David Hadbawnik's Blog

Holy Sonnet 6

Let’s not fight over the check that’s coming

all too soon; the waiter’s weaving through

the tables with his tray — we can’t split it,

either, there’s no going Dutch with Death who

demands payment in full, prompt and exact.

Hurry, there are diners hovering close by,

eager to take our place, coffee’s been served…

And though I try to pay my card’s declined,

my cash no good — so go ahead, add this

to all that I owe, already so steep

as to make a mortgage broker blush, deep

as any trade deficit with China.

I’ll float away, disgraced but made good,

another debt forgiven by your blood.

Holy Sonnet 8

The Zika virus can’t be sent to hell.

You can’t put brain-eating algae on trial,

and the alligator that dragged that boy

into the lake won’t have to answer for

its sins — so why should I, just because

I’m a sentient being who can make

decisions of a sort, though I’m led by

nature just like anything else on earth?

But WTF do I know? I don’t know

shit about your plan, it’s written in wind

and waves and stars — so lobotomize me,

let me crawl away blasted by your blood,

a bug half-sprayed, almost dead, happy to

be squished and flushed at last, by you, for good.

Holy Sonnet 7

The horn goes off before my final shot

reaches the goal, the whistle blows, the game

is lost, the other team pours onto the ice,

their gloves and sticks flying, and above them Death

(the announcer) laughs, already picking

apart my stats, pointing out weaknesses

in my game, tweeting about how I’ll be

forgotten as, all done now, I retire.

Yet as I unlace my skates and peel off

my jersey for the last time, the anger

melts away, the all-consuming pressure

leaves my bones, my soul relaxes, I break

into a grin, with nothing left but love

and laughter that wipes out each loss, every sin

Holy Sonnet 5

I’m on every platform — look me up

@useless_sinnerfullofregret, where

you can find devotional messages

and images reflecting my endless pain.

It didn’t always used to be this way,

but my accounts were hacked and now I must

wipe everything clean, erase, delete

and reboot, even if my only hope

is that you rip out every wire by hand,

snatch bytes from thin air. Other people post

self-indulgent updates of vacations

in exotic locales, memories of

good times — I’m the friend you only follow

out of hate, whose grief is deep, joys hollow.

Some Kind of Idea at the Coast

‘She sang beyond the genius of the sea.’

…the fuck’s that mean?

Tony, you seen this?

‘She sang beyond the genius of the sea…

The water never formed’ (the fuck?)

Look, all I know is this babe was singing

By the edge of the sea, and we were there.

Why was she singing? Who knows?

It’s not like they were passing out programs.

The tune was familiar somehow, but also not,

Like you could hum along and almost

Know the words, but to say that what she sang

Was somehow involved with the wind

And the waves — that’s nuts, OK?

It was just her singing. She was hot,

Sure, but the sea was out there doing

What it does, moving in the light

As the light moved — ‘Hey,’ said Tony,

‘You gotta light?’ and someone gave him one

So we could toke up while she sang.

If it was only her standing there singing

With the sea behind her, that would’ve been cool.

But there were all kinds of tourists and folks

On vacation, kids running around screaming

Their asses off while moms chased them,

Guys with massive pot-bellies wearing Speedos

And lots of bad hair and tattoos on display.

Yet even though we were getting hungry

And we wanted a burger and maybe some of that

Fancy ice cream they were selling,

Something about her voice made us

Stick around.

I don’t know if some of us thought

We could hit on her or what.

She just kept right on singing, as if

None of us were there, kind of like

The sea I guess, which kept moving and slamming

Against the rocks, she was making shit happen

You had to admit and we were conscious of

How we were following her around as she walked

In a stalker-ish kind of way

But by that point we couldn’t help it.

Yo, Tony, you remember how

when that babe finally stopped and we turned

around the sun had sort of slid down

Like a giant pizza off the edge of

The sky and you could see little squares

Of light in all the windows of the bars

And bungalows and we stood there

For a while, going like, ‘Woah’?

Man it was trippy. Tony

Said something kinda profound, although

You really had to be there.

And then we all just faded off

In the fading light towards other stuff.

Holy Sonnet 3

Unfriend me, haters, crop me out of yr selfie

which is the world; leave me like a fuckboi

after a 1 a.m. text — look and then

swipe me away to online oblivion,

a bad date with a dad bod and no game.

Dismiss me in a vicious subtweet

I’ll never see — block, unfollow, flag me

as offensive, send me to the spam box…

For I do worse every day to him

who forwarded my soul (a corrupt file)

to the King. And though I suffer exile

virtually, desperate for a “like,”

his love stripped anonymity away

so his avatar was deleted for real.

