Impersonating Someone Impersonating Someone

Posted on February 7, 2013 | Leave a comment

There are actors who transform into roles and are essentially unrecognizable from role to role–Daniel Day Lewis comes to mind.

Then there are actors who are ALWAYS themselves, no matter what–Jimmy Stewart was always Jimmy Stewart.

It seems to me Bradley Cooper is somewhere in between there, but closer to the disappearing kind, and part of the reason I think that comes from watching different movies–Sack Lodge from Wedding Crashers doesn’t even really look that much like Pat Solitano from Silver Linings Playbook.

And then there’s the matter of impersonations. Mr. Cooper’s good at them, and it’s interesting to me to watch him do them. There’s a facility for mimicry, obviously, both in voice and mannerism. But it’s also a talent for storytelling, for finding the right line to quote. I think it’s a reflection of intelligence and also a very actorly amibtion and habit–he’s clearly someone who spends A LOT of time watching and listening other people.

It’s just plain funny to hear Owen Wilson’s voice coming out of Bradley Cooper’s pretty face. But it’s good comedic instinct on the impersonator’s part to understand that the surprise of the voice will be even funnier if the diction also dips down from James Lipton’s comment, “Christopher Walken and Owen Wilson both have very distinctive sounds”  to Cooper shifting into an Owen Wilson posture to say, “Claire’s mom made me feel her hooters.”

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Posted in Twenty-one Days of Bradley Cooper

Bradley Cooper Pie (chart)

Posted on February 6, 2013 | 4 comments
What I find interesting about Bradley Cooper

What I find interesting about Bradley Cooper

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Tiger-Beat-Teeny-Bopper-Fan-Fan-Fan, Stop

Posted on February 5, 2013 | 1 comment

I was eight when I learned that Rick Springfield slept in the nude at B&B Hobby Shop in Mt. Vernon, Illinois.
_____

Every Sunday after church, my family  would stop at B&B Hobby, next to the Granada Theater in downtown Mt. Vernon, at a time in history when small-town downtowns everywhere were still thriving.

The store was so much deeper than it was wide—in my memory, there were sections and sections toward the back of the store, very dark, high shelves so teeming they were close to toppling. Back there, the paths in the linoleum weren’t nearly as worn. Head shop? Porn section? Just a little girl’s imagination? I never, never went all the way back.

Dad looked at the selection of pipes and tobacco. “The better it smells, the worse it tastes,” he always said about pipe tobacco.

My brother looked at balsa wood dowels and possibly-huffable glue and model paint. Among his other creations was a working guillotine that he threatened to use on my Ken doll.

Mom and I looked at magazines, right in the front of the store, next to one of the big floor-to-ceiling pane-glass windows. I was absolutely focused on Tiger Beat and Teen Beat and 16 Magazine. (I was 8 or 9 when I read 16, 13 or 14 when I read Seventeen, and then at 17, began reading Andy Warhol’s Interview.)

Once we’d loaded up the counter with that week’s purchases, which always included the St. Louis Post Dispatch, we piled in the car and headed toward Opdyke, about a 20 minute drive.

I always read on the way home. I always got a headache. But I could never wait.

_____

So of course, what I did was read “Why Rick Springfield Sleeps in the Nude” at B&B Hobby Shop when I was 8. Because I read it there, because it was SO TITILLATING, when I think of Rick Springfield, yes, I think of General Hospital, yes I think of “Jesse’s Girl,” but mostly, I think of that headline on the cover of Tiger Beat and I am SMACK RIGHT THERE in B&B Hobby. With a little bit of a sick car-headache to go with it.

And why did he sleep in the nude? As I remember it, he told a story about waking up when he was a boy with both legs somehow in one leg of his pajamas, and being terrified that he’d somehow lost a leg, and ever after slept in the nude.

One wonders now at the probability of any single part of the story being true (very low) and also the probability that the editors were making a joke about a different sort of leg getting stuck in his pajamas (very high).

Oh! Those early 70s! What a time. It was also Donny Osmond I was nuts for (I had an Osmond’s lunch box I wish I’d kept, like this one)

In what I now understand as the beginning of the end of my pre-pubescent teeny-bopper phase, there was once an article on Shaun Cassidy, where he was asked what kind of music he listened to. I only remember one band from his list, Led Zeppelin, but I came away understanding he was the same age as my brother and listened to the same kind of music. My brother hated what I listened to. I used to torture him by singing, “Make the world go away,” in my best Marie Osmond impersonation.

