Leadbelly Sing Along

At the folk music festival, one of the bluesier performers attempted to engage us all in singing the chorus of the old Leadbelly songs, "In the Pines" (also known as "Where Did You Sleep Last Night?"). It's been recorded by just about everybody, but my favorite version is the one by Nirvana on their MTV Unplugged in New York album--ah, those glorious olden days when MTV still played music . . . but let me not digress. If you want to see the Nirvana performance of the song, go here, but it may break your heart.

My spouse and I belted out the refrain and then realized that almost nobody else was singing. And despite being encouraged by the performer each time as the refrain came around, almost nobody sang.

Now, it's not a complicated refrain, some variation of: "Oh girl, my girl, don't lie to me. Tell me where did you sleep last night? In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don't ever shine, we shiver the whole night through." It has two or three notes. You can whisper them or scream them, the way Kurt Cobain did. Like many old, old folk songs, it's hard to go wrong.

It was Woody Guthrie, after all, who said if your song needs more than three chords, you're showing off (or was it 2 chords?). Folk music, like punk music, has a do-it-yourself ethic. We should all be able to participate.

So, why did so few people sing? If we'd been in a regular gathering of people, I'd understand. The idea of a group of people singing together, regardless of skill and talent, has largely been relegated to church these days (and even in churches, there's a disturbing trend of having star performers and congregations who don't sing . . . but let me not digress). But we were in a group of folk music people, many of whom perform/sing/play on a regular basis.

I've spent days thinking about that reluctance to sing and thinking about how we live in a culture where people are likely to know fewer and fewer songs. Arts programs have been cut out of schools so that students can bubble in test questions more efficiently. Radio stations have been gutted, so that we have less access to free music. In some ways we have access to more music than ever before, thanks to the Internet, but I'd be willing to bet that most of us are listening to less music these days.

I've also been thinking about my PhD and about teaching Brit Lit survey classes year after year. One of the advantages of the PhD has been that it opened that teaching door to me. One of the other advantages of my particular PhD program is that we read a lot of literature. And when I taught the survey classes, I had to fill in the gaps in my knowledge, so I read even more literature.

One of the things I miss with my move into administration is that teaching life where I was surrounded by literature (even when that life was surrounded by Composition too). One of the things that shocks me about some MFA programs is how some of them produce graduates who haven't read much more widely than the works of their fellow grad students.

In both music and literature, so many of us are losing our heritage. I was lucky, in that I went to a liberal arts school, where I met lots of people with music collections even more extensive than mine, in genres unfamiliar to me--so I have a familiarity with country music, for example, that I wouldn't have otherwise. Both my undergraduate and graduate programs believed in a broad literary focus, in addition to following my particular passions. I could analyze the work of a little known female writer, but I'd also be delving into the work of the dead white guys that generations of English majors before me had studied.

I suspect we're also losing our heritage in other fields too. On Monday I wrote about my students and their glancing acquaintance with history. I bet the same is true in most fields, especially in the humanities.

How to combat this loss? I wish I knew. Perhaps when Obama has finished transforming the medical system and the financial system, he can turn his attention to education. Perhaps in an age of access to more and more knowledge, we will just have to accept the loss of some of it. Lest I glorify my undergraduate days too much, let me remember that my research plan was to go to the library and read the 6 books and 9 articles (on microfilm!) that the library had--and then I was done and wrote the paper. Now we have access to so much more--maybe I'm wrong to expect more comprehensive understanding of subjects.

It's the human condition, isn't it? Everything we love will be lost, and we must figure out how to go on living with the knowledge that it will all be lost.

But I can't afford to go down that existential path any further. I must make soup for the homeless (tonight is my church's stint at the soup kitchen), poems for myself and anyone else who's interested, changes to a manuscript, and then there are the errands to run . . . some day, I will feel profound sadness at all the errands I can no longer run.

Thinking about Poetry at the Folk Music Festival

On Sunday, my spouse and I went to a local folk festival. It used to be a much larger, outdoor festival, with multiple stages held over a long holiday week-end. Then that festival was essentially wrecked by several disasters--a series of hurricanes in 2004 and 2005 left the park where the festival was held unusable. A series of power and money struggles left the leadership of the folk club too fragmented to regroup the festival elsewhere (at least, that's how it's been told to me).

But last year, the new leadership decided to hold a scaled down version at a local bar that's usually a country-western dance hall. Some people complained about the lingering smell of cigarettes, and it was an imperfect venue in other ways (dark, cavernous, not a wide beer selection), but it seemed to work. And so, we went to the second annual event on Sunday.

As we listened to one performer, my spouse said, "This guy was an NEA literary fellow?" It seemed hard to believe.*

I said, "Maybe his creative writing is better than his song writing. Maybe this music would seem more profound if we were stoned."

