William Dunbar's The Thrissil and the Rois, The Thistle and the Rose

The Poem, unpacked, with some translation from medieval Scots English to English.

The Thrissil and the Rois (Thistle and Rose), composed by William Dunbar of Scotland, is comprised of stanzas in rhyme royale form. To clarify, rhyme royale stanzas consist of seven lines, usually of iambic pentameter (typical for narratives of the time). The rhyme scheme is a-b-a-b-b-c-c and is normally made up either as a tercet with two couplets  (a-b-a, b-b, c-c) or as a quatrain with a tercet (a-b-a-b, b-c-c). 

This allowance for variance is particularly helpful in longer narratives. 

Notice that the poem uses aureate vocabulary (using both Latin and French) to glide it forward. Aureation is seen nowadays by some critics as being pretentious, however it is a method not of embellishment for embellishment’s sake but as necessary dressing. The narrative of Dunbar’s herein is presented via a quite common medieval device: dream vision. Since the poem was written to celebrate/commemorate a wedding (James IV of Scotland and Margaret Tudor of England), the embellishment of aureation and the dream vision device are appropriate.

Let’s look at the poem itself now, beginning with Dunbar’s description of Spring (also emblematic of the beginning of a married life).

Quhen Merche wes with variand windis past,

And Appryll had with hir silver schouris

Tane leif at Nature with ane orient blast,

And lusty May, that muddir is of flouris,

Had maid the birdis to begyn thair houris,

Amang the tendir odouris reid and quhyt,

Quhois armony to heir it wes delyt,

The sleeping poet has a dream in which he is addressed by the personification of May.

Me thocht fresche May befoir my bed upstude

In weid depaynt of mony divers hew,

Sobir, benyng, and full of mansuetude,

In brycht atteir of flouris forgit new,

Hevinly of color, quhyt, reid, broun, and blew,

Balmit in dew and gilt with Phebus bemys

Quhill all the hous illumynit of hir lemys.

"Slugird," scho said, "Awalk annone, for schame,

And in my honour sumthing thow go wryt,

Quhairto quod I, Sall I uprys at morrow,

For in this May few birdis herd I sing?

Thai haif moir caus to weip and plane thair sorrow,

Thy air it is nocht holsum nor benyng,

May reminds him that he had previously promised her to write a poem about the rose. 

With that this lady sobirly did smyll

And said, Uprys and do thy observance,

Thow did promyt in Mayis lusty quhyle

For to discryve the ros of most plesance.

Quhen this wes said depairtit scho, this quene,

And enterit in a lusty gairding gent.

And than, me thocht, sa listely besene,

In serk and mantill, full haistely I went,

Into this garth, most dulce and redolent,

Of herb and flour and tendir plantis sueit,

And grene levis doing of dew doun fleit.

In the garden, Nature (seen of course as a woman) sends messengers to the animals, birds and plants of the world, requiring their immediate presence, their homage. [All present were in twinkling of an eye, both beast and bird and flower, before the queen ... as embodied in the last couplet of this part.]

Scho ordand eik that every bird and beist,

Befoir hir hienes suld annone compeir,

And every flour of vertew, most and leist,

And every herb be feild, fer and neir,

All present wer in twynkling of ane e,

Baith beist and bird and flour, befoir the quene.

Nature calls the Lion forward, described as the Lion Rampant standard of Scots Kings. Notice the rich description of this kingly beast and know Dunbar, as poet of the Court, was wont to thusly honor James:

Reid of his cullour as is the ruby glance,

On feild of gold he stude full mychtely,      [on field of gold he strode most mightily.... think of royal banner]

With flour delycis sirculit lustely.

This lady liftit up his cluvis cleir,

And leit him listly lene upone hir kne,

And crownit him with dyademe full deir,

Of radyous stonis most ryall for to se,          [of radiant stones most royal for all to see]

Saying, The king of beistis mak I thee,

And the chief protector in the woddis and schawis.

Onto thi leigis go furth, and keip the lawis.

Exerce justice with mercy and conscience,

And lat no small beist suffir skaith na skornis

Of greit beistis that bene of moir piscence.

The lion is the embodiment of the duty of the King to bring justice to all of his subjects,

the humble and the more powerful.The animals therefore acclaim their new King. 

The Eagle appears to symbolize the King's plan to keep the peace within Scotland and,

perhaps, with England. Nature crowns the Eagle King of the birds, sharpens his feathers

to dart-like points, enjoining him to let no ravens, or other birds of prey, make trouble.

All kynd of beistis into thair degré

At onis cryit lawd, Vive le roy!

And till his feit fell with humilité,

And all thay maid him homege and fewté, 

Syne crownit scho the Egle, king of fowlis,

And as steill dertis scherpit scho his pennis,  [pennis = feathers]

And bawd him be als just to awppis and owlis 

As unto pacokkis, papengals, or crennis, 

And mak a law for wycht fowlis and for wrennis. 

And lat no fowll of ravyne do efferay,

Nor devoir birdis bot his awin pray.

Nature then inspects the plants and judges the spiked thistle to be 'able for war'. The thistle is crowned King of all plants with a gleaming crown of rubies.

The thistle seems to represent the King's determination to defend his Kingdom.

Nature then advises the Thistle to show discretion when judging other plants.

Upone the awfull Thrissill scho beheld

And saw him kepit with a busche of speiris.

Concedring him so able for the weiris,

A radius croun of rubeis scho him gaif.

And said, In feild go furth and fend the laif.

And sen thow art a king, thow be discreit,

Herb without vertew hald nocht of sic pryce

As herb of vertew and of odor sueit,

And lat no nettill vyle and full of vyce          [and let no nettle vile and full of vice]

Hir fallow to the gudly flour delyce,

Nor latt no wyld weid full of churlichenes

Compair hir till the lilleis nobilnes,          [compare her to the lillies’ nobleness]

Dunbar is a not-so-subtle admonisher to the King in this next part, wherein he seems to be warning the King to be done with the practice of having mistresses. He does this in the voice of Nature who praises the red-and-white rose over all the other flowers.The rose represents Margaret of England.

Nor hald non udir flour in sic denty

As the fresche Ros of cullour reid and quhyt,

For gife thow dois, hurt is thyne honesty,

Conciddering that no flour is so perfyt,          [considering no flower is so perfect]

So full of vertew, plesans, and delyt,          [so full of virtue, pleasance, and delight]

So full of blisfull angelik bewty,                  [so full of blissful angelic beauty]

Imperiall birth, honour, and dignité.               [imperial birth, honor, and dignity]

It is clear that these lines are meant to praise the lovely Margaret of England, and to serve as a warning to James that he has it all at home, and should not stray. Nature addresses the rose directly, praising her and calling her forward to be crowned.

Than to the Ros scho turnyt hir visage

And said, O lusty dochtir most benyng,

Aboif the lilly illustare of lynnage,

Fro the stok ryell rysing fresche and ying,

But ony spot or macull doing spring,

Cum, blowme of joy, with jemis to be cround,

For our the laif thy bewty is renownd.

A coistly croun with clarefeid stonis brycht,

This cumly quene did on hir heid inclois,  

Quhairfoir me thocht all flouris did rejos,

Crying attonis, Haill be thow richest Ros,

Haill hairbis empryce, haill freschest quene of flouris!

To thee be glory and honour at all houris!

The birds join the acclamation of the new Queen who is compared to a pearl which is totally expected in the poem as 'Margaret' is derived from the Latin term (margarita) for a pearl.

The commoun voce uprais of birdis small

Apone this wys, O blissit be the hour,

That thow wes chosin to be our principall,

Welcome to be our princes of honour,

Our perle, our plesans, and our paramour,

Our peax, our play, our plane felicité:

Chryst thee conserf frome all adversité! 

Now the poem switches from the dream of Dunbar to Dunbar himself.  Birdsong merges with the dawn chorus. Dunbar awakens and looks for the garden he saw in his dream but finds it gone. While half-frighted, he “begins” to write the poem. This is reminiscent of what would later be seen as a magical realism poem, much like Xanadu.

Than all the birdis song with sic a schout,

That I annone awoilk quhair that I lay,

And with a braid I turnyt me about,

To se this court, bot all wer went away.

Than up I lenyt, halflingis in affrey,

And thus I wret, as ye haif hard to forrow,

Of lusty May upone the nynt morrow.

It is the ninth of May.

This poem may be one of Dunbar’s best. It certainly engendered a fairly robust admiration for his work from James IV, who appointed him as Poet to the Court. Dunbar’s ability to connect nature (with a capital N) to the monarchy is without reproach, either then or now. I am reminded of Sir Elton John’s remake song sung at the funeral of Princess Diana, wherein he refers to her as England’s Rose. I’d like to think Sir Elton has read Dunbar’s Thrissil and Rois, but I’m not taking that leap. But I will happily claim a certain visceral intertextuality that comes from the collective unconscious. In the world of magical words and symbols, we can rest assured that there is more “out there” waiting for us if we allow ourselves to be dreamers and writers, and to pay attention to the issues of the day, happy and not so... all is the stuff of poetry.