I wasn’t done being a teeny-bopper, but a layer of sweetness had been stripped away. In its place, a dawning awareness of the chasm that yawned between what I thought I knew and what was true.

Being a teeny-bopper fan was hard work then. You had to wait for magazines to come out, you had to pay to belong to fan clubs, and you had to watch TV pretty much all the time just in case someone showed up somewhere.

Now? Pshaw. Easy as pie. Set up a Google alert and you learn more than you even really want to.

And thus we encounter the middle-aged teeny-bopper phase. I don’t put the posters on my wall any more, but I still get that little frisson, “new picture!” or “new detail!” or “new movie!”

On Monday’s show, Katie Couric asks Bradley Cooper about his dating life, and mentions how the media seems absolutely obsessed. He does a nice collapse on the couch, and then comments that he partly finds it pretty interesting and partly finds it pretty disheartening.

There’s also a video of him on Howard Stern’s show, from 2011, when Stern is not just praising Renee Zellweger (who was Cooper’s girlfriend at the time), but Stern is also trying to figure out if he’d had a shot of sleeping with her one time back when, when they were having their hair done in adjacent chairs…. The look on Cooper’s face is hard to interpret, except that there’s nothing in it that is saying, “I’m enjoying this part of the conversation, Howard, please say more.”  If you track the timeline of media coverage of his love life, Cooper & Zellweger broke up just days after that show.

[Finding out Bradley Cooper is a huge fan of Howard Stern is somewhere on the same emotional planet as finding out Shaun Cassidy liked Led Zeppelin. Interesting.]

I’m not as nice as Katie Couric (seems to be) and not as crude as Howard Stern (seems to be).

I wish I were so different from either of them that I could interview someone like Bradley Cooper and not bring up dating at all.

Ultimately, in the pie chart of “What I Find Interesting About Bradley Cooper” (tune in tomorrow for the full chart!), “Whom He’s Dating” is a mighty-slim sliver.

But I wish it weren’t a part of the pie at all.

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Posted in Family, Mt. Vernon, Opdyke, Twenty-one Days of Bradley Cooper, Uncategorized

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What to Sing When You Wash Your Hands (Day 2 of Bradley Cooper)

Posted on February 4, 2013 | 2 comments

After YET AGAIN having a horrible cold at the end of last semester (this has happened four or five semesters running), and taking most of the semester break to recover, and now, 4 weeks in, getting my first cold of 2013, I am determined to get healthier and stay healthier.

I’ve been seriously focused on washing my hands the way everyone says you should, even more than usual, the last three weeks (so this latest cold can’t be blamed on that at least). To make sure I was washing long enough, I was, indeed, singing “Happy Birthday” to myself.

But here’s the thing–do I really want to sing “Happy Birthday” to myself? Twice? Multiple times a day? I’m o.k. being 47, and trust me, when it gets closer to my birthday this summer, I’ll be jabbering about it.

But it’s not my birthday every day. Even Walt Whitman wouldn’t want to celebrate himself, to sing himself, THAT way, every day.

What would it mean to have that in your head so much?

Why not quote some Walt Whitman? Or “The Charge of the Light Brigade?” Or some Dickinson? Or “Come live with me and be my love?” Or this, which would break my heart open every time–“tell me a story of deep delight.”

What I’ve been doing is making up my own lyrics to the Doxology to fit my Zen Baptist theology a little better (Wisdom shows up–amazing how a girl picks that dolorous tune right up.)

I’ve also been singing a song I learned a very, very long time ago at a Good News Circle School for Evangelism week at the Baptist Resort (seems like a contradiction in terms, I know) at Green Lake, Wisconsin. It’s just a little ditty that puts these verses to a tune–makes them easier to memorize:

Galatians 5:22-23 “But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control–against such things there is no law.”

That’s a better way to move through the day, right?

But I’ve also been listening to the soundtrack from Silver Linings Playbook (the movie that inspired 21 Days of Bradley Cooper). What about singing this while you’re washing your hands:

“My cherie amour, lovely as a summer day
My cherie amour, distant as the milky way
My cherie amour, pretty little one that I adore
You’re the only girl my heart beats for
How I wish that you were mine”

Way sweeter than “Happy Birthday.”

As a special treat for Day 2 of 21 Days with Bradley Cooper, here’s an interview with Bradley Cooper where Peter Travers gets him to speak in French and then sing from “My Cherie Amour.”

