New Semester

It’s always nice to see a new batch of students in your classes at the beginning of a new semester, along with a few returning faces. This semester, it looks like I have a good group. Classes are reasonably sized, but not too huge. I’m excited about using my new textbook in creative writing with another group of 12. It’s one I’ve been writing and publishing as an e-book for my students. So this semester, I can test it on another group of creative writers.

Besides Creative Writing, I’ll be teaching two sections of Late World Lit — one online and the other in the classroom — and one section of Modern Poetry, which is always a lot of fun. My class sizes are not too big and not too small, so I’m happy with the numbers, too. I wouldn’t mind a few more in my face-to-face sections, but there are enough in each to have good discussions. Should be fun!

New Year’s Resolution 2: Complete a Book of Poems

Some readers of this blog will be familiar with my series of poems on the paintings and logs of Walter Inglis Anderson, which I’ve called “Barrier Island Suite.” They’ve been around for a few years and have been published individually in magazines over the years, but I’ve never quite decided what to do with them as a collection. Enough have appeared in magazines now that I can begin to think of book publication, but the collection is on the long end of chapbook range and a little too short for a full-length book. There are 20 poems in the series so far, though most would go to 2 pages in a book, so I’d be looking at a 40-page chapbook. I’ve never been quite satisfied with that, and recently I began rethinking the collection.

Since a suite is a related series in art, a suite of poems could be any length, but a suite in music is a more definite form of related movements, usually 4 in the suite de dans, though modern suites especially can be any length. To break up the series, I had initially thought to organize them in sections, which might roughly correspond with a movement in music. With this idea, I’m considering using the first several poems as a prelude, then having four more movements, which would involve keeping two existing series of poems intact and composing two more new sets. What I like about this idea is that it would allow me to write on two themes I would like to include.

Most of the poems take place on the barrier islands where Walter Anderson would camp and draw or paint for weeks at a time. They explore his relationship to nature, but also the relationship between madness and civilization, since Anderson suffered from an undiagnosed mental condition, which led him to leave his family and the Shearwater pottery for these extended solo trips. Though I initially wanted to keep the family and life at the pottery on the sidelines, it has begun to intrigue me how that part of his life was related to the solo artist. I’m planning to do some more research into his life at home and incorporate some images (especially from the mural he painted in his cabin) and stories from that side of his life into a movement that may take a different poetic form than the other poems.

Again, the idea of a suite helps here, since the music is typically in different time signatures and tempos. It may mean making some changes to existing poems as well, and I might add a few poems to the sections that already exist. The last section I’d like to write is on the Mississippi River, and will be based on his statue, “The Father of Waters” and may enlarge the focus of the suite to encompass more than Anderson himself.

Those are just a few notes of what I’d like to do. It’s a project I’ve been mulling for some time now, and 2014 seems like the right time to take it on. The additional research is exciting, as is the prospect of returning to this project with the goal of creating new material.

New Year’s Resolution: Clean My Desktop

This one is rather easy to accomplish, though it may be harder to keep! Did you know that leaving files on your desktop can slow down your computer’s performance significantly? I do, and yet I still put them there for easy access. This year, my resolution was to clean off this space and start afresh. It’s an easy resolution to do, at least in the initial stages. Dealing with all of those files can be a bit of a challenge.

I tend to download some files to the desktop or move them there so I can find them easily. This may be photos that I want to drag to a web page’s drop zone or documents that I need to look at once or twice and then discard. The desktop seems ideal because it is visible and I won’t forget them. But then the files add up and pretty soon there is clutter.

The easy solution is to move them all into a folder. Create a new folder on the desktop. Call it 2013 Desktop Files (or name it whatever you like). Select all, then deselect your new folder. Drag the selected files into the folder, then move the folder off of the desktop to your Documents folder or some other location on your drive. Voila! Your desktop is clean.