Poet Laureate Project 2012 (winding down, gearing up)

It has been 8.5 months since I was named Poet Laureate of Rockland, Maine. In the giddy haze of that announcement, I knew that there was plenty to do. Oh sure, there are laureates (including the US and various state laureates sometimes) whose tenure is filled with appearances and bravas and claps on the back, a public presence without much of the public being involved. I am not so much one of those. I am, have always declared myself to be, a working poet. Now don't confuse this with commerce, or pay, or even stipends to write or distribute poems to the masses. It doesn't come with some kind of contract to write books.  I mean down-in-the-ditches W-O-R-K. This is my joy over writing. I love to get poems out there to people who might not have seen a poem in a very long time. I like poetry to be the surprise they get for being alive. To that end, as I reflect on the last month of the first calendar year of my laureateship, I am in review. Each of the monthly projects has put poems into people's lives in direct ways.

1. Visits to local poets' readings during May-July; it's good to support local poets in their efforts to bring their writing to the public.

2. August  

Poetry Flash Mob  (200 poems distributed on Main Street in 15 minutes by a group of 13 poets.

3. September

Labor Day Send-Off  (over 100 poems of travel and farewell to departing visitors on the southbound bus and to those folks checking out of our historic inns)

4. October

Halloween Day... Poems and Pumpkins at the Library in the morning.

Poetry and pumpkins at Mrs Gould's 3rd grade class at South School, Rockland, from noon-2PM.

5. November

Attended and read at the Veterans Day event at the Dowling Walsh Gallery; this event was organized and hosted by our previous Poet Laureate, Kendall Merriam. He is a vet and this is a project he began during his two years as PL.

 Poems for the Palate   Thanksgiving week... nearly 500 poems distributed in packets to local eateries and inns; poems of thankfulness and poems about food.

6. December  

GUINNESS EVENT    On the day of Solstice, Dec 21, I will attempt a marathon reading at the Library. I will start reading aloud at 9AM (when the library opens) and keep reading until 5 PM (when the library closes). This reading in public by a single poet has not been recorded by Guinness as far as I can tell. I am still working on getting the needed paperwork to have this recorded and thus set a baseline record.


Thus will end 2012, and I am already planning for 2013.  Here are a couple hints as to what you can expect:

In January, I will launch a project The Poetry Box. I will install a box (the kind realtors use for flyers at homes) in the library where poems will be left for people to exchange one for another or simply just help themselves. I will keep it stocked from January until April (poetry month... see info later on that very PACKED month of activities.)

In February I will host a Sweetheart Poetry Tea, inviting poets to come and read poems of love and devotion, bringing their own sweethearts with them or reading to a long-lost love. This will be an event open and free to the public.

Keep your eyes peeled for more work with school children. In summer we hope to launch a Creative Writing Camp for students grades 5, 6, & 7. It will be free for the students and will be held at our local  middle school, with local writers and teachers as facilitators. This promises to be fun for all and to keep young minds engaged in the process of that fun!


That's enough for now. I hope you can see that being Poet Laureate is pleasurable work. I am inspired by the cooperation of local poets for the many projects I have done and will do in the future. I also thank the poets from here to California and everywhere in between for sending poems when I put out a call for a specific kind of poem for a project. They are all the backbone of poetry, and I couldn't do this without them!

Four words and a discussion on "Flyting"

I am a word freak. No doubt about that. Some people quilt or knit in front of the TV. I prefer finding interesting words and figuring out how to use them in poems and other writings. Today, looking up some information on my ancestor, Scot poet, William Dunbar, I discovered 4 words and came up with a poem analysis of a famous poem in which he is a participant (see below flyting).

Words:

1. Gleg (adjective)  means sharp-witted or intelligent
From that comes gleg-gabbit which means smooth-tongued.

OK so now I'm intrigued. Gleg might find its use in some poems where a rhyming word is needed, particularly in an ars poetica wherein I am striving to unveil the poetic process itself. Can you imagine how I might use gleg-gabbit that way? Hmmm. I'm starting to get itchy-fingered here and start writing that poem.

Certainly I'd love to be thusly described. Am I gleg-gabbit? Have I the quality of gleg?

2. Makar (noun)  means poet or bard. The qualities of a makar include quickness of expression, concision of expression (there go the darned adverbs and adjectives!). A makar creates quality, controlled, formal poems.

OK the intrigue grows. Am I in any way to be included in this illustrious group? Am I up to the poetic legacy of my ancestor who is legendary as a makar? I want to be known thusly. I really do.

3. Aureation (noun)

From gold. Means "to make golden." This is a device in rhetoric or poetry that involves a gliding or heightening of diction in one language by the use or introduction of terms from another. Consider this poem in which I use a French idiom to heighten the music of the wind's bluster. I use the idiom (It's a blustery day) as the title and immediately define it in the first line, first phrase:

Le vent souffle en bourrasques

It’s a blustery day, my head full of cotton

clouds and blue skies, lies

you once told have blown away like leaves

that died in November. Now we lie

under a maple, listening to the sap run

against our beating hearts. Tell me sweet

that you will stay. Le vent souffle en bourrasques

my darling; hold me close and stay.

Some critics believe aureation is an abomination, an unnecessary boasting of one's gleg as it were. Some critics think aureators are just showing off. What do YOU think? [talk among yourselves and then comment!]

4. Flyting (noun) is a kind of poem used in medieval times (when Dunbar was writing a performing his poetry) as a way to "roast" or insult another person, in Dunbar's case even King James of Scotland. His poem The Rose and the Thristle, Dunbar is calling out the monarchy for its self-centerdness and its excesses. Luckily for him, the King was flattered. 

The word, flyting, comes from flyta (meaning provocation) and flitan (meaning quarrel) and refers to a ritual poetic exchange of insults. Dunbar was a master of flyting. But he was not alone in his mastery.

In the dual poem (The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedie) there are two exchanges. Dunbar opens the verbal, poetic battle with a three-stanza address to his commissar, heaping lofty scorn on the poetic pretensions of Kennedy.  Kennedy shoots back in three stanzas of his own, an address (very pointed and personal) to Dunbar, admonishing him to bide his wheesht. Undaunted, Dunbar unleashes a sustained poetic attack  in no fewer than 25 stanzas; Kennedy counters with an equally sustained reply, topping Dunbar's 25 with 38. And so the battle rages on and on, with each taunting, insulting and provoking the other in turn.

There is a great show of outrageous verbal glegness by both makars ending with with a showy verbal exchange in which are found the doubling and tripling of rhymes and intense alliterative language.

Evill farit and dryit, as Denseman on the rattis... (The Flyting, l.51)

Structurally, Dunbar uses the standard eight-line ballade stanza for his major attack, but his opening stanzas use the variant rhyme scheme ababbccb.

It is this variant that Kennedy employs throughout in both of his replies. The lines are pentameter, 5 feet of meter, 10 syllables in all.

It is interesting to study the content of the insults in this flyting: There are seen definite strategies of mock character assassination. Accusations even involve the capital crimes of theft, treason, and heresy [sounds a bit like what is going on in political circles and among talk-show pundits like Limbaugh and Hannity et al]. At certain points in the poem, there appears a potentially dangerous sense of political frisson. Kennedy actually describes the Dunbar coat of arms as a noose replete with "Hang Dunbar" written underneath. 

Most of the insults thrown by Dunbar are matched in kind by Kennedy, balancing the poem as to its overall structure. The insults are graphic and personal. Both cast doubt on the other's poetic skill; Kennedy states that while he ascends Mt. Parnassus to imbibe the insiprational waters, Dunbar goes in early spring to a farm pond and drinks of frogspawn.

Dunbar characterizes Kennedy as speaking in a rough and barbarian-style dialect, as well as being physically hideous and shriveled, and as being poor and hungry. Kennedy is no slouch in the insults department either, suggesting Dunbar was a dwarf, descendant of Beelzebub and having no control of his bowels, even to the point of nearly sinking a ship in which he was traveling. 

Anthologies often print Dunbar's portion alone, but the battle between the two makars was evenly matched. According to some, Dunbar may be stronger in his bombast, while Kennedy seems to exercise tonal subtlety. Even if no actual images of either man have survived, this flyting may indeed be the portraiture of these two well-armed gleg-gabbit makars.

Thus ends my afternoon of verbal delight. I am feeling full and satisfied. I hope that you take time to gleg this post and comment in your very best manner!


Carol B, hopeful gleg-gabbit makar 

"Where it's at" or why grammar faux pas make me crazy

I officially moved back to Maine in 2006. Upon my first trip to the grocery store for "just a few items," I noticed a wonderful thing: the 15 or fewer check out. Yes, that's right, the sign says "fewer" not "less." I became joyful, ebullient even. I congratulated the checker on the grammatical accuracy of the sign. I went to "Customer Service" and congratulated the manager. I knew I'd been rewarded for decades of correcting poor grammar. I'd moved to grammar paradise.

