Kristen Orser's Blog, page 5

Syllabus Planning and Other Ways to Induce Crying

This week, I’ve been knee deep in papers. Head deep really, as in sunk.

I’ve got a technique of putting all the papers around me and then getting more and more stressed about how all the papers will operate as a functioning course. This technique has always failed, but processes take time to discover right?

Here’s the thing, I’m looking at the sample syllabi and the kindness of colleagues for sharing how this new school and new programming operates, but I’m noticing a real lack of actually teaching writing.

I know, I know, I’m sure it’s implicitly there. But what if I’d rather plan a day where we literally just talked about appositives for how they function, how they are rhetorically manipulated, and how they can function as a metaphor for other types of writing (stemming from the Greek “to be near” it sets up the thinking that writing is often about putting ideas near other ideas and seeing how they start to act together)…doesn’t that seem like something we’d talk about it in a writing class?

I’m cool with all the critical reading, interpretation, and skills developed in that manner, but writing too often seems abstracted or formulaic. By college, I’m hoping we’re teaching them how formula structures can be manipulated and how writing actually “works” to think and create knowledge.

I guess it goes alongside a conversation about the over-teaching of narrative and a culture that relies on Instagram-ing, Tweeting (I like to say Twittering still because there is an anxious frenzy captured in that colloquialism), and updating about ourselves. Rarely do we talk about this as performance…we call it narrative sometimes, which seems false and seems to ignore any real study of narratology that examines the sense of surveillance even in self writing.

I have complicated feelings about starting with narrative in writing classes: community building (hooray), risk taking (hooray), but does it teach us how narrative effectively works? Is it often a throw-away assignment?

This quarter, I’m tying the narrative to questions of authenticity and leaning pretty heavy on Wittgenstein to drill the point. But I’m also planning on talking about writing strategies and not expecting that reading and “interacting” with texts is really a way that teaches writing. Fingers crossed that that’s the way it should be.

back to the chalkboard

Backbending. Backwards. Backbiten. Backfired.

None of these; not even a back and forth pin the backwater I’m paddling in. Instead, it’s a backbone. It’s my own spinal column up against a thought:

I know, thinking about the classroom as an open field is a bit forbidden – what with objectives, a call for more standardization, a real inquiry about the “state of education,” and an authentic fear that the theory-driven teaching (totally guilty of it) lacks structure – but it’s important.

“It” needs stretching to make this thought: It’s important to create classrooms that examine Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, one must remain silent.” We have limits hanging over our heads and we have to speculate into, between, and beyond those limits. Isn’t this seeking education? Isn’t this seeking more important than a perfectly placed comma because it asks, instead, for a comma that’s placed with intention and purpose? I’d rather see a comma that shows choice making than one that shows standardization; I’d rather that, when one cannot speak, he dances.

Obviously, my own skyline thinks clarity is out of the question anyway…certainty is even less out.

Today, out my own window, a boy says “gotten” over and over again: “I’ve gotten bit. Gotten bit.” He’s laughing. It’s a bacchanalian language, not a perfect one. 

This is the back and forth: do we innovate within the systems or do we innovate because we create new systems?

I feel this in poetics too. I feel this when I say, “Yes a form and shape!” And the shape is a love-in where the staying within, the game of playing in the lines, is sportive. But I feel the same wild and licentious feeling when there’s shapelessness.

I feel this when my mentor and friend emails me and says something about an imperfect tense that isn’t entirely clear to me – isn’t even something I’d notice if he didn’t point it out, but because he pointed it out I start to look for it and feel beaten by the strength of arguing for clear and certain communication. But the thing we’ve both read is something I understood, felt, and cared about; the thing we both read had thoughts that I had flings with and now the scruff is pointed out, but I’m still pretty weak, weak enough to keep coming back to the thoughts and totally forgetting about the tense.

Is it weird that I don’t care about the tense? Is it weird that, even after he shows me the failings, I still don’t care and I argue that chronology isn’t as important to me as it is to him. 

I go back (theme huh?) to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando and think about time, gender, and location shifting. It was one of the first books I read that made intuitive sense to me…sense because it loosened the discomfort of “fitting” into syntax and shows the real hinterlands of how it works to try and work out ideas and stories. 

