6 posts tagged “poetry”
In honor of World Teachers' Day today, tell us about a teacher who had a positive impact on your life.
John Abram Bubb, d. 1993, sculptor in stone, dearly remembered: the coolest art teacher who ever was.
Sister Patricia Binko, the Nun of Suzuki Strings. I play the violin because of her.
Bruce Weigl, poet, critic, essayist, memoirist, translator, and fucking cool guy. I had his English 213, Intro to Poetry Writing, pretty much by accident -- it fit my schedule that fall. I thought, "Oh, poetry. That should be easy" -- words which haunted me as I sat down to write my 4-hour master's-degree candidacy exam in 1997.
Carolyn Forche. My guru. I love Carolyn forever.
Peter Klappert. Peter is another poet under whose grad-school strictures I blossomed.
Chris Thaiss was the first instructor to teach me how to teach, way back in the TA days. Now, everybody I work with teaches me more about all that.
"A vividness and lushness of diction—that stubborn willingness to say whatever it takes to bring the poem alive for the reader—distinguishes Gwyn McVay’s poems from the vast majority of young poets publishing today. Combined with a serious and politically charged regard for our world, these poems are mature artistically as well as intellectually. When I came to the end, I wanted more." —Bruce Weigl
"Hi! Please read my book!" —Me
What is one of your favorite poems?
Submitted by marvel is my pen name.
Oh, please be joking! One? One?!
*sits down, composes self* This is hard to break down by category, even. Favorite haiku? There are numerous contenders, including this one by Oemaru that, several centuries later, has a double meaning to those of us who "aim to misbehave":
gives light
to its pursuer.
Favorite sonnet? See, that's huge too. You have everybody from Petrarch to Ted Berrigan to grapple with on that one. Favorite limerick? I have to cop to liking one of the crude ones:
A mathematician named Hall
has a hexahedronical ball.
The cube of its weight
times his pecker, plus eight,
is his phone number. Give him a call.
Favorite book-length poem? There are numerous there, too. C.D. Wright's Deepstep Come Shining, Carolyn Forché's The Blue Hour, works by Gwendolyn Brooks, Hart Crane's The Bridge, Alice Notley's The Descent of Alette, Anne Waldman's Iovis, Charles Olson's Maximus, obviously Pound's Cantos (with, one grants, severe misgivings), and always and eternally Allen Ginsberg's Howl for Carl Solomon:
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,
angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
- who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat up smoking in the supernatural darkness of cold-water flats floating across the tops of cities contemplating jazz,
- who bared their brains to Heaven under the El and saw Mohammedan angels staggering on tenement roofs illuminated,
- who passed through universities with radiant cool eyes hallucinating Arkansas and Blake-light tragedy among the scholars of war,
- who were expelled from the academies for crazy & publishing obscene odes on the windows of the skull....
Whan that Aprille, with hir shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed euery vayne in swich licour
Of which Vertu engendred is the flour
Whan Zephirus eek, with his sweete breth
Inspired hath, in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram half his cours yronne....
But is it one of my favorites simply because it's stuck in my head, or was on my reading list for my MFA exam? Does it become favorite-er if I know the person, or they're a FOAF? No -- I'm sorry. I cannot even begin to answer this question.
Share a photo of something that made a huge impact on your life.
In the fall of 1989 or the spring of 1990, I forget which, I had declared my English major at Penn State and was looking through the course schedule to find classes that both fit my schedule and satisfied requirements of my major. We had to take a certain number of hours of writing classes, for example. I flipped a page -- I remember this very clearly -- and saw an open section of English 213, Introduction to Poetry. "Oh, poetry," I thought to myself. "That should be easy."
AHAHAHA. HAHAHAHA. The terror with which I approached my four-hour written master's degree candidacy exam years later for my Master of Fine Arts in Poetry -- well, my thesis advisor, who saw me just before the test, said that I looked like I was about to be executed, but was being very calm about it. But the words were silly on another level: I had no idea that poet Bruce Weigl was teaching the class, nor, if pressed, could I have identified him at the time beyond the guy who usually gets alphabetized right after Wang Wei in chain bookstores. Yet it was in this class that I would come to think of poetry as more than something that I did in my spare time -- rather as something that was really for me, that could be a vocation, that could be something a person did with her life. And so I do.
