Support

Susan Gibb laments course cancellations in this post and the apparent opportunities available in the state of Connecticut. I think she’s right to do so.

Part of the issue here, I would assume, is the focus of CT education in the face of change. It’s going to take a while for curriculum to channel into a number of futures: environment, power, transportation, and creative media development. Secondly, it’s going to take a while for the student population to chance their way into what could be interesting opportunities in art, business, entertainment, and the sciences. Many students won’t break a conventional narrative until learning tracks become safer bets.

Hopefully, our program in New Media Communication will be a part of the change. This is the apex semester for us to get everything off the ground with at least one major University connection to build on.

Will the students come without a lot of hype or some sort of guarantee?

My Own Praise Poem

Is there edge more
dangerous than snowflake
on the air in summertime,
an omen, maybe, of the sun
dimming to nothing,
or weary grown,
or just waiting
for the praise of birds.

I’ve known what it feels
to be at the bottom of an iron shoe
crushed under lake ice,
scratching to breathe.

One day I rose to the warm
of a morning after
weeks and weeks
(perhaps it was a thousand years of blindness)
enduring showers of rocks from the clouds
too much
for the summer grass
and the frond-bound frogs
and the smothered day laborers,
and opened my window to a breeze
that brushed my cheeks like fingers.

Cast back the weft of those days
when you heard dogs bark
somewhere in the night
–far away–
Suck in the smell
of baking bread
and grilled meat–
boiled sugar–
and testaments
on old paper.
Listen to the booming of the trains
chained in those smoky downtown yards
where cats watch from between cans
the stars stream
above sleeping towers.

Some where a body rolls
in on the tide.
A voice like copper wire
cuts my arm.
I smear blood
with a shuddering thumb
into images of hillside children
bouncing and bruising their persons
on the greens,
calling into the shadows
for all the sweet in fruit
and the potent enormities in soil
to squeeze into themselves
as we, watchfully,
with heavy fingers,
wonder at how listless we are
and dull
with the imagination
of weeds
while they
like chimes
cut the wind into glass.

Plot

Chuck Dixon has an interesting essay on the state of comics and storytelling. One area caught my interest

In genre fiction, plot separates the men from the boys. Come up with an interesting, engaging story with rising action built into it and then set your character in motion within that plot. Only a dullard repeatedly extrapolates on a character’s personality and calls it a story. Only a dullard would enjoy that. Sure, you can get away with it once in a while and it’s cool to reward readers with some new revelation or reaction based on the antagonist’s core beliefs or conflicts. Those are moments that thrill longtime fans and add depth to the character’s world for casual readers. But these Tennessee Williams plays that go on for years and reach no cathartic resolution are tiresome; especially when presented in a medium and genre where we want to see the hero and his cast doing something.

One issue I would take with this is Dixon’s use of either or reasoning. Perhaps the pendulum has swung to extremes in comics (I’d argue that much of his assailing is also true of “work-shop” short fictions as well, where too much in storytelling often relies on increased shock factors), where “ambiguity” has become “the new hip in comics,” but this doesn’t mean that there are only two modes: plot and character-driven telling. If we must have plot, we can strike a balance between what develops from intensive character development and interesting situations and problems. This is exactly why the Punisher example is precise and appropriate.

Tinderbox and Prototypes for Poets

Protos.pngOrganization principles are put to excellent use in Tinderbox. But it takes thinking ahead. For a container for 2009 poetry writing, I first created two empty notes and made each of them a prototype, with a few unique properties. I titled them “Formed” and “Free Form.” Then I wrote a Ninja poem inside a new note, assigning that note to the “Free Form” prototype. Then I started another poem, a sonnet, and assigned that to the “Formed” prototype.

Now that this is set up, I can generate work and keep the two kinds of poem organized according to these two formal genre.

Rabble

An interesting and significant dialogue on the relationship between Denis Rancourt and the University of Ottawa

JF: Why is it important to you to not grade your students?

DR: With grades students learn to guess the professor’s mind and to obey. It is a very sophisticated machinery, whereby the natural desire to learn, the intrinsic motivation to want to learn something because you are interested in the thing itself, is destroyed. Grades are the carrot and stick that shape obedient employees and that prepare students for the higher level indoctrinations of graduate and professional schools. The only way to develop independent thinking in the classroom is to give freedom, to break the power relationship by removing the instrument of power.

Titles

They’re crazy. I’ve landed on That Night I Saw on My Homeward Way. For kicks and for congruence.

The first part goes like this:

A June night
the moon full
with cooling milk
and gypsum grain
I saw a shape leap
from the stones and drop
into the black
hush of the sea

with links at “night” “cooling” and “the sea.”

Reminders

I have to keep reminding myself that writing poetry is not about repeating what I’m thinking, but about finding strings of words that I would never have thought if I hadn’t assigned the time to sitting down and kicking myself in the ass that’s between my ears.

