tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-224612262011-11-14T18:29:37.496-06:00jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comBlogger1191100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-2699065479058789142011-07-26T06:55:00.000-05:002011-10-21T15:55:30.895-05:00

Inside Higher Ed has a brief article up today noting that the Norwegian right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik’s manifesto attacks “intellectuals such as Antonio Gramsci, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse and Theodor Adorno.” If you go to Inside Higher Ed’s source, Galleycat, you’ll find a longer list, including Wilhelm Reich, which for some reason IHE decided to omit (orgone energy a little too

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-31851131187033486122011-06-17T11:10:00.000-05:002011-06-17T11:22:58.601-05:00

Another post for my students. I mentioned this in class today, and several folks were interested, so here it is: “Wasness” by Aldon Lynn Nielsen. The essay takes on a recent book claiming that there is no more African-American Literature because AAL was a very specific sort of literature responding to very specific conditions at a very specific time. At that time has passed, etc., etc....Nielsen

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-16287092497965668632011-03-28T08:51:00.000-05:002011-03-28T08:55:22.925-05:00

A very quick entry: LeGuin weighs in (again) on the issue of Google’s digitization of works without author permission. Her post is very useful, as are the first few comments. I’m hoping it stays that way. (I dread the arrival of the flag-waving “info wants to be free” and “monetize everything” crowds.)BOOK VIEW CAFE BLOG » Unfacts Concerning the Google (Un)Settlement

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-88594246225638012272011-02-13T07:42:00.000-06:002011-02-13T07:55:07.769-06:00

This is a quick reading recommendation for my students. Ange Mlinko has written a very good review (at The Nation) of Robert Duncan’s The H.D. Book. Reading this book was for me a transformative experience. It changed not only how I look at poetry but how I imagine the arts and experience to intersect. Though it can be at times difficult, the book has a charming and thoughtful personality and

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-15561609031167235802011-02-01T12:45:00.000-06:002011-02-01T14:38:54.819-06:00

A recent episode of Science Friday features Hank Shocklee (Public Enemy) and Kembrew McLeod (U. of Iowa Prof. of Comm.) discussing intellectual property and digital sampling: Science Friday Archives: Digital Sampling and Remix Culture: Creativity or Criminality?Also of interest: Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Poetry | Center for Social Media. Information on the issues of intellectual

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-18037006530613504232011-01-27T07:54:00.000-06:002011-03-11T11:21:45.125-06:00

To my students:I wanted to post a few online poetry resources. These are places I visit from time-to-time and that I think might be useful/interesting/entertaining to you. It’s from my own interests, so feel free to drop me a note via the comment box or e-mail if you think I’m missing a good resource.There are two blogs that are very useful because they gather lots of poetry-related articles from

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-37951511478115199872010-12-19T06:59:00.000-06:002011-06-21T05:46:48.407-05:00

There are a number of services available today that provide free online file storage, some of these even provide file-sync (which you can think of as automatic and ongoing file back-up). All of these services provide some way to share files, including, in some of them, easy ways to collaborate on work.A few words on file-synchronization: you need this. File-synchronization automatically makes a

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-46118922917839089452010-11-19T10:45:00.000-06:002010-11-19T11:22:37.988-06:00

I’ll be presenting the paper below at the The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 in February of 2011.Title: “Gender, Generativity and the Muse in the Work of Rachel Blau DuPlessis”In her critical and poetic work, Rachel Blau DuPlessis often critiques the female muse created by poetry. From her early poems, such as “Praxilla’s Silliness” (1987), to her current ongoing

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-46638908065368596072010-11-18T08:20:00.000-06:002010-11-18T08:57:56.028-06:00

Since I’m one of the resident computer nerds in my department, I’ve been asked a couple of times about “the cloud.” The questions have been something like “Hey, should I use this awesome cloud thing.” My answer is “maybe” or “certainly” or “probably not.” That is, “It depends.” And I generally emphasize that the cloud is more a marketing buzzword (YouTube) than anything else. It’s companies

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-10662190144572225742010-10-28T06:39:00.000-05:002011-05-11T08:42:44.535-05:00

There’s a new blog series on The Atlantic, “The Righteous Skeptic’s Guide to Reading Poetry.” I believe the “righteous skeptic” part is disingenuous, as the author, Adam Roberts, describes himself as a recent Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate.What’s interesting to me is the link between the first article and the second in this five-part series:Next week: Adam discusses what makes a poem "accessible

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-88862752553070968692010-10-16T07:34:00.000-05:002010-10-16T08:26:42.102-05:00

Brecht anticipates the viewpoint of a libertarian plutocrat and futurist.I started teaching Brecht’s Mother Courage last week. To contextualize the play for the students of my general education course, to explain the Marxist and/or anti-fascist attitudes of the play, I brought in some quotes from Brecht’s essay “Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties.” This essay can be found in the back of the old

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-41183152855365561282010-10-07T12:30:00.000-05:002010-10-07T12:31:36.773-05:00

The following was posted on Harriet today: Questions from a high school English teacher. It is excellent advice from John Gallaher on how to teach poetry.