Not so fast. While the grocery store somehow miraculously does have signage that employs proper grammar, there is a glut of poor grammar spoken aloud in every area of life here. I'm referring to the penchant people have for dangling their prepositions off the ends of nearly every sentence. UGH!

"Do you know where we're at?" "Tell me where it's at." "I need to wait to see where I'm at." "He doesn't know where he's at."

Let me just say that I am AT my wits' end!

When I was still teaching college English, I was an absolute terror on this error! I corrected students right and left and would not tolerate this grammatical boo-boo, this crime against speech and writing. One day, having been corrected by me, a student offered a REASON, an EXPLANATION for the use of "at" at the end of a sentence. She asserted that the "at" gave specificity to the "where." ????huh???? Oh yes, there it is: supposedly if you are saying in general where something is, no need to use "at," but if the location is specific, you NEED the at. Once the laughter in my brain had subsided, once the incredulity of the conversation had played itself out, I simply said OH MY GOSH, are you serious? She was.

Of course this led to a great teachable moment for the entire class, most of whom actually thought her logic (their word not mine) was correct and her explanation plausible. I struck a blow for grammar that day and now former students of that class still comment to me that never ever again will they drop an "at" at the end of a sentence. Lesson learned. Dramatically so. (Do you like my virtual sentence there?)

But the "at-isms" continue to haunt my life. Here in Maine it is epidemic. I wonder if you, dear reader, are finding this to be true where you are. (NOTE: I did NOT say "where you're at" because you are already there, you are somewhere, not at somewhere)

I sit on our local school board. It is shocking to me that so many people on the board, on the staff in our district, INCLUDING principals and teachers, use the "at-ism" in everyday speech and writing. I cringe to hear this. It is like fingernails on a blackboard (Remember blackboards that were not a web-based platform for online classes?)  I digress. What is amazing to me is that anyone connected with education can so blithely and blatantly misuse grammar on a regular basis.

What is to be done? Can anything help? Or has grammar gone the way of cursive writing? (another soap box I may jump on at some point). I have no answer at this point other than to say I will continue to correct and admonish. Will you join me in stamping out the "ats" hanging on the ends of so many sentences?

31/31 December poem-a-day challenge

Fresh from the successful completion of the 30/30 November challenge, I am on a roll (bun, ciabatta, kaiser, etc).

Some folks have indicated they'd join me for a December challenge, so I am posting 31 prompts here. Feel free to copy them and keep them handy so you are on top of what is being written each day. Now this does put a bit of pressure on for Christmas Day. I KNOW you are up to the task.

1. Write a poem about sudden, inclement weather.
2. Write about a school experience.
3. Write about a piece of furniture.
4. Write a poem about a gain.
5. Write about a wine or ale or beer.
6. What is the first thing you see when you open that "junk drawer" or at the back of a little-used closet.
7. Write about a poison.
8. Write a poem about what is just outside your door or window today.
9. Use 4 words from a book you have read recently. Open the book to page 9 and find the words there.
10. Write about a place you visited as a child.
11. Write a poem about a long-ago love.
12. Write about an item of clothing or jewelry.
13. Write a poem about a deal or bargain you made or would make.
14. What is left behind as winter arrives? Write about missing it, or about being glad it's gone.
15. Write a poem inspired by the phrase, in the front row
16. Find a family photo (from a while back) and write about one of the people in the photo who seems different from everyone else.
17. Write a poem that contains opposites.
18. Write a triolet.
19. Write about a fight.
20. Write a poem about a piece of mail you received today.
21. Listen to a song, pick out a phrase from that song and write a poem about it.
22. Choose a lesser holiday (or one from another culture) and ask yourself 4 questions about it. Then write a poem from your answers.
23. Using some or all of the following words, sleep, stones, fury, careful) write a poem about making changes.
24. Write a poem from the perspective of the first minutes after waking or the last minutes before falling asleep.
25. Write a lament.
26. New house, new city, new job.... write about newness or change
27. Use the starter, I catch up with you
28. In a library book you've just checked out is an envelope... what is there? Write a poem about surprising news.
29. Name a river, write about it.
30. Write a poem that is a premonition or warning.
31. Write your final poem of the year. What will this be? Poet's choice.

Poetry = Happy

I've been deep into my Wilbur Project (not actual title of eventual result) and am now reading some prose pieces. I recently came upon the "poetry = happy" piece ["Poetry and Happiness, "Prose Pieces, 1953-1976, Wilbur, p. 119] on the day of the recent election. In fact, this writing probably saved me from a state of total apoplexy that day. I freely admit that I have been over the top in terms of watching TV and reading political articles and posts. I have invested so much of myself as to have temporarily gone "off the cliff" in terms of my own writing. The writing I had been doing prior to election day was iffy at best. Some major editing is in order I am sure.

R-E-L-A-X  was what I told myself, but I failed to follow my own good advice. Simply put: it [election] seemed to be too darned important in the long term to relax and let things "go to hell in a hand cart." I saw arguments among friends, grumpy and disgruntled candidates and supporters, and even saw some members of my church getting off the message of love and acceptance into a rigid stance on marriage equality, a judgmental and ignorant stance against LBGT folks who see marriage, CIVIL marriage, as a civil rights  issue. I saw a trend toward voting against "sane" self-interest in health care and social issues. It worried me.

But there was Richard Wilbur ready to reassure me. There he was in his own voice letting me know that my refuge is, and always can be, poetry. Poetry equals happy. It equals the kind of happy that knows no political boundaries or fences. It equals the kind of happy that sees color in nature and not in people. It equals the kind of happy that lets us sleep soundly, without fear. It is a living, breathing dictionary of words, available for all without judgment. There for the using. There to illuminate even the darkest moments.

On Election Day, as I was working the polling place along side Republican and Independent colleagues, I noticed a calm happiness in these volunteers while serving our voters by smiling at them when handing them their ballots. I reminded the high schoolers who came to help that it is good to thank each voter for voting. These students jumped right in and did this. I saw a sense of poetry in how they did that, with happy smiles. It made a visible difference in our voters. I saw a sense of poetry in the voters too, from the man who told me his wife had died a week earlier and "really wanted to vote in this election" to the man smelling to the high seas of fish guts, to the young poll worker whose 18th birthday it was and who was waiting for her mother to come so she could be there for her daughter's first ever vote. It was pure poetry to see the patient lines of people, breathing in and out and eager to make their voices known. It was pure poetry that, finally, in my head words were beginning to come forward to be counted. I was becoming a poem as I sat and watched and helped.

Late on Election Day, after I returned to the polling place for the hand-counting of ballots kicked out by the machine, I saw poetry and rhythm in how that counting process was done, in teams of GOP, DEM, and INDEPENDENTS making sure each vote was scrutinized for voter intent so it would count. As ballots moved through fingers and passed from one team member to another, I heard a rustle of democracy that is a purely poetic sound. This sift of ballots and rub of pencils checking lists was musical, poetical, and magical.

I went home from the polling place at midnight, having given myself the day to participate in living poetry. I was happy (not just because of the results of the election) because I had discovered a poetry OFF the page that equates with a national rhythm, something we can hear breathing like the wind if we stop long enough to be observant, to pay attention.

Richard Wilbur reminds me (us) of what Robert Frost once said "the earth's the right place for love." I say poetry on and off the page is not just equal to happy therefore, it is more than up to the task of human love. It is earth and spirit and person, and all of this is the gestalt of "happy."

Teacher Evaluations Should Be Done By.....?

"... the solution being considered by many states — having the government evaluate individual teachers — is a terrible idea that undermines principals and is demeaning to teachers. If our schools had been required to use a state-run teacher evaluation system, the teacher we let go would have been rated at the top of the scale.

Education and political leaders across the country are currently trying to decide how to evaluate teachers. Some states are pushing for legislation to sort teachers into categories using unreliable mathematical calculations based on student test scores. Others have hired external evaluators who pop into classrooms with checklists to monitor and rate teachers. In all these scenarios, principals have only partial authority, with their judgments factored into a formula.

This type of system shows a profound lack of understanding of leadership. Principals need to create a culture of trust, teamwork and candid feedback that is essential to running an excellent school. Leadership is about hiring great people and empowering them, and requires a delicate balance of evaluation and encouragement. At Harlem Village Academies we give teachers an enormous amount of freedom and respect. As one of our seventh-grade reading teachers told me: “It’s exhilarating to be trusted. It makes me feel like I can be the kind of teacher I had always dreamed about becoming: funny, interesting, effective and energetic.”

Some of the new government proposals for evaluating teachers, with their checklists, rankings and ratings, have been described as businesslike, but that is just not true. Successful companies do not publicly rate thousands of employees from a central office database; they don’t use systems to take the place of human judgment. They trust their managers to nurture and build great teams, then hold the managers accountable for results.

In the same way, we should hold principals strictly accountable for school performance and allow them to make all personnel decisions. That can’t be done by adhering to rigid formulas. There is no formula for quantifying compassion, creativity, intellectual curiosity or any number of other traits that make a group of teachers motivate one another and inspire greatness in their students. Principals must be empowered to use everything they know about their faculty — including student achievement data — to determine which teachers they will retain, promote or, when necessary, let go. This is how every successful enterprise functions.

