writewrite

Weather report from Richmond, Indiana:

Saturday Night: colder.
Partly cloudy.
Lows around 3 below.
Northwest winds around 10 mph.
Wind chill readings 8 below to 18 below zero.

Stay in. stay warm.

Today was the first day of poetry class. I felt very strange being a student. Awkward, nervous, anxious, excited, tongue-tied. Exactly as, I presume, my own students feel in my classes. Or any class. Today, in poetry class, we learned about the structure of the class, the expectations, all that stuff. Then, we talked about ourselves as poets. Or in my case, not poets. Then we read poetry aloud. Then we did a poetry writing exercise. One line at a time, listening to Mary Fell’s instructions, we wrote. I was skeptical the entire time. No, I thought, this won’t work. I am not a poet. Still, I trust Mary a lot, and so I wrote. And wrote. And then at the end of the exercise, lo and behold, there it was: a poem.

We all read our poems aloud. It was a little miracle, really. How the images just bloomed on the page, and each line seemed somehow to resonate with the next and the next. How lovely poetry is, what a strange thing that seemingly disconnected images can create a new world. I like this. I really really like this.

Okay. And then here’s where dogs come in. I took Owen for a long, long walk in the woods, knowing that the next two days are going to be much too cold for me, and especially for skinny Owen, to venture out for very long. We walked and walked and walked, Owen carrying his beloved tennis ball most of the time, only occasionally dropping it at my feet for a throw. Then, we got to the pond. Owen dropped the ball so I would throw it.

“No, buddy. Get your ball. Let’s walk.”

He complied. Briefly. Then, he dropped the ball again. Please? Please throw it?

“Okay,” I said, and picked up the ball and threw it along the narrow path that circles the pond. Owen scrambled after it, and in his mad scurry to get the ball, managed to knock it onto the ice-covered pond, about three feet from the edge.

“You can get it,” I said. “Go on.”

Well, he couldn’t get it. Not really. The ice was a little too thin, and started cracking when he ventured out too far. So, I found a long branch, and after much maneuvering, retrieved the ball, and threw it for Owen one more time.

Of course, for Owen, “one more time” does not exist. He kept dropping the ball at my feet. I kept saying our agreed upon command: No buddy, Get your ball, Let’s walk.

And then, Owen, who is smarter than any dog should be, looked at me, tipped his head to the left, trotted to the edge of the pond, and dropped his ball down a little slope so that it rolled out onto the ice. And yes, you guessed it, he couldn’t get it, but I could, and so Owen got me to throw the ball once more than one more time.

Like the poetry exercise: A little miracle, of a sort.

Stephen King has written something about teaching that goes approximately like this: teaching is like hitching your brain to jumper cables for sixteen weeks. What he means, and he said it better than I can remember it, is that as a teacher, you put out an enormous amount of intellectual energy for your students. They get your brain juice; you get drained of it.

I do love to teach, and sometimes am pretty good at it, but it takes a huge part of my brain, the part that likes to write, and often I find it excruciatingly hard to write during the semester. I’m trying to get over that, find ways to keep juicing up my brain. So, this semester, I am taking a poetry class with my friend and colleague Mary Fell, a wonderful teacher and poet. It’s the first writing class, semester long, I’ve taken since graduate school. And I didn’t realize until today how actually excited I am to be doing this. I walked onto campus feeling the feelings teachers do on the first day of class: anticipatory dread, anxiety, and sadness at giving up the freedom of the open days of not teaching.

And then I thought about the poetry class. Oh! I’ll be on the other side of the desk. Getting brain juice. Just that thought alone was enough to open a door in my brain. Little jittery ideas in red plaid suits and green tights started running out and ricocheting off my skull.

Look at me!
Hey, over here!
Yo, me, me, me!
No, ME! I’m the best idea of all!

Okay, guys. Calm down. You may have to wait until Friday. Glad to know you’re still there. Don’t go anywhere.

They promised they wouldn’t. In fact, my plaid-clad idea guys are right now sitting around a card table just above my left eyeball, playing five card stud. They keep stomping their feet when someone wins the pot. I’m threatening Advil if they don’t calm down.

Did you hear that, guys?

Yeah, okay, sorry ’bout that.
Okay. Sorry. Yup.
We’ll keep it down.
Shhh. Keep it down, she said.
Yup, sorry, Jean.
Whose deal?
My deal. Who’s in?
I’m in.
Me too.
All righty…ante up, here we go

I haven’t posted on this blog with regularity for some time. Owen and I have been talking about this. I’ve told him that I’m trying to decide what to do with the blog. Observations of Richmond, Indiana? Writing about writing? Writing about teaching? He shakes his head no to all of the above. A log of my dog?

“Well, yes,” Owen says. “That would be a fine choice.”

Still, as of yet, I haven’t quite decided. I have enough writing projects going on right now beyond the blog that perhaps the writing energy is siphoned off into them. Maybe so. And then there’s the question of what a blog is for anyway. Is it to update the two dozen friends and family who read it? Is it to make a professional statement? Is it just a place to place writing?

“Yes,” Owen says. “But only if the writing is about your dog.”

Still why blog? That blog being the verb; this one, the one you are reading, being the noun. The act and the thing itself — right now I’m considering both, the impulse to (verb) and the reasons for (noun).

For the record, Owen the dog who might be logged on the blog, doesn’t hold blogs in truly high esteem. He explains: “A blog, the thing, is an overt expression of self-consciousness,” he says. “A self-consciousness which requires an examination of self, as if self were worth examining at all which is something we might and should argue vigorously against. Then through blogging, the act, we have the perpetuation of self, casting a sense of futureness and becomingness as opposed to the pleasure of now, and the purity of beingness.”

Um, Owen? What?

“In the world of dogs,” he goes on, “this sort of thing — blogging, self-conscious consciousness, a hypervigilant becoming — this is regarded as on a plane not coexistent with perpetual bliss, of now, of beingness. A state which we dogs have — supremely and perfectly — achieved.” He wags his tail. “As you may have noticed.”

Ah yes. I have noticed. Good dog.