I hate to admit it, but when I did this, I moved 863 files that took up 20 GB of room. I should see a significant improvement with them stored in a new location that the operating system doesn’t have to worry about as often as the desktop. But that’s also a lot of junk to clean up and file appropriately. Most will probably go in the trash. Some should be archived in the right folder. That’s the harder part of the resolution to keep!

The hardest part is to keep it from getting this bad. For me, this will mean cleaning off my desktop every semester (at least) and at best once a month or so. I can keep the things I’m really working on and move everything else to a temporary folder for filing. But I know that in the thick of things, this can be hard to find time to do, and so it builds up. That’s what makes it a great New Year’s Resolution, to at least start the year with a clean desktop and then try to do better in the coming year.

2013 in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2013 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

The concert hall at the Sydney Opera House holds 2,700 people. This blog was viewed about 10,000 times in 2013. If it were a concert at Sydney Opera House, it would take about 4 sold-out performances for that many people to see it.

Click here to see the complete report.

Why Hire a Poet?

I’m not on the job market, so I can use myself as an example in this post. But I’ll try not to brag too much. Poets generally have reasonably high self-esteem, but not huge egos. This probably stems from the fact that most people don’t think of poets in the highest regard. We’re seen as a little strange, I think. But it’s still a respectable profession, though it is one where we face an enormous amount of rejection. We send poems out to magazines, and even with a good submission, most come back unused. More often than not, the whole submission comes back, but we’re thrilled when 1/5 or 1/4 is kept by a publication! (One poem accepted out of four or five in a submission is great. Two is superb.)

This turns poets into perfectionists. We tend to be very detail oriented, though we’re also able to laugh about it (most of the time) and don’t get overwhelmed by our own attention to detail. If I truly were OCD, I don’t think I could live as a poet. I manage the details; they don’t manage me. Or at least, that’s what I like to think.

But more than paying attention to details and paying attention to language at the most subtle levels, which any poet needs to do, you will find that poets have developed a keen sense of structure. This comes from looking at sentences and from looking at how those sentences (and the sounds and images that make them up) are arranged in the grid of the poem, across lines and stanzas or between the poems of a book.

Recently, I was asked to revise the student bulletins at my university. These are publications for undergraduate and graduate students that range anywhere from nearly 400 pages to about 150 pages. They contain descriptions of the university departments, policies, programs, and courses. It is a lot of different kinds of information, in other words. It seems to me that a poet was perfect for this job, even though that might not be the first person you’d think of. After all, the language is these publications is far from poetic.

Nonetheless, it involved arranging and rearranging lots of information, which called for the attention to detail and structure that I’ve developed as a poet over the years. Thinking about how to arrange the information and how to convey it in logical, consistent ways is exactly what a poet does on a micro level every day. This task just meant applying it on a larger scale. Of course, it didn’t hurt that I do a little programming for myself on the side (for fun and to calculate my grades), and that I know my way around web design (at least passably) and have learned a few online authoring tools like WordPress and Joomla!.

The lesson I take from this experience is that employers shouldn’t look down on someone who’s a poet, thinking that they are only impractical ninnies with their heads in the clouds. In fact, poets can be very practical, very goal driven, and very down-to-earth. Poets, on the other hand, can learn from this not to hide the fact that they are poets, but to emphasize the skills that they have developed. There are many kinds of poets and many different ways their avocation might help them in their vocation. Sell it, when you’re on the job or on the job market! And don’t wait until someone hires you to start applying your skills to other areas. Take up other forms of writing, including writing for the web or technical writing. Don’t be afraid to move into ‘non-poetic’ fields and bring some poetry to them.

In Memorium: Nelson Mandela

It is hard to hear of the passing of Nelson Mandela today. He was one of the major political figures of my youth, a living icon to look up to as a man of unprecedented strength of spirit, yet a man of passive resistance. Icons of a former day, Gandhi or Martin Luther King, were historical figures by the time I came of age, but Mandela was still in prison, fighting for an end to Apartheid.