A government-run teacher evaluation bureaucracy will make it impossible to attract great teachers and will diminish the motivation of the ones we have. It will make teaching so scripted and controlled that we won’t be able to attract smart, passionate people. Everyone says we should treat teachers as professionals, but then they promote top-down policies that are insulting to serious educators.

If we don’t change course in the coming years, these bureaucratic systems that treat teachers like low-level workers will become self-fulfilling. As the great educational thinker Theodore R. Sizer put it, “Eventually, hierarchical bureaucracy will be totally self-validating: virtually all teachers will be semi-competent.”

The direction of education reform in the next few years will shape public education for generations to come. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has repeatedly said that in the next decade, “over 1.6 million teachers will retire,” and our country will be hiring 1.6 million new teachers. We will blow that opportunity if we create bureaucratic systems that discourage the smartest, most talented people from entering the profession.

Deborah Kenny is the chief executive and founding principal of Harlem Village Academies and the author of “Born to Rise: A Story of Children and Teachers Reaching Their Highest Potential.”

What is wrong with this? 

The first thing wrong with this and other commentaries about evaluating teachers is that we continue on the merry-go-round of tying evaluations to student "performance." In no model I have seen is there a holding accountable for performance by either parents or the students themselves. When my children were in school, I was a huge factor in their academic lives. (I say "I" because their biological father was not at all involved in school matters, not when we were together and not afterwards) We were part of the "broken home" statistic that gets thrown about: divorced, single mom of 4, living in poverty with no nearby family or an involved father on the scene. But my girls did amazingly well in school (and all are successful now as adults). Why is that? 2 factors: a work ethic and involvement. Homework was done, looked at by me, turned in on time, studying happened around the table where I could help or at least be present (there was NO help from me with math). At no time did I take the attitude that the "teachers" were there to fix my kids, to stuff facts into them like sausages, to  make them "learn" or to teach to a standardized test. It WAS assumed that each would take up her own learning as her personal responsibility. I used to say, "school is your job, your report card is your paycheck." That made sense to them. Of course I also instilled in each a love of learning new things, of mastery in each task undertaken. THAT is a key factor. I recall my father saying to me, "do your best and give it your best effort." I saw him working hard every day to support our family. We were not well-off by any means; he worked overtime to make ends meet. But he and my mother insisted that we do our own work: school work. We were told that education was the key. They were not highly educated people, Dad leaving school after 8th grade to help support his mother and 7 siblings, and Mom graduating as Salutatorian of her high school class and then being a stay-at-home mom after marriage. But both promoted the notion of education as important. Both were lifelong learners in their own right. It was the message we got that propelled us forward to succeed. It was the ethic learned at home and the sense of personal responsibility we saw modeled.

This leaves me wondering what messages and modeling are being given to some students today. What is the level of parental involvement, either from dual parent homes or single parent homes? I certainly experienced both kinds of homelife with my girls, and both worked to develop and foster a satisfactory ethic for education because I made it work. I got my education with a sense that it was up to me to accomplish and succeed. So did my girls.

So before we go down the path of tying learning outcomes to teachers as a way of evaluating, retaining, or releasing them, we ought to find ways to inculcate a sense of responsibility in our students and ways to support family life. We ought to hold each student personally responsible for his/her "performance." One way is standards-based learning. Teachers as facilitators, rather than as sausage stuffers, is on the horizon if we look to this style of learning. Students will become empowered with their own learning and will take ownership of the process with teachers there to lead and assist. It is a fact that we are still using the same teaching model developed in 1893: teach all students the same materials in the same way. Isn't it time to finally admit that all students are not the same? Isn't it time to let each learn in his/her own way? Isn't it time to stop "standardizing" everything and admit that our strength is in diversity? I think it is.

Fortunately, we are moving to standards-based learning. It will be a tough sell to many citizens because it shatters the old model and change is hard for many to accept, much less to embrace. But it will make a difference for our students and their (and our) futures.

Stay tuned.

STEM: and I don't mean science, math, engineering, & technology

There is a good deal of flap these days about how children learn, what they ought to be offered in school, and the resultant "results" we might see in the areas of test scores on the short term and quality of life (employment-driven in large part).

As a school board member, I deal with these ideas and willingly engage in the pursuit of better school environment, culture, experience for our students. It has been said, put forth, that we must concentrate our students' school curriculum on STEM subjects. Allegedly, we must do this to increase their post-educational chances in a competitive work world. What will be the "jobs" they might find with or without a focus on STEM? Are we preparing these students for the future where jobs they might land are not at all the jobs of this era, and perhaps jobs that do not even exist right now? For the record, this is an old saw. My parents chattered on about this when I was in school. My grandparents too. Take typing, take cooking, take public speaking. Take chemistry or mathematics. Take psychology because there are more unbalanced people in the world and that number is growing because of the evils of rock and roll.

I heard it all, argued endlessly with my father over the idea that learning to learn and being curious were more important than algebra. (Seriously it IS more important) We went back and forth constantly over how grades came about and fought about whether or not they were important markers for progress and success. It was a battle in which neither of us could declare solid victory. But what I learned from all of it was this:

Be a learner and be interested (curious); apply what you think, what you take to be valid for you based on observation and experience; make a difference for yourself and others with your ideas; be open to the world and all the things in it; be self-assured in the areas of your own accomplishment but don't be arrogant about anything.

I can happily report that these "learnings" have stood me in good stead so far. But here I am, done with child-raising and fussing over my own children's educational lives, and involved yet again with the whole, never-ending questions and attitudes. Nothing much has changed other than the current sagging state of economics (not a change exactly but a resurgence of an old problem) and burgeoning world population. Subject matter discussions still rage on with the same divide in place. What students ought to learn/study vs HOW students might learn/study. We are clearly still in the ditch here. Add to that a trend toward privatization of education in the looming and oh so real incarnation of charter schools, for-profit charter schools. It is all so confusing for people. What to do that will do the best for children, for the future of our country in a competitive world culture.

I propose the same, but refined argument I posed to my father over fifty years ago. STEM: Search, Think, Evaluate, Merge (merging method with subject matter so that a student can command and expand). I am saying that we need to focus our attention and efforts on improving, not demolishing. Why put vast cash into making new what simply needs to be reconstructed with different (more reasonable) goals in mind? We are still using the 1893 model. Want to drive around in THAT vehicle? I think not. But we are doing just that: teaching (attempting to teach) using the model that one ought to teach all students the same material in the same way. No wonder a visual learner cannot "see" the material being spoken "to" (read: AT) him or her? No wonder the hands-on, kinesthetic, learner can't get a "feel" for the material appearing on the power point in the front of the room. In 2002 I took a basic computer class (required by my university) in which we never touched a computer. Really? you ask. REALLY. Imagine taking a film class with no film viewing whatsoever. Or how about a machine tooling class with nary machine or a tool in the room. No wonder the audio learner cannot function in a class where everyone is totally quiet and no discussions ensue. No wonder we are failing our students.

I believe we need to look at not just subject matter (yes, we can still have algebra and physics) but at how students learn and how to put in place an empowerment of the learners, all of the learners, not just the "brightest" or the "struggling." We need to reevaluate how we teach and how we evaluate. We need to stop "talking about" and start doing. We need STEM (see above re-defining of the term).


[ giving you some time to let this sink into your mind..... tick tock, tick tock, tick tock.... ]

OK, you have your position on this topic clear now? Let's discuss. Oh, and I'm waiting for someone to bring up the hidden topic here:  Is our learning so utilitarian that we only care about the jobs it will bring? How can that work when the jobs on the horizon may be jobs that don't exist now?

I ask you: what about learning to KNOW? Is knowledge a luxury we just cannot afford?

The Aubade, or breaking up is hard to do

I enjoy writing and reading aubades. For purposes of instruction (for those of you who may have read these and not known what the form is) an aubade is typically a morning poem or, more specifically, a poem of parting lovers. It is usually reflective of the speaker's feelings of loss or dejection. It also somewhat celebrates the lovers' connections to one another. It can be licit or illicit love that is discussed, celebrated, mourned.

I have an affinity for the poems of morning (odd since I don't really "do" morning) and these love poems are right up my alley.

