Comment

Shelley I'm wondering if you say tyuning or tooning? But sorry, I have to move on to the next post, which begins:
I read Don Kerr's poem called "the fart" in his Wind Thrashing Your Heart, published by Hagios last year. Hilarious, one of several poems working that way. One of my students said he thought the poem was about secrets. "I suppose farts are secret," I found myself saying, via class chat.
So far, no response.

Next Question

What kind of music do you most want to make?

Into Thinking

I'm going to             
               claim Twilight has jazz as
                           speed a sprained ankle.

I'd like to write it better but
                      reading page 212 air
                                                yellows.

Listen to Stan Getz
                that Latin strings album
                                                call.

I shake my head sadly. Page 212
                              (taped opposite)
                                            all in the leading.

You never told me
            mind if we do
                       something different?
                      

Idea

Let's see if this works. I pass out pages ripped at random from a copy of Twilight found in my laundry room. Make something of this, I might say. I try the idea myself.
Page 163 begins "'No,' he said curtly, and his tone was livid."
Not very nuanced a characterization.
The spacing of words on the page itself cries out don't read me but I guess
lots of people do.
But on to the making of something. The poem scoops
a word or two (as much
as it can stomach) finds
grimace twice in three pages and gets
the hell away.

"On Being Ill"

Writes Virginia Woolf:
Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to view, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us by the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist's armchair and confuse his "rinse the mouth--rinse the mouth" with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us--when we think of this, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature."
Her essays are full of this sort of thing--wonders of brilliant sentences. I can't wait to run this one by my first-year students. Classes start Thursday.