And if you’re still wed to singing “Happy Birthday,” here’s a clip from the Palm Springs Film Festival where Mr. Cooper accepts an award on his birthday and then gets serenaded with “Happy Birthday.” It’s kind of sweet if you can block out Mary Hart’s high-octane schmooze mode.

Let me leave you with this thought: what do you think Pilate was singing in his head when he washed his hands of Jesus? (I’m thinking something by the Clash.)

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Posted in God Stuff, Healthy Health, Poetry, Twenty-one Days of Bradley Cooper, Uncategorized

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Top Ten Reasons for 21 Days of Bradley Cooper

Posted on February 3, 2013 | 7 comments

Not that anyone needs a reason to blog about anything, really, but I do have reasons for writing about Bradley Cooper for the next 21 days. Reasons other than the fact that once it occurred to me to do it, it seemed too hilarious not to. And too impossible to have 21 posts that fit my blog and connect to him somehow. I mean–it’s not solely a fansite. He has at least one of those arready.

I have something in mind similar to the moments when the absolutely brilliant curator of “Fuck Yeah, Paul Gross” waxes thoughtful.

So it might be movie reviews, or meditations on subjects in his movies, or just any random thing I’ve noted. Plus at least one sample essay which I need to write for my ENG 102 students for their pop culture unit.

And at least one serious piece on the creative process–his relationship with Robert DeNiro is awfully interesting in terms of how creativity crosses generations.

But, o.k. sure, 21 days is a little obsessive. Let me share with you a question I have been asking for YEARS: What do people who aren’t obsessive have in their heads? Just nothing? Just air?

Don’t answer.

Here are my top ten reasons for 21 Days of Bradley Cooper:

10. He was an English major, so he may well have an opinion on the Oxford comma.

9. He lives with his mom. Who is short.

But it’s more than the fact that I’m a short English professor who loves both her son and her mother:

8. Because there are so many nominations for Silver Linings Playbook, I am going to watch EVERY MINUTE of the Oscars, and I actually care who wins. I can’t remember the last time both of these happened, and I am genuinely excited. Also, his short mother will be his Oscar date.

7. Even my therapist is a Bradley Cooper fan.

6. Good excuse to watch Bradley Cooper movies I haven’t yet seen.

5. As an English professor, part of my work is writing. As a writer, blogging is part of my work. If I research for a blog, that is work. If I write about Bradley Cooper then I turn out to be a complete workaholic. The irony alone makes this an important reason.

4. In January, I inadvertently upped my blog traffic SIGNIFICANTLY by writing about David Bowie and Jodie Foster. Since I genuinely love pop culture, I do want to write about it, and I love the idea of piggy backing on all the Googling Mr. Cooper must be generating. Craven, I know. [Here’s a little bonus tip for you Lexulous players out there–“cravens” is an acceptable word. Might be for Scrabble, too. Not sure.]

3. February is bleak in Wisconsin, in terms of scenery. The landscape is gray, and all the pretty young seasonals from American Players Theatre don’t start showing up until April and May. Thus, pics of Bradley Cooper can’t help but brighten things up:

Bradley Cooper at TriBeca in 2009.

Bradley Cooper at TriBeca in 2009.

2. I write a lot of sonnets for this blog and some of the subjects of those sonnets wouldn’t recognize a sonnet if it bit them in the ass. I suspect Mr. Cooper would. Not that he would see a sonnet here. And not that my sonnets bite.

Not in the ass, anyway.

But ultimately, the reason is

1. Silver Linings Playbook was a phenomenal movie. I haven’t been that moved by a movie in a long, long time. I find myself wanting to write about it and this way I won’t feel like I need to say it all in one post.

So, from now until the Oscars, I’m going to try to post something of substance about Bradley Cooper every day. Something every day, anyway.

(Picture of Bradley Cooper by David Shankbone from flickr–part of Creative Commons)

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Posted in American Players Theatre, Folks I Loves, Twenty-one Days of Bradley Cooper, Uncategorized

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Pedagogy Stew in Voice of the River Valley

Posted on February 2, 2013 | Leave a comment

In the category of New Year/New Adventure, this is my favorite so far. I’m very happy to have a column in the very cool regional publication, Voice of the River Valley. The tagline on the masthead says it pretty well: “A guide to people and events that inspire, educate, and enrich life in the River Valley area.”

