The Final Blog!

We have a mere two days of class left before our presentations begin. I'd like one last blog post from you, a final reflection about the reading you have done this semester. What form it takes is up to you, but I'd like it to be at least 250 words, and it should be done by the end of class Friday.

Reflections like this help me to make this course as personal and challenging as possible. But you need to be honest--don't say things just to make me feel good about the class.

So, in your final blog post, begin with some statistics: As accurately (and honestly) as possible, tabulate how many pages you have read this semester for this class. If you like, you can also break that down by categories: (fiction / non-fiction, or pop fiction / literary fiction).

Then, in a free-written response, contemplate any or all of these questions:

How would you characterize yourself as a reader when you started this class? How independent were you? What kinds of things would you read on your own? How often would you read on your own? Where or why would you read?

During the course of this semester, what kind of reading did you do? Was it easy to find things that interested you? Did you have trouble finding something you could stick with? How did you choose the things you read? Did you have trouble meeting the weekly page quota?

Where and when did you find yourself sitting down to read? Do you tend to read with music on, or in silence? By the computer? Did you find yourself checking your phone a lot, or do you ever lose yourself in the reading? Do you ever talk about the books you read with your family or friends or teachers?

Now, at the end of the semester, have you changed in any way as a reader? Do you read the same types of books you did at the beginning, or have you discovered any new types of writing that you like? Are you more or less likely, do you think, to read independently this summer? What do you think you might read next?

As for poetry . . describe your attitude toward it at the beginning of the semester. Was poetry treated any differently in this course compared to other English classes you've had? Was the type of poetry read here any different? Has your attitude toward poetry changed in any way?

Again, please be honest in your responses.

I've loved teaching you all this semester--thanks for taking the course and making every day a fun one.

Mr. Hill

"The Naming of Cats, " T.S. Eliot

The Naming of Cats is a difficult matter,
It isn't just one of your holiday games;
You may think at first I'm as mad as a hatter
When I tell you, a cat must have THREE DIFFERENT NAMES.
First of all, there's the name that the family use daily,
Such as Peter, Augustus, Alonzo or James,
Such as Victor or Jonathan, George or Bill Bailey--
All of them sensible everyday names.
There are fancier names if you think they sound sweeter,
Some for the gentlemen, some for the dames:
Such as Plato, Admetus, Electra, Demeter--
But all of them sensible everyday names.
But I tell you, a cat needs a name that's particular,
A name that's peculiar, and more dignified,
Else how can he keep up his tail perpendicular,
Or spread out his whiskers, or cherish his pride?
Of names of this kind, I can give you a quorum,
Such as Munkustrap, Quaxo, or Coricopat,
Such as Bombalurina, or else Jellylorum-
Names that never belong to more than one cat.
But above and beyond there's still one name left over,
And that is the name that you never will guess;
The name that no human research can discover--
But THE CAT HIMSELF KNOWS, and will never confess.
When you notice a cat in profound meditation,
The reason, I tell you, is always the same:
His mind is engaged in a rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular Name.

"Lost," Carl Sandburg

Desolate and lone

All night long on the lake

Where fog trails and mist creeps,

The whistle of a boat

Calls and cries unendingly,

Like some lost child

In tears and trouble

Hunting the harbor's breast

And the harbor's eyes.

"Summer," Carlo Betocchi

And it grows, the vain

summer,

even for us with our

bright green sins:

behold the dry guest,

the wind,

as it stirs up quarrels

among magnolia boughs

and plays its serene

tune on

the prows of all the leaves—

and then is gone,

leaving the leaves

still there,

the tree still green, but breaking

the heart of the air.

"Barking," Jim Harrison

The moon comes up.

The moon goes down.

This is to inform you

that I didn’t die young.

Age swept past me

but I caught up.

Spring has begun here and each day

brings new birds up from Mexico.

Yesterday I got a call from the outside

world but I said no in thunder.

I was a dog on a short chain

and now there’s no chain.

"Today," Billy Collins

If ever there were a spring day so perfect,

so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze

that it made you want to throw

open all the windows in the house

and unlatch the door to the canary's cage,

indeed, rip the little door from its jamb,

a day when the cool brick paths

and the garden bursting with peonies

seemed so etched in sunlight

that you felt like taking

a hammer to the glass paperweight

on the living room end table,

releasing the inhabitants

from their snow-covered cottage

so they could walk out,

holding hands and squinting

into this larger dome of blue and white,

well, today is just that kind of day.

"Abscess," Forrest Gander

Good morning kiss. Their teeth glance. Clack of June

bugs against pane. On the porch a young man

in the full sun rocking.