But there wasn't a chance of getting our chemistry altered legally. The bar had no microbrews, and the one bottle of Merlot they had on hand had been open God only knows how long. Yes, we've become alcohol snobs in our middle age. We, who used to mix up huge vats of almost undrinkable beverage from grain alcohol and Kool-aid (we called it PJ--was that done elsewhere or just at my small, Southern college in the mid-80's?), we now turn up our noses at swill. My spouse used to drink Milwaukee's Best beer (as my Sociology professor used to crack, "If this is Milwaukee's Best, I'd hate to taste Milwaukee's Worst!"). Now the only American beer he'll drink needs to come from some small, anti-corporate brewery.

Since I had no wine to savor, I turned my overactive mind to the music. It was quite a mix. We had some really great performers who did wonderful blues and bluegrass music. We had some earnest singer-songwriters: some who wrote good stuff (if you haven't checked out Rod MacDonald yet, you should--do it right now), and some who sang rather predictable lyrics about the loss of orange trees and overdevelopment. There were some tribute bands (one guy who covered John Denver songs and a group that keeps the work of the Weavers alive). It was an interesting mix. Everybody got half an hour to play/sing.

I asked one of the organizers if the performers got paid. They got paid barely enough to cover the gas. I guess they came because they were going to be in the area anyway--there's quite a folk music circuit, and we're on the way to some other venues. I suspect that some came hoping to sell CDs. Some are local, so what did they have to lose?

So many art forms are becoming ones we do for love and perhaps for a pittance of money. I used to write hoping that I could write my way out of my teaching job. I had a vision of a best selling novel that would be made into a movie.

But even if I'm not going to make a living from my poetry, I'm happy to be a poet. Not everything has to be transformed into dollars to make it worthwhile.

In some ways, I feel like a mystic who is still functional in the world. The normal world hears some Science story about tectonic plates and the earthquake in Haiti. The normal world shrugs. I take notes, and my mind starts to whirl away, creating a poem that has nothing to do with earthquakes, but instead thinks about the planet as a patient with arthritis.

I'm like Blake, seeing figures in the flowers. My students assume that Blake was some drug addled freak who died young in a gutter; they're amazed that he had a completely functional life as a printer and engraver, in addition to creating his mystical illuminated writing.

A modern Blake--could that be my goal? I'd better get back to my paintbrushes. Or maybe I'll be a modern Blake who works in poetry and fiber. I like having something luminous to think about, today, when I get back to work by going to a meeting about the Spring schedule that promises to be long and perhaps combative.

*I couldn't resist trying to figure out if the one performer really did get an NEA grant. He did. So have lots of other people. If you want to see your tax dollars at work, go here for the complete list of who has gotten which writing and translating awards (it's not a complete list; it's a report that was published in 2006). It's really an impressive list.

"Back When You Marched with Martin Luther King"

I'm always amazed at how much people don't know. I'm not fabulous at remembering dates myself, but I can get decades straight. I assume that people coming out of high school will know basic facts, and that might be my first mistake.

I've had more than one student say, "Back when you marched with Martin Luther King . . ."

I always interrupt to say, "I was born in 1965." Often I get a blank look. I explain, "I was born in 1965, and King was killed in 1968--that would have made me three when he died. I could hardly walk, much less march." Notice how I did the math there too; I never assume people can do basic math, since I often can't (I'm a disaster with percentage questions).

Don't get me wrong. I'm flattered that they think I'm an old Civil Rights veteran. I'm just a bit aghast that they don't understand the history. Perhaps they're really telling me how old I look, but I don't think that's the case. My students just don't know their decades.

Well, that's what teachers do, right? They teach. They make up for the gaps left by teachers who have come before. So, I give a mini-lesson about the Civil Rights movement, and on we go.

Once I played with a poem idea:

I'd like to think I'd have marched with Dr. Martin Luther King,
but he'd have made us wear our Sunday best,
and I can hardly get from the car to the church
in these high heels,
much less from Selma to Montgomery.

There's more, but I can't remember it. It's buried in a rough draft file. Perhaps I'll dig it out and spend some of this holiday revising it.

This day has always felt almost sacred to me (for more on the religious aspects of this day, go to this post on my theology blog). I've always been impressed with the Civil Rights movement, with how they stayed civilized, even when the agents of civilization (the police, the sheriff, the white establishment) seemed mad and crazed with rage. I've always been impressed with how they held fast to their beliefs, even when they flew in the face of what society might teach us. I've always been impressed with the changes that they wrought.

My younger self, that impatient nineteen year old, was impatient with how long social change took. My older self looks back at how far we've come and how quickly, and I suck in my breath and pray for continued success. A black president: my nineteen year old self would not have believed it would have happened in her lifetime. But it has.

