How to Judge a Poetry Contest

Okay, I’ll admit it, everyone is different in this regard, so I ought to just title this “How I’m Judging the Davenport Poetry Prize for Knox College.” There, now that I’ve included the name, some enterprising Knox students googling my name or their school, might stumble upon this page. That’s all right. I promise not to reveal the winners nor those who won’t win. With 21 entries, there’s only one thing for certain: 18 people won’t go home with a cash award.

This is a small contest (in terms of numbers). I’ve judged bigger ones with more entries, but my method is about the same. One of my first goals is to read everyone’s poem a couple of times. Another goal is to fool myself into making a decision, because it isn’t easy to disappoint 18 out of 21 people. They are all people, after all. And all of those people are poets. So how to decide?

My method is to start sorting. Initially, I”m not looking for who’s in the top three coveted spots. That would be too daunting. Instead, I’m looking for whose poems strike me as worth another look. But rather than sorting into two piles (again, too daunting), I sort into 3-4 piles: Very good chance, good chance, maybe not, quite likely not. So far, I only have 3 piles, though I haven’t decided what to call them yet.

When I have made it through the stack once, I will go back through each pile again and sort until I end up with 2/3 in one part and 1/3 in the other. I like to read most poems at least twice, since I find my initial reaction to a poem may depend on when I read it or how I reacted to the poem before it. Sorting helps me to look at poems in different orders and different contexts. Reading a poem a second or third time, I usually see it better than the first time, though initial impressions are often true (but not always). Some poems get three or four readings at this stage as I weigh which pile they ought to be in.

One aspect of the Davenport prize is that the next round involves conferencing with students. Everyone’s work has merit, and I wouldn’t mind talking with any of these poets. But my time is limited, and 14 half-hour conferences will likely take me more than 7 hours, figuring some time in between, breaks, lunch, etc. This will be spread out over two days, and I’ll also be giving a reading, for which I’ll need to prepare.

So what am I looking for in a prize-winning or even conference-eligble poem? I’d like to find some lines that I wish I would have written in a poem that I would never think to write. Vivid imagery is one way to achieve that; another is interesting use of rhythm and sound. Ideally, there’s some of both. I appreciate unity and concise language (even in a long poem). Ultimately the poems I’ll gravitate to are the ones that reward multiple readings as I go back through them to prepare for the conferences. For that to happen, the poet also has to have something to say. I don’t mean I want a didactic poem (though I’m not averse to it), but I want to feel what the poet feels, and I want a poem that still gives me something to think about after I’ve read it several times. I’ve seen several poems that have this potential. It will take more time with them all before I know for sure which will rise to the top.

In Memoriam, David Hernandez, Chi-Town Poet

Yesterday, I learned that David Hernandez had passed away of a heart attack at the age of 66. He died in his beloved city, Chicago, on Feb. 25, 2013. (By the way, there is another David Hernandez, a poet from California, who is very much alive.)

Reading this news two months after the fact brought back vivid memories of another stage of my life, when I was fortunate enough to know David and be influenced by this fabulous poet and teacher. As I read articles about his life that included lines from his poems, his distinctive voice came back to me as well. David read his poetry with a musical lilt, even when he wasn’t performing with his band Street Sounds. When he was with the band, then the full sense of the Latin rhythms came through, but even without the band, you could hear the echoes of the music in his lines. Poetry Poetry has audio clips of several of his poems available online, including one of my all-time favorites “Why I Want to be a Real Poet.” But it’s hard to pick a favorite David Hernandez poem: every poem is a hardened gem.

Hernandez has been described as a street poet, as Chicago’s unnofficial poet-laureate (he wrote innaugural poems for Mayor Harold Washington), and Chicago’s first Latino poet (he began publishing in 1971). But I didn’t know any of those things when I met David in 1986. He was well into his second decade as a published poet, but apart from his fabulous poems, you’d never guess it to look at him or to interact with him.

I was just a kid, fresh out of college, trying to make a living in my first job at Chicago Review Press, and my good friend and college professor, Robin Metz, was running Knox Colleges’ Urban Studies program in Chicago for a semester. He enlisted me to help out with their poetry workshop. David was the real poet, I manned the coffee pot and  sat in on the informal discussions. I was probably full of myself and gave too much ‘advice.’ David was always encouraging, gently prodding or exploring a poem, but mostly encouraging the other poets to explore their creativity. You see, he never treated us like students; he always treated us like artists. He could be demanding about art, but you never felt judged or looked down upon. He led by example, and his example was absolute honesty. There was no room for pretentiousness in the little church basement where we met each Saturday. He never had to lay down the law or tell us to be humble: you just knew. In part because, though he never claimed to be a great poet and even wrote ironic poems about wanting to be a ‘real poet,’ we could sense we were in the presence of a real poet.

I learned more about life and about poetry in those Saturday mornings with David than I would in many other classrooms, so I was sad when the Knox students packed up their bags and went back to campus. But I didn’t need to be. David was still around, and I’d bump into him at the Green Mill Lounge, where I’d started going to the Poetry Slams. And David never forgot who you were and never acted like he didn’t know you because he didn’t have to know you anymore. Each time you saw David, it was like no time had passed. We remained friends throughout the time I lived in Chicago, and he remains one of my absolute favorite poet friends from those days.

How I May Have Saved My Dog’s Life with Buttermilk

Disclaimer: Okay, I’ll never really know if buttermilk saved her life or if it’s just a coincidence, but if you ask me, it helped. And it makes a catchy title. I’ll give the real credit to our vet and only partial credit to buttermilk.

First a little background. Last week our dog, Zinneke, was diagnosed with Autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia. If the name isn’t enough to scare you, then the symptoms would be. Essentially, her body has started fighting her own red blood cells, so she was lethargic and wouldn’t eat. If you know Zinne, then you know there’s something seriously wrong if she won’t eat. So we took her right to the vet, but certainly weren’t expecting anything as serious as this. She’s 7.5 years old, and other than some bladder problems due to a birth defect when we first got her, she’s been as healthy as they come.

Fortunately, there is a treatment. Steroids can block the immune system’s response and manage the disease. It will likely shorten her life, but she could go on for quite awhile. Or she could die quickly, according to the vet. Our research online showed 40%-60% of dogs die from the disease, but it seems crucial to get past the early stages.

That’s where the buttermilk comes in. When we got her home, Zinneke would eat some chicken and some rice. As the days went on, though, she started eating less and less. We tried different dog foods; we tried human food — pancakes were still a hit on Saturday, but by Sunday, she was hardly eating at all.

Monday morning, out of desperation, I thought to give her some buttermilk. I’ve heard that it can help with ulcers and stomach upsets due to cancer, etc., so I figured it was worth a try. She lapped it right up, better than anything I had given her in days. After the buttermilk, she was more interested in wet food and would also eat rice soaked in buttermilk. Eventually she got back to eating chicken and even her own dog food. By tonight, she has been eating out of the bowl (and not my hand), and has regained much of her appetite.

Now did the buttermilk really save her life? If it turned her appetite around, then I believe it helped, at any rate. Of course, it could be that the steroids and antibiotics had finally kicked in and that’s why she was more interested in the buttermilk in the first place. You be the judge.

Of course, there are other tricks that have helped, like giving her her pills in peanut butter. That’s something I learned from our humane society vet, and it really works if you need a dog to take medicine. Once they start licking the peanut butter, they don’t taste the medicine, and they can’t stop licking, so they swallow whatever’s with it. I cut the pills up small enough so they aren’t much bigger than a peanut chunk. Other suggestions I’ve used are to wrap the pill in deli chicken (which worked at first), or cover it in cheese (but Zinneke turned her nose up at cheese, as hard as that is to believe). Peanut butter proved irresistible, especially once I got a little on her tongue and she started licking.

So if my dog stopped eating again, would I give her buttermilk? No. I would take her to the vet and find out what the problem was. But if she’d been to the vet and was being treated and stil wouldn’t eat? Then I’d be sure to try buttermilk again. With any luck, now that she has her appetite back, she will regain her strength and the vet can reduce the steroid dosage until it’s manageable. She’ll be back to her old self or close soon.

Federated Music Clubs Festivals

Tomorrow, our son is participating in the local Federated Music Clubs Festival for the 8th year in a row. It’s about time I add a post, so I thought I would take a moment to thank the clubs for the opportunities they provide for so many students. The kids in our Suzuki Strings program (and the piano students from around the city) have all been practicing like mad to earn their Superior ratings (we hope). They learn music theory and get to perform some pretty complicated pieces. We would still have a good strings program in our town without the Music Club Festival, but this gives many of the kids the incentive they need to really polish a piece. That and recital are the high points of the year, at least for individual performance. Though only some will go on to be professional musicians, the appreciation for music that they develop, along with the discipline that it takes to excel, will remain with them their whole lives. And many will continue to play in one context or another for the rest of their lives. Without the many hours of volunteer work that goes into organizing the Festival, many of these kids would not receive the encouragement they need to excel with their chosen instrument.

Translating Goethe

This past weekend, I took up the challenge to translate a few poems by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. I did it because my World Lit textbook didn’t include any of his lyric poetry, and it’s no fun to teach Romanticism without starting with Goethe. Yes, I know he’s technically part of the Sturm und Drang movement that precedes Romanticism in Germany and includes Classicist elements, but especially in the lyric poems (not to mention his incredibly romantic novel The Sorrows of Young Werther), he clearly establishes the tone for Romantic writers to come, and I like to see him as a transitional figure that creates a bridge between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. Literary periods never start and stop as conveniently as their labels would suggest.

But the problem with teaching Goethe’s lyric poetry is that there aren’t good translations available. One issue is copyright. I don’t feel comfortable using much of another recent poet’s translation without permission (there is fair use, though that’s a tricky issue). So if it’s not in my textbook, I prefer public domain. There are some competent 19th Century translations, but their language is dated and can be a challenge for students — too many thees and thous, and too convoluted syntax. The twentieth-century translations that I own (Michael Hamburger’s, Christopher Middleton’s, and John Frederick Nims’, and Vernon Watkins’ in the Princeton Selected Poems) are faithful renderings, but at least in the four poems I wanted to work with, the translations lacked the simplicity I value in the original.

I had translated a couple of the very short poems a few years ago, so this year I decided to tackle “To the Moon.” The challenge with Goethe is that he rhymes, and he does it very facilely in German. To ignore the rhyme would destroy the poem, but to get exact rhyme would often require too much change to the meaning. I tend to be fairly literal when I translate. I don’t like to interpret or read too much into the poem, though I am willing to rearrange and play with shades of meaning as needed to get the form. As I’ve done when translating Dutch sonnets for my Masters thesis ages ago, I resorted to off-rhymes or vowel rhymes at times. As long as the vowel was close and the consonants of the rhyme words weren’t too far off, I was willing to live with it. The point was to suggest rhyme, rather than slavishly repeat what couldn’t be repeated in English. The rhyme sounds are all different, anyway, and often different words have to be used as rhyme words. I tried to have at least one pretty close rhyme pair in each stanza and allowed one pair (usually the first and third lines) to be a little less exact. Since Goethe uses a ballad stanza, and since that can be an unrhymed, A, unrhymed, A pattern, I felt that a partial rhyme was justified, especially if it allowed me to keep from straying too far with the meaning. I was a little more strict about the meter. I didn’t always follow the exact foot that Goethe used, but I tried to keep the number of beats consistent with the ballad stanza. I wanted the feel of the poem to be what it was in the original as much as possible.

It was fun to pull out my old dictionaries and spend time looking words up in my Roget’s Thesaurus. Translating is always a puzzle, but when form is involved the puzzle is more complex and challenging. It was so much fun, that I decided to take on The Alderking next. I stuck with that title, even though some translators use Erlking, which doesn’t make much sense in English. Maybe Earlking would be better, but the combination of Earl and King seems redundant; whereas, Goethe’s mistranslation of Erlkönig out of the Danish to make an Alder-king makes the Elf-king a king of the forest trees. To me, that adds to the poem. Again, the rhyme was a challenge, as was the meter. There are places where I’m not 100% satisfied, but then you never are. When I teach them again, I might revisit the translation and make other choices, but I’m happy enough with it for now. And I provided my students links to some alternate translations so they can compare. That emphasizes for them that translators vary in their rendering of a poem and reminds them that what they read in World Literature is always translated.

Genesis of a Poem

This is not my usual method of writing a poem, but I’m pleased with the way it turned out: A good friend wrote me the other day and asked if I would write a poem for his daughter’s 18th birthday. Since we know her very well, I was happy to do it, though I didn’t have a lot of time to get it done. (And to be honest, if I’d have had more time, I probably would have procrastinated!)

