2 Board Alley

December Post

    So, having rolled up my cyberjeans and taken off my electronic socks, I'm wading back into the pixel-pond called blogging. I've  missed it.  It's MY place on the web, where readers come and go, reading whatever dream, idea or story that I've put up (like jams and jellies?)here (like a collage?).  My blog is my focus, however meandering and illogical it may seem.  And it's my writing, my exercise in using words.  yes, I like Facebook and Twitter, but I've really hungered for returning to my platform.  I've missed reading other blogs, writerly and academic.  Your blogs are where I've gained so much professionally as well as personally.  

    And I want to do more playing around with the graphic elements of things--to create a new banner, for one.  This "Bink in the Shadows" is simply a placeholder for things to come.  I've missed playing around with graphic design--there's great satisfaction to be had in mixing colors and shapes and photos and fonts--multimodal glee, as it were.

When I look  back at my September posts, I'm tempted to do a point -by-point update, but since laziness trumps temptation, I'll only do a few:

• Walking--a great idea that fizzled down to walking up and down the stairs at work.  However, I was seized with the fun to be had working in my yard, so it's a near-substitution of exercise.  Of course, yoga continues, and I'm thinking of moving to a class and having a private lesson once a week.  Financially, that would be great, but the truth is that getting into the groove of going to a class is going to take quite a bit of energy.  I tend toward inertia at the end of the day. Oh well, another small, incremental goal, eh?
• Meditating:  this habit completely fell out of my life this year--and I used to meditate every day.  For years. I need to schedule a time and a place every day in order to return to the habit, which I know will help me remain calm and lower my blood pressure.
• Working:  I have been pretty happy at work and have returned to being able to give my all without also feeling like if I do give my all, I won't have any energy for anything else.  Now that the stress and the grief has faded, I feel good, and am grateful for that.  Most of my energy has been going into my textspace--I feel more focused about what I want to have in it--have done a lot of "Big Picture" thinking about the needs of Basic Writers in terms of technology, and, of course, writing.  My modest goal for next semester is to podcast the unit intros and the biweekly plans.  Just podcast.  Nothing fancy.  And my modest realization is that, say what you will about Powerpoint, I like using it with BW's since it moves logically slide by slide, and contributes to slowing down and adjusting the pace at which the students zoom through things.

And, how are you?

Posties

I've written a post for CCE called "Viral Bob and The Lizards of Satan," about Blogger Bob and the hijinks that have ensued from his post about Governor Palin. If I could figure out how to create a link on my husband's Mac, I'd put one in here! Let's try this.

I'm going to be posting my weekly progress report on my sabbatical application over at my sabbatical blog, That Online Text

What's doin' with the rest of youse guys?

Reginald Shepherd

The poet Reginald Shepherd died yesterday, and the world has lost a brilliant poet and dedicated teacher. 

I can't claim to have known him well--that's my loss for certain, but I was lucky enough to have studied with him one summer through the Concord Poetry group in Massachusetts. A thoughtful and through reader of his students' poetry, he inspired me as a writer and as an instructor. 

Summer Research

I've spent the summer researching the Irish-American fishing industry in New Bedford, Massachusetts in order to continue working on my Irish poetry cycle.  This summer has affording me the time to relax into thinking poetically--for example, I 've been mulling over the structure of the overall piece as well as the poems themselves and am using the design on my wedding ring, a Celtic labyrinth of peaks and swallows, to guide the big picture.  In terns of the writing, I'm leaning towards some repetitive structure for the poem I'm writing about my great-grandfather, a fisherman who was lost at sea.  There are some drafts of other poems in my notebook which will take shape in time. 

The video above is courtesy of rootstelevision.com. 

Poems Inspired By Leslee

1.The swans race
on watermelon skis
Down the Typepad Charles.

2.The fox wiggled backwards
From under the azaleas,
and plopped on my porch.

3.Flocks of bills
land on my desk:
homing season.

4. The fawn looked in the window:
Finding the tree pose, I nodded.
Namaste

A Haiku MashUP

Follow the links to the original haikus!

New Year's day

meets the moon:

the dog curls in the pillows.

New Year's Poem

Leslee gave me the idea, and when I went to Watermark's site, I savored my way through the Watermark New Year Haiku Collaborative Poem Dance! When I reached the end, what else was there to do but add one of my own?

New Year's Revolutions (draft 1)

Calendar dreams fade,
dissolving with each season--
like ink in a sunworn diary.

13 Teachers Meme: The First Eight

Billie tagged me with this very interesting meme, and I've been thinking about it all day.  I have tried to stick to naming people who were teachers, at least for the top nine, because, well, just because.  After I finished the list, I realized that learning, maternal approval and writing were so mixed together (none of my faves were math teachers, though I can't say that I was abused at their hands).  The downshot is that I've been in therapy for years to get centered in my life and to learn for the sake of my love for it, not to please anyone. Maybe that's an upshot, though! The other upshot is that I do love to write, and I am so glad that so many teachers recognized my small gift, especially during my high school years.

And to whom would I like to pass this meme along?