Today is a day to dream big and bold visions. We could change our society. We could make it better. What would that society look like?

We have to dream that dream before we can achieve it. We have to find the courage to hold tightly to our visions. We have to face down all the fire hoses, both those of our minds which inform us of the impossibility of our dreams and those of our society, that tells us to move more slowly.

But first we have to dream. Dream boldly, today of all days.

Trivializing Slavery and the Middle Passage?

In one of my classes, in 2002, I showed the movie Amistad. The depiction of that passage across the Atlantic stays with me. Even as I watched it, my poetry brain was making connections, seeing it as a metaphor for so many things. It led to the poem which I pasted below, which was published here in Clapboard House.

In my writing, I've always felt free to go wherever I wanted to go, to follow whatever sparkling threads and bread crumbs my muse (the one who works in cahoots with my subconscious) leaves for me. In my publishing efforts, I pause a bit.

I worry about being sacrilegious--not that I worry about a jealous God smiting me, but I don't want to trample all over people's beliefs. While my poems stay true to my beliefs, my beliefs which are undergirded by decades of reading and close study, I know that alienating people is not the way to open a discussion about differing beliefs.

I wonder, too, about some of the imagery I've used, imagery that doesn't come from my own heritage. If you look at my fair skin and hair, it's clear that I'm not descended from slaves or Native Americans. My Scottish shipbuilder ancestor wasn't rich enough to own slaves, I'm fairly sure, and my German farming ancestors could barely afford to feed themselves, so they weren't owning other humans.

I'm reminded of the discussion that we had in a creative writing class that I took when I was nineteen. We (the students) all argued that a man couldn't possibly understand what it was like to be a woman, and that a white person couldn't write the experience of a black person. The teacher fought valiantly against our view, but he didn't convince any of us at the time.

How little we believed in the powers of the imagination! Oh we of little faith!

Needless to say, after several decades of writing experience, I disagree with my nineteen year old self. I think that a thoughtful, empathetic imagination can probably understand the situation of any character we want to create.

Yet I also want to tread carefully. I don't want to trivialize anyone's history.

So, after all that preamble, here's my poem, which links marriage at midlife to the Atlantic ocean voyage endured by slaves. Have I pushed the metaphor too far?

Middle Passage of Marriage


Our younger selves—those feckless
European adventurers—fettered
us together. Marriage, a brilliant capitalist
scheme to make money
or at least to collect presents,
and we are left to cope
with the decisions of our younger selves,
decisions made with callous
disregard for the human flesh involved.

Shackled below the decks, we make our perilous
way across the Atlantic of our lives together.
We have spent most of our days
on this journey staring at each other’s skin,
knowing the other’s every habit.
We have kept each other alive and sane,
in part because the alternative is so grisly.

If I let you go, watched you slide
into the abyss, I still wouldn’t be free.
It would be worse to be chained
to your corpse, so I settle
into this Middle Passage.

I yearn for the freedom of our youth,
those carefree days when we didn’t know
the boredom of these watery vistas,
the endless irritations in the hold of this ship.

Ignorant of the horrors
that await us, the indignities we shall suffer
as we slave on the plantation
of aging, I hold tight to the hope
of a New World, a continent to call my own.

Harriet Tubman Haunts My Poems

Since I spent so many years as an English major, it's hard for me to just write my work, without also imagining a grad student several hundred years from now writing about it. I know what images I've put in my work, but I wonder what images other people will see. Will they focus on what's important?

And here we're back to some interesting questions in the field of literary criticism. Does it really matter what the author intended? How much should my background as a reader affect my literary criticism? How much should my knowledge of an author affect my reading of the work?

So, dear little future grad student, I wonder if you'll even have access to blogs and such. How will you treat them? Will you see them the way that I see the journals, diaries, and letters of poets and writers? Or, since they're more public documents, will you see them differently? Will you care about what I thought about what I was writing?

In case you will care, let me expound a bit.

I'm a woman who grew up in the U.S. South, just after some of the great successes of the Civil Rights Movement. Our schools in the 1970's and early 1980's were uneasily integrated, that integration enforced by busing (integration which has largely fallen by the wayside now). Our teachers were intent on teaching us that prejudice was wrong. It was hard, though, not to notice what a new idea that was, surrounded as we were by the ruins of great plantations, the ruins of the U.S. South, the knowledge that before the Civil War the U.S. Southern states would have been the richest states and now they seem forever destined to be the poorest.

Or maybe I was just an unusually aware child and teenager.

Anyway, it's no surprise to me that images that come out of slavery haunt my poems. They haunt our country, so why shouldn't they haunt our creative work?

I do worry that perhaps I trivialize some of the material, but I'll write more about that tomorrow.

For today, here's a poem inspired by Harriet Tubman. It first appeared in South Carolina Review, and I included it in my chapbook, Whistling Past the Graveyard.

