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Year: 2013

Check Out the Poetry Storehouse

October 29, 2013 • • Leave a comment

The Poetry Storehouse is a very cool new resource for bringing new life to poetry:

The Poetry Storehouse is an effort to promote new forms and delivery methods for page-poetry by creating a repository of freely-available high-quality contemporary page-poetry for those multimedia collaborative artists who may sometimes be stymied in their work by copyright and other restrictions. Our main mission is to collect and showcase poem texts and, in some instances, audio recordings of those texts. It is our hope that those texts will serve as inspiration or raw material for other artistic creations in different media.

A few of my poems are there too, along with a reading of my 2010 poem “For the Goddess of the Empty Sea” by NS. Do check it out, and maybe even create something new from what you find there.

Because Math Said So

October 9, 2013 • • 1 Comment

I heard that They say math is the language of nature and the way in which we explain everything, which is a pretty cool thing to think about. Math is probably the language of God despite the church’s old fondness for Latin. That’s part of why I like math, but it wasn’t always so. Math and I have not always been friends.

Math turned against me in second grade, which I otherwise loved. I think it was the regular timed tests. I could never get past subtraction even when the rest of the class had moved through multiplication and on to joyless division. It’s probably where my hatred of school began too. Eventually, I began to get things under control, but then those fiends threw letters into the mix so now I had to deal not just with numbers but sometimes x and even his diabolical buddy y. I always liked reading and writing, but now it seemed the whole treasonous alphabet was turning against me.

Sometimes I understood it, but it wasn’t until later that I took satisfaction in solving a problem or working a proof the way I did writing a good story. So there were ups and downs along the bumpy road to graduation: Algebra was a down, Geometry was an up—the first one in math since first grade, Algebra II was down, Trig was a giant up. This is where I started to actually enjoy it. I thought I was home free, but then came Calculus and… well, let’s just say it’s a good thing I didn’t need it to graduate. In college, I only needed to pass basic algebra, which I did, and then no more math forever, I thought. I celebrated by treating myself to a cheeseburger.

Flash forward twenty-some years, and my current teaching assignment involves helping students earn their GEDs. I had to relearn (learn, really, but the re- in front makes it sound better) all the algebra I swore I’d never need to know and that I’d never use in the “real world.” A funny thing happened, though, when I started FOIL-ing and throwing around slope-intercept and quadratic formulas. I liked it. I liked learning about it and getting a bit of a deeper glimpse at how the universe works.

To my surprise, I also found I like teaching a little math. We English teachers live in a world of ambiguity, debatable short answers and essay questions, endless discussion, and gray areas. (Or is it ‘grey’ and did I really need that comma before the ‘and’?) Part of the fun is helping students fumble their way to coherent arguments in support of their ideas and positions. But sometimes it’s nice to break up the day by teaching some math.

The road to the solution for any given problem is a journey and for those of us who find the greatest meaning in the journey (and, let’s be honest here, aren’t being graded on the problem), it can be an interesting journey to take. But I admit, a couple of times a day, it’s nice to be able to point to a number and say that this is the correct answer and there is no other choice. No debate. No argument. The answer is 42. Why? Because math said so, that’s why.

Fire Carriers

October 1, 2013 • • 4 Comments

you grasp for stolen rock
in freefall dreams

when slow heart winter
ends in rushing wind

in warm air wake the ceiling gone
wax dripping from your wings

peculiar prey these insects
so full of foreign blood

you shrug against the unfamiliar
weight, this strange sky dawning

rest in wooden building eaves
roost in secret attic shelters

alight and burn with dawn
a million tiny fires raging
through the empire of the sun

///

I just finished reading James Jones’s The Thin Red Line (which I do recommend) and found myself reading up on the Pacific battles of World War II. The Wikipedia rabbit hole led me to one particularly horrifying scheme thought up during the war, Bat Bombs:

Bat bombs were an experimental World War II weapon developed by the United States. The bomb consisted of a bomb-shaped casing with numerous compartments, each containing a Mexican Free-tailed Bat with a small timed incendiary bomb attached. Dropped from a bomber at dawn, the casings would deploy a parachute in mid-flight and open to release the bats which would then roost in eaves and attics. The incendiaries would start fires in inaccessible places in the largely wood and paper construction of the Japanese cities that were the weapon’s intended target.

They were never used against the Japanese, but the army did manage to blow up one of their own facilities experimenting with the concept. I found it particularly troubling, this use of wild animals basically to kill civilians, and I kept thinking about the bats. What it must have been like to suddenly be out of hibernation in a strange place, that sense of dislocation coupled with the instinct to hunt and roost. That’s what led to this poem.