That covers a lot because there IS a lot here–I’ve been here for more than twenty years, and I’m still amazed. There really does seem to be some kind of vortex that draws in interesting stuff, and I’ve never lived in a prettier place. (Sure, Missoula was gorgeous, but in a way that alarmed me the whole time I was there–I’d be driving and see MOUNTAIN in my rearview mirror and my Midwestern brain kept telling me “MASSIVE THUNDERHEAD.”)

The current publisher, Sara, is picking up nicely from the founder, Mary, and I’m happy to be a part. I’ll be posting monthly some “stewing” on pedagogy–what we teach, how we teach it, why, whether it works…. This column will typically be focused on the two ends of a spectrum I’m involved in, teaching at the college level and then volunteering at the River Valley Elementary Studio School where Wendell attends. Also, parenting involves a fair bit of educating….

The February issue is available in more than 100 locations around southwest Wisconsin, and also online. The January issue contained this piece, which I’m happy to reprint here (I’ll always wait to post one until the next issue is out–and I’m making almost no changes here, except to add links or correct minor things I meant to say differently.)

ALSO NOTE: I’m happy to take requests. What should I write about as I’m stewing over pedagogy that applies to both college and our public schools?

_____

Howard Gardner’s groundbreaking book, Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences, came out in 1983, the year I graduated from high school. I saw no evidence of its existence in my college or graduate school courses—as an English major, I was supposed to demonstrate what I knew through exams and essays, and I did a pretty good job of it. In creative writing classes, I was supposed to experiment, but on the page, with regular ink. I did occasionally ask professors to assess my learning in ways they hadn’t announced in the syllabus. I once wrote a poem in response to John Betjeman’s “The Conversion of St. Paul” (better than anything I was writing in creative writing) and asked if the professor would grade it instead of the essay he’d assigned, which wasn’t going well. He was a sweet man and said yes, “But try harder to write an essay next time.”

It wasn’t until I’d been teaching full time for several years that I began to hear about multiple intelligences (or their close cousin, learning styles) from two directions: my university colleagues, typically with much derision; and students, some of whom were very aware of what they were good at and how they learned best. In fact, I’ve had several students over the years tell me they were kinesthetic learners and thus not good essay-writers, and could they have an alternate assignment? (For irony, see previous paragraph.)

I’m interested in how students learn, though, so I do not meet multiple intelligences and learning styles (and I know they’re not the same thing) with the same skepticism as many of my colleagues. Asking about this recently, one common response from my colleagues ran along the lines of, “Wasn’t that all debunked?”

In a 2009 article called “Matching Teaching Style to Learning Style May Not Help Students,” author David Glenn reported on research that shows that although students may have a preferred learning style, the crucial thing, in terms of learning, is whether the teacher has designed the class to best teach whatever concept or skill is currently on the docket. To me, this is the best match-up of theory and practice.

I volunteer a couple of hours a week in my son’s second-grade classroom at River Valley Elementary Studio School, usually during literacy time. His teacher, Nicole Steigenberger, has done a terrific job of setting up a variety of activities for students to choose from, and she nudges them, gently, over the course of a week, to read to themselves, to a partner, draw in response to written descriptions, write in response to pictures with prompts, write their own stories, etc. They also take online assessments periodically, and they get a few minutes just before lunch to do literacy apps on the iPad. These students are not only learning to read and write. They’re learning to learn and demonstrate their knowledge in a variety of ways, which, given the amount of learning they have ahead of them, is almost as important as learning to read and write.

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Posted in Pedagogy Stew, Spring Green, Teaching, Uncategorized, Work Life

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Looking for Wow

Posted on January 31, 2013 | 4 comments

First Baptist Church in Madison, Wisconsin (where I no longer officially belong but will always, in some way, BELONG) once hired a youth minister who had a nose ring, so, I liked her immediately. Then also she has a son the same age as mine. And then she quoted Anne Lamott in a sermon and called her the writer of the fifth gospel. BOOM! That’s one of the ways I know I’m in the same tribe as someone—massive respect and affection for Anne Lamott.

I read her latest, Help, Thanks, Wow, on the iPad, with the Kindle app, and I liked the book a lot. (Also liked reading digitally–If my son hadn’t essentially taken over the iPad, I might be reading more books that way. )

I like her definition of prayer:
“It is communication from the heart to that which surpasses understanding.”

I am charmed that this might annoy, unnerve, or offend any number of people I care about, who see prayer differently than I see it–all across the spectrum from pretty conservative-evangelical-fundamentalist Christians who’d be bothered not to see God in a definition of prayer (if they haven’t hidden me entirely on our social-media-in-common sites) to my atheist friends, who politely avert their eyes when I get going on the Jesus talk.