So I’m going back to the classroom with this woodsy feeling of really wanting to give students authentic tools to “make it” and really feeling an apologetic concern that boorish language isn’t so turned and rotten as writing and thinking that doesn’t push. 

Reasons Blogging is Difficult

There are whole days I don’t have a relationship with the computer, and I’m pretty happy for our temporary break up.

We see other people. I see the ocean, the redwoods, and a day baking shortbread for friends. I even sneak out to see the phone and hear someone’s voice – their real and actual voice, which is different from their language.

I don’t know who the computer sees when I’m away, but it seems fine without me. Seems happy when I come back and brimming with things to tell me.

For July and August, I didn’t see the computer often and – likewise – didn’t see this blog. That might be because it’s intention has changed:

I moved to California and intended to chart the movement which, at the time, felt like a diaspora. Dramatic, I know. Then I intended to chart “marriage,” which also felt like a scattering: the easy fall-in-love to the difficult stay-in-tune. And then I intended to chart the things I might actually need to make paths for: writing, baking, teaching, and having a “purpose.”

Truth is, I’m not good at charts. I can’t read a map and I prefer the Situationist approach to psychogeography and “feeling” my way to a left hand turn. Those intentions were not possible because they aren’t anything I really care about. I care about some small things: keeping egg whites’ integrity when blending with ganache, reading Proust even though Juliet couldn’t bear him and Albert died before we finished reading him together, watching the tide come in, laying upside down  in the morning because it feels good, writing sentences that are thought out and show a thought being thought out, teaching people to communicate in and across mediums, and laughing full belly laughs even if it sounds ridiculous.

Those kinds of things don’t necessarily make for good blog reading – they are minutia and probably belly gazing. I read design blogs, craft blogs, and process blogs because they are stunning. When I want to read the belly gazing small things, I turn to a book.

That is a lot of what I’m noticing: I turn to a book. I turn into a book. I turn and find a book. I turn the word turn to trust, tuck, and tune and it makes sense that I’m reading.

Last night, Jesse and I talked about the characters I’ve been with for two years and how they are ready to finish telling their own story. Anne has decided she doesn’t want the “e” at the end of her name and she also doesn’t want her hands because Steven might look at them and think they are open and asking for something instead of listening to her head, which is determined about things having a place and an order. Steven, according to Jesse, needs to be able to talk. I imagine he thinks that too. I imagine Steven has wondered when it’s his turn to say what he thinks about cut off hands and the deer hunting. He’s gotten to pull too many potatoes at this point and it’s unrealistic that he doesn’t envy Aaron for getting to go under the world through the mine and seeing what’s past the roots while Steven stays above and pulls at things, prays for rain, and watches Ann drop letters from her name. September and October are finishing months for this story. The intention of the blog, for working it out. For two months of watching what’s never been a chart take a shape that turns into a book.

Or, sometimes, a bottle of wine and a night reading someone else’s stories.

re-writing : Cathy Wagner’s Poetic Labor Project

I looked at a short story to finish it and it just looked back at me. Cathy Wagner’s Poetic Labor Project has me dizzy.

I can’t put a finger on it, but I’ve pressed the idea hard. Yes, it’s labor and it’s labor of the most difficult kind. For me, time. Sadly, time. I write for companies that pay me pennies, I nanny for more than that, and I teach when someone else forgets to ready a syllabus or makes a mistake. And I write between things.

Writing, in this way, is very elusive. It’s near, it’s near – I have that idea to put that nearness into a word and see what other words gather around it, but the dishes pile up and, because my husband has a “career,” it seems like I should do them.

Last week, my mother and sister visited and comforted me to say, “It’s this way.” The everydayness of wanting to write is, for my sister, wanting to read; for my mother, wanting to cook a meal. The problem with the everydayness is the labor and the value of the labor.

I want to give you an experience of the ordinary, but when I talk about the dishes and remind you that I’m a woman with a husband, I’ve made the ordinary something else: a political statement, a gendered position, a question of economics, a spectacle. I cannot put a finger on it, but I press down again: I’m working, working, working and the real work, the writing, gets quiet.