Running from the Plantation of Despair

I dwell in the plantation of despair,
held in the chains of mistakes and doubts,
whipped by all the demons who keep vigil
over this boggy rice farm of depression.
I’m an ocean away from my home, my happy
self, in a land where I can’t speak the language,
digest the food, or interpret the constellations.

I inhale the dust
of a million dashed dreams. I sink into a songless
sleep and wake to a day drained of color.
Gradually I forget my real name, my mother’s face,
the syllables of my own language. I can no longer
trace the steps that brought me here or plot
escape. No revolutionary, me.

And then she appears at half a crack of dawn, dark
as the night, with my running shoes in her hand.
“Girl, we got to set you free.”

She doesn’t listen to my fears, my creaking
knees, the slow heaving of my lungs.
I follow her light, my North
Star, setting me free. We run to liberty,
avoiding the dangerous dogs, the slaveholders,
naysayers who would sell us back
to the plantation of despair.

Dreaming About Poet Laureates, Community Colleges, and Harriet Tubman

Last night, I dreamed that I was some sort of employee who was trying to help Poet Laureate Kay Ryan. In my dream, she had come to me to tell me that she didn't want to be Poet Laureate anymore, and we were strategizing her exit strategy.

I woke up and thought, Great--even in my dreams, I'm some sort of low-level administration type. If I'm going to dream about Poet Laureates, why can't I dream that I'm the actual Poet Laureate?

Of course, I've been daydreaming about the Poet Laureate position for years. I've always been intrigued by the projects that the Poet Laureate chooses to pursue. Most of us are familiar with Robert Pinsky's Favorite Poem Project, but other Poet Laureates have done interesting things too.

When I woke up this morning, I thought, I wonder if Kay Ryan is still Poet Laureate, and I set out to search. I came across this story, which talks about the project that Kay Ryan will do, a project which focuses upon community colleges: "The Community College Poetry Project is made up of three parts. National Poetry Day on Community College Campuses will be celebrated on the first day of April beginning next year and will include events, readings, and a conference call with Ryan. A Web page, 'Poetry for the Mind's Joy,' will launch early next year hosted by the Library of Congress' site. Lastly, colleges will submit their best work each year to feature on the site."

In this story, Ryan says, ""I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly—and with very little financial encouragement—saving lives and minds. I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, with the possible exception of the bicycle."

What a wonderful statement about community colleges. I finished my Ph.D. during another time of deep recession and cuts in teaching staff (back in 1992). I won a job at Trident Technical College, which was one of the biggest community colleges in South Carolina. I think some of my professors might have felt I was a bit of a failure, but I was happy to have that job. It paid a living wage and gave me benefits.

One of the benefits that it gave me was that I really felt I was doing important work. Most of my students were the first in their families to attend college, and I felt fortunate to be their guide. I knew that this chance to attend a community college was their shot at escape from a low wage future. I liked being part of the team that helped that to happen.

During those days of teaching endless sections of Composition (and the lower level, pre-college Comp classes), I often thought of my childhood hero, Harriet Tubman, and how our vocations were similar: leading people to freedom, some of whom were a bit resistant to being rescued. Seeing myself that way helped me during the days when my job felt more like drudgery than heroism.

In this story, Kay Ryan says, ""I always think writers will come from the most unlikely sources. Maybe that is because I was educated in a community college, I didn't look a bit promising and I got to be poet laureate of the United States."

Kay Ryan's comment touches on one of the difficult parts of being a teacher: you rarely know whether or not you've been successful. You teach your lessons on Composition in sixteen weeks or less, and the students go off to their next class, and eventually they graduate, and you never know what happens.

Well, sometimes you know. On Friday, a former student came to see me. She said, "You changed my life."

No, gentle reader, it was not my writing instruction, exactly, that changed her life. She said, "I brought some flan to class, and you had a bite, and you told me that I'd be really successful if I went into business making flan." Years later, that's what she's doing. I hope she'll be successful. I hope my taste buds weren't wrong. I hope she has good business skills to go with her superb flan making skills.

Perhaps most of us have this job difficulty. Very few of us have jobs that let us know for sure that we're making a difference. The other day, after my Penelope of a day of re-revising a revised report to turn it back into the original report and updating it, I asked a friend, "Is this is what I was put on Earth to do?"

My friend said that was the wrong question, but she couldn't tell me what the right question would be.

I think it's the right question. And happily, most days, I do feel I'm doing what I was put on Earth to do, at least for part of the day. It's one of the joys of midlife. When I got my first teaching job, I spent a lot of time wondering if I was at the right school. Now I know that I can do my Harriet Tubman work in any number of settings with many types of work.

Of Changes, in Weather, Sleep, Writing, Work, Movie Viewing

We've been having several weