Their writing

Love, siblings, speaking up, Mary Oliver, drawing, mind, autobiography, waking up, Sweden, how to get him to talk to me, being a 20-year-old male, a shuffle-text of pet stories--that's what I got. Most of it was quite lovely, sometimes dazzingly so. Almost always genuine, if occasionally too obvious.

This weekend I'll finish work on the class anthology: Playground. Here's my intro:

We went around the table, each choosing a favourite playground apparatus to write about. I was amazed when my choice, the giant slide, was not selected. (I must be as out of date about this topic as I am about most others, I thought. Those giant slides of decades past—they’re probably not even legal anymore.)
That was reason enough, I hoped, to get involved as one of the 14 writers whose words you are about to read. The idea was simply to play, in writing about play. And I wanted to play with the other kids, just as I always did those many years ago in playgrounds from Herbert to Moose Jaw.
I got involved in another way—as editor. Credit the writers for the energies of memory and story, the notations of times past and passing. Blame me for tampering with what they wrote. These are smart, open, lively writers who over and over again this term exposed themselves, always appropriately, in language. It’s been my great pleasure to work with them.

English 251: Longer Writing Assignment #4, due Thursday, April 9

“The world, moist and bountiful, calls to each of us to make a new and serious response. That’s the big question, the one the world throws at you every morning. ‘Here you are, alive. Would you like to make a comment?’”
- Mary Oliver, Long Life: Essays and Other Writings

Your comment will be an expository essay.

Friday, April 3, Luther 100, 4:30

Today I'm shipping five boxes of writing stuff--everything from notebooks to publicity materials, going back 30 years--to the U Regina Archives. If you want to have a look, help yourself.

Now I've got to burn some music for the14 Tractors launch, a wine and cheese event, with a few words by yours truly. First up, "Cool Water", Sons of the Pioneers.

This Morning

Not experienced readers of Sask poetry, my Sask Literature students, in this round of essays I've got to finish marking by noon, have come to certain conclusions about poetry collections they chose to write about:

"Parenthood" is a central theme "inside the walls" of Michael Trussler's Accidental Animals.

Robert Currie's Learning on the Job offers "a general understanding of what it means to be a father, a husband and a human being".

Poems in Judith Krause's Mongrel Love are said to be "alluring".

Shelley Leedahl's A Few Words for January covers "everything from pain to poverty".

In Ring Finger, Left Hand, poems by Katherine Lawrence express "a strong voice of love, loneliness and anger".

And so on. There's lots of room to push further with such observations, of course. The main thing missing is consideration of form. Even if most of the poetry being considered is conventionally lyric in form, that fact in itself is worth noting, I'd say. These readers tend to treat form as simply a transparent servant of content.

The "old-time education" option for this assignment, by the way, was to memorize a poem and deliver it to the class, following up with discussion questions and a short written commentary. Only six chose that option.

Just for the fun of it

After reading Judith Krause's "Black Ice", a poem selected by one of my students, I got this idea. Write a short prose narrative about a car accident or close call. Now re-compose your writing into about eight two-line stanzas, six words per line. Slap a title on it. Ok, now turn your paper over and answer this question: Is this a poem?

My favourite answers:

Yes, anything can be a poem and a poem can be anything.
Well, I wouldn't normally construct a poem this way. So I would have to say not really.
I think it's a poem because I believe it is a poem.
It can be read like one.
This has the potential to be a poem.
There are no set standards to say exactly how a poem should be organized.
It conveys way too much emotion to just be called a "story".
It could be a poem if I wanted it to.
It does not make the best poem because of punctuation, form, etc.

After running those points past my students an hour from now, I'll show them a few accidental linkebreaks like these:

-seatbelt never tightened and his airbag
didn't depl0y

-the right hand lane and cuts
me off

-I felt like I had
no control

-The truck flipped
four or five times, end over

end

-sister, cousin Brittany and my Aunt
and Uncle in the other.

The final step, for now, will be to invite my students to perform a few simple edits of "punctuation, form, etc." and see what they get.

My poor students, and poor me

I want my creative writing students to listen to what I say--listen, think about, accept/reject as required. But that voice saying
-push it
-I don't think this works
-play up the intimacy
-I think this poem wants longer lines
- delete?
-don't describe, be
-why such familiar responses?
-title a bit static
-try three-lines stanzas?
-love the prose poem push
-check sounds
-swing the lines
-reduce word count by 40%

and whatever else it's always saying--forget it!

Do you believe in God?

Still on the Ratzlaff, we must consider the above questions, since Ratzlaff's book, in the manner of memoirs going all the way back to Augustine, at least, notates a transformation in matters of the spirit, for which that question is a crude point of entry.

I'm going to put this question to my students today by inviting them to respond to it in journal entries (which no one sees) and maybe even by secret ballot. I suppose I'll invite students to respond verbally, although I'm not yet sure if I want to encourage simple statements of position, one way or the other.

My point is to approximate, somehow, the process Ratzlaff covers in Backwater Mystic Blues--an exploration of what he believes and how he believes it. We've seen how bitterly dismissive he is about fundamentalist dogma of any kind, especially the kind he was raised into. We've noted his radical changes of career--mennonite preacher, Ed Psych teacher and counsellor, writer--as he moves, decade by decade, into his own mystic territory (accompanied, from time to time, by an array of mystics from various traditions, and other figures as diverse as Carl Jung and Sandra Dee). All the while he's trying to save what's worth saving from religion and psychology, and he's trying to lay down some lovely prose about it all.