When I was a student at Knox College, a group of us got involved in the anti-Apartheid movement, arguing for divestiture from companies with holdings in South Africa. I can’t claim to have been a major part of that movement on our campus. My good friend Adam Bruns was one of the main organizers, though, and I remember hanging out at the shanty we built on campus to raise awareness. I say that we built it, though I don’t recall how involved I was in the actual construction. I remember hanging out there many days and talking politics and social issues (and I’m sure other more local and personal issues as well).

Later, I would follow Mandela’s successful battle to be released from prison after 27 years and then watch as he helped guide a nation through reconciliation and rebuilding. Those years were not without challenges, yet Nelson Mandela always seemed the epitome of honor and nobility. His influence in the country, the continent, and indeed the world. He was a leader who helped make the world a much better place in the 21st century. Without him and those he inspired, our world would be a much darker place.

Why are All Poets Dead or Famous (or Both)??

Okay, so I hope to be living proof (along with many of my friends and students) that the title of this post isn’t true. However, I wouldn’t blame you for thinking it was true if your only source of information was an online bookstore. Just one example this morning, I went to Barnes and Noble, searching for information on a recent poetry collection, which I was able to find when I had the title or (I assume) the author’s name. But while there, I happened to click a link on the page to “This Season’s Best Poetry Books.” Sounds promising, right? It ought to bring up the latest, greatest of the poetry publications of Fall 2013, right? Not so fast…

Clicking that link led to a page with Homer (not even a new translation), Emily Dickinson, Pablo Neruda, Denise Levertov, and a collection of classic Haiku from the British Museum archives. Living poets included Billy Collins, Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, and Nicki Giovanni. Nothing wrong with them, but they’re hardly the newest poets on the block. And Rita Dove’s Penguin Anthology of Twentieth Century American Poetry won’t give you a sense of the season’s best. The closest title to match the link title was Denise Duhamel’s Best American Poetry 2013.

I tried clicking on American Poetry to see if that gave me anything better. No luck. Hardly a living soul represented other than those on the list above. And I know from searching Amazon that the situation isn’t any better. Many brick and mortar stores aren’t much better at stocking recent poetry. Yet there are hundreds of new poetry collections introduced every season. So how can you find out about good recent titles?

If you live near a good independent, you might find it on the shelves or you might catch the poet when they are in town for a reading. I wish I had an answer — living in the hinterlands it can be hard to find out about culture of any kind. Subscribing to one or more good poetry magazines can help. Poets and Writers often has ads for new collections (and the prizes that sponsored their publication). If poets and poetry publishers want a bigger reading public, though, we need to do more to make those collections visible.

Day of the Dead: the genesis of a poem

Okay, I’ll admit it. Sometimes I check my stats in WordPress to see how many people are visiting my blog and what they’re looking for. Lately, the number of visitors has risen dramatically, largely because of some posts I wrote awhile back while troubleshooting my DSL modem. Blogging lesson: if you want traffic, write about technology. But this blog was initially supposed to be about poetry and life. I can’t help it if sometimes technology takes over life! However, I was pleased to see someone recently was searching on an interpretation for my poem “Day of the Dead.” That caused me to reread the poem on Nov. 1, and though I don’t want to tell you how to interpret it — isn’t that as much the reader’s choice as the writer’s? — I would like to give a little background information.

Gravestones on the Artcroft propertyThat poem was written in Nov. 2005 on a beautiful, sunny fall day when I was walking around the property at Artcroft, a truly unique and magical artist retreat near Carlisle, Kentucky. I had the great pleasure to spend time on the farm of Robert and Maureen Barker at a time of year when no other artists were around. For much of the day, I had the place to myself and could walk the pastures, woods, and ponds looking for inspiration. One day, Maureen showed me an old cemetery on the property, and that became the genesis of the poem. There we found several gravestones scattered on the ground near what had been a field. They were either toppled by the forces of nature, by vandals, or by a farmer clearing the field and not paying attention to the old graveyard at its edge. The history of the site remains a mystery.