Aubades are usually somewhat short ( a few stanzas or a couple of stanzas in some cases) as if to mirror the brief moment of departure. Let me recommend a few excellent ones:

Late Aubade by Richard Wilbur
Aubade by Philip Larkin
Shadows by Judi Van Gorder
Aubade: Some Peaches, After Storm by Carl Philips

But I want to turn attention to an excellent and somewhat unusual aubade by Richard Wilbur, For C. which was published in his 2000 collection, Mayflies (Harcourt)

For C. (From Mayflies, Harcourt 2000)

This poem, comprised of 5 6-line stanzas, each of which is a quatrain and a rhymed couplet, is at its soul an aubade. It begins in the third person singular (she/he) describing a departure of lovers. She leaves him standing at a window and departs in a taxi. At face value, nothing too sorrowful is happening here, until the reader gets to the final line of the stanza, the final phrase of the stanza: forever west. Now the reader is set up for what is to come as Wilbur unfolds the laundry of the poem, the hard luck and hard decisions. Of course Wilbur isn’t going to let us off hte hook for five lines before setting forth his message. A close reading of the poem shows in the first line that there is some conflict. His use of the word clash to describe the closing of the elevator and then the word sinking in the next line both prepare us and hint at the fact that there is trouble or discord or at the least unhappiness brewing.

In stanza two, the poet moves to a bit of a somewhat general commentary on what happens when people part, but not without getting personal. He refers to saying goodbye as being on such a grand scale and yet there is the pinpoint intimacy of lovers who had only the duration of a dance. This stanza is luscious in that it is evocative and plaintive, suggesting the lovers who for whatever reasons are doomed to this one dance, would like more. Again, Wilbur chooses his words carefully to get to a somber tone. Using the word darkling is an interesting choice. In using this, he presages a tenebrific life for the lovers who must leave the one dance with knowledge of a life forgone (doomed not to be). The reader feels what they feel, sympathizing a bit with their plight even if not agreeing with the illicit nature of their desires for one another.

The next stanza is purposefully enjambed to connect the lovers to the universe, which Wilbur does with great skill in the detail of the Perseids and their flash, and more specifically in their crumble. The poet moves quickly from the light of the Perseids to the darksome fate of the lovers whose being together unravels as they know it must. This burn and crash symbolism is not an overt judgement on the lovers, but an observation of their plight, in true aubade style.

Next there is a movement to a departure dock, and readers are weighted with specifics of farewelling, i.e. grief and baggage. In using this imagery, Wilbur embodies the sorrow, the heaviness of heart that is the aubade at its foundation. He ends the stanza with the crux of the poem: what they must leave behind is a difficult love, one that flashed bright as the Perseids. (The amorous rough and tumble of their wake) I am reminded of  Wilbur’s The Writer, in which the speaker of the poem (father) wishes his daughter a lucky passage, then later wishes it harder. Life and love are hard passages. Wilbur knows this and we do too.

Wilbur shifts in stanza four to the deeply personal we. There is a shift here too in he tone of the poem. The speaker of the poem is off on a comparison between the doomed lovers and his own relationship. The poet does this in a seemingly mocking tone, stating that he and his beloved cannot share in bittersweetness, regret, in large despair. He then takes it to the grounded state of his own love: of constant spirits. They are the entrusted ones for long love, pure and righteous love. He praises the mundane but steady commitment of enduring and decorous and accepted love, then ups the ante by purporting that this staid and tame romance is an art, and is sostenuto, lasting long beyond the regular measure.

The beauty of an aubade, certainly what is accomplished in this one, is that a poet can explore not only his/her own views of love, the personal, but also can foray into the opposites, the perhaps unlucky passages of others’ loves. What this aubade does that some (many) do not do is to combine the two looks. It also accomplishes a movement from the universal (unnamed lovers in various circumstances) to the personal. Most poems dare not go there. Wilbur not only dares, but invites. 

The Interview

I am prepared. I have studied my questions very carefully. I know what it is I want to know and know therefore what to ask. 

The above seems to be a standard approach to any kind of interview. I know what it is I want to know and know therefore what to ask.  If it were that simple.

On Wednesday, October 3rd, I will ask Richard Wilbur five questions. I know what I want to know. I am prepared.

But the truth is, five questions will not be enough. Every time I read a Wilbur poem (even if it is a poem I have read a hundred times, like Love Calls Us to the Things of This World or A World Without Objects is a Sensible Emptiness), I have more questions.

What that tells me is that the poems are THAT good. Who doesn't change over time? Poems, unlike corporations, are alive forever. They represent the inner selves of their creators. They represent and present themselves to readers/listeners. An interview, a series of questions, is only able to capture where the reader and the poems are in that moment. Next year, the reader will have a different view perhaps or be in a different frame of mind or situation as he/she encounters the poems. But I have promised to ask five questions and only five. I have no wish to exhaust the poet in any way. I do not want to press him to go beyond a comfortable session. I am willing to limit. What this has done for me is quite marvelous. It has forced me to focus. It has forced me to consider what is important to me in Wilbur's work of a lifetime. Imagine an interview that is a total REview. Unwieldy and awkward. Presumptuous. Rude perhaps. Five questions is plenty. IF they are really good questions. I know what I want to know.

Now imagine a focused conversation. Meeting Richard Wilbur has been on the top of my "bucket list" for a decade and a half. This interview is more than that. As a serious poet, I want to KNOW about him as a poet, not just iconically, but as a worker over words and ideas. I think of his poem, He Was when I think of his laboring over his poems. Unlike the speaker of the poem,  I want to let myself see him as a real person. Despite a bit of admitted hero worship, I want to be aware of the reality of this man who writes the most beautiful poetry I have ever read. I believe that he has laid solid ground for so many poets and readers who have encountered his work:  Having planted a young orchard with so great care (New and Collected Poems, 1988, He Was, p. 332, line 13).

I want to see his poems as perhaps he intended them to be seen and known. Oh I am not going to ask him what made him think of writing this poem or that poem. I know why we write, what gets to us that makes us unable to stop writing. I want instead to know how the world, filled with things and sensibly full at that, drives him to save it on paper. I want to ask about how he and my father both served in WWII and came home alive to make families and go on despite what they saw of war. I want to find out how my father, a dropout at eighth grade, decided to write a poem in 1992 when he revisited his foxhole and the place where he was captured, even though he never wrote another poem before or after. I hope to discover the genealogy of poetry that Wilbur and my father share.

Moreover, I want to listen to his voice as we talk, and have it in my head as I write about his poems or read them in the future. I want to be in the room with that big vocabulary and those big ideas about the world. I want, above all things, to be able to write about his work in a way that honors it and him.

I am prepared. I have studied my questions very carefully. I know what it is I want to know and know therefore what to ask.

Welcome to a Beheaded Thursday

Have you ever awakened to the feeling of being disconnected to everything around you? It's like the head you laid on the pillow the night before has been severed and remains in the dream state while the body gets up, dresses itself and moves on to the day. Welcome to a beheaded Thursday.

Actually, I'd rather have the head part going onward and leave the body in sleep. The body needs so much tending: feeding, washing, dressing, brushing teeth, all that necessary "stuff" of morning. For me, today was one of those "shot out of a canon" mornings. I had forgotten to pick up the farm share yesterday afternoon, mostly because the head was on duty and in the world of poetry. So, my hubby, who normally gets up early woke me to remedy my faux pas. I threw on clothing (do I like what I'm wearing right now? NO) and drove to pick up the goodies from the farmer who is by fall and winter a teacher. I think that redeems my boo-boo from yesterday. But the point here is that the body was up shockingly early and the head was not ready for prime time. The head, you see, was working late which required the body to hang around the office.

I'm prepping for the big interview with poet Richard Wilbur, which is one day less than a week from now. The head is revved up with possible questions and a desire to read more of Wilbur's poems before the interview, just to be better prepared and to be completely IN the work. The body, however, got worn out in a hurry and pushed itself beyond the normal late night limits of a body and then had to jerk itself up and out way too early. What happens when I have these late night sessions is that the body needs to rest more the next day and the head needs to be a work while this is going on. This morning the head stayed home while the body drove off into the sunshine for veggies and a chicken. Beheaded Thursday indeed.

I am happy to report however, that the head is awake now and replete with dreamed interest and materials. This happens. Dreaming, I can vouch, is a helpful state for writers. Much happens in the head during REM sleep. I am lucky that the part of my brain which works as a ghost-writer has a photographic memory. I awakened with some great ideas for the interview and a sense of things being pretty well jelled, save for the fifth question to ask Wilbur (I said I'd limit the interview to five questions).

A fascinating thing about the beheaded state is that Fate sometimes intervenes and brings a serendipity along to help. This happened today and took the persona of my 20 year old grandson, Christopher who just happened to spend part of last evening in discussion with his college mates over a Wilbur poem, Still, Citizen Sparrow as well as Wallace Stevens' anecdote of the jar poem. Christopher and I ended up in  a brief chat on FB a bit ago about these two poems and poets, with my asserting that Wilbur and his poem far outdo Stevens and his. (No disagreement there from Brilliant Grandson). The resultant serendipity: I asked Christopher if he had a question he'd like me to ask Wilbur next Wednesday, a question HE might ask if he were there with me. Fate, in the person of my grandson, has now provided me with the fifth question. I had four solid ones before this morning and now I am ready. The question he posed fits perfectly as a segue from one of my questions. AHA!

The whole grandson in the mix part of the upcoming interview is a wonderful thing. First of all, it reinforces for me that Wilbur is not passé as some in my grad school program were wont to suggest. (Aaaargh, meter: just making it OLD was the hue and cry)

More important than that, it shows that generations after generations are still asking wonderful questions of poets and poems.