Jars incubate tomato plants. His mother sweeps the dirt

yard away from flowering vinca and bottle tree.

Straightens up, one-eyed by ragged hens. As her boy

ambles away to the steady pulse

in his skull.

The cattle gate

swinging open behind him.

She takes a headache powder

and it is nineteen and twenty seven.

The James overruns its levee, backs up

the Blackwater. Nineteen and twenty nine: she reads his postcard,

the tobacco crop burns. Nineteen and thirty, drought.

Long limp bags drag through fields. The Lord whistles

for the fly. Revival tents threaten a rain

of scorpions. To cure her hiccups,

the woman sees a hypnotist. Promptly

coughs herself to death. In pungs marked men ride. The son

is blown away. No one returns in this story. No one escapes.

The tribe is glued together for ruination, friends.

There is no more time, there is no way out.

"A Date," Kevin McFadden

The first seated takes the chance he’ll be

stood up. She’s getting on with the hope she may

get off. One and one make one

in this riddle. Or, more closely, comedy routine:

first, impressions; second, observations.

Impolite to have thirds. Bachelors and bachelorettes

beware: more than tonight they can mess up your order.

Who would go for the lobster expects the claws.

No pets allowed, keep your shirt on, places this strict—

like loony bins—require a jacket, sir. Mark sudden pauses,

gaps in the flap, commas where a sutra might be...

and what shall we make of it, love, perhaps?

What elevator is this anyway, that even the prospect

of going down has made you high?

What’re you on?

"That Feeling," Karley Dobis

That feeling that you get,
when your stomach's about to drop,
do you know which feeling I'm talking about?
the one that makes life pop.

That's the feeling that I get,
right inside of me,
and that feeling that I get,
is all I want to be.

I feel it here,
I feel it there,
I get it so much,
it shakes the atmosphere.

The more that I get it,
the more I believe,
that anything is possible,
that I can achieve.

It takes over my mind,
it fills up my soul,
this feeling that I get,
never makes life dull.

I'm not just a golfer,
I have another light,
and this feeling that I get,
is the one when I write.

"Palindrome," Lisel Mueller

There is less difficulty—indeed, no logical difficulty at all—in
imagining two portions of the universe, say two galaxies, in which
time goes one way in one galaxy and the opposite way in the
other. . . . Intelligent beings in each galaxy would regard their own
time as “forward” and time in the other galaxy as “backward.”
—Martin Gardner, in Scientific American 

Somewhere now she takes off the dress I am

putting on. It is evening in the antiworld

where she lives. She is forty-five years away

from her death, the hole which spit her out

into pain, impossible at first, later easing,

going, gone. She has unlearned much by now.

Her skin is firming, her memory sharpens,

her hair has grown glossy. She sees without glasses,

she falls in love easily. Her husband has lost his

shuffle, they laugh together. Their money shrinks,

but their ardor increases. Soon her second child

will be young enough to fight its way into her

body and change its life to monkey to frog to

tadpole to cluster of cells to tiny island to

nothing. She is making a list:

Things I will need in the past

lipstick

shampoo

transistor radio

Sergeant Pepper

acne cream

five-year diary with a lock

She is eager, having heard about adolescent love

and the freedom of children. She wants to read

Crime and Punishment and ride on a roller coaster

without getting sick. I think of her as she will

be at fifteen, awkward, too serious. In the

mirror I see she uses her left hand to write,

her other to open a jar. By now our lives should

have crossed. Somewhere sometime we must have

passed one another like going and coming trains,

with both of us looking the other way.

"Summer Music," May Swenson

Summer is all a green air—
From the brilliant lawn, sopranos
Through murmuring hedges
Accompanied by some poplars;
In fields of wheat, surprises;
Through faraway pastures, flows
To the horizon's blues
In slow decrescendos.

Summer is all a green sound—
Rippling in the foreground
To that soft applause,
The foam of Queen Anne's lace.
Green, green in the ear
Is all we care to hear—
Until a field suddenly flashes
The singing with so sharp
A yellow that it crashes
Loud cymbals in the ear,
Minor has turned to major
As summer, lulling and so mild,
Goes golden-buttercup-wild.

"The Cold Within," unknown

Six humans trapped by happenstance
In dark and bitter cold
Each possessed a stick of wood--
Or so the story's told.

Their dying fire in need of logs,
But the first one held hers back,
For, of the faces around the fire,
She noticed one was black.

The next one looked cross the way
Saw one not of his church,
And could not bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.

The third one sat in tattered clothes
He gave his coat a hitch,
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought
Of wealth he had in store,
And keeping all that he had earned
From the lazy, shiftless poor.

