Bright Star -- a poetic movie

Bright Star (2009)

In honor of poetry month, I had to make a point of watching Bright Star, a film about the relationship between 19th Century poet John Keats and Fanny Brawne. Lord, this was depressing. It was a beautiful movie and it got me digging into their stories after I watched the film, but ultimately I wasn't blown away or quick to recommend it to others.

The Parent Problem in Young Adult Literature

I just read an interesting article on YA Literature by Julie Just in the New York Times. It examines the role of parents as either dead, absent, demonized, or so bland they fade into the background. It's something I've thought of with books for younger readers like The Boxcar Children and the Series of Unfortunate Events and the like. It does seem like there are an awful lot of orphan books out there. Which reminded me of how years ago when playing with my friends' daughter Hope, she informed me that we were sisters and our parents were dead. I was horrified. Then I remembered a version of "playing house" that my brother and I played on the farm. We pretended our parents were dead and that he was my older brother (though he is actually three years younger) and he was a carpenter named Tommy. I was a bossy sister who crafted the scenario and his persona as well as my own. So, yes, maybe there is something developmental about the idea of children wanting independence...

One of the most profound gems in the article is as follows:
Many contemporary young adult novels seem to reflect genuine confusion over what the job of parent consists of, beyond keeping kids fed and safe. This isn’t surprising, after a decade in which “overparenting” became almost a badge of honor and you could sign a child up for a clay-modeling class only to find that you, too, were expected to stay and make coil pots. The Mommy & Me trend helps explain the baffling numbers from a report, published in 2006, that found working mothers were managing to spend about the same amount of time per week with their children as stay-at-home mothers did 40 years ago. In those days they said “Go play” rather than “Go away,” but the comparison surely says something about the expectations of both groups.

When I think about my own childhood and how I was raised in the 70s and 80s, I would concur. The thought of my mother accompanying us to the swimming pool or the neighborhood park or outside to play is literally absurd. I understand why that has changed with the times, but I wonder if it's always for the better.

UPDATE --
Liz Burns from A Chair, A Fireplace & a Tea Cozy addresses Just's article here. All very interesting stuff.

A Poem

Here's a draft of a poem I wrote tonight as I drove home from my sister's new place. She's moving into her first house--renting it with three other girls.

No title yet. It's a first draft. It's sort of scary to post something in its rough form. Enough apologies. I'll try to do more of this to truly celebrate poetry month.


Driving home in the rain
I heard Bob Seger
singing Against the Wind.
and for about five minutes
I could have been 16
on a side street in my hometown
turning corners
past sleep-darkened houses.
Me and the night.
Those were different days when
gas was practically free,
and I had nothing but time.

And life is sweet now, mostly
and my problems, if I have any at all,
are the big sort,
the I-can't-solve-this-on-my-own sort,
the it-takes-a-village sort.
Yet, this song stirs something--
A memory wound up tight,
spooling out more feeling than fact.

How many nights did I shut the car door
turn up the radio and drive nowhere at all?
A sweet release.
A small sanctuary from the world.
To think, to be.
Free.

Poets, Start Your Pencils...

17 Seconds of Joy

Not sure I can put into words how happy this little video makes me feel.

Books Across America

I'm super excited that our school library will be getting $1000 worth of fun new titles. I applied for an NEA Books Across America grant last November. Prodded into it by our faithful librarian... :) And I got the grant. Yippee. I love celebrating reading with students and this will make it even easier to put books into the hands of kids.

I have ideas. Ideas about teens and reading. Ideas about getting books into the hands of everyone--young and old. Ways to get books visible in the community.

On an errand run today I watched a little girl who used to hang around my apartment building swish by on a metal scooter and I thought about her and books. I wondered if she read much. Wondered if she had books of her own to read. Wondered about this summer when school was out. Wondered if she would hold a book in her hand even once between May and September. I wondered if there were books out there, near the park, on a shelf of some kind, in our neighborhood to borrow without a library card, without having to go to the library across town, if she would read them. If she would be interested. If it would give kids something to do. And then there are bus stops. And wouldn't books go nicely with bus stops? Yes, I have ideas. I love to read. I want to share that.

