speach tree

Just finished reading A Van Jordan's MACNOLIA (2004). I thought this was a useful critique by Tim Morris. I agree with him that the more interesting poems were the dictionary-definition format poems "to", "with", and "from." Though I am no formalist, I am warming up to using forms to teach poetry. I don't know if persona poetry is considered formal, but it usually gets people to write. But I digress. Below is a sestina that I want to use in a lesson, but I'll have to work out the lesson later - too tired at the moment. NB: 1. Fanny Brice, the longtime star of the Ziegfield Follies, was known for her talents as a comedienne as well as a singer. 2. Princess Tam Tam was a film starring Josephine Baker, produced in 1935. 3. "My Man" was a popular song written by Maurice Yvain as "Mon Homme." Later, the English version was written by Channing Pollock for the Ziegfield Follies. 4. Pepito was Josephine Baker's fiance from 1935...

In an effort to try to clean up the house - get rid of old papers etc - I came across a little pad of paper from Free Minds Collective days. We must have been brainstorming some ground-rules or something. Here is the list: confidentiality speak from personal experience, not from sweeping generalizations step up, step back respect support have an open mind: don't be thinking about a response while someone is still talking reflect keep the goals in mind check your body language Here are some other notes... Interventions: 1. use positive reinforcement 2. make the student a leader 3. provide choices 4. deal with sickness, not symptoms 5. build trust but don't confuse building trust with being friends 6. find and encourage passion 7. know the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic rewards 8. sometimes you have to be tough - a mommy (??) [sometimes my own notes confuse me.] Responding to different learning styles: 1. kinesthetic - with your hands 2. present the same concept in di...

but luckily I have hard nails and it didn't hurt. My father is moving out of his rental house in the suburbs of northern VA (into another house of equal size and shape in the same suburb of VA). I am frantically going through my reams of print-outs, books, notes, journals, field-notes, letters, pay-stubs, magazine articles, sketchbooks, receipts, thesis drafts, and mangas dating back to before the millennium. D, R, and I recently discussed our attachment to material objects that - in addition to taking up space - give us access to privilege. What do I mean? Well... For example, my books. I have all these ridiculously articulate books about literary theory, poverty in America, Native cultures, immigration law and theory, and sewing machines, most of which I have not read, but which place me in the (over)educated class, one marker of which is that we have more than 100 books in a personal collection. For more on the educated class, read the liner notes for College Dropout by Kanye a...

some words i have recently re-discovered and with which i have rekindled a romance: hummingbird morsels porcupine crave skitter pumps rush ponytail stem astringent sinister condensation dominate battle mushroom yum words that have lost favor with me recently: space feel syllable tail challenge script descent race class press guilt like futile suicide waterproof sorry I tried to explain the four writing systems in Japanese today with my middle school students. I guess the basic one would be hiragana - a script that indicates different sounds arranged in syllables, which can be rearranged to form words. Katakana , the other basic script is a counterpart sound-script that looks edgier and is used only for foreign words. The third script is kanji , Chinese characters that signal both a sound and a meaning - some kanji characters are associated with multiple sounds and multiple meanings. The final script is romaji , based on the alphabet, used for the transliteration of Japanese words as we...

a bad date is like trying to turn on a lamp that isn't plugged into the wall. changing cities or houses is sometimes like a singer who has to keep the same name over the years despite how much she grows. trying to learn inDesign, photoshop, and illustrator is like having a muscle ache that gives you a headache. you don't know how they could be related but anyway it's a pain in the ass. unexpectedly getting the afternoon off from work is like having brownies for dinner. it's what you wanted, but not when you wanted it.

R and I were talking about Louise Erdrich, one of my literary heroes, and her character Fleur Pillager. R raised the issue of self-exotification, a problem I had been thinking about specifically with respect to Erdrich's work ever since I finished reading Four Souls and moved on to Tracks . N and I had talked about the voyeuristic relationship of the reader to the text, something that is not necessarily exoticist but it's certainly a trope that encourages exoticism, I think. We also talked about how the stories Erdrich relates are not living stories - they are often of the past, and thus it is easy to remove one's responsibility and relation to the text. In any case, I feel that the intimacy of the stories penned by Erdrich are a result of her own upbringing as a writer and as a person, and I don't want her to write differently, but I have to acknowledge this trap of self-exotification... I guess my argument though with that assessment is that Erdrich doesn't just p...

Last night ND called me out of the blue as he was walking to the Rock to finish a paper for a class I never took but always wanted to take while at Brown, mostly to watch how Prof. DK taught the class. Everyone I know who has taken that class has said that DK is a Good Teacher, and I am inclined to believe them. They say he gets a class talking to each other about what they got out of the books, without imposing a lot of his own agenda. It is said that he asks a lot of good questions and listens to what students say. I had a lovely conversation about books, and I realized today that I love talking about books! Especially novels, I think. Maybe I should be a Lit teacher after all... But I like talking about what I like about books more than I like leading a discussion about books... and YT told me I should think about being an art teacher instead. In any case it was very nice to talk to ND about books we had read or wanted to read. If my spirit animal was not already a lion who is tryi...

Today I had a wonderful time strolling the sneezy Brooklyn Botanic Garden with my Japanese students (mostly middle school), getting to know them while enjoying the beautiful plant-life. What I did not enjoy so thoroughly was the Sakura Matsuri (The Cherry Blossom Festival) itself. Here is what I am going to put up on my public blog: Spending my childhood summers in Japan, some of my favorite memories come from the neighborhood festivals in Nagoya and Kochi . There were carts with middle-aged men and dumpy women yelling "Hai IRASSHAI!" ("Step right up!") which really fast always sounded like "HAIRASSHAI!!", hawking plastic festival masks, goldfish-scooping games, mitarashi dango, and takoyaki from hastily erected stalls lining the main walkways. There would be snotty children running around bumping into things and screaming, yukata-clad women looking coy for the men, and older men in belly-warmers and sandals traveling in clouds of smoke, a glowing cigarett...