I particularly like this paragraph:
“Prayer can be motion and stillness and energy—all at the same time. It begins with stopping in our tracks, or with our backs against the wall, or when we are going under the waves, or when we are just so sick and tired of being psychically sick and tired that we surrender, or at least we finally stop running away and at long last walk or lurch or crawl toward something. Or maybe miraculously, we just release our grip slightly.”

Oh, does that resonate with me–both the need to release my grip AND the way that prayer helps me do that.

Her categories of prayer are helpful, though of course she’s not the first to come up with these. There’s “help,” for which we have the formal name of “intercessory prayer.” And then “thanks,” which some would call “prayers of thanksgiving,” and then “wow,” which I would probably call praise, but seems to be the official category of “adoration.”

Or is it?

This article, “Prayer and Subjective Well-Being: An Examination of Six Different Types of Prayer” lists these: “adoration, confession, thanksgiving, supplication, reception, and obligatory.”

Here’s how Whittington and Scher define prayers of adoration: “prayers focused on the worship of God, without any reference to circumstances, needs, or desires.” This is partly what Lamott means by “wow,” and it also coordinates with my new favorite song “Bring Your Praise,” by Trin-i-tee 5:7 (and if the fact that I love this song isn’t proof the Lord works in mysterious ways, well then….)

“If you want to see amazing, all you got to do is praise Him,” they sing. And also, “he can do anything, but he wants you to praise him.” (Which makes God sound a little needy and high-maintenance, frankly, which makes the Gnostic idea that Christianity’s creator-God has some issues. I always figure he was a second son, based on his dismissiveness about primogeniture in Genesis….)

Here’s the definition Whittington and Scher use for a prayer of “reception.” They quote another researcher, who says reception is “characterized by a contemplative attitude of openness, receptivity, and surrender, resulting in experiences ranging from peaceful/quiet to rapture/ecstasy.”

Sounds more like WOW, doesn’t it?

So I’ve been singing that song, “if you wanna see amazin’, all you gotta do is praise him” and essentially looking for wow.

I wrote one “help” prayer and posted it recently: “Prayer for a New Semester.” And of course there have already been school shootings, so immediately there’s the issue of “when God says no” and the question of whether my lack of faith is why my requests don’t get granted 100% of the time. (I found this sermon very comforting–I’ve long made the connection of “if faith is a gift, it’s not my fault I don’t have it.”)

I followed that up with a “thanks” prayer, “Grateful for my Crazy Life.”

Here are a couple of stabs at wow:

Stopping in Lone Rock

If I lived in L.A. traffic would drive me nuts,
And I don’t like Chicago’s bus-to-bus-to-el routes,
But yesterday’s commute sucked big-time, massive
Sucking—whereas usually my rural drive
Is lovely—how many eagles this week? A pileated?—
Yesterday it was snow-slick on the way in
And on the way home I nearly went snow-blind.
Today I worked from home, fever-breathing with a cold.

At one point I thought, “So this is zen driving” because
Really, I was guessing where the road was.
In the distance, there simply was no road in sight.
Up close, you could hazard a hypothesis.
I had to stop in Lone Rock to buy sunglasses—
My eyes were exhausted from staring at white on white on white.
____

All right, so it’s also a prayer of complaint (not a problem–there are whole Psalms that do that, right?), but the last six lines I was trying to convey the wow I felt, even though it wasn’t a very blissy wow.

I’m not such a fan of winter.

But I do use these cold days and nights (it’s supposed to get down to -11 tonight) to practice wow. One of the ways I do it is looking at frost on windows and seeing how many images are there that start with the letter “f.” Feather, flame, fire, fractal….By the time spring gets here, the list is usually pretty long. It’s not gratitude. Gratitude, from me, about winter–almost never going to happen. (MINUS ELEVEN.) But I can, occasionally, get to wow about it.

Frost in my bedroom window

Frost in my bedroom window

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Posted in Bloem or Pog, God Stuff, Searching, Uncategorized

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Grateful for my Crazy Life

Posted on January 26, 2013 | Leave a comment

Just this once, right now, and I wouldn’t say
It will happen again, I’m glad I have too much to do.
My crazy job is almost never boring.
I have the kind of brain that makes big plans
Involving levels and layers and long-term fun
With multiple players and organizations, and—well,
I tell you what—it makes me feel alive.
And tending to the people that I love
Takes time, but look at who I love—a full
Roster of family and friends and coworkers, a whole town
Of creative, funny people. And I LOVE Things,
More than a To Do list, more than software.
My house is messy, yes, because we choose
To read and play instead of clean. What a way
To be allowed to live. I’m grateful. At least today.