Love the Enthusiasm for Reading

UND Writers Conference 2010

Deena Larsen 4:00 pm Reading
at UND Writers Conference

Each year I get pretty excited about the UND Writers Conference. This year's theme wasn't my favorite --Mind the Gap-- Print, New Media, Art. I read a LOT online but I still like my books in print and perhaps I've not evolved enough to really embrace hypertext poetry in all its glory.

Our RRVWP featured author was Deena Larsen and she and her partner were kind enough to join us for dinner at Eagle's Crest after her 4:00 reading. She talked about links and hypertext poetry and secrets. She used grad students holding images and phrases to demonstrate the power and versatility of links. I get it, I think. I'm just more of a straight forward boring girl.Cecelia Condit and husband

Deena Larsen and Nick Montfort

In addition to Deena we also got to chat with Nick Montfort and Cecelia Condit.
There were just enough of us that there seemed to be three-five conversations going at once and I was caught up mostly in the Nick Montfort Q & A. I fear we scared him with our rapid fire questions, the poor guy. Still it was fascinating learning about Implementation, his sticker novel (a novel in approx. 240 sticker installments spread all over the world), and discovering he'd also read The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson and without missing a beat could refer to bits of the bizarro technology in that world. Despite the fact that I'd not read as much of their works prior to our dinner, it was still a fascinating discussion.

Following dinner, I drove back to campus for Art Spiegelman's presidential address. It was a wild ride of images, ideas, and history of comics. Jack Weinstein interviewed Spiegelman.

I still need to decipher my notes, but here were a few of the things Spiegelman said:
Regarding Maus, he wanted to write a comic book that readers would need a bookmark for. He didn't set out to write a "graphic novel." It seems graphic novels have more respectability. He's managed to create "art." Spiegelman says, "It's a bit like thinking you are a "hooker" and finding out that you're a "lady of the night." After hearing he's considered the father of the graphic novel Spiegelman says, "I'm demanding a blood test."

Mmmmm Pizza.

I discovered a new favorite frozen pizza at Sam's Club the other day. Bellatoria pizza. I tried both the Five Cheese variety and the Margherita one (as seen in the pic). Man, oh man, they were both sooooo good. They have eight thin crust varieties, and I should try the rest but I loved both of these so much it's going to be hard to to switch. I highly recommend this pizza.

Ahhh... what we like and what we do.

A Song of Perfect Propriety
by Dorothy Parker

Oh, I should like to ride the seas,
A roaring buccaneer;
A cutlass banging at my knees,
A dirk behind my ear.
And when my captives' chains would clank
I'd howl with glee and drink,
And then fling out the quivering plank
And watch the beggars sink.

I'd like to straddle gory decks,
And dig in laden sands,
And know the feel of throbbing necks
Between my knotted hands.
Oh, I should like to strut and curse
Among my blackguard crew....
But I am writing little verse,
As little ladies do.

Oh, I should like to dance and laugh
And pose and preen and sway,
And rip the hearts of men in half,
And toss the bits away.
I'd like to view the reeling years
Through unastonished eyes,
And dip my finger-tips in tears,
And give my smiles for sighs.

I'd stroll beyond the ancient bounds,
And tap at fastened gates,
And hear the prettiest of sound-
The clink of shattered fates.
My slaves I'd like to bind with thongs
That cut and burn and chill....
But I am writing little songs,
As little ladies will.

In Love with All Things Lost

Little Locke picks wrong.

Check out the awesome collection of Lost inspired images
in Grickle's "Foggy Memories of Lost" set on Flickr.

RRVWP Poetry Workshop with Brent Goodman

Brent Goodman, poet and teacher

Painting with Your Senses: Teaching "Show Don't Tell"
Friday, March 12, 6:00-9:00 PM

Throughout the course we wrote a number of poems in 15-20 minutes, but in this session I wrote four. Here's an example of one of our prompts:

Write a poem --any length we want --
specific things must be included:

* a tongue will touch or taste something
* a smell will remind a speaker of something else
* you will invent the name of a color
* something in the poem arrives or departs
* invent a verb
* name what the radio is playing
* name a body of water

Here's a draft of my attempt (you'll notice I didn't get all the requirements in, oops.)