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-56510857279625484292010-10-05T18:19:00.000-05:002010-11-01T13:21:53.868-05:00

This is a quick introduction to my plans for the Introduction to Poetry course. Note, though: this may change some, as I have to finalize and organize. If anything here is unclear, e-mail me, and I’ll try to clear things up in a reply and in an addendum to this post.Since this is an introductory course intended for both English majors and non-majors, I’m going to try to introduce attitudes,

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-34223001282905660362010-09-07T07:29:00.000-05:002010-09-07T07:38:27.224-05:00

From the preface to a recent volume of poems:Most of the following poems are experiments written mainly to see how the language of consumer society can provide an aesthetic experience. Some readers accustomed to “workshop poetry” or mainstream verse will likely find these poems strange, even awkward. They might even doubt that these poems are poetry. If that reader is you, try not to let

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-57140840469934916462010-08-01T07:38:00.000-05:002010-08-04T07:12:32.064-05:00

Saturday I tried to find some information online about how to adjust the frames of my new glasses. They hurt like hell. So, hoping I wouldn’t have to wait until I could get back to the optician, I headed for Google for advice. The search results were not helpful. The first page or two of results were all from places like eHow, howtodothings, answers dot com, answerbag—and the articles at these

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-33023136662266449212010-07-21T15:09:00.000-05:002010-07-21T15:47:58.844-05:00

Well, now that MacJournal has its bug/beef with blogger all ironed-out, an entry:I just listened to a PoemTalk podcast from last year, “it’s like a new reality, man,” on Stevens’s late poem "Not Ideas about the Thing but the Thing Itself” (the text of the poem is at the podcast link). As Al Filreis notes in the podcast, this poem continues Stevens’s long argument with William Carlos Williams

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-69328282689346831562010-06-08T08:46:00.002-05:002010-06-08T09:19:39.881-05:00

Juliana Spahr has a great blog entry: “notes for talk at the panel ‘Why Is Gertrude Stein So Important?’ at the ALA.” In it she argues that the language we see in Stein is a sort of pidgin that’s a product of interactions with or knowledge of colonized cultures.         I wanted to respond to her argument publicly, but she has comments off on her blog. Anyway, here’s the passage that prompts me

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-40702384634758016382010-03-14T08:47:00.000-05:002010-03-14T08:50:59.027-05:00

A nice piece over at X Poetics (their description: X Poetics is a collaborative blog edited by Robin Tremblay-McGaw (San Francisco), Kathy Lou Schultz (Memphis), and Jim Brashear (New York)) on Harryette Mullen’s genealogical project: Harryette Mullen: Where the Bodies Are Buried.A good description of her work from the article/entry: “Rather than placing them under lock and key in order to

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-75619580596799111282010-03-05T08:48:00.000-06:002010-03-10T07:06:05.162-06:00

In “Professormatic,” an anonymous blogging professor at InsideHigherEd laments the impersonality of teachers lecturing from Powerpoint and busily writing comments in word processors and Blackboard. He, or she, opens the blog entry with quotes from Georgetown University students complaining about the lack of the reassuring presence of the professor’s hand-writing in typed paper comments. The brief

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-36841368301775484482010-01-31T07:17:00.000-06:002010-02-06T10:36:07.954-06:00

I’ve had to explain (or felt compelled to explain) to several friends and students why and how popular books are priced and why publishers charge “so much” for electronic books, which have a theoretical production cost approaching zero. To save myself that time, and to offer a more cogent explanation than I can often manage, I’d like to point to comment #11 in this discussion of MacMillan and

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-90876170406423071682010-01-05T13:06:00.000-06:002010-01-05T13:10:57.109-06:00

I’ve been meaning to post here on poetic obscurity and my experiences teaching obscure poetry, but I’m busy, busy. But a Christmas gift (Daniel Tiffany’s Infidel Poetics) prompts me to quickly share here four of my favorite quotes about poetry, which I realized today are all about obscurity:“Poets are the legislators of the unacknowledged world.” — George Oppen«For the attempt to approach a

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-7857974991360825392009-11-19T14:11:00.000-06:002009-12-15T09:29:00.931-06:00

I’ll be presenting again this spring at the The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900. The abstract:Title: “Susan Howe’s Mis-taken Male Mentors”This presentation will examine Susan Howe’s engagement of male mentor figures in her book-length encomium of Emily Dickinson, My Emily Dickinson. My Emily Dickinson is well-known for its attempt to correct feminist readings of Emily

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-36541515530768568872009-11-15T17:05:00.000-06:002009-11-16T16:20:30.402-06:00

I see a lot of advice from faculty and professional organizations to people seeking jobs in English departments, but most of the potential feedback for search committees trying to create job postings is buried in discussion boards and wikis where job seekers kvetch about the process. Since I’m looking for a job now and I’ve been on a couple of committees trying to formulate job postings, I

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-73754619685128407112009-09-10T09:04:00.000-05:002009-09-10T09:10:30.926-05:00

If you’re headed to the ASAP/1 conference, I’ll be presenting on Friday at 8am.Friday, Oct. 23, 8:00-9:30 a.m. SALON B “Ethics and Affect in the Contemporary Arts” Moderator: TBA· “Dreaming of Djeannine: Nathaniel Mackey’s Jazz Derivations”John Patrick Craig, University of Tennessee Knoxville· “Morrison’s Beloved, Nancian Community, Derridean Witnessing”Ana Maria

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-19050517988396272782009-08-20T06:51:00.000-05:002009-08-20T06:56:32.631-05:00

If you happen to be teaching Foucault’s concept of “Panopticism,” an article in today’s Slate might be useful to you. In “Why Do We Call Galileo Galilei by His First Name,” Brian Palmer briefly addresses how surnames became codified by European states seeking to regulate their population:The governments of the various Italian city-states eventually grew frustrated by their citizens' constantly

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-59964882347891792892009-08-17T07:43:00.000-05:002009-08-17T07:58:59.472-05:00

“Those who had something to say thrived; those who didn't, noodled.”— Fred Kaplan writing in “Kind of BlueWhy the best-selling jazz album of all time is so great” for Slate, about the impact of Kind of Blue on later jazz playing.This remark privileges presentation and communication over process and experience. It seems to me that this also means privileging a sort of lecture over a sort of dialog

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-55458610031023619192009-05-12T06:34:00.000-05:002009-05-12T12:14:52.188-05:00

There’s a problem with some of the language used to describe vanishing tenure-track and full-time jobs. Articles describing the problem, like today’s “The Disappearing Tenure-Track Job” at InsideHigherEd, tend to obscure the agency behind these “disappearing” jobs; for example, the author writes that new data shows “how much the tenure-track professor has disappeared.” Here’s another one: “

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-25586967696431318882009-05-01T07:39:00.000-05:002009-12-04T08:41:27.864-06:00

Mark Helprin strikes again, with a book (Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto or Why You Should Get Off My Lawn) arguing, as he did back in 2007, that copyright should be extended as long as possible. An article—Hands Off, It's Mine—in today’s WSJ reveals something of the sort of mindset that would want to “protect” a writer’s work in perpetuity:when the copyright term expires, the "remixers"

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-89455224191470813702009-04-12T14:11:00.000-05:002009-06-03T09:02:32.541-05:00

I just finished, finally after many five-minute snatches during office hours, Alyce Miller’s “Real Fakes and Inauthentic Others” in the March/April Writer’s Chronicle. The essay introduces a list early on of “patterns inherent in hoaxes” like “spacial/temporal distance” and aesthetic/experiential distance.” Though these terms seem useful, they don’t resurface later in the essay at any significant

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-85826764781747875742009-04-11T08:20:00.000-05:002009-04-11T08:27:43.050-05:00

Jerome Rothenberg has posted a series of entries from his wife’s writing on the Seneca people, specifically her interviews of Harry Watt. Since I want to share this with several people, and he doesn’t provide a single convenient set of links, here are the four pieces of writing he’s posted:Diane Rothenberg: Corn Soup & Fry Bread: A ReminiscenceDiane Rothenberg: The Economic Memories of Harry

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-40124293140600682302009-02-22T15:35:00.000-06:002009-02-22T15:45:57.044-06:00

I have just returned from The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900. That’s a mouthful. I very much regret missing Ed Roberson’s reading. Attending the panel on his poetry has put his books on my shopping list and has added Evie Shockley to the list of scholars I want to keep an eye out for. I also very much enjoyed the panel for which I read, and look forward to speaking

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-7829825044911329252009-02-01T16:43:00.000-06:002009-02-01T17:11:57.157-06:00

I recently fetched home Adrienne Rich’s On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose 1966-1978 (Norton 1979) to read an essay I’d seen referenced elsewhere, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Revision.” I love the way she introduces the essay:The Modern Language Association is both marketplace and funeral parlor for the professional study of Western Literature in North America. Like all gatherings

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-14035489041674943972008-11-05T06:11:00.000-06:002008-11-05T06:21:22.724-06:00

I have 102 students. Three are black, and the state of Tennessee, where I teach, is 17% black. And here’s a side-effect of Obama’s win that I was expecting and dreading: people saying that, since America has a black President, it no longer has race problems. Ta-daa! The Nebraska higher education system has banned consideration of race in admissions. And Roger Clegg, president of the Center for

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-86035309617125084762008-10-05T08:23:00.000-05:002008-10-05T13:16:40.945-05:00

Well, everyone’s excited about Issue 1 of an exciting new journal. Three thousand or so poets in it! “Their” work seemingly generated by an algorithm. Real poets with fake poems. A real anthology with fake poems in it. That sounds familiar.Many poets are very upset, and you can read some of their angry comments at Harriet, where the article title calls this piracy. Others, like Amy King, are

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-46988598582817683072008-09-13T11:37:00.000-05:002008-09-14T07:58:13.743-05:00

I recently came across a bad physics joke inspired by the Large Hadron Collider: “do my bosons give you a hadron?” One of possibilities of the LHC is, as many probably know, is the possibility of finding the Higgs Boson, a particle presumed to emerge from ripping up the fabric of the universe in some new way. I’m not a physicist, as that probably horribly inaccurate definition would suggest. What

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-74207229810381561002008-09-02T14:30:00.000-05:002008-09-02T14:59:22.413-05:00

absent albatrossbloated beaver careless chameleondada dodo elegant elephant frisky froggormless gopherhumpy hippoirritable ibexjamming jackasskwazy kookaburralibidinous lambmaudlin macawnaughty narwhalornery ocelotpusillanimous pussycatquerulous quetzalraunchy redstartsatisfied sea liontouchy tigerupset ungulatevast vicunawasted wallabyxenophilic xiphiasyawping yakzealous zebra

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-21418533422942429702008-08-24T09:16:00.000-05:002008-08-24T16:29:19.863-05:00

This fall I’m teaching three sections of freshman Composition I, which has a heavy emphasis on rhetoric here a the University of Tennessee (Knoxville). And I’m teaching one section of Introduction to Poetry. That gives me 105-110 students, depending on how the adding and dropping works out by the end of this coming week.In the composition class I’m using Ways of Reading, which is a text full of