Last week, I wrote a review of a book that was – possibly – really trying to put a finger on the ordinary…it was all error after error. A confused tense, a mixed up word, a repetition that didn’t add up. It might be because of how I ordinarily talk in pauses and hesitations. It might be because I talk about language for being bendy flexy and I want to show off how the word pull sounds so lovely in my ear and makes me think of days with dandelion bulbs, the wind picking up just so, and the whole world feeling like its gone to seed.

I couldn’t write that. I wrote, instead, the word pull and the editor said, “I don’t quite get what you mean.” I don’t correct him or explain, but I erase because I’m so happy to have an editor looking at anything, so happy to have work that is the work. I let the word delete and the whole memory with it.

My own poetic diction from James: you use a lot of “and”, from Joan: you use a lot of “or” and I don’t get it, from Arielle: the tone is so serious, and from Rick and Lisa: the thinness and the fatness, are you listening to it?

Thankfully, Rick shows me Charles Baudelaire and I see him for how far away he seems. I see him for how he thinks things about ordinary things, but doesn’t see himself engaged. And that might be the current labor, the labor that makes blank pages pile or the short story that looks back at me, I’m so engaged in the ordinary. I call my father and tell him about the way I choose to alter a recipe “just so” so that it’s my recipe, how I carve out very small spaces to call “my own” so that I’m still making and interfering a bit.

It’s this way with the word pull: I use it and insist it makes a difference when it’s used and when it’s erased. Is this labor? To make that word an experience, a real material object that I remember having and losing and re-making.

When I walk with the baby I nanny, I hear her starting to make words and they all mean something to her. I’ve never thought of telling her that her poetics are off, but I do ask her to say things. I point to water and say “water.” When she looks at me, she doesn’t say water. She says something else. I think, “are you saying fish? are you saying swim?” But she isn’t. She isn’t saying any of those things and she’s working very  hard: I see her little tongue pushing around, I see her hands moving to explain, and I see her head nodding to tell me that she’s very correct making sounds. I imagine she’s in love with sounds, with the very different ways she can say all the things I’m asking her to say.

on disappearance

Like everyone else, I was following the Hipster Racism debate back in May.

It was dinner conversation and, especially after moving to a new location with an entirely new dialect, really heated. It gave me a chance to reaffirm and clarify, for myself, what I think about how language is used – Note: that’s the important part, language is USED. It’s employed. Language doesn’t “just happen,” the idea needs to be transmitted into sounds and into a word, possibly even a sentence. Ignoring contexts and feigning language-mistakes (or just not apologizing when you mess up) is a choice.

Now, with the Olympics’ new frenzy of quick, not-thought-out tweets, I’m back to thinking that poor choice making is a deep, cross-cultural language problem.

So, why don’t we talk about language for its ethics.

I remember, in grade school, that “word choice” was a part of rubrics. But it seemed like points were earned for “glamour grammar” instead of careful and thought out word choices; careful writing that showed the time and process of selecting the best word. I think this is a worthwhile essay: one that is maybe 100 words and shows, in that 100 words, why each word was chosen and what that word transmits.

In freelance writing, I flounder because it takes me a really long time to get the writing done. I’m thinking about the brand, the echo of each word, and the goals of each word choice. Then, I’m thinking about the movement of the writing and how syntax and punctuation is making the words move. With blogging, tweeting, and fast writing I’m pretty pumped about connectivity, the potential to open empathetic communities, and the opportunity to be conduits, but I do think it’s making language move too quickly and moving without attention to what is packed into those words.

The difference between words becomes really clear when one letter changes a word.

Yesterday, I was typing an email to my dad – to let him know my phone’s busted – and I wrote Dead Dad instead of Dear Dad. Just one letter.

I stayed up all night.

Today, he’s in the hospital.

I talk a pretty big game about language as a conscious act, as active choice making. If you decide to put a word on a page, to articulate a word, to use a word, you are making a choice and there are ethical ramifications and consequences to those choices.

No, I don’t think I made my father sick nor do I think that I’m capable of future-telling/seeing, but it’s scary when you see words become “active.”

I haven’t disappeared, I’ve just hermit crabbed until I have something to say.