I’ve been thinking for awhile about writing an ‘occasional poem,’ especially in the wake of the recent inaugural poem. So I thought about what this might entail, and was glad the the occasion wasn’t quite so momentous or public. It was comforting to think of inaugural poems I have heard, which usually don’t reference the occasion directly. They have often been written to fit the president, but also incorporate themes and even experiences that come from the poet’s experience as well. They are often loosely organized, almost Whitmanesque, and though I didn’t want to vie with an inaugural poem in length, it was nice to realize that the poem’s unity can come from the occasion as much as from the poet.

With this in mind, I still was stumped about where to begin. So I looked at some recent photographs of a trip where we’d seen the family. Nothing immediately came to mind, but it did bring back good memories. Then I thought that a birthday poem might start by referencing the name of the person. I looked up “Tesse” in a few online baby guides, and wasn’t thrilled, though the meaning of ‘harvester’ did seem appropriate for someone turning 18 and reaching a kind of harvest. This image made it into the poem. ‘Hunter’ and ‘Woman from Therasia” weren’t very helpful, though vestiges of hunting may have survived in one image, and woman appears in the poem. I found a few places that listed the meaning of “fourth child,” though that didn’t help, since she’s the second. I decided that four might suggest square, and used that at one point. Some sites seemed to be influenced by the harvest meaning, and added ‘summer,’ which I thought was useful. Since her birthday is in February, this suggested contrasts, and helped me get to a first stanza.

Of course, a birthday poem might easily reference birth, so I began there, with a seed planted in winter. Other contrasts followed, some going back to the memories and associations I had from photographs and visits. Rather than get too literal, though, I wanted to keep the images a little on the surreal side. And as I was searching for an image and for a title, I thought of the word “tessellations,” intricate mosaic-like geometric patterns. This is something our son has been interested in from his art classes, and we had gone to the M. C. Escher museum this summer and seen his drawings of geese, frogs, and fish other interwoven shapes. This fit the theme of contrasts, and of course the play on words with her name worked for me. Combining that with the idea of the harvest as a rite of passage into adulthood and the paradox of leaving home and staying tied to it, I had my poem.

Of course, it took a few revisions before I was completely happy with it, or at least happy enough to send it off with birthday greetings! I was also glad that, unlike an inaugural poet, I only had one poem to write. I’ve heard for an inauguration the poet often writes three, and then the President picks the one he wants to have read. That would up the pressure just a bit! Though of course, you’d have two more poems that you could then take and revise on your own terms. We’ll see what happens to this poem after the big birthday (tomorrow). As I told my friend, it was an interesting assignment. It was a bit of a challenge, but turned out to be a rewarding experience. And if Tesse likes it, that will be the main thing.

The Art of Writing

It is the beginning of a new semester, and today I taught the first session of MUW’s introductory multi-genre Creative Writing class. As usual, as I walked the dog and gathered my thoughts before class, my thoughts turned to what we can teach about writing. It occurred to me, that in creative writing classes, we often gravitate to discussing what works (and what doesn’t). Sure, we want to move a an audience, but we often gravitate to the lowest common denominator, to the pragmatic approach. So one of my resolutions for the semester is to remind my students that writing is an art.

In class, we were discussing our goals. It was a good place to lay the groundwork by reminding students that in a creative writing class we focus more on the artistic side of what is said. When we write an essay, we care about communicating the ideas or making an argument. Those things matter in creative writing, too, but we focus more on the sound of the words or the patterns of a sentence. We have the luxury of writing something because we think it’s beautiful. (An essay written in rhyme might be unique, but I would still grade it primarily on the ideas, not the rhyme scheme.)

My goal in in this is to encourage students to move beyond the pragmatic and think about the beautiful. Of course, they don’t have to be opposites. Voltaire, in describing his utopia of Eldorado, praises it for making the practical beautiful. If I can begin to instill in some of my students a love of language and an attention to its subtleties, then I will be happy.

As I reached the farthest end of a cold gray walk along the river, which was already nearing flood stage, and as the dog and I turned around to come home, the looming clouds unleashed a steady rain that didn’t stop all day. Yet despite the cold and rain, the river retained its beauty and showed off its power.

Luddite Redux

ipod 4g photoAwhile back, I wrote a post about working on our in-attic TV antenna to get off-air broadcasts instead of cable. That made me wonder if I was a Luddite or a geek. Today’s techno fun confirmed this luddite status. I took a few minutes (didn’t take long) to replace the battery in our old iPod 4g/photo. It’s not that ancient, but feels like it’s been around for ever. It was actually only bought 7 years ago, but has been replaced by a nano and Now a Touch. Still, it can hold most of our music (at least most that we want to take on a long car trip) and there was no reason to throw it away just because it wouldn’t hold a charge for more than a few minutes. It was still working fairly well when tethered to a speaker set that doubles as a charging station, but had lost its portable existence.