On the writing side of the aisle:  Leslee and Bob

On the academic side of the aisle:  Middlebrow and desert democrat

And. . . . . .Now .. . . . . . .My List:

1.  Mrs. Stutler: My first grade teacher at Campo Alegre, who, when she showed us a poster of Dick, Jane and Sally with the word "Look!" on it, and announced that we were going to learn to read, must have seen the Look! on my face.  Despite my having been a reader since I was four, I believed that a real teacher in school was going to give us the real deal on reading--the magical incantation, the key to encylopedia bookcase, not just a "Look!". Within the week, she had me reading third-grade readers "just for fun," and it was.  She didn't make a big deal out of it, but she did encourage my reading and writing.

2.  Miss Donnocker was my fourth grade teacher during the year we lived in Berlin, Germany, and I am so glad of that.  She was a good, enthusiastic teacher who took us on field trips all over West Berlin--to the Wall, to Peacock Island, to the museum to see the bust of Nefertiti and to the Grunewald to sit on a sunny day and draw pictures.  Although I was class president and experienced my first bout of plagiarism (another student plagiarized Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle because she was jealous of me), I don't remember much about my academic progress except that my mother disliked her.  She said Miss Donnacker wasn't a good teacher at all. 

3.  Sister Mary Ann was the English teacher for the seventh and eighth graders at St. Michael's School ("SMS is the Best" was our chant).  These were the years when my mother was dying, and I was fairly spaced-out. I earned D's for three quarters and then burst into creativity during the last quarter when all we did was write.  Sister Mary Ann would ask the best writers to read their works out loud to the class.  My classmates would cheer me before I began.    I guess this would be the moment when I knew that grammar and good writing were related, but not closely. Anyhow, getting that genuine affirmation from her at the time of my life went a long way towards keeping me alive when I was a teenager and young adult. 

4.  Sister Barbara was the prinicpal of my high school, and in my senior year, she was my academic advisor, which was a kind of homeroom teacher.  She was so good to me during my junior and senior year--during my junior year I was so depressed that I gradually flunked out, and when I went to see her in May of that year, I fully expected to be yelled at.  She didn't yell.  Instead, she got me to sign up for a double load of classes during my senior year and never, ever, wavered in her confidence in me.   

5.  Sister Ann taught me journalism and creative writing during my sophomore year in high school. She was kind to me and respectful, and one day she said, as I was writing a paper, that if I wanted to, I could be very successful as a writer when I got through college.  Because the comment was so out of the blue and so genuine, I was struck by it enough to remember it when times were hard. And she was my sociology teacher, who assigned Alvin Toffler to read and write about.

6. Sister Patricia was a theology teacher who moved to Japan for awhile, who got a Ph.D and now works at Georgetown.  She was a smart, warm person, and my strongest memory is of being in the theology resource room with her and saying that I knew that although I was grieving my mother's passing, that one day I would wake up and it would all be over.  She touched my arm and said "No, that's not how it works.  What you are going through takes time."  Then, I thought "oh, shit, not more time like this," but as I look back, it was an incredibly honest thing to say in 1973, long before anyone studied  the effects of  a parent's death on a teenager's life.

7.  Sue Liggett taught me English Lit at MC, and as I recall, she was wonderful.  So wonderful that her example lead me, years later, to consider becoming a community college professor.  Why? Because she was smart, funny, intellectual and enthusiastic about her students.  Also, she seemed genuine, not taking on the lofty tones of condescension that the stereotype encouraged. 

8. My Abnormal Psych Professor Whose Name I Can't Remember.  He was great--and the most affirming person I've ever had teach me.  An Army psychologist, he was teaching at UMUC that semester, and kept us happy and active throughout the whole semester.  And yes, he was extremely intelligent, using humor to help us over the hurdle of diagnosing ourselves with every malady we studied. 

What's New?

Tell me!

Things Poetic

Like a squirrel stuffing her cheek,

I've written two posts for this week.

Charming, huh? 

Although most of today's blogging is at CCT,  I do want to write about two loosely related ideas here, now, today.

The first is that I'm adding Karren Alenier's blog, The Steiny Road to Operadom:  A Book Publishing Trajectory, to the Writing blogroll on the left.  Aside from being one of the mothering forces of D.C. poetry, Karren is also a writer who has published several chapbooks and the libretto for Gertrude Stein Invents a Jump Early On.  She visited my Women's Lit class earlier this semester and gave us an insider's view of the creativity and grit that go into conceiving and developing such a work.

The other idea I want to bring up is Clancy's post on memorizing poetry, in which she quotes Amanda of Household Opera's post about the "incantation[al]" nature of poetry, and how, memorized, it comes back to serve us when we need it."  One of the things I plan on building into the poetry class next semester is to do more with the sound--out loud--of words.  Last year, one assignment was to read aloud one of one's poems to the class--to prepare, to practice breathing and intonation.  Another assignment that I'm building into the course is for each student to develop a podcast of some of their poems. Requiring the students to memorize a short, favorite poem would be a good idea as well.