I’ve said this before – in an essay awhile ago – but a mentor who wasn’t really my mentor in grad school has become a person I really admire for what he said that I maybe should have listened to better (see, words echo and echo and echo). At one point, David Trinidad said (when we were reading a poem for Columbia Poetry Review that was written by a young, hip poet), “this is what happens when someone hasn’t experienced anything and thinks he can write anyway.” At the time, I took that as an easy way to dismiss some parts of contemporary poetry that I adored, but now I get what he was saying: it takes time to have something to say and throwing words around isn’t the same thing as poetics.

To bring it closer to home, saying something just to say something isn’t the same thing as saying something.

upper state (not upstate)

What I like about most states is regionality and regional identity. I liked that, in Buffalo, the identity was blue collar and a boasting proximity to Canada (even the threat to leave if state politics got too out of control). It wasn’t like Ithaca, NYC, or even Rochester (it’s seemingly sister city). All the regions: Upstate, Central, the city — and the smaller divisions — Southtowns, Finger Lakes, etc. had their own peculiarities.

It’s not surprising that it’s this way in California too. Chico, unlike Santa Cruz, was canyons, rivers, and the kind of lounging we haven’t gotten to do since moving to this state. After talking about how we missed rivers, how the ocean could never be like the rivers and the lakes that we’re used to (TLC, you got it right it seems), it was good to float around and be pushed by a river.

I’m more thankful that we got invited to go – by the Truby family – to see their family. I’ve relocated enough to know that it takes time to assimilate, but invitations here have been less frequent. This was a really intimate invitation: the chance to see three families at once.

Enough blabber about the trip. Getting back to work: the poetics of place on the mind and, at home, a resurgent conversation about Guy Debord and the situationist.

Jesse and I are thinking about our move here as akin to a derive: certainly less planning and more following a sense of psychogeography. At least, a whim. There’s an instrument, in this kind of mapping, that I’m starting to think all our moving, marriage, and time together neglects: autonomy.

In the first exercise of Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit, she asks about your tool. I can’t help but think that, as the artist, it might have to be the self. And the second I think it, let alone type it, I feel incorrect:

Like the ego of “I” is the “sudden, restless revulsion form the whole tradition of nineteenth and early twentieth century poetry,or maybe from lyric poetry as such, because it seemed, finally, to have only one subject, the self, and the self–which is not life.” (Robert Hass).

Imagine the individual telling the story: we moved to California because… Both Jesse and I would map this out differently, but if we put the maps together and then create the co-map, we’d noisily be showing how difficult it is for two people to really live together, to make those kinds of “moves” together.

Jesse’s map would have more hope: a job offer, a company he really loves, a friend he already feels affection for, and an idea to “build” a family.

My map would have more bleakness: leaving family and friends (a more deconstructed space)

Both of us bearing our own less “mappable” things too and we might have to liken it to how the sun is different in each place we’ve lived, how the windows filter the light differently and we’ve seen each other look completely brightened and completely shadowed in each move.

The point is, there needs to be a response to the very real feeling of dislocation, of trying to locate something we both know: we moved together. There needs to be a response to a real thing that’s happening and that can’t come with just self-understanding or a self-narrative map. Chico might be the beginning of “moving together” as a map.

What we need now, more than a tool, is a process:

the point of departure
the observations of departure and
the thread from here to there
and the succession of facts to see overlap

On Olympic Nationalism (but not really)

There’s a song I like – a whole album really, but one song in particular – by the Head and the Heart called Coeur d’Alene. Translated, the title means heart of an awl, which I’m pretty sure draws allusions to (or from) the Coeur d’Alene people, a Native American Tribe who are – in some texts – also called “the pointed heart” people. The reference brings up the question of being “from” somewhere; possibly, being “of” somewhere. It might also work to connect the reverence of place to the heart. A pointed heart, an awl-shaped heart, and being indigenous, bring from a place, of a place.

What does the heart have to do with place/placement?

I tell my husband that my heart’s heavy with the Atlantic. I tell him that looking at the Pacific is not-at-all-similar. Geography matters in this way. The geography of feeling distant, feeling the two of us try to stay close together.