Holy Sonnet 2

Death, don’t talk trash — look at the scoreboard.

No matter how many threes you splash through

the net in my face, there is one Big Three

that wipes away all your boards, your points.

Any star with a killer crossover

dribble can put a defender to sleep,

and a whistle-happy ref can foul out

a player like that, giving iffy calls

to the home team, altering the game…

So why should I be afraid of your moves?

Then there are owners who’ll move a whole team,

killing off a city, all for a buck.

After the final horn we’ll all be saved–

win or lose, the game done — death, you’ll be waived.

Holy Sonnet 1

Batter-up to my heart, triple-threat God

you who can hit harder than a slugger

on ‘roids staring down a pitcher who’s got

nothing left in his arm, a hanging curve

looped right over the plate, square up and smash

that tater so that I drop into the

glove of a kid halfway up the bleachers,

the last note of the national anthem still

ringing in his ears. From that, dented and

scuffed, let my heart rest for many years on

a mantle next to other forgotten stuff,

photos and knickknacks and coins, until

you pick me up and put me back in play,

a small white dot in all that green and blue

Kalamazoo 2016 Redux

Where were the swans this year?

I just returned from my seventh International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, MI. As always, I had a great time, emerging both exhausted from the whirlwind of activity and socializing, and exhilarated from the stimulating and provocative discussions. This Kalamazoo felt different, however, and not only because it was my first time attending as a full-time professor, with the support that entails; and I write this now in an attempt to untangle the threads of that difference, which seem both personal and general.

First, instead of making the usual trek from Buffalo — which had always been a sort of celebration at the end of spring semester, arriving to family and friends in Detroit with perhaps a few papers to grade and my own presentation to put the finishing touches on — I flew all the way from Kuwait. This had seemed like a good idea way back in the fall. I could, as always, rent a car and visit my sister and friends in the Detroit area, drive to the conference, and make a sort of vacation out of the trip. However, in reality, the trip proved a logistical challenge, if not a nightmare: with AUK’s semester not yet finished, my time was even more curtailed than usual. I stepped onto the plane in Kuwait with a raft of essay drafts to respond to, as well as a senior thesis to shepherd through the late stages — not to mention a nasty head cold.

In truth, it was a bad time to be away, and most surprisingly, I didn’t want to be away. I had grown to love my Poetry and Poetics students, and I felt keenly the loss of two of the last three class dates before semester’s end. I had also been working closely with my senior thesis student, the two of us intensely discussing Dante’s encounter with Muhammed in the Inferno, on which she would be presenting her research at semester’s end. Leaving now, with the presentation just a couple weeks away, felt like a sort of abandonment, though I promised to be responsive via email if she needed any help. Being sick made everything that much worse, as I downed cold medicine to get me through the days and largely avoided the usual rounds of open bars and late-night reveling in an effort to preserve my strength.

Even upon arrival, things felt different. As I made the familiar drive off I-94, through Kalamazoo to the WMU campus and thence to registration, I was immediately struck by the incongruous new modernist dining hall being grafted onto the boxlike structure of Valley I, while the pond, always a nice place to relax and reflect between sessions, had been fenced in, the familiar family of swans banished. And it was cold. The weather is always a surprise in Michigan; I’d grown up there, of course, and over the years at Kalamazoo I’ve experienced rainy weather, chilly weather, sweltering weather — this year it was frost and snow. Thus, combined with my cold, my usual morning runs through downtown and campus were replaced by attempts to sleep in, followed by hustling to the warmth of my rental car and morning panels.

The panels I attended were varied and wonderful — none of the papers I heard were half-baked, and many were dazzlingly complete and provocative, even at less formal roundtable sessions. These included a session on “Animal Languages” with great stuff from Robert Stanton on “Old English Animal Voice Catalogs” and Michael Warren on bird sounds in Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen‘s MEMSI session on “Play”; Gabrielle MW Bychowski and others on “Hermaphrodites in the Middle Ages”; and the mindblowingly entertaining “Dead Language Karaoke” with examples from Old English, Latin, Arabic, Icelandic, Middle English, and Middle Scots. Then there were the sessions I’d helped organize — eth press‘s panel on Jack Spicer‘s The Holy Grail, in which we listened to recordings of Spicer reading the poem interspersed with a discussion from the perspective of several medievalist-Arthurian scholars; and, with Will Rhodes, a roundtable on pastoral verse titled “Against Progress,” in which I spoke about the pastoral elements of Virgil’s Aeneid while others discussed the poetry of Edmund Spenser and Samuel Daniel. Though this latter was scheduled for the dreaded 10.30am Sunday morning slot, and thus sparsely attended, the audience asked excellent questions and we had a wonderful discussion about the complexities of pastoral poetry, a seemingly appropriate end to this Kalamazoo with snow swirling outside.