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-14320220085161666232008-08-18T07:40:00.000-05:002008-08-18T08:04:53.150-05:00

This morning I read in Slate Pinksly’s “The American John Milton: The Poet and the Power of Extraordinary Speech” with qualified pleasure. In this essay, Pinsky argues for greater appreciation of what I see as the most significant quality of poesis, the ability to make language strange or new. But I’m a bit amused by his choice of vehicle for that: iambic pentameter and inverted or convoluted

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-24816744838210273472008-08-03T07:26:00.000-05:002008-08-03T07:38:53.550-05:00

The article title almost says it all: “Free Academic Articles Get Read But Don't Generate More Citations” (ScienceDaily). Research has found that a scientific research article made freely available will be read more often than its peers distributed via traditional methods. But it won’t be cited more often. Basically the writers of science research are behaving responsibly with their research;

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-23581271611126982022008-07-31T18:18:00.000-05:002008-07-31T18:39:30.549-05:00

Tennessee Board of Regents OKs Diploma Mill DegreesFrankly, the Tennessee Board of Regents’ lack of support for the value of a higher education comes as no surprise to me. But here’s the scoop: “State Employees List Suspect Degrees.”Basically, state officials and some educators got degrees required for their jobs online by simply filling out a form and writing a check. And the State Board of

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-44913445200106858022008-07-30T16:23:00.000-05:002008-07-30T16:42:13.362-05:00

An hour or so ago, I read Ron Silliman’s lament for the absence of a contemporary edition of Williams’s Spring & All. Now I find myself in the library with a copy of Poems of Clarence Mangan (Many Hitherto Uncollected). I run my hands over the page and feel where the print slammed into the paper. The pages are brittle with a rough tooth suitable for crayon or charcoal. And that sent me looking

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-21266424098451059912008-07-19T07:45:00.000-05:002008-07-19T07:47:04.273-05:00

distances and timespace is bigthere’s a lot of stuffother stuffthe important thinghuman beings are concerneddynamic systema pretty patternones you can’t fit you call irregulara large bulgeislands in spacethey’re really prominenttime is important very slowlyall the timea swarm of companionsit’s not perfect

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-90406548538149370842008-07-04T06:49:00.000-05:002008-07-04T07:03:13.847-05:00

“War poet Robert Graves 'stole work from his mistress'”The article’s beginning:Few would doubt the brilliance of Robert Graves, a man considered to be one of Britain's foremost war poets whose verses on Greek mythology and frontline conflict cemented his name in literary history.        But one academic has accused the poet of stealing ideas, literary criticism and poetry from his one-time

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-62707471679269954632008-07-03T15:08:00.000-05:002008-07-03T15:15:50.861-05:00

I was recently in a local coffee shop overhearing, and this occasional poem came out of it:Bobby said sundown in the city.I heard him say seven times seven.What is a screening memory?I know he wants hot dogs.They make him sit outside with a popsicle.With the exception of the last two, the lines are all overheard. I like what I found. I guess they’re not strictly overheard, but reporting on

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-22543985406658237712008-06-28T07:27:00.000-05:002008-06-28T07:28:54.357-05:00

A website where there will be weekly postings about the status of the College of Arts and Science at the University of Iowa as flood recovery continues:CLAS Flood Recovery Updates- College of Liberal Arts & Sciences - The University of Iowa

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-85107124099252983222008-06-16T09:15:00.000-05:002008-06-16T09:16:21.511-05:00

There’s an informative article in the Iowa City Press-Citizen by Mike Chasar on the poet Obama calls his muse: “Obama's bitter muse: Frank Marshall Davis.” To whet your appetite:Interestingly, anti-Obama crusaders know more about Davis (whom they call "Obama's communist mentor") than Obama's own political party does. Like many individuals interested in combating American racism in the 1930s and

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-29072407506066444082008-06-14T08:23:00.000-05:002008-06-18T15:19:08.980-05:00

It’s getting a bit late in the flood for me to do this, but if you have friends in Iowa City, here are a some useful links for keeping track of what’s going on:Buildings Currently Flooded at the University of Iowa University of Iowa Main Library Flood Update Iowa Under Water The University of Iowa Iowa City Press-Citizen photos (6/13)Iowa City Press-Citizen photos (6/14)Johnson County, Iowa road

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-4433096673630167672008-06-11T13:32:00.000-05:002008-06-11T13:46:12.757-05:00

I just caught a post on Boing Boing about a 1944 manual (36-page pdf) from the Office of Strategic Services (a forerunner of the CIA) on how to sabotage your workplace. I’m linking to it here because the advice reminds me so much of actual practice in some of the committees I’ve been on. Here’s a list of the procedures advised by the OSS dirty-tricksters:Insist on doing everything through “

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-55327867804774848642008-06-10T06:57:00.000-05:002008-06-10T07:07:15.701-05:00

Though she refused UVa in her lifetime, because it was segregated, Harlem Renaissance poet Anne Spencer’s papers are now to be collected there. The angriest poem I know by her is “White Things,” the last line of which seems to me to be an inversion of the stereotype of the black speaker as backward or chthonic. I also recommend a look at her “The Sévignés,” a look at the “intricate involvement of

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-64604921505322422042008-05-08T16:28:00.001-05:002008-05-08T16:54:57.999-05:00