My blood spools,
spinning like the dizzy maker
on my childhood playground and
if I think too hard
or stare too long
I get the same motionless feeling
and now I start to slump a little to the left
afraid
to embrace that weightless feeling when
as a child I'd hold on like Superman
with my legs spindling out behind me
And my mouth is a copper penny
as my platelets return.
Welcome home, my own red sea.
I pray I won't feel the shiver
of my vein collapsing
as the cuff's chokehold tightens on my arm.
I require
a bit of gauze--a game I play with myself
to pretend there is no 16 gauge needle.
Something to squeeze,
my brain immersed in book,
and a blanket thick to work its warmth
when the saline slams through the tube,
reverse motion washing the coagulant-rich crimson back to shore,
a glacial melt spilling in my veins.

Our Poem: Creative Collaboration in the Classroom
Saturday, March 13, 8:30- 11:30 AM

We adopted a poem from the choices Goodman provided in a mini-anthology the night before. We used our "adopted poems" to examine the following things.

Any poem can be considered in terms of its...
Line – isolating the lines and looking at them
Music – looking at the sound devices
Shape – is it short lines, long lines, etc. stanzas, appearance.
Mind is this more about concept or ... (I missed the rest of that one)
Velocity is this meant to be read word by word… or is it more like Alan Ginsburg
Foot – meter?

Then we each picked just ONE line from the poem that we liked and talked about why. Looking at line breaks and at the "poems within the poems"

We tried an Exquisite Corpse poem and then did some partner poems some blind, some responsively. None of these quite worked as well for me, but I could see potential for cool things, especially with students.

Building Your Own Room: Inventing Poetic Forms
Saturday, March 13, 1:30-4:30 PM

In this session we started by revising one another's poems from earlier. It was interesting to hear others' efforts at revision and tightening of language.

Then we attempted to understand line breaks in a poem where they'd been removed. It was an interesting lesson in enjambment.

How do you form a line:
Breath
Idea
Architecture

We ended things by trying to write in a very tight form--a set number of lines and syllables. And then we'd revise that to fewer syllables, fewer lines. It was a great exercise. Difficult for some (ahem. me!)

Brent Goodman - Public reading/Q&A session
Saturday, March 13, 7:00-9:00, North Dakota Museum of Art, UND

The night ended off with Brent doing a public reading from his book The Brother Swimming Beneath Me. A few of us gathered recently to read some of his poems and to do some poetry explication before we met him. I loved what I read and it was thrilling to hear him read from that book at his reading. I'm all revved up for poetry month now... yippee!

I am craving this pie...

Fire up the oven!

Wordless Wednesday -- the cheater's edition in which I take a picture of words and of my grandma's cookie tin which I love tremendously.

Write Fifteen Minutes a Day

I posted this on my creative writing page on my teacher website, but I went to the trouble of creating the links so I thought I'd share it here too. March starts today. Make this a goal. Why not?

----------------------------

Here's how Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Speak, Chains, Wintergirls and more, explains her WFMAD project posted on her blog: The rules are simple. In fact, they aren't even rules. They're more like guidelines, the Pirate Code of Writing.

1. Commit to write for 15 minutes a day for the entire month of August.
2. Just do it.

Seriously. That's all there is to it. You don't have to sign up anywhere, or meet minimum word count goals or complete a whole freaking novel in 30 days. (And obviously, you can do this ANY month... it doesn't have to be August) Just. Write. Every Day. This. Month. 15 Minutes.

Day 1 -- Dreams
Day 2 -- Photo Feelings
Day 3 -- Are You Hungry?
Day 4 -- It's in the Details
Day 5 -- Word Geekery
Day 6 -- Meet Your Character
Day 7 -- Shift the Point of View
Day 8 -- Blueberries with Laurie
Day 9 -- Daring to Dream Big
Day 10 -- Magic Phrase
Day 11 -- Choices
Day 12 -- Listening In
Day 13 -- Memory Maps
Day 14 -- Work in Progress Manipulation
Day 15 --Sin
Day 16 -- Snooping
Day 17 -- Take a Chance on Plot
Day 18 -- Sensory Overload
Day 19 --Planting and Harvesting
Day 20 -- Inked
Day 21 -- Secrets
Day 22 -- Showers of Words
Day 23 -- Howl
Day 24 -- I Remember
Day 25 -- Time Machine
Day 26 -- Once Upon a Time
Day 27 -- Talking Heads
Day 28 -- Movement = Story
Day 29 -- The Challenges of Color
Day 30 -- Signs
Day 31 -- Celebration and Reflection

If you want more, try her WFMAD project from 2008. Here's Day 1.