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Posted in Bloem or Pog, Burnout, Creativity, Daring Greatly, Family, God Stuff, Poetry, Procrastination, Spring Green, Teaching, Work Life, Writing

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Prayer for a New Semester

Posted on January 23, 2013 | 4 comments

No massacres, no guns at all, no death,
No sharp-turn, black-ice, driving-to-work car wrecks,
No suicides, no overdose, no heart attacks,
No valiant battle with cancer lost, no death.

And also just this one semester,
could everybody get to class on time?
Including me? And then, once we’re all there,
could we try to stretch each other’s minds?

This is a prayer for brilliant course design,
for follow-through, for good assignments meant
to let my students show me all they’ve learned,
not sort them into piles of can and can’t.

May we focus most on what matters most,
and may deep learning grab us in our hearts.

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Posted in Bloem or Pog, God Stuff, Poetry, Teaching, Uncategorized

Car Sonnets, Bloems, and Pogs

Posted on January 20, 2013 | Leave a comment

UPDATE: I no longer write sonnets while driving. Nothing bad happened, but on reflection, it seemed so clear it was distracted driving.

Did you land here look for sonnets about cars? If you leave a comment, I’ll write you one…..

ORIGINAL POST:

Lions and tigers and bears, oh my. Kind of like that.

Also not entirely unlike “father son and holy ghost” because I side with the Orthodox idea there, that the Trinity is meant to be un-understandable, to remind us there is always going to be something we can’t fathom about God. (I can’t remember where I read that, but it’s probably from my Holy Trinity of theology–Karen Armstrong, Kathleen Norris, or Anne Lamott. Probably Kathleen Norris.)

But my list is MOST like “gypsies, tramps, and thieves,” because one person could be a gypsy AND a tramp AND a thief, or there could be lots of people fulfilling those roles.

So, to define:

A CAR SONNET is a sonnet that was written entirely, or at least begun, while I was driving, usually on my commute to work. Unless that’s illegal, in which case of course I don’t do that. Who would do that? Not me.

A BLOEM is a poem I wrote primarily to post in my blog, upon which I usually commentate in the same blog.

A POG is a poem I post in the blog, which I think could probably stand alone (even though I go ahead and commentate anyway).

Of these, I would say the bloems have the least poetential. (Poetential, adj. Meaning: Least likely to stand the test of time, or the smell test, or the urge-to-revise test, or the put-in-a-manuscript urge.) They’re in response to current events or current concerns. Here’s a recent example of a bloem, a poem I wrote because I was so freaking excited that David Bowie had a new album & a new single.

And another bloem, about Ding Dongs.

Here’s a recent example of a pog (much of which I probably did write in the car as I drove to work, but I was writing only one line a day, so that didn’t take the whole commute). Since “Sustainable Chaos” is my life motto, this is an important poem, and like other pogs, has some level of poetential. One of my goals when I work on my full-length manuscript of poetry (either Summer 2013 or Fall 2013 or Winter 2014) is to look back through the blog and see which poems still excite me. I wonder if this one will.

Here’s another pog, called “Yes. No–wait” in which I have a conversation with competing voices. And which I do have in mind for a particular collection, a chapbook called “Each Other’s Anodyne,” all about teaching and work-life balance issues. It has a pretty particular audience in mind, and we may try to publish some to raise money for my sabbatical (speaking of work life issues).

And “On Conscientiousness” is an important topic for me, and I do love this poem.

Not surprisingly, “Truck Pulling the Moon” was written while I was driving.

And another car sonnet (not surprisingly, I’m often thinking of work when I’m commuting), called “The Moan Tax.”

I’m not entirely sure why these distinctions(and non-disctinctions, since a car sonnet could be a pog or a bloem) are important to me. Especially since I’ve realized one of my biggest weaknesses as a poet is the ability to view my work in terms of audience–who will love what? What should get submitted where? What will stand the test of time? (Or the smell test.)

All I know is what I do, and that I feel compelled to share, and thus–poetry is a part of my blog.

(I’ve meditated on this once before, sans categories, here.)

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Posted in Bloem or Pog, Car Sonnets, Creativity, Poetry, Publishing, Sustainable Chaos, Uncategorized, Writing