Last semester, I adopted his book of poems about the Vietnam War and its aftermath, Song of Napalm, for my Social Issues (now Foundations of Sociology) class. It really took off with the students, and so I'm doing it again. Bruce was kind enough to favor us with his presence via conference call. I hesitate to ask him that again, because this semester, the damn class is at 8:15 in the morning! Still -- that all these years after I was last in a class of his (in 1992, and then he changed my life yet further by signing me into the graduate seminar of visiting professor Carolyn Forché in 1993, but Carolyn is quite another story in herself), that Bruce would be willing to talk to a bunch of my students for an hour about poems and about a war he was in before I was born -- that's just the kind of guy he is.
Bruce changed my life. He is the godfather of my poetry, with a small g. Or maybe Godfather, capitalized: the way I saw it, he really did make me an offer I couldn't refuse.
What books are on your nightstand?
Joseph Ceravolo is a poet whose works never fail to tickle my brain in all the right ways, like a cool ginger ale in a hot country store. He is sadly no longer an inhabitant of Earth; he has left the building -- but the poems he leaves behind are an incredible pleasure, and can always help get me writing again when I'm in a slump. I think I discovered him through the Electronic Poetry Center at SUNY-Buffalo, or the POETICS listserv based there.
I would be shocked out of my hiking boots if no birdwatcher was without a secret or blatant partiality to some subset of the bird kingdom. Some people are all about being able to identify different warblers. Some people have the money and leisure to travel the world extending their life lists by hundreds of species. You have your fans of particular biomes; you have your riparian birders (along rivers), your pelagic birders (along coasts), and then you just have people with admitted favorites. Peter Matthiessen likes cranes. I like them too, but as you may have figured out from the rest of this blog, I really, really like crows and their relatives -- ravens, magpies, jays, jackdaws, choughs, treepies, drongos.... I haven't got far into this book yet, which is really sad considering it was a birthday present (I'm a Pisces; you figure it out), but what I've read, I've liked.
In the course of my travels I passed by an amusement park last week, but did not enter. I confess that I have never in my life been on a rollercoaster: I see little point in paying loads of money ($8 just to park at this particular attraction, never mind the actual tickets!) and waiting in line to endanger myself, when I once broke a toe merely thinking. (I got up to get some information that was in another room. Sadly, a very solid oak IKEA chair leg was in my way.) And really, I have enough extra adrenaline surges.
Yesterday and the day before, I signed two publishing contracts: one for my forthcoming book (I don't believe the words "my forthcoming book" even as I type them, yet, depending on the publisher's schedule and his already-accepted mss., it could happen as soon as this fall), and one for my contribution to a yet-untitled anthology of women poets that will be on Red Hen Press. I also got the news that my sister and her husband are beginning launch sequence to adopt an infant girl from Guatemala.
All of these things are made of awesome and win, yet they turn (what's left of) my spine to jelly. I really thought that once I learned my book had been accepted for publication, my sole, solitary, and only feeling about it from then on would be euphoria. It would be like having intravenous Ecstasy or something. Uh, no. Gentle reader, if you want to duplicate the sensation of staring at the words "my book" when they refer to your own very first book, drink five Mountain Dews and visualize being naked at the dentist. People will shortly be able to see everything. "Hmm, got a little plaque on that ass!"
If you've lost somebody (four grandparents; a whole pantheon of great-aunts; a mother who would have gone around mentioning her daughter's forthcoming book to every random person with whom she exchanged two words in the course of her day; friends), you've got that extra burden of knowing at every stage that the person would have been immensely happy at this moment, but isn't there to share it. My sister's future daughter will never have known her grandmother, so my auntiehood responsibilities are not merely doubled but squared: I need to carry for my sister's children -- suddenly the plural word applies, although her daughter-to-be may not have been born yet -- memories of their grandmother, and her ways of doing things.
So if you're having a book, as with antidepressants, it's not just like switching your internal mood indicator to Euphoric and leaving it there. You have mood swings, you have cravings. (No, I haven't thrown up so far. No weight gain either, no.)
Props time: Bruce Weigl, poet, memoirist, anthologist, translator, and literary scholar, was my first poetry professor in college. This is really all his fault. (My book, I mean. Not my sister's baby.) He doesn't keep one nice unified website, but you should totally go Google him or just head straight to Amazon and buy one of his books. (Interestingly, his memoir The Circle of Hanh is about international adoption.)