Jesse reads Maphead and tells me that cartography is not geography. We sit in a small room when he tells me that and I think about Joshua Beckman’s poem:

hooray! For Lagos, Accra, Freetown, Dakar / your son is on the telephone the Germans / landed safely Seattle off to Istanbul / tiny planes please circle oh tine planes / do please please circle (“Ode to the Air Traffic Controller)

It’s the geographic location and wanting to fit all of it – the all of the all – into one place. Jesse wants to fit us here and he wants it to be easy to call my family, visit the other coasts, and still pronounce ourselves Midwestern. But the clarity and control of that “all-ness” is slippery. And I go back to the song:

But oh the songs people will sing for home / And for the ones that have been gone for too long / Oh the things people will do for the ones that they love.

So when Mitt Romney questioned London, I get why the whole city (and then the country) got a little pissed. You don’t question someone’s home. In Buffalo, where I was born and where I was married, someone at the wedding said “This place is horrible.” I hadn’t lived there in over twelve years, but her insult to “my city” made me feel a small fury.

I’ve hear the phrases: politcs of place, the landscape of identity, etc. I’ve even taught the coursework of home. It’s been on my mind again:

“Migrants must, of necessity, make a new imaginative relationship with the world, because of the loss of familiar habitats. And for the plural, hybrid, metropolitan result of such imaginings, the cinema, in which peculiar fusions have always been legitimate. . . may well be the ideal location.” —Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands (1992).

It’s on my mind when I look at Chelsea’s photographs from Africa and try to write about them, to figure out how to “use” them without pushing a romanticism or a colonialism on them. I watch the Olympics and think about how badly nationalism wants to preserve, to be something to identify with, to give and create identities. And what of regionalism? In my own situation, the Western region seems more foreign than my time in Czech, in Venezuela, in France, and anywhere else. And I know that difference is because I’m not “visitor” here.

Chocolate Macaroons

When Ellery’s sleeping, I’m reading The Sweet Life in Paris. 

I really ADORE David Lebovitz’ recipes (especially for ice cream) and I mostly like his writing, but there’s one part of the book that’s been less than perfect: There’s a bit of an over generalization about Americans.

I’m in a new place where the etiquette is different: a million texts happen before a plan is made, thank you cards are not sent, bringing a gift to dinner surprises people, etc. It’s more casual on the West Coast, which is teaching me to relax, to let things happen (and making me feel a bit square peg). And sure, I’m not thrilled about it, but I guess reading someone else’s cultural over-simplification makes me appreciate that it’s not wholly correct to simplify the coastal differences.

Does that make sense? I’m never sure where those conversations get us…as a connected human culture. Does it contribute to romanticizing French culture? Does it lessen the value of regional American differences? I’m just not sure what it does. It’s no different from when I talk to people about Buffalo and they mention snow…yup, there’s that. But Buffalo has a large refugee population, a pretty impressive art culture (UB poetics contributes to that), architecture that might make Europeans blush, and a rich history of diversity (remember the Underground Railroad?). People seem surprised when I say my mother teaches Burmese, Sudanese, and Bhutanese refugees. I guess the fullness of a place seems important to me and the easy, over-simplification doesn’t resonate or seem authentic.

It’s hard to be an outsider insider: he’s an American in Paris (outsider) who knows and is integrated into Paris (insider). You get the sense that he wants to be insider insider (if that’s a phrase) and it’s compelling to read, in the subtext, that real desire to BELONG. I’m probably most interested in the recipes and the writer’s real need to be accepted and belong in his new place.

I was surprised to read about the active role of apprenticeship in bakeries in France. I’ve wondered why there isn’t more of this in the States (though I do see more of it on the West Coast and I think programs like the Freeskool and alternative education are increasing). I’ve been really struggling to find full and plentiful work–work that satisfies my curiosity and my desire to give back–and I’m thinking apprenticeship might be a way to seek that out more realistically. I wonder, are there teaching apprenticeships still that haven’t been wrecked by the cutbacks?

One thing Lebovitz is ALWAYS great at is making his books and recipes easy teachers…you get to apprentice the books. He really excels at making things easy to follow, offering variations, and providing an explanation of techniques.

I used the macaroon recipe from the book last night and, happily, made my own almond flour to boot.

Delicious. Like I said, I love his recipes. The almond flour isn’t a recipe in his book, but it’s a recipe that should be in any repertoire. Almond flour is expensive and it’s way too easy to DIY it.

