the boiler of his boat. To diminish friction, he paves the road with iron bars, and, mounting a coach with a ship-load of men, animals, and merchandise behind him, he darts through the country, from town to town, like an eagle or a swallow through the air. By the aggregate of these aids, how is the face of the world changed, from the era of Noah to that of Napoleon! The private poor man hath cities, ships, canals, bridges, built for him. He goes to the post-office, and the human race run on his errands; to the book-shop, and the human race read and write of all that happens, for him; to the court-house, and nations repair his wrongs. He sets his house upon the road, and the human race go forth every morning, and shovel out the snow, and cut a path for him.
...
The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language. When simplicity of character and the sovereignty of ideas is broken up by the prevalence of secondary desires, the desire of riches, of pleasure, of power, and of praise, -- and duplicity and falsehood take place of simplicity and truth, the power over nature as an interpreter of the will, is in a degree lost; new imagery ceases to be created, and old words are perverted to stand for things which are not; a paper currency is employed, when there is no bullion in the vaults. In due time, the fraud is manifest, and words lose all power to stimulate the understanding or the affections. Hundreds of writers may be found in every long-civilized nation, who for a short time believe, and make others believe, that they see and utter truths, who do not of themselves clothe one thought in its natural garment, but who feed unconsciously on the language created by the primary writers of the country, those, namely, who hold primarily on nature. But wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things; so that picturesque language is at once a commanding certificate that he who employs it, is a man in alliance with truth and God.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Nature"

Return of the Prophet

     As I have again been swamped with work, the blog has been relegated to the back burner.  This is what I've been reading via audiobook recently:

     The well of love that waters your garden is at times filled with your tears.  And it is good that it is so, for no waters are purer than those precious droplets released in your moments of surrender.  Tears are seed drops of joy shed by your soul's physician.  You may curse the physician's medicine, but the cure for your suffering is in your tears.  Weep until seeds of joy take root in the womb of your soul.
     -Return of the Prophet, Hajjar Gibran

America, Land of Dreams

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

from "Let America Be America Again" Langston Hughes

Poetry All Up In Here

     I'm teaching a lesson tomorrow on poetry.  

     I'm starting with Tupac and Mos Def.  

     Then moving to Langston Hughes - 

I, too, sing America.

I am the darker brother.
They send me to eat in the kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.

Tomorrow,
I'll be at the table
When company comes.
Nobody'll dare
Say to me,
"Eat in the kitchen,"
Then.

Besides, 
They'll see how beautiful I am
And be ashamed--

I, too, am America. 

Poetry with the Doctor

One fish. Two fish. Red fish. Blue fish.
Black fish. Blue fish. Old fish. New fish.
Some are red and some are blue. Some are old and some are new.
Some are sad and some are glad. And some are very, very bad.
     Dr. Seuss, One fish two fish red fish blue fish

      I found out today that my project on the Donors Choose website was fully funded, this just a few days after I got an email from DarienBookAid informing me that I will be receiving three boxes of books from them.  Apparently all you have to do in this world is ask and you shall receive.  My students needed books, and thanks to some wonderfully generous people, they are going to get them.  I have no words to express the gratitude that I have to all of the people that are making my little library possible.

Needed Advice

It's been a while.  Mostly because every square inch of my free time in the last two weeks was spent preparing for the GRE Literature test by cramming ridiculous amounts of obscure literary facts into my brain.  However, as I was studying one night, I found this lovely passage from John Lyly, an Elizabethan writer:

Descend into your own consciences, consider with yourselves the great difference between staring and stark blind, wit and wisdom, love and lust.  Be merry but with modesty, be sober but not too solemn, be valiant but not too venturous.  Let thy attire be comely but not costly; thy diet wholesome but not excessive; use pastime as the word importeth, to pass the time in honest recreation; mistrust no man without cause, neither be thou credulous without proof; be not light to follow every man's opinion, nor obstinate to stand in thine own conceit.  Serve God, love God, fear God, and God will so bless thee as either heart can wish or thy friend desire. 

In Praise of Folly

"Where ignorance is bliss; 'tis folly to be wise."
Thomas Gray, Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College

     I can't decide whether Mr. Gray has hit the nail on the head, or if he's a hopeless fool himself.  Despite suffering brought about by an awareness of the world's harsh realities, is ignorance really the best way to live?  Maybe.  Maybe not.  I go back and forth.
      Mr. Gray seems to think that wisdom comes precisely from becoming aware that the world ain't all sunshine and rainbows.  After a long melancholy poem, his ending quip throws its hands up, and says that if ignorance makes you happy, well then, screw the world and be ignorant.  I just can't seem to agree with that defeatist attitude, but something tells me that there's more to the poem than that.
     For lack of time, here are more questions/concerns I have with Mr. Gray -
1. Is it a bad thing to be a fool?
2. What do you mean exactly by wisdom?
3. How are you defining bliss?
4. Are we to assume that bliss is to be sought after?
5. Are we talking about deliberate ignorance?

Batter My Heart

     Taking a break from Johnny Steinbeck, I was studying for the GRE Literature test by brushing up on some 17th century writers.  This I found:

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,' and bend
Your force, to breake, blowe, burn and make me new,
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearely'I love you,' and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee, 'untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chast, except you ravish me.

John Donne Holy Sonnet XIV