Even more important than both of those things is the relationship I have in poetry realms with Brilliant Grandson. He may not write poetry (YET), but he loves reading and thinking about it. It's a start.

The body is now demanding breakfast. It's 1039 AM so I guess I ought to meet the demands. The head, however, is grumbling about how much there is to think about before next Wednesday.

Beheaded Thursday indeed!

The work ahead

Well, today will be a big day for me. I will phone Richard Wilbur to set up the appointment he has agreed to regarding my work on my study of his complete poems. He has agreed to answer five questions. Of course this presumes I have five excellent questions for him. I have been thinking long and hard what it is I want to ask him, what I want to know about his work. I could seriously spend the entire interview time asking questions about what I consider to be five of his best poems (I will list them later). But if I did that, I would miss getting to his view on poetry and on the world his poems inhabit. So I will spring forward into my questions, armed with those poems that might be reference points for the five things I will ask him.

I have loved the poems of Wilbur for a long time. They have a majesty and mastery of diction for one thing. I read a poem and immediately begin asking myself how he "did that." I want to know about his line breaks, his way into and through a poem, his sense of musicality, his ideas about revision. I want to be inside his head. My own head is spinning a bit at the idea that shortly I will be sitting one on one with the greatest American poet of our time. His "career" has spanned over seven decades if not longer (he is 92) and he's been US Poet Laureate, won not one, but two Pulitzers, has been massively published. He had a long and happy marriage to the girl of his dreams and they had a lovely family together. He has gone to war and come home again to write about it. For me, this rich and fruitful lifetime has given him and us as his readers a microcosm of the American experience. We only need to pick up a few poems to see our own place in the world he describes. It is this very thing that makes me want to share my own experience of his poems with others. Where do I think he stands in the world of American poetry? At the top of it all.

I therefore have embarked upon this larger-than-I-thought project, to read and annotate every poem (or nearly every poem) of the great man and write a "biography" of the poems. Not a biography of Wilbur per se, but of his writing. I want it to become a conversation I have with readers and poets of this age. I want to inflame other readers with a love of the poems that so inflame me and inform my own writing every day. Will this be some dreary academic effort? By no means. I hope it will be a conduit of reflection over the work, a way "in" for others. So, the five questions. Hmmmm, the five questions. I have to focus on the five questions and stop being nervous about the meeting. I can do this.

Oh, so you might be asking yourself which five of his poems I consider his best. Here they are, not in any particular order save the first, which I consider to be as close to a perfect poem as one might get.

Love Calls Us to the Things of This World
The Writer
First Snow in Alsace
To An American Poet Just Dead
The House

I must say that, with except for the first poem on the list, I might almost exchange any of the next four with four others. I choose these because they have done something visceral to me as I read them. The last on this list has especially affected me. It is a poem that alludes lovingly to Wilbur's wife, now deceased. It suggests a loneliness and a longing to be reunited with her, while realizing now is not the moment. It is poignant, but not at all maudlin. That's the thing about Wilbur: he can DO that with such grace and deliberateness that we do not get annoyed and call him "confessional." We simply sigh and understand him. We who are poets sigh, understand him, and want to write LIKE him.

As I sit here writing this, my eyes wander to the battered copy of his New and Collected Poems, replete with the word COYOTE stamped on it from my undergraduate university bookstore. I itch to get back into the poems. Today, however, I will read and annotate poems from his last two books, Mayflies (2000) and Anterooms (2010). I'm also keen on knowing if he is sitting at his own desk today, writing something new.

RHE poems: Ideal for Ferns

RHE poems: Ideal for Ferns

Buying a Degree? I think not.

This post is in response to the blog by Dawn Potter which I read today.

Dawn includes a comment about poets who "buy a degree for the sake of a job..." Overall, her blog post is filled with interesting points about the tough job of writing. But... buying a degree??? I have a problem with this.

The statement implies that those poets who get degrees in the genre buy them, and that these degrees are gained sans hard work. Furthermore it implies that somehow these "degreed" poets are not serious poets. My MFA in Poetry was HARD ACADEMIC WORK, filled with the rigor required of any degree work. This was in addition to the creative impulses and endeavors attached to an art. In no way is the blog post's generalizing statement about buying degrees accurate. It is also pretty demeaning of those who do the difficult work of an MFA. It also sets up a "them vs us" situation between poets who have degrees and those who do not have degrees which is not at all helpful.

I do agree that academia has attempted over many decades to subsume poetry, to make it the property of the academy. Dana Gioia got it right in his essay, Can Poetry Matter, which speaks to that problem specifically. The essay rightfully accused academia of trying to own poetry and keep it unavailable for the populous. The essay got him metaphorically and actually booed for a long time. BUT, it brought to the fore an attention to the notion of what and who makes poetry that is lasting— a worthy sacrifice for him which has been somewhat costly over time. His blackballing by many institutions as to becoming a part of the "canon" was and is worth it to him. He is a wonder of a poet and successful in the realms of poetry OUTSIDE the university (and inside in some cases). What cannot be denied is that he took a path to poetry AWAY from academia. He was a successful businessman who knew poetry was his "real life." So he wrote. Still he writes. Check out his newest collection, Pity the Beautiful, to see some fine poetry. Or look at his libretto for Nosferatu to see stunning work. I recommend Nosferatu's Serenade.

Seems to me the point here is to keep doors open wide for poets who do not choose the academic path. We must not let universities or colleges presume ownership of the genre and its successes. But it is a choice each poet who is serious about getting her/his work read and appreciated must make. To degree or not to degree...

Poets may go down a path of singular effort in solitude, making whatever inroads they can to get the work out there OR they may choose a more academic path getting an MFA. No matter the path, it is still about the work itself when all is said and done, HARD work. No matter the path, it is LIFELONG work. My point here is that it is a new day and many poets do NOT go to the degree as their path, finding acceptance and success in that choice. Many others choose the degree path and still struggle to find acceptance and success. Struggle is struggle. We all do what we can to get the work out there and be successful in our chosen art.

My MFA may have opened up a few doors, but I still struggle to get the best work written, to get it to the right places, and to get my reputation as a POET to be based upon the work, not upon whether or where I earned my degree (EARNED being the operative word here). I work with the same rigor as any other poet who focuses on the work and on a continual learning process in the art.

It is of course true that a degree can lead to a job. Most poets do not have a salary behind the scenes for them (a working spouse, a benefactor, legacy or inheritance) and so must work to put food on the table. A job helps do that. In some ways, the "job" is a detriment to the writing as was my college teaching job which took so much of my time it was difficult to find writing time and even more difficult not to let the stress of that job interfere with being creative. At any rate, the bottom line seems to be that creativity, and poetry in specific, needs to be seen as part of the aesthetic, not a means to another end. To say that degreed poets buy their way in is an unhappy thing at best, an insult at worst.

It is noteworthy here perhaps to comment on other degrees which might lead to jobs. Are students now at some university studying engineering or chemistry, buying their degrees? Is Dawn Potter's son who just started college doing that? Or are they and is he preparing for life work? If those degrees lead to jobs and not to poems, are they more or less successful? If all degrees (higher education) were FREE, would Potter be claiming that poets' degrees were somehow more acceptable even if they led to jobs?

I might add that (IN MY EXPERIENCE) some naysayers who snark at MFAs are exhibiting jealousy at not having the degree themselves. I am not saying, nor am I implying, that Dawn Potter is one of these. But I have met them. They sneer and snarl about poets with MFAs. When I ask if these poets have ever considered getting an MFA, I am most always met with "I can't afford it, I can't take time off to do it, or some reason other than they think the degree is not worthwhile. So they grumble and dismiss the degrees of others. This kind of them vs us mentality is not at all helpful in promoting poetry. By the way, why is it that other genres do not seem to fight one another for authenticity, only poets? I have NEVER heard a novelist complain that another novelist with a degree is less of a novelist. Hmmm. OK, maybe journalists do this... maybe.

As for the process, there are many paths to writing. Many. These sometimes include generative exercises. Do these in and of themselves produce exceptional poems? Not so much. But every crack in the door is an opening to writing. No one way is "approved" or "best," and we each have our own processes. If mucking out a barn does that, so be it. If giving oneself a prompt to begin the day's writing does it, so be that too. My process includes reading something great to immerse myself in the words and images and asking myself "how did _____ DO that?" I read voraciously, and not just other poets' work.  Science, politics, history, cultural essays, etc. We live in a big world, and it is all material from which something might be gleaned or an idea sparked.

Potter's essay today refers negatively to those exercises and workshops where the instructor refers to the process as "fun and easy." Should poetry be called "easy" by anyone? NO! It is serious work. But can one enjoy the process? YES. I find it "fun" [read as enjoyable and fulfilling, not as entertaining] to sit down to a blank page every day and write. Of course what I see as enjoyable may not be another's view. I know folks who find doing complex math problems "fun" but this is not my cup o' tea. Is their mathematical practice to be denigrated because they enjoy it? I hope not.