I remember a long time ago. I was stopped at a light in downtown El Paso and poof, an idea came, and I knew then that this was the game. I was writing a novel about a guy named Tell Monk, who’d returned to his mountain town to repursue a relationship after being gone. He had to break into his house, since he’d lost his key, and was met in a room by a gun-weilding sheriff who’d come to investigate, and thus the story proceeded into all kinds of cliche, which I need to go back to sometime and “re-pursue.” At the time, little sparks would come and the thinking was fun.

But now it’s poetry that’s coming and so it’s time to pursue poetry. But what does extending the writing look or feel like? How does the writer know that something’s new and not a thought that’s become repetitious or tiring? I don’t know, but it’s worth thinking about. We can’t just invent interesting thinking or relations by wishing they’d come, but we can write something and then test a metaphor or image, subtract a word or implant a word that springs from the crazy relation.

Bones. Ninjas. Yup, there are rocks on the high sides of mountains. Yesterday, I thought about a poem in which a ninja balances on a guitar string. Now that’s something I’ve never seen and this spark reminded me that in many poems that are linked I’d been careering through redundancy, that I’d been searching through the same waste basket finding the same old trash. That’s what’s there, the cups and bread crusts of the lunch before. Sometimes, however, the bite in that old sandwich looks like a urinal or the memory of a shadow on the red church carpet at 10 in the morning on a cloudy day, when no one’s about and the candles in their red cups have been lit. Hail to the tossed sandwich crusts. Hail to the votives of the candle-lighter who knows not that his lamps tremble on the floor like the anxiety sharpening the edge of a shout blown through a widow’s mouth on some winter day with hungry children sleeping through their dreams.

Knowledge Use

The Courant has a sad article on mortgage relief in CT.

The Wrights, with yearly income of about $80,000, share a predicament with thousands of families in trouble in Connecticut — many of whom had reason to hope for help from the state. An examination of Connecticut’s mortgage relief programs shows that only a small fraction of homeowners have qualified for aid that was meant to reach many more families.

Even as foreclosures continue by the hundreds, more than $100 million set aside by the state to help families keep their homes is going untapped. The state programs are so narrow and carry so many restrictions that getting approval is nearly impossible.

From what I can gather from the article, there are several programs in CT and each comes with its own set of standards: EMAP, CTFAMILIES, and HERO:

Since July 1, a program to help homeowners make payments on their mortgages has helped one borrower so far, with just five approvals pending. That, despite 382 applications for the program — the Emergency Mortgage Assistance Program, or EMAP.

The centerpiece program, CTFAMLIES, has fared better, with 65 loan refinancings closed, totaling $13.5 million, among 309 applications. Another seven refinancings are approved, and awaiting a closing date.

In yet another program — the Homeowner Equity Recovery Program, or HERO — the state planned to buy mortgages from lenders, who would take a loss, and negotiate to set more affordable interest rates. HERO has yet to help a single homeowner, and just one loan is expected to close later this month, state records show.

These programs, according to the article, are managed by the Connecticut Housing Finance Authority. My intent here is not to write about the financials but to ask a few questions. If a relief program is going to be useful, it seems to me that a few important items are required: 1) develop a process to identify who needs assistance 2) develop a process for getting aid to them as painlessly as possible. Standards matter, but it’s not that difficult to develop them. Why do we need separate programs, which will confuse people having problems and looking for information and will put a lot of administrative load on the state and its employees?

Moreover, a quick look at the CHFA website is enough to confuse anyone or drive them bananas.

Centers

Regarding this post on poetry, there are still further questions. Every block of poetry must have a center or be centered as if it were a unique or single poem.

In addition, a new concept developed last night. It has to do with time, simultaneity, and four dimensional views, meaning 3D plus time. This isn’t hard to figure out. The concept goes like this: A medieval cathedral is a four dimensional object. Typically, they took more than one generation to build and they have material and spatial scope. The other metaphor is a painting that takes generations to complete, thus each layer has a different surface of compression.

This approach is freeing. Rather than a narrative line intertwingling the bits and pieces, relations work through the compressions.

It’s fun again.

Soft News

Yet another article by Tom Condon on suburbia.

Suburbs have been developing for more than 100 years. A main problem with the explosive suburban growth after World War II, driven by such things as GI mortgages and cheap cars and gas, was its form. Low-density, auto-dependent sprawl might have made sense in an era of large families and 30-cent-a-gallon gas, but it is no longer sustainable. Burning fossil fuel is endangering the planet. Paving fields and forests is damaging the water supply. Sending people to exurban subdivisions is isolating them from other people.

Retrofitting the suburbs reduces car use, lowers household costs, increases time for social engagement and exercise, and improves air and water quality, the authors write. Between aging boomers and young “echo boomers,” there is an increasing market “for a more diverse selection of urban housing types and places.”

It’s good to keep up the voice on this, but there are very few examples of real spatial movement on the relations in CT. This is getting repetitious and soft. Where are the suburbs being retrofitted?