This is where iFixit came to the rescue. I’ve used their services before to replace hard drives in ailing laptops and such. Usually, my attempts have been successful, though one time we gained a hard drive and lost the internal speakers (a cheap external pair worked better than trying to repair what I broke). This site has great instructions and pictures for every step. They warn you how difficult self-repair might be for any task, and they’ll even sell parts at a reasonable price. My new battery and a couple tools to open the iPod with only cost $15. With their tools and instructions, I was able to pop open the case, disconnect a couple sets of wires (didn’t damage any this time!), remove the old battery, and replace it with the new one. I’m sure this voided my warranty, which expired something like six years ago, so I don’t mind. I had to use a Torx 6 screwdriver, which I happened to have from a previous laptop repair. Otherwise, it might have cost me a few dollars more. I got a virtually new iPod (granted the hard drive is still the original, so who knows how long it will last), and I got to see the inside of the iPod I’ve been carrying around. I also gained the confidence to know that if something else breaks, I could probably replace it or at least find out of it’s worth trying to fix.

What I like about this company, besides their excellent instructions and parts, is their philosophy. They’re a small company based in San Luis Obispo. It doesn’t hurt that I have fond memories of this town from a road trip down the California coast after I graduated from college, but the thing I really like about them is that they have lots of information on their site about what happens to e-waste when it is ‘recycled.’ When I do have to throw something out, I try to find a responsible recycler, but I agree with their philosophy that fixing our toys is a lot more responsible than replacing them. If we kept our technology a little longer, we could do a lot to keep the landfills from filling up with our outmoded electronics.

Online Shoppers Beware!

Online shopping has gotten more challenging this season. Have you noticed the fine print on Google’s shopping site? Down at the bottom it reads “Google is compensated by some of these merchants. Tax and shipping costs are estimates.”

Several months ago, I noticed Google’s announcement of their change to the way they would rank search results in the shopping area. I also noticed around that time that the results I got from searching there weren’t always the best price. I could often find a better deal if I just searched Google (not Google Shopping) for what I wanted, even if I sorted Google Shopping by lowest price, which isn’t on option in a regular search.

What this means is that you’re getting fed what advertisers want you to see, not what you’re really searching for. The same stores pop up over and over, and the same stores (sometimes with better prices) get omitted. Usually this means the little guys get left out and the big operators are the ones who show up. It also means you might miss out on some good products. It’s one thing if you’re searching for a particular item by brand name (you’ll find it somewhere); it’s another if you’re searching for a broader category, like “maple syrup” (you may only find the brands and suppliers who’ve paid for you to find them).

As a result of these changes, I’ve begun to trust Google less and less, and I’ve found their site to be less useful than it was a year ago. I’ve gone back to searching multiple shopping sites like Yahoo Shopping, Dealtime, Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and Pricegrabber. And of course, if I’m shopping for computers or other electronics, I might try price comparisons at CNet, MacWorld, or ZDnet. I’d love to find one site that could query them all, but haven’t run across it yet. It’s not that I trust these sites much more than Google, but at least if I search multiple ways, I’m more likely to find what I’m looking for.

At the same time, I’ve also gotten more concerned with how these sites and the ones I land on are tracking my actions online. Recently I’ve started using Duck Duck Go instead of Google for basic searches (though their shopping search hasn’t been that helpful, since I can’t sort by price, etc.). And I’m trying out Ghostery to block the tracking elements on these pages. We’ll see if the ads I’m shown stop being geared towards what I’ve recently searched on!

All this is to say that the old adage, “Buyer Beware,” takes on even more meaning online. It’s something I’ve known for a long time, though you get lulled into the new status quo of online shopping easily enough. Google’s changes didn’t come as a big surprise, really. Those changes, and recent news reports of online tracking, just served as the most recent eye-opener. Am I surprised that Google and other shopping sites need to earn a profit and will sell advertisement (as well as data on my shopping habits) in order to do so? No. But I do need the occasional reminder that this is what they’re up to. And as shopping sites change their practices, I need to be prepared to change my shopping habits as well.