Teaching Creative Writing--Finally

I'm starting to really, truly love aspects of my job this year--which is something new.  I detest the politics behind education, both in terms of the euphmistically named "No Child Left Behind" Act, and just the politics of the city or town you live in, compiled with building politics.  As a brief aside on that other, other, other steaming heap of turd George Bush the second left us with, NCLB is a big disaster.  My supe posted a blog on his page that said it perfectly, though I can only paraphrase.  Though the act is a disaster, and as big an equity as separate but equal, its name forced us-- those of us in education, with unions and huge voting power behind us--to roll over and take it like prison bitches.  I assure the soap on a rope reference is purely my own contribution to the apt statement.  I will say nothing further, because I don't intend to often blog about the nature of public education in this country, but I could... for quite a while.  I love to elaborate on why I use that word "inequity," for instance, but I won't.

Anyway, I'm teaching a course in creative writing.  In creative lyrical writing, no less.  Yes, that's right: poetry.  So, I've discovered that it was complete bullshit that I am another Verlain, destined to have poetically peaked somewhere between age seventeen and nineteen, with nothing  but a handful of poems a year if I was lucky thereafter, fully half of them being a bag of suck.  Most days when I give my students an assignment, I complete it as well.  Here are the results I don't hate-- proof that forcing myself to write does exactly what it always did under the man I still admire more than I've ever been able to say to him with a keyboard: it makes good stuff happen sometimes, when I just write even when I feel like I can't.


This piece is a "found" poem: You get another text, often in prose, often something like expository non-fiction, and you force yourself to use lines from it verbatim.

Shadow Walkers

Only a person full of fears already,
Full of shadows,
is drawn towards
A life only in the night

But, immortality
Fear of death so common,
living forever seems like the ultimate fantasy
But, submitting to that awful bite
Holds the promise of a ghoulish paradise
Perpetual youth, perhaps, but such a cost

Draining others; living in obscura
Lurking, listening
Loving no one--
or loving, without fulfilment, without completion

Are we all vampires anyway?


Another found poem: this time I made them (us) turn to page 100 of an almost randomly pulled novel off the bookshelves of my  classroom, and use sentence 5.

O.C.D.
"As always, she watched me complete this task as if I were the most mystifying creature she had ever seen--and quite possibly mad"--Dean Koontz, Relentless.

The piles must move dozens of times in a day
Dozens-- no need to exaggerate and
claim hundred, but certainly dozens.

Piles of pencils, of scrap paper, of neatly
 arranged photocopy.

Moved as if a corner out of place
would topple the entire Jenga game
Moving what can be seen in an attempt
To arrange that which cannot--
the chaos of a life with so many variables,
So much to balance and keep aright
Fear sometimes soothed as the piles
Are made to march in order.
Inadequacies allayed as the
Uncontrollable dangers are contained
Within the ritual.


I am sorry, but that is it so far.  I edited both of them-- only very slightly-- as I posted them.  A third one is nearly ready.