GravestoneAt the time, I had been thinking of my own father’s death a couple of years before in December. The poem “Requiem” had come to me a few days previously. The time of year and the time of my life seemed to coincide for contemplating mortality — a theme that I wanted to explore in the book Time Capsules, as I was realizing a seasonal cycle for the collection that was beginning to come together. The epitaph in the poem “Gone, but not forgotten,” came from one of the stones, though unfortunately not one that I captured in a picture. The irony of the statement was not lost on us, and yet as Maureen and I paid reverence to those whose stones had been scattered there, they were not forgotten entirely, though we did not know anything more than their names and dates.

Of course with the title, I was thinking of the the Mexican celebration on Nov. 1, as well as the more familiar version of All Saints Day, a day of remembrance. The belief that a veil is removed between two worlds at certain times is a common one. It may be the coming of winter that turns our thoughts towards death or it may be a reminder like visiting a graveyard. We may need these reminders, both to acknowledge those who have gone before us and to return to the everyday world with a renewed sense of vitality.

So I thank whoever searched for the meaning of this poem for giving me the reason to revisit it and remember where and why it came to me. And I thank Robert and Maureen for providing the experience and the time for reflection that allowed it to become a poem.

Fun with e-books (or Never Say Never)

Quite awhile back, I wrote a complaint about e-books. My issue at the time was that Kindle didn’t include page numbers from the original print versions of e-books, but I was curious that students were starting to use them in one of my classes. They presented a challenge for scholarship, but I could see the advantage.

Also awhile ago on the Creative Writing Pedagogy group in Facebook, I weighed in on the question of whether to use a textbook in a creative writing class (the original question was whether to use a how-to book). I argued that a textbook gave me someone else’s perspective on creative writing; someone I could agree with or disagree with in a kind of dialogue with the author. I felt this was good for my students, and though I still feel that way, in the end my dissatisfaction with my current textbook and the alternatives let me to decide to try writing my own. For now, I call them ‘Notes,’ and not a book, but as I thought about how to make them available to my students, I decided to go with an ebook format.

Creating a basic e-book actually turned out to be relatively easy, though there may be issues I would need to iron out if I wanted it to look more professional. Still the workflow that I’ve adopted works very well and produces a decent looking final product that can be read in several format.

I opted for the epub format initially, since it is open source and can be read by most readers. My biggest concern was that students could have access to the text without much hassle. After weighing several options, I decided the best way to write the text of the book would be in Pages. This was true because I already own it, even though I haven’t used it extensively. I have it to read texts that students send me and to open the old AppleWorks documents on my computer — yes, I’ve been a Mac user since the days of ClarisWorks and AppleWorks. But the biggest selling point was that it would export a document to epub format very easily. I tried a couple of simple documents, and the output was pretty good. I also learned I could create a table of contents that would then be the table of contents in the epub document. To do this, I followed Apple’s help to set up styles that would be included in the table of contents. Once I did that, the TOC updated automatically as I wrote and applied styles.

Besides epub, I decided I should also give students a pdf of the book. Once again, in Pages this is easy. I just print and then save a copy as pdf. The only challenge came when trying to make the book available on a Kindle.

Of course, Amazon won’t read the epub and Pages cant’ export to the mobi format (one of two that Kindle uses). Fortunately, there was a solution that worked incredibly well. It came from Amazon in the form of Kindle Previwere. All I have to do is open the epub file in the previewer and it creates a mobi version.