The  black man's face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight,
For he saw in his stick of wood
A chance to spite the white.

And the last man of this forlorn group
Did nought except for gain,
Giving just to those who gave
Was how he played the game,

Their sticks held tight in death's stilled hands
Was proof enough of sin;
They did not die from cold without--
They died from cold within.

"Dust," Dorianne Lux

Someone spoke to me last night,

told me the truth. Just a few words,

but I recognized it.

I knew I should make myself get up,

write it down, but it was late,

and I was exhausted from working

all day in the garden, moving rocks.

Now, I remember only the flavor —

not like food, sweet or sharp.

More like a fine powder, like dust.

And I wasn’t elated or frightened,

but simply rapt, aware.

That’s how it is sometimes —

God comes to your window,

all bright light and black wings,

and you’re just too tired to open it.

"What I learned from my mother," Julia Kasdorf

I learned from my mother how to love

the living, to have plenty of vases on hand

in case you have to rush to the hospital

with peonies cut from the lawn, black ants

still stuck to the buds. I learned to save jars

large enough to hold fruit salad for a whole

grieving household, to cube home-canned pears

and peaches, to slice through maroon grape skins

and flick out the sexual seeds with a knife point.

I learned to attend viewing even if I didn’t know

the deceased, to press the moist hands

of the living, to look in their eyes and offer

sympathy, as though I understood loss even then.

I learned that whatever we say means nothing,

what anyone will remember is that we came.

I learned to believe I had the power to ease

awful pains materially like an angel.

Like a doctor, I learned to create

from another’s suffering my own usefulness, and once

you know how to do this, you can never refuse.

To every house you enter, you must offer

healing: a chocolate cake you baked yourself,

the blessing of your voice, your chaste touch.

"Music, when soft voices die," Percy Bysshe Shelley

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory,
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the beloved's bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

"The Unnatural Apologie of Shadows," Nathalie Handal

We say lightning has no wings

when it slides down our houses

We say loss is just a condition

we acquire to bury our pity further

We say the bleeding hands

on the table filled with red wine

imported products and passports

are just reminders of

who we have become

We have no titles no birthright

no groves or Shakespeare

to return to

We apologize for the fear

growing out of our ribs

Apologize for the numbers

still etched on our tongues

"Everybody Who is Dead," Frank Stanford

Today's poem: "Everybody Who is Dead," by Frank Stanford

Today's action list:

1. Write one reading log. Only two logs a week needed now.

2. Complete your draft for tomorrow.

"Weeds," Wesley McNair

Today's poem is at the Writer's Almanac.

"Your voice, your eyes," Paul Eluard

Anna Karina, from Godard's Alphaville

Your voice, your eyes
your hands, your lips
Our silences, our words
Light that goes
light that returns
A single smile between us both
In quest of knowledge
I watched night create day
while we seemed unchanged
beloved of all, beloved of one alone
your mouth silently promised to be happy
Away, away, says hate
never, never, says love
A caress leads us from our childhood
Increasingly I see the human form
as a lover’s dialogue
The heart has but one mouth
Everything ordered by chance
All words without aforethought
Sentiments adrift
Men roam the city
A glance, a word
Because I love you
Everything moves
To live, only advance!
Aim straight for those you love
I went towards you, endlessly towards the light
If you smile, it is to enfold me all the better
The rays of your arms pierce the mist

For a link to Anna Karina's reading of Eluard, click here.

"To You," Kennth Koch.

Today's poem can be found at the Poetry Foundation.

Action List: 3 May 2011

Robert Desnos

After discussing the Anthology Project, we will not have as much time as we usually do today for our blogging, so here is a simplified action list:

1. Compose one log to catch us up on what you have been reading lately.

Choose one of the following:

a. Read as much as you can of "Behind the Hunt for Bin Laden," the background on how they developed the intelligence to find the world's most wanted man, on the New York Times and make a brief response post (what surprises or interests you the most).

b. Read this article on what it means to be a "wired family," and write a post in response--how much does your family resemble the families described here?

Robert Desnos, in the concentration camp where he eventually died. He had been part of the Paris resistance during the second world war when he was captured.

"I said it to you," Paul Eluard

I said it to you for the clouds
I said it to you for the tree of the sea
For each wave for the birds in the leaves
For the pebbles of sound
For familiar hands

For the eye that becomes landscape or face
And sleep returns it the heaven of its colour
For all that night drank
For the network of roads
For the open window for a bare forehead
I said it to you for your thoughts for your words

Every caress every trust survives.