Homemade Almond Flour: blanch almonds in boiling water for one minute and quickly run cold water over the almonds (in a colander), peel skin off of the almonds and bake almonds in an oven at 350 for about 15 minutes. Grind the almonds in a food processor to make a nice flour texture.

Freelance: falling behind on freedom

Perhaps it’s the old Protestant work ethic, drilled in from my blue collar/steel town/northeastern disposition, but I’m a pretty hard worker.

Giving up my full time job as a part time teacher (yup, two schools and way more hours than any full time job I’ve had), to try my hand at freelance writing, I realized two things pretty quickly:

I don’t know how to market and what it means to market. I’m actually pretty curious why my MFA didn’t cover this; I’m including submitting work, sending queries, finding publishers, and what now seems like it should have been a 101 class I must have missed. Work piles up and I find it on odd places: yesterday, an old children’s book I wrote was next to the sweet potato hash in the fridge, a poem was in my address book, and my grocery shopping list was scrawled over an idea for a book on mentorship (still a good idea). And perhaps I need more hustle: writing more reviews, looking for more calls for work and writing to them, sending books out, all that poetry-biz stuff. Which leads me to my second lesson…
There’s no freedom in freelance. To put bread on the table I work two part time jobs that hour me past full time and keep me notorious for bringing work home and working after work.

This is the real lesson of writing: making a space for it.

Ive really tried not to be a writer, fact is: I’m more sane when I’m writing. It isn’t, in this way, free-ing or free at all. I think this way on the page too: the work is careful, the punctuation is thought out, each thing and mark need to have a reason (at least a feeling of a reason). It’s interesting that we–cultural we–talk about writing as freedom and make it a kind of mystical liberation. I don’t think there’s much about writing that’s mystical (it’s hard work, practice, study, and attention) and I’m not sure that the freedom we talk about is the freedom writing garners.

I do think it’s freedom to think, to try and finish a thought and see that it’s un-finish-able–that it gets tangled into another thought or it gets connected into an interrupting thought, etc. I think it’s freedom to see this kind of connectivity and that might be what’s mystical: connection.

Let’s Begin

The thought never ends.

Chelsea calls and we bounce idea off of idea, talk backwards and forwards. Likewise, Joan calls from years before and tells me about her new project, how she is seeing it connect and cohere. I think that’s what we do–artists and people–we connect and cohere.

I’m back to Duncan, to how struck I am by an opening field and a poetics that relies on ”composition by field.” All poetic parts are equal: the punctuation as important as the language, the thought that never made it to the work as much a part of the poem as the thought that did. All events: breathing, thinking, writing, punctuating, deleting, etc. are in the poem.  There’s more romance in this pursuit, more to keep me pushing past how utterly failed it seems sometimes.

As a teacher, when my students used words that “weren’t quite right” or reflected some thesaurus digging, I was pretty proud of them. There was a love of language, a real interest in finding the right word and seeing how far they could cast the net. The “disturbance” of an off word reminded me of Duncan and his own intentional disturbances–which intelligently challenged poetic boundaries.

The poem becomes a collection, a gathering of impulses, mistakes, voices, everything that’s overheard. I remember James saying, “If the dog is barking, put the dog in the work. If the door slams shut, open it in the work.” You can resist and include the world around you, you can react and ignore. The poem is a space of ATTENTION. The poem is a GATHERING where you can put in and take out.

How does this relate to the image that Chelsea sent me, the image of two Africans that worry me because they are “hand held,” documented, and we might make them ornate or beautiful because we’re afraid of making them anything else? It relates because–like all work–Chelsea, Duncan, and myself are listening to our connections, to our mind connecting the dots.

With Chelsea’s work, I’m thinking of multiple immediacies…I’m thinking about how that image is in my head when I’m washing the dishes, when I’m writing a poem, and my responsibility to that image is because of its echo. I am not echoing with the people in the image, but they are thinking about what they’ve never seen, who they’ve never met, and how the rest of the world might see them.

Let’s begin chasing these connections. Let’s see what happens if we pin it down and do a little study. The thought comes, flowers, goes to seed, and there are more thoughts to follow.