The “Against Progress” pastoral roundtable crew: Nicholas Hoffman, Megan Cook, Will Rhodes, David Hadbawnik, Melissa J. Rack

Change, and some hint of trouble, seemed to be in the air at this congress. One congress-goer posted a short piece on the lack of senior academics at Kalamazoo, while Shyama Rajendran wrote about “The Work We Still Have to Do” in terms of inclusiveness and power dynamics in medieval studies, and Gabrielle MW Boychowski posted on the controversy that erupted from the “Pseudo Society” session after several speakers used transgender slurs in attempts at humor, resulting in some people walking out of the session and the organizers issuing an apology and promise to fully vet all papers in the future. “#FemFog” shirts, referencing the Allen J. Frantzen misogyny incident from last January, were much in evidence, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen even wrote a piece calling into question that most sacred of conference activities, the imbibing of alcohol.

Fighting off my cold, I drank much less than at previous congresses — I believe I managed one beer at the BABEL party at Bell’s Brewpub Friday night, and a beer and a couple of watered-down scotch-and-sodas at the Saturday night dance, and because of that I enjoyed feeling more awake and alert as the conference wore on. It wasn’t until the dance that I finally felt well enough to cut loose, and I found myself dancing with some old and new friends for several hours to the mostly ’90s playlist pumping into the ballroom, having real fun for the first time since my arrival, sweating and laughing, staying until the bitter end and even hanging out afterwards in the Valley dorms, eating popcorn and laughing some more with a handful of folks. Some of the conversation inevitably turned to job stuff, and I was keenly aware of those who had barely made it — or had not made it — to Kalamazoo. Someone tweeted afterwards about having to explain the lack of affiliation on a conference badge, which felt like “not having a last name,” and indeed, subtle and perhaps unintentional hierarchies were often in play. “Where are you now?” sounds like an existential question, but in practice it’s inevitably tinted with issues of status as much as genuine curiosity — not “being somewhere” is akin to a kind of academic death, or at least state of Limbo.

In some sense, this held true for me as well. The “American University of Kuwait” printed below the name on my badge prompted questions that went beyond the usual “How are you liking it at University X?” and sometimes a simple statement of incredulity: “I can’t believe you came this far for a conference!” I answered such queries in the good-natured spirit with which I hope (and trust) they were asked, genuinely eager to talk about some of my amazing students and colleagues, as well as the strangeness and wonder of living in the Middle East. In truth, of course, it is difficult for me to make it to conferences in the U.S., especially during the school year, and despite the support I receive my North American conferencing will be limited in the future. And there are some tough challenges — I was reminded of some of the issues we’ve faced while communicating with my wife Tina about a leaky bathroom back home, and stepping into the Exhibit Hall to look at the riches of the book fair was an exercise in frustration as I thought about our limited university library and the tiny collection of books I was able to bring.

Every Kalamazoo is different. It’s my favorite conference because, creature of habit that I am, I love the routine of knowing it’s there every spring, knowing my way around campus and (sort of) around the city, seeing familiar faces and catching up, submitting to the relentless rhythm of the sessions and socializing — most of all, feeling the fellowship of others who are so passionate and smart about all things medieval. Kalamazoo was the first conference I felt welcome at, and it helped make me feel certain about the academic and, I guess you could say, life path I eventually chose. Despite the changes in Kalamazoo and me, I hope to continue that fellowship well into the future.

Andrew Marvell Palimpsest (“The Grower’s Song”)

Used to be I had the world by the tail–

The lush buds fresh and sticky,

Green and kind behind the house

All of it, with me, a giant selfie

Till this babe Julie came and she

What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.

Like, for real–but somehow even while

That happened the buds grew bigger

And toking ’em, you got an even better

Buzz than before, no doubt–

Since Julie hit the scene and she

What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.

Ungrateful custies — how could you

Quit buying your dank from my stash?

And hang out smoking strange bongs

While I sit here, short on cash?

Cuz Julie came around and she

What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.

And tho we once were buds (get it?)

I’ll have my revenge — I’ll pack

Us all in a great big bowl

And light it up, smoke the whole

Damn thing — Julie’s in the house and she

What I do to the pot, does to my head and me.

And so, my plants, who’ve been

More like me than myself, I’ll go

Up in a giant puff of smoke,

Forgotten like a stale old joke,

Since Julie’s here, and she

What I do the pot, does to my head and me.