Must a thing be painful for it to be acceptable? Definitely not. I did not have horrid pain in childbirth because I paid for classes to learn techniques to moderate the pain, and yet I still bore healthy children who are great adult  people now. Is my experience less "authentic" because I did not suffer? Are my children less acceptable because there was not suffering to get them here? Childbirth was a joy for me. It was still HARD WORK for which I prepared well, thus lessening the pain and suffering of the act. Should I be accused of "buying my children" because I paid for classes in childbirth? Nope. Of course not.

What challenges me every day is to find the time to write and to do my best to find the right words, images, juxtapositions, etc which will make a poem convey something meaningful. Those who have degrees still must do this work, continuing on the path of educating themselves in their chosen art. Art is not stagnant. We all must keep learning and doing ON OUR OWN even if we have those pesky degrees. So now, off to write, and when I do so, it will be with a wealth of instinct AND knowledge. I will not write the poems on the reverse side of my degree, but I will write with gratitude for the experience gained while earning it.

Cleaning my office

Let's face it, I am a stacker. I have stacks of books and notebooks, along with a huge stack (a few stacks) of printed poems and workshop handouts and assorted other "stuff" I might need some day.  Every few weeks I vow to get the whole thing organized. I do a fair amount of organizing and then get sidelined by my own writing. I sit down at the computer or find a notebook that has some appealing lines or phrases in it and I am done with the cleaning. I don't even know what to think about myself in terms of this never-ending tide of stacks and clutter. It is not that I am heading for one of those hoarding shows on TV. No. It is more that I can't seem to get myself into a system. I have space for everything (mostly) and yet I find myself with a desk that gets piled upon and several stacks of books and projects that I might work on at any given moment. I have an office that is ample and with a supply closet that is unheard of space-wise in a Victorian house. I ought to be able to BE as organized as I'd like to be. Ha!

I am busy. That is one of the problems. And I am a multi-tasker. BIG part of the problem. If only I could just work on one thing, be done with it, send it out, and begin on the next thing. Sounds so good, doesn't it? But my brain is so busy that I pop back and forth in my interests. Thus the multiple projects underway at any given moment. The great news here is, of course, that I am never bored. In fact, I frequently exhaust myself from all the work in progress.

Here is a little sample of what is on tap for me right now:

1. Richard Wilbur Project:

   An in-depth study of his poetry since 1947, annotated with commentary as to culture and society

2. Millay Project:

   A collection of original poems written in response to Millay's poems along with
   persona poems written (hopefully faithfully) from INSIDE Millay's life

3. Revision of poems written in the past two years which for some reason have not been picked up for publication

4. Submit Psalms From the Commons (a collection of psalm-poems that invoke everyday life. Where to send????

5. Finish The Boyfriend Project manuscript (fine-tune) and submit. Where to send????

These five major things are not even part of my tenure as Poet Laureate. I have a plethora of work to do there as well.

All of the above are exciting projects, keeping my attention and interest.

But the list and the load are keeping my office a jumble. On Sept 6th I am headed off for a long weekend out to sea (Star Island, AO). After that, I will definitely set aside a few days to finish cleaning this office. I think actually that if it is REALLY organized, all of the above will be easier. The big deal part of this is the bookshelves. I need to get a grip there. I have decided to take all of the books off and restructure. I once alphabetized. A nightmare. Every time I got a new book, I had to shimmy the books along to make room. It was fine unless the book was at the start of the alphabet. ALL books then had to move over by one. UGH. So now what I will do is go by gender. I have more books by male authors (go figure). I may end up with an entire bookcase of men. I will also remove any and all books "about," including biography. These definitely need a spot of their own.

I have been shredding like mad. Each day I shred old poem copies (do I need ten of each?) and receipts and errant mail with my address on it. I believe in staving off identity theft wherever possible. We have a good shredder. It is in my office, so all family shredding happens in here too.

I have also been putting things in file folders. I have so many poetry handouts for use in workshops and  mentoring. I need these so I am not creating anew each time. But it is time to have them REALLY organized. I have beautiful file folders and a nice file cabinet. I also have a wire folder basket that sits near my desk for easy access. Old stuff in the file cabinet, newer (in use) stuff in the wire basket. It's a process.

It has occurred to me to hire a professional organizer. I toy with that every time I attempt a major overhaul of the space. But how would I know where she put everything? How would she know what I cannot live without? Grrr. Obviously this is a DIY deal.

I recently spent a couple afternoons sitting on the floor of my office taking on the paper stacks. I am happy to report these are now organized and in file folders. Next step is organizing the file cabinet and wire basket to do what they are here to do for me. My desktop is clean and organized. Mostly. I am on my way. After Star, I will get the rest done. I may invite one of my poet friends over to do the bookcases with me. What a day that would be. We'd have to consume a LOT of wine I think. Yeah, that sounds like a plan. OK, who will I invite? Who might actually say yes?

Tricks of the Trade, or just "tricks"

We writers have our favorite strategies, our conventions, our "tricks of the trade" so to speak. For some of us it is a particular way we begin or end our writing. For others, it may be a favorite phrase or word. For still others, it is syntactical techniques that make our writing "ours" and unique.

Out of these strategies was born, at some point, the "five paragraph essay." It was certainly a hallmark for organizations like Toastmasters, who used the format to give its members a safe way to approach a speech. It goes like this: tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell it to them, then tell them what you told them that you said you'd tell them. Ah, my eyes glaze over.

This particular "strategy" gets tricky when it filters down into and pervades school systems.  The typical student-written five paragraph essay follows a toastmasters-style format, the result of which creates an atmosphere in which  students write this way all the way through from 6th grade into high school, mistakenly thinking this is how everyone writes who writes. Gone is the creative impulse, the subtle shifts in approach that make reading so pleasurable. Teachers of English/Language Arts are frustrated (the good ones I mean to say) with the lack of creativity this "formulaic" kind of writing fosters. Many of them, and many school systems are pushing back hard against this mind-numbing writing.

Writing, simply put, would not matter without readers. So many students, and perhaps their parents, have come to see writing as a means to an end: students have to do it (write, learn how to write) to meet a standard or get a grade or get a job. This mistaken idea about writing is putting the civilized world in a precarious position. We live in a post-modern society that exists almost devoid of nuance and metaphor. We revere pundits and sloganeers. We listen for just the right sound byte to support a given position.

I say that the "tricks" of writing to culture, instead of writing from inside culture, damage that culture. We, as poets, essayist, journalists, etc. need to take the long view, not the efficacious view. We need to model for those who would write. We certainly need to engage at the school level and demand that what is taught is NOT the five paragraph essay, but a playful and creative approach filled with imagery, nuance, curiosity. We need to offer ourselves as models, get into classrooms and support those teachers who want their students thinking for themselves, in and out of the box. We need to shine a light on great writing, ours and others'. What kinds of exemplars are used in the schools of your area? I have been asking [as a school board member] to see the writing standards and exemplars for our district. I finally, after months of asking, got these. I took one look (and I did not have to look far) and saw that the exemplars of writing put forth were AWFUL. When one looks at an "essay" that has over a dozen misspellings in the first long paragraph, it is AWFUL writing. To say (as this report did) that this writing "met minimum standards" is dangerously worse. Somewhere, somehow, we have set the bar so low that we accept terrible writing as minimum. It is like saying "well the student arrived at school and stayed all day, so we're good because he/she met the minimum standard." Seriously? It is so with writing. We must set the bar high enough to tantalize student writers. We must let them know that creativity, within guidelines and standards, is key. We have a remarkable facility for language and usage. Let's employ these skills toward a new way of teaching writing. Let's give students in all settings, public or private, the tools they need to be their true creative selves. Being creative is not a means to an end, it is the end itself.

Let us not play tricks on our students, in school or in private workshops. We don't need to give "strokes" for any piece of writing we see. If we can be constructive in our criticisms and offer real strategies that live on the page as vibrant and nuanced and unique, we will foster that kind of critical thinking in all areas. Of course this begs the question of how much and what kind of criticism we give. It is fine to praise the effort, but without a way forward through revision and a tool box of strategies used daily by those of us who write now, it is empty praise and not at all helpful. In large part, it has to do with how we FRAME the message. We know the pitfalls in writing. We circle the edges of those daily. But we have developed ways to monitor our own writing, have learned  to enlist the help of our writing peers, and have come up with methods for revision. We ought to share those strategies with those who will stand on our shoulders in the future. It is largely up to us who live with our writing every day to set the example by doing, and by sharing and mentoring. We have passion for writing. Let that infect all who look to us for how it's done.