I upload all three of these files into my course in Blackboard, then copy and paste the text into a discussion forum for good measure. This allows students who don’t want to download the files a chance to read them online, and they can comment on the chapters as they read them. I make a new thread for each section of the chapter so the discussion gets broken up a bit

More Fun with the Phone Company

We all love the phone company, right? This time I’m not writing about ATT or my dsl modem (see previous posts, if interested). This time, I’m writing about Virgin Mobile, whose prepaid phones we’ve been using for some time now. We’ve started to notice that their customer service is going down the tubes and their prices are going up. We’ve actually never been very satisfied with their coverage, either — we get it in Columbus where we don’t use a cell phone very often, but on the road, where we might, we were constantly searching for service. Many of the places where we go were just outside of the coverage area, including both of our parents’ homes, and a lot of road in between. Kim wanted to use an iPhone so she could connect with wifi and text messaging more easily. She found a good deal on a nice one through ebay, and decided to go with another prepaid plan PagePlus. Even though Virgin now has iPhones, on PagePlus, she could bring her own phone that she bought–it has to be a Verizon or PagePlus phone–and the coverage is through Verizon’s network.

I found a blog post at Geek in the Forest by a woman who had done exactly what we wanted to do, and so we were off. Here’s where the challenge began! The problems so far have not been with PagePlus, but instead with Virgin Mobile. There wouldn’t have been a problem, if we didn’t want to save friends and family the hassle of entering a new phone number for her (and updating schools, etc.). First, we had to make sure she had active service — we had let it run out, so had to put a little money on the phone to start the account up. That’s not so bad, and was something we expected. The cost of adding money to the account was the same as the cost of getting a new number at PagePlus, and Kim used up most of the money to make a few calls before we made the switch, so we really weren’t out anything.

The problem was that Virgin doesn’t tell you your actual account number. You use your phone number to log in to their website, and there is no mention of the account number anywhere in your account information. I had to call customer service to get the information we needed to port the phone number to PagePlus. That’s a hassle, but still not too bad — or it wasn’t until I tried to call.

Virgin has gone to completely automated “customer service.” When I called, I got the typical menu of options: press 1 to get information you probably already know, press 2 to do something you don’t want to do, etc. Pressing 5 was for “anything else,” but it didn’t lead to a person–it led to another menu of things I might want to do, but didn’t. I tried a few options on a few phone calls. Nowhere in the labyrinth of the customer service menus was there an option to talk to a person. I tried filling out the form on their website. After several minutes, I got an automated reply that just thanked me for contacting them and said they’d get back to me eventually. I called again.

This time, out of desperation, I tried a trick I’ve heard of for the auto-menu-from-hell. I dialed 0, even though it’s not one of the menu options listed. This took me to a ‘secret’ mini-menu of three items. I forget the first two, but the third was support, which sounded promising and did lead me to a real person. She was actually quite nice and gave me the information I needed. Now PagePlus is trying to port our number again, and soon we will have a new account (unless there is some new wrinkle) on a new carrier. The coverage promises to be better, so if it’s not too hard to keep the phone active, then we’ll be happy. If we’re reasonably happy, I plan to call Virgin support one more time (as soon as I use up some minutes on my phone!) and get the other account number, so I can switch it as well. I probably won’t go with a smart phone, though. I have an old Verizon dumb-phone that has a new battery and is just itching to be used about once every few months. And I love the fact that the minutes I buy on PagePlus can last 120 days. That means I could keep a phone for my minimal use for just $30 a year.

And PagePlus has an online chat service for registered accounts. I called the first time, and the hold wasn’t too bad (maybe 15 minutes), but the guy a spoke with (without navigating an intricate menu system) told me I could register for an account before my phone was activated and then do everything via chat. That was much quicker, and I could listen to my own music, not Virgin’s hold music. Something tells me this could be a good move. The only drawback to PagePlus is that they are on Verizon’s CDMA network, so when you buy a phone, you have to get one with the right antenna, and you won’t be able to use that phone on another carrier. But if the service is good, that won’t be a problem. Kim has an iPhone 4 — she was looking to go as basic as possible and that’s the earliest one available for Verizon — so there’s not much difference between it and other GSM iPhones. I’ve read there are some more issues, such as no simultaneous voice and data on CDMA, which you can do on GSM phones for the iPhone 5. If those are issues you care about, be sure to check out the differences between carriers before you make up your mind! For my old Motorola dumb-phone, it won’t make a difference at all.