In this post, I’ll show you how to get the average of a range of grades in Excel after dropping the two lowest grades. Here’s the example formula: =(SUM(A1:A6)-SMALL(A1:A6,1)-SMALL(A1:A6,2))/(COUNT(A1:A6)-2).What this formula does is sum up the values in the range of cells A1 to A6. Then it subtracts the first smallest value (small(a1:a6,1)) and the second smallest value (small(a1:a6,2)) from

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-2567786321355674592008-05-01T08:24:00.000-05:002008-05-01T08:31:39.240-05:00

A Scots poet, Gillian K. Ferguson, is making freely available her 1,000 page poem on The Human Genome. I haven’t read the whole thing. I stopped after a couple dozen lines of the first poem in the sequence. Here’s the opening of the second poem in the series:Unpluck your shining eyes; time-tutored stones - bright miracles of light’s yearning to be seen, even in darkness -biology’s artistic

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-28174806169879030572008-03-19T11:54:00.000-05:002008-03-25T15:01:22.045-05:00

I’m still not quite able to be objective enough to start theorizing this, and I’m still wanting to do more research on this apparently nation-wide problem, so I’m just offering a more extensive list of what students stand to lose from this process by which UMI/Proquest and university libraries are digitizing dissertations. I’m also going to post more about the solutions people come up with at the

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-71587299528342964922008-03-19T10:46:00.000-05:002008-03-19T10:55:33.522-05:00

In recent days, there’s been some controversy over a new policy of the University of Iowa Libraries. They plan to start putting graduate student theses—dissertations, masters theses, and creative theses—online, freely available to anyone. Students have been legitimately concerned about work being published that is not yet polished. They are also worried that this form of publication might well

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-40179738764172670142008-03-17T12:02:00.000-05:002008-03-17T11:04:43.214-05:00

I haven’t had a lot of time to blog lately, so here’s a little writing warm-up I just did as I prepare to do some writing on the topic of Susan Howe, gender, and her engagements with Williams in the opening of My Emily Dickinson.        When I draft, the resulting material should be pretty rough. It should, as I tell my students, look like crap, not polished prose. If there aren’t problems with a

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-41658404891559003162008-01-20T16:49:00.000-06:002008-01-20T16:59:55.785-06:00

I've started experimenting with sound poetry using GarageBand and Sound Studio. The ability to overlap tracks so easily in GarageBand (or probably many other products; this is what I have) makes me quickly conscious of not only sound but overlap in meaning. I'm currently tinkering with overlapping the sound of Sputnik's frantic little bleeps with splices of Duncan reading and my own rambling

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-89056052908583340132008-01-08T18:26:00.001-06:002008-01-08T18:26:34.809-06:00

Today, I’m writing to seek your support and a commitment to the opportunity to serve. Yesterday, I made a passion for the people positive momentum. We’ve built over the student success and his seven year tenure. With your help, I’m writing to support that positive momentum we’ve built over the last few years: I appreciate faculty. It’s important that you have spent nearly all that to make this

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-24515488027498157712007-12-14T15:22:00.000-06:002007-12-19T07:52:52.698-06:00

I just put a link to Nick Piombino’s blog fait accompli in the list of blogs linked from mine because I ran across his entry for today. I can’t direct link to it yet, so you must navigate to it yourself. Check it out: entries from a spam poetry contest. I liked his entry especially because it tends toward aphorisms and because of it’s of the echoes of justifying god to men in his opening

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-79523224446371158592007-12-07T06:31:00.000-06:002007-12-07T06:34:14.585-06:00

“US poet and novelist Bukowski's poems to be translated in Iran”Pretty much what it says, except that Marquez was also published there, his “Memories of My Melancholy Whores,” then rapidly banned when the bluenoses figured out what was in the book, leaving his book to sell on the black market at twice the price to a much more interested crowd of readers.

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-17367643050242917102007-12-06T08:00:00.000-06:002007-12-06T08:32:57.310-06:00

There are so many things I want to write about here. I’d like to write about Joan Retallack’s criticism of fantasy and folklore in her discussion with Quinta Slef, “The Poethical Wager,” in which she claims that “the Grimm fairy tale can render [...] brutality oddly acceptable,” a claim I find very troubling, given my Duncanophilia. I’d like to write about Charles Bernstein’s “sixty-second

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-19846863357866386872007-09-28T06:46:00.000-05:002007-09-28T07:24:06.329-05:00

There are so many poetry societies, foundations, and other award-granting clubs out there, that I lose track of them. Frankly, I don’t care much about these institutions. A few of them accomplish goals that seem useful, to me, such as publishing a journal or sponsoring a reading series or conference—in poetries I care about. Others seem to exist just for passing out awards to members or for

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-90321652639507763542007-09-09T09:15:00.000-05:002007-09-09T09:38:04.062-05:00

Inside Higher Ed has an article up on “When Student Writing Could be a Red Flag.” It offers a list of seemingly reasonable ways to identify when a student is suffering potentially dangerous emotional distress, when creative writing on “a violent or dark subject” is “a sign that a writer may be a danger.” The proposed procedures are, unsurprisingly, coming from Virginia. They are aimed at

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-71736424728464794862007-09-05T08:09:00.000-05:002007-09-05T08:43:20.435-05:00

Fred Thompson! Fred, Fred, Fred! Fred Thompson! Okay, okay. So why did this guh-reat local candidate for Presduhdent want to pardon poor pitiful patriot Scooter Libby? Is the guy really so great? Anyway, from The Boston Globe:The website of Thompson's presidential exploratory committee, imwithfred.com, suggests that Thompson helped reveal the taping system and expose Nixon's role in the

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-85695186122668435962007-09-03T08:42:00.000-05:002007-09-03T09:20:07.909-05:00

When I signed the lease for a rental house in Knoxville, Tennessee this summer, my landlord told me about a number of social events I could go to, by way of introducing me to the town. He said, “Boomsday’s pretty nice.” I heard Bloomsday, and I said, “Bloomsday, really?” Then he said, “No, no, Boomsday.” I heard Boone’s Day and thought “How nice, a holiday for Daniel Boone; I can wear one of

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-10303839069601143262007-08-07T10:44:00.000-05:002007-08-07T10:45:00.566-05:00

what is a readingit is thatand some other thingsidol ands

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-13578103059064125512007-08-05T06:49:00.000-05:002007-08-05T07:58:51.519-05:00

Almut and I have moved to Knoxville, Tennessee. We’ve been here a week, and there’s only one box left to unpack: books for which there was no shelf until I made one yesterday with wood from a set of box springs the last tenants left here. It’s nice to walk out in the morning and see the next little mountain through the haze or fog that gives these mountains their name. And I missed birds so much.

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-41824052902537940062007-07-18T07:21:00.000-05:002007-07-18T07:33:20.611-05:00

So Duke’s having a problem with iPhones causing wireless access points to crash on the campus network. One grad student reports on Slashdot that this is a serious problem because they have so many students taking tests on computers using wifi: “If a WLAN AP goes down, and that's during a test, you've got the grades - and unhappiness - of 40+ people/class on your head.”        What are they

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-67473134387956538802007-07-11T10:09:00.000-05:002007-07-11T10:14:07.334-05:00

Is putting pen to paper enough(pleasure)Why pretend here to speakto peopleI pass overpresuming we’ve nothingthat’s plain enoughrough covers soft / the plan a pain“Such weather we share” AmenI put things out on the tablefor you sell themmoney lost to meI’ve been putting things I don’t want to move and don’t know want to throw away out front on a table with a sign “Free Junk (leave table).” The

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-46393941281270623692007-06-08T09:30:00.000-05:002007-06-08T09:36:49.906-05:00

stanza stanza———my stone—stanza stanzastanza stanza———alone—stanza stanzastanza stanza———coiled—stanza hung firestanza stanza———no bone—stanza stanzastanza stanza———strikes—an instance

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-87765759479619333502007-05-24T17:27:00.000-05:002007-05-24T17:30:07.115-05:00

My love is not for the gunbut to shoot.——————The gun gainsfrom that and from steeland wood an old urgency.To cast, to toss, iacta est.it is hard / to speak of thiswoodgrain metal-weightsettling along eyelineanswers to breath

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-75964225437935586862007-05-17T18:59:00.000-05:002007-05-17T19:07:13.251-05:00

There are valuable lessons for all teaching to be gained from working in a writing center. Here’s an excerpt from my late-night funsies reading that captures one lesson/advantage of having writing center teaching experience:‘Quite different. At close range there is no possible confusion. But pray, sir, why must I not teach the young gentlemen?’“Because, sir, teaching young gentlemen has a

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-36844360283198624582007-05-09T12:50:00.000-05:002007-05-09T13:08:42.001-05:00

As I write this my printer is coughing out a ten-page outline for the penultimate chapter of my dissertation. This is how my work typically progresses toward a draft these days: an initial outline of some 4-5 lines sprouts subheadings and then notes from primary sources populate the subheadings, and finally secondary sources become subheadings for the primary sources. Then the whole vast

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-68091730729608431592007-05-08T17:35:00.001-05:002007-05-08T18:19:49.570-05:00

I don't want to get all Sapir-Whorf, and I don't have a beef with Dmitri Anastasopoulos's article in Callallo 23.2 from which comes the following excerpt. Nope. It's a good piece. I'm just thinking of the channels of thought our language leads us down, leads me down as I write.Anastasopoulos's reading leans toward the dialectical attitude of Derrida's White Mythology to describe something that is

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-35625123447762706342007-04-23T11:53:00.000-05:002007-04-23T12:02:48.882-05:00

I have a friend who’s trying to use the GTD organizing system to get his life in order. We often exchange e-mail on our systems of dealing with the vast amount of information we need to organize, synthesize, and act upon in our daily chores. The following is an e-mail I wrote to him this morning. As I was finishing it I realized some of my methods just might be of interest to other academics

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-38259143946009573222007-04-16T16:27:00.000-05:002007-04-16T16:51:34.279-05:00

I wrote the following script to catalog pictures I send to myself from my cellphone. You can use a rule in Mail.app to detect your cellphone’s return address and then run this AppleScript. The script first moves the attachment to a new location. Then it changes the Spotlight comment for the file to be the first line of text in the original e-mail message. It then sets the creation date of that

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-61400974103646011842007-04-16T11:38:00.000-05:002007-04-17T11:06:15.898-05:00

The following are notes I made on my writing process yesterday while I was working. I like to “catch” such stray thoughts to make them pay later, for sharing and/or for my own learning.I am moving from the precis to the outline after a rough outline, using the comments field in OmniOutliner to hold parts of my precis and begin expanding upon them.        I am developing essentially the same

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-31426567633838691912007-04-11T12:02:00.000-05:002007-04-11T12:08:25.834-05:00

A post by Gabriel Gudding to the Poetics List tells me that Christopher Smart was born 285 years ago on this day. It’s sad that there’s not a good, cheap edition of his works, including the fragments, readily available. At least you can find him on the web.An excerpt from Jubilate Agno—Let Nathan with the Badger bless God for his retired fame, and privacy inaccessible to slander.Let Joseph, who

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-8360869584437083352007-04-09T07:58:00.000-05:002007-04-09T08:37:48.239-05:00

I’ve been keeping a list of interesting words since I was a boy. Periodically I misplace the list and have to start over. That happened several months ago, and when I ran across my list today, I realized that my criteria for being on this list have become more demanding. I used to have lots of words that just sounded remarkable. But now it seems I’m collecting interesting nouns; my list has

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-60910149135479999552007-04-08T08:55:00.000-05:002007-04-08T09:03:48.464-05:00

I was roaming around the web this morning, and saw an application to do what I've been doing using an AppleScript that I patched together from someone else's shell script example. If you paste the script below into Script Editor, you can change the relevant portions (volume path, username, SSID of your network) to get a script that will launch your home file server if you’re connected to your

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-24159034733015843972007-04-03T13:21:00.000-05:002007-04-03T15:12:55.847-05:00

In my research on H.D., I just came across an article by Lawrence Rainey that, in publish-or-perish fashion, rehearses an argument later re-purposed for his Patronage and Poetics of the Coterie. The argument has two parts. The first part is that H.D. didn’t publish this stuff we’re seeing now in her lifetime, so it’s a specious construction of contemporary critics. The second part is that H.D.

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-43045132561973691252007-03-03T17:42:00.001-06:002007-03-03T17:42:43.029-06:00

radiatorI seem to becandlenot youtilewhat I feellamppretendingtablestill minepulloverthat’s why yougestureshould studyscratchphilosophyexit signpoorly expressedcroonstuck in a moldtumultthat’s totallygrainworthlesspower chordI asked you’68 revolution—for months

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-28552584269357268592007-03-01T08:41:00.000-06:002007-03-01T09:00:38.051-06:00

I am not a good traveller. Rather, I travel well, but I’m not a good arriver. The moment actual travel stops I find myself ready to return to my home. Away from home, my chest feels a little hollow, my lower back tenses, my appetite comes and goes. I want to hide away from all the strangeness around me. Again, I have to correct myself, as it’s not the strangeness that disturbs me as much as the

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-68173364980662523902007-02-24T11:24:00.000-06:002007-02-24T14:47:10.540-06:00

I’ve been working lately with the conflict between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan over her Viet Nam war poetry. For those of you unfamiliar with this, I think Marjorie Perloff’s essay on the confrontation is a good start. I’ll cite that below with a few other resources to consider. But for now, a long quote from Perloff’s essay to give the background:But by 1968 something had changed. That

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-82626829407639031272007-02-14T11:43:00.000-06:002007-02-14T11:44:17.382-06:00

The Poetry Lab has moved. If you’re new to that topic, here’s a brief precis I just wrote for another project:The “Poetry Lab” provides students with a chance to share poetry with other students who are interested in writing poetry. What we do differs from most creative writing workshops in two ways: we study literature in direct conjunction with our writing projects and power is decentralized.

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-12178252858819513022007-02-03T17:53:00.000-06:002007-02-05T12:59:14.486-06:00

This entry is mainly for folks in the poetry lab I’m teaching through the UI Writing Center, but if you’re not in that group, you probably need to know a little about Oppen, too, right?To begin, here’s a brief note on Discrete Series from the Gale Literary Databases:Strikingly, the opening poem of Discrete Series is an oblique tracing of Oppen's journey outward, from an interior space of

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-36168223839643107642007-02-01T13:04:00.000-06:002007-02-03T18:27:53.425-06:00

Here’s a quick run-down on our last meeting. We started off looking at works that had inspired us to write poetry, works in which we saw something we also would like to do. Bret showed us some of the letters from the end of Danielewski’s House of Leaves and some prose by Hubert Selby, Jr (The Demon), which he said was interesting because of the omission of lots of punctuation, and he’d

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-34764658554998222722007-01-31T12:34:00.000-06:002007-01-31T12:59:18.290-06:00

From an article at Science Daily:To measure the assimilation of a verb in a sentence, De Goede asked more than 400 study subjects in eight different experiments to listen to about 120 spoken sentences per experiment. Whilst listening they were shown words on a computer screen and they had to indicate whether or not these were real Dutch words. Half of the words were related in meaning to the

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-61016045734448939202007-01-28T17:20:00.000-06:002007-01-31T14:22:52.877-06:00

I had a couple of proposals to put on the table. First, I proposed that we keep a portfolio of our work that we revisit several times this semester in order to think about what we are doing as poets, what form our work is taking, what lines it is following. I also suggested that we produce a serial poem. I offered a handout with quotations from Charles Bernstein, Robin Blaser, Joseph Conte, and

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-2419468238628518282007-01-21T18:03:00.000-06:002007-01-21T18:16:20.129-06:00

According to wikipedia, there are many ways organisms can live together. Often competition is emphasized in our imaginings at the expense of relationships like commensalism and mutualism, so it’s pleasing to see evidence to the contrary: Lavender and cypress grown together and inoculated with mycorrhizal fungi under glass showed significantly higher growth than when they were cultivated and

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-15888220537137197302007-01-08T13:31:00.000-06:002007-01-08T13:55:41.744-06:00

As you may see, the move from blogger to Google blogger has been a bit rough on my blog template. I’ll be cleaning up for the next couple posts.I’d also like to apologize to all of you non-spammers who left comments that have not appeared until today. I had turned on comment moderation accidentally. I truly thought no one had anything to say, and I cried myself to sleep all those long-lonely

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1165762018452774932006-12-08T17:55:00.000-06:002007-01-08T13:32:21.051-06:00

Well, for our next-to-last meeting, I asked the students in the poetry lab to read some excerpts from various reference works on poetics or linguistics on the following topics: rhyme, rhythm, syntax and structure, and tropes and metaphors. Typing this in now, I see a bias derived from Language Writing in my decision to locate structure with syntax rather than (also) with rhyme.        The

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1165418018930703012006-11-30T18:27:00.000-06:002006-12-06T09:16:53.016-06:00

For our meeting on 11/27, we discussed rhyme and distributed villanelles that we’d written. Our discussion of rhyme centered around the following passage from The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics:More broadly, however, we must say that r. is the phonological correlation (see EQUIVALENCE) of differing semantic units at distinctive points in verse. It is essential that the

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1163529015315164322006-11-14T11:09:00.000-06:002006-11-14T12:37:17.970-06:00

For our Poetry Lab this week, we were to write small essays about the sources of our writing, after having read the first ten pages of Robin Blaser’s essay on Jack Spicer, “The Practice of Outside” in The Collected Books of Jack Spicer. Most of the students responded in a way that indicates some frustration with “academic” or intellectual models of poetic inspiration, perhaps the most impatient

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1163193155112788272006-11-10T07:50:00.000-06:002006-11-15T20:25:23.073-06:00

For this week, we all worked on slam poems, following examples at Poetryslam.com and the National Poetry Slam website. Three of us made it to the poetry slam at The Mill (11pm on the 2nd & 4th Wednesdays of each month), and one of us got up and read, and from what I hear got a lot of positive attention from the reading. That untitled poem begins “today I changed nothing—” and follows another good

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1162738939829959872006-11-05T08:46:00.000-06:002006-11-05T09:02:47.483-06:00

This week in the poetry lab our experiment was to try out the technique Tom Phillips used for Humument. (You can see more examples of this sort of work at Altered Books and at the other Altered Books.) The composition, the visual layout, of the following example from out class is really nice, and I like the effect of the pen-scratching as a method of selecting and deselecting text.

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1162233433442758362006-10-23T16:03:00.001-05:002006-10-30T12:37:13.446-06:00

I voted yesterday, and I’m proud of that fact. There are many who say it is shovelling sand against the sea. Still others see refusal to cast a vote as a vote for “none of the above.” I don’t agree with either opinion, and to those who vote for “none of the above,” unless you have walked the polling station and marked “none of the above,” I call you lazy. Furthermore if you refuse to vote as a

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1161120346985037602006-10-13T10:38:00.000-05:002006-10-17T16:28:41.346-05:00

This week our assignment in the Poetry Lab was to read Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse” and write poems based on our understanding of its principles. In class I was told by one student that the idea of Olson’s essay was that the poetic line/page should be a guide to the reading and that this page should be somehow commensurate with our body and our breath. Another student interpreted Olson’s

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1160341827934943592006-10-08T16:01:00.000-05:002006-10-08T16:10:27.996-05:00

Here are two short poems I wrote for our assignment this week in the Poetry Lab. In the first I was working toward three beats per line, and in the second, four. I cheated, naturally.A Little Poem for Graymountain of mangray huge expansejocular quiddities of graywhere clouds unmaskan twinklingNowhere FastWhere you goin anywaygeographic center FridayDes Moines Sundaylike that and Sundayso it’s ten

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1160096092582295572006-10-05T17:12:00.000-05:002007-01-28T18:15:10.087-06:00

For this week, we were to consider the poem as a visual object (given that Barrett Watten was here speaking on ekphrasis). We were assigned to find and indicate the strong stresses in a poem from last week. Our discussion of the poems for this week addressed the sorts of decisions made when you are arranging a poem in a visual field. Some poems were more readerly than others—a term I have not yet

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1159802792837929682006-09-28T11:57:00.000-05:002006-10-05T21:45:37.073-05:00

I lost my notes for this meeting due to a computer problem (I had to reformat my hard drive!), so I will simply say that this week we chose exercises from writing “self-help” books like those authored by Natalie Goldberg and wrote poems based on those exercises. Here’s one of our results:Intro to Suck My Kisswell, I'm Sailinnnnnn yeahDurn ba BAH durn ba Yeah!Durn ba BAH durn ba Oh Yeah!Durn ba

jpchttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03810955298378231921noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-22461226.post-1159286260029435042006-09-26T10:51:00.000-05:002006-09-26T10:58:37.736-05:00

        — for A.FourSometimes you just have to try it. Will it open for you?Will I open for you? Is that who you want here? To hear?There is so much more. Such as EleanorSpeak. And my liver too.FiveYou are from so far away, and here you are.I know you are, but where am I?Applecore, Baltimore. . .We have eaten sin and beauty andWe do not know. Is I your best friend?SixEyes in a mirror see so

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