Seamus Heaney is poet of the day for me today, but he is not alone

I'm up early, although I certainly don't believe in this practice. I have tidied my desk and sharpened a few pencils (highlighter pencils) and all my electronics are charged and ready for today's use. I have now turned on my music and am listening to "Deep Purple" by Nino Temple and April Stevens. All set. (breakfast once my stomach is awake)

In my straightening out of desk, I came upon my copy of Seamus Heaney's Selected Poems, 1966-1987, buried under some papers. I laugh as I recall that I once decided that I ought to always read poems from this volume alongside Richard Wilbur's New and Collected and Anthony Hecht's Collected Earlier Poems. These poets are my holy trinity of poets. I know, I know, where are the women poets? I have female poet heroes too, of course (Elizabeth Bishop, Kay Boyle, ESV Millay, Marianne Moore, et all) but these particular male poets share the aesthetic that has formed, and continues to form me as a poet. Blame it on "the canon" that I was exposed to the poetry of my triumvirate before I got tuned in to the women poets. Nevertheless it is true that when I need a big awakening in what poetry IS, I go to these three and their poems to "revise" me. I see how important it is to be well-read. I see how important diction is to embodiment in a poem. I'll quote here from each of my "guys" to show you what I mean about diction and how careful use of concrete details can make a poem SHINE on the page:

Wilbur (from First Snow in Alsace)

The snow came down last night like moths
Burned on the moon; it fell till dawn,
Covered the town with simple cloths.

Absolute snow lies rumpled on
What shellbursts scattered and deranged,
Entangled railings, crevassed lawn.


Heaney (from Digging)

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun

...

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Hecht (from The Grapes)

I stood beside a table near a window,
Gazing down at a crystal bowl of grapes
In ice-water. They were green grapes, or, rather,
They were a sort of pure, unblemished jade,
Like turbulent ocean water, with misted skins,
Their own pale, smoky sweat, or tiny frost.

...

And all those little bags of glassiness,
Those clustered planets, leaned their eastern cheeks
Into the sunlight, each one showing a soft
Meridian swelling where the thinning light
Mysteriously tapered into shadow,

...

And watching I could almost see the light
Edge slowly over their simple surfaces,
And feel the sunlight moving on my skin
Like a warm glacier. And I seemed to know
In my blood the the meaning of sidereal time
And know my little life had somehow crested.


Well, it can hardly get better than this. These lines make me weak in the knees, make me want to write, make me want to give each of these poets a huge hug. [Two of the three are still living, so that's a possibility I suppose.] At any rate, I am determined to keep these three volumes ON my desk in case of a fire. I would certainly grab these if I were told I could only have three books for the rest of my life. Marooned on a desert island? Yep. These three in my rucksack. I never tire of the poems in these books. I learn something new every time I read the poems. EVERY time.

I won't taint YOUR experience of the above lines by analysis of them. But suffice it to say, I want you to digest them in a way that is meaningful and helpful to your own writing or reading of poetry. In my Wilbur study, I may make a comment on Heaney's or Hecht's poems from time to time, placing Wilbur's poems in the company of poems from the other two. They exist for me in a triangle, perfectly supporting one another, balanced, solid.

For today, it is Heaney. I will take notice of how he does what he does in the following [recommended] poems: Bye-Child, Follower, Bone Dreams, From the Frontier of Writing, and The Guttural Muse.  I will read each poem several times, at intervals throughout the day. I find this to be a great way to let the poems IN to my unconscious mind.

NOTE: I also will read Dana Gioia's Nosferatu's Serenade, as I am committing that poem to memory which requires repetition on a daily basis.

It makes me smile to know that I have these poets available to me as teachers, by way of their poems. It is comforting to know that I don't have to travel to find help when I am bogged down in my own work and feeling like I am writing the same poem over and over (am I?) or when my diction seems to fall flat.   I can read Bye-Child  and find permission to write the unspeakable, have the freedom available to me as a poet to take a stand and do it in stunning language and image. I have skills with language, but often fail to give myself permission. Heaney and the others give me not only permission, but also urge me.

Dream Job(s)

I am unemployed. Well, I an "unsalaried" at the moment. I work harder than I ever worked when I was employed by someone else. I don't keep regular hours, often working into the dark while the rest of my family sleeps. Sometimes however I need to go photograph the boats in the harbor or meet someone for lunch downtown.  Sometimes I write in front of the TV if the Red Sox are on or the Patriots. I am inspired by sports (more on that at another time). Sometimes I just need to sit on the porch. Mostly I am at the desk daily.

My workplace is my office, a few steps from my bedroom in a nice little victorian house on the coast of Maine. At any given moment, my CFO may come in and ask me what I bought at Amazon, or how much of the Staples receipt is for business and how much is for home. He often reminds me that I ought to consider eating something. I don't have dress-down Fridays at work. I work in my pajamas most days, so to "dress down" would be quite the sight — even for me, my sole employee.

This sounds like a dream job. And it is. But it pays very poorly. In fact, it hardly pays at all. The IRS is on point constantly trying to say this writing business is a "hobby." Stamp collecting, coin collecting: those are hobbies. What I do is WORK. I send out my writing in hopes of publication. I have been fortunate to have many poems accepted and published. I have 4 books under my publishing belt. I am Poet Laureate of my city. Success! you say. Of course. But where is the cash, the scratch, the green, the dough? The truth is that poets are EXPECTED (in the world of publishing) to give away their work, to be happy to have the poem in a reputable journal, to get excited about the one or two contributors' copies that arrive, poem on page such-and-so. Don't get me wrong, it is fine to see one's poem(s) in print. It is great to have the "publishing credits" and get nice comments from other poets when they pick up a copy and see the poems there. But none of us could live on contributors' copies.

What do we do then? We often take teaching jobs. I did this, fresh out of my MFA program. I was hired to teach Freshman and Sophomore Comp at a community college, Victor Valley College to be precise. I did this very well. Although at times mind-numbing, the class provided me with the chance to be fully engaged with students. I loved them and their interesting lives which poured forth into their papers. I fought to get them to be more creative in their writing by inserting as much poetry as possible into our assigned work. I raved about the things poetry can do to make life worth living. I got through to them and many of them became joyful in their writing. I had one class of 12 students who just shone! I loved that class and it was mutual. Still, it was a drag on my own creativity. What time was there to write? I wanted to teach creative writing rather than comp. I went to my department chair and asked to be allowed (yes, ALLOWED) to teach what was my degree: writing, creative writing. She informed me that those classes were "plums" reserved for full-time faculty (I was an adjunct). I asked if it wouldn't be better for the students to be taught by someone 1. with a degree in writing and 2. who actually is a working, published writer. Her response shocked me."It's not about the students." Well, wow. I pointed out to her (in vain) that not ONE of those "plum" faculty members wrote a word, published, or had a degree in creative writing. No problem for her or the college. It was NOT about the students (beyond their tuition and fees). This was the slippery slope to no more typical teaching for me. I quickly lost heart.

Fortunately for me, I am noting if not creative. I realized that 1. I needed more time for my writing, and 2. I could teach privately. I scrabbled together a plan and that is the path I travel these days. I conduct workshops for interested writers who want to know what I have learned and discovered about writing. I am putting my degree to good use. HOWEVER... the pay stinks. If I could do a workshop a week, I might be able to make a decent living. But let's face it... it's workshops twice a year, at best three times a year if I am lucky. In this economy I am grateful for that. And my books sell well enough to make me happy that they are out there for people to read and enjoy. The shining star is the plenty of time to write aspect of my "employment" situation. My dream job? Not quite. But very satisfying on a number of levels. I am not complaining (much). But my dream job IS out there. I know it is. How to make it happen is another matter.

I have had several notions of what a dream job might look like for me. The one that is the quirkiest and which makes my family laugh at me is to be a toll-taker in a toll booth on I-95. It would be so interesting to see all the people who come through, what they are doing as they drive, how they ae dressed — to imagine where they are going or from where they have come. OK, so not going to happen. I live on the coast, AWAY from I-95. Probably would not be too healthy either, breathing in all those fumes. So... what to do and where to go for the dream job that wouldn't end up killing me.

My real dream job is teaching in a low-residency MFA program like the one where I got my MFA, no wait! AT the one where I got my MFA: Vermont College of Fine Arts in Montpelier, Vt. Yes, I suppose I'd take a job in another program. I would. But my DREAM job is at VCFA. The facts and the problem: I am certainly qualified. I have a degree in CW, I have 4 published books, I have an intimate knowledge of the program and its workings. I am motivated, there are already on faculty a number of grads. Ha! That may be the problem. Due to accreditation (apparently) there is some kind of limit on how many former grads they can have on staff. Oh and there is some kind of hiring freeze (I've been told). Hmmmmm. Not good for me getting the dream job. But I may have a solution. I hope it is a solution. My proposal is that VCFA hire me as an ADJUNCT. I could be the girl in the dugout, waiting to be put into the game when one of the poetry faculty is absent for a semester on LOA (Leave of Absence). This happens, more than one might think. How they have handled this is to add to the student load of the other faculty members. Why not, instead, have me do it? I think this is a brilliant plan. I am working on this plan. Seriously, I want my dream job. The one without the gas fumes.

Until this becomes a reality (and I am working on it), I will apply to other MFA programs and stay here at my desk in my pajamas writing the best poems I can, sending them out and being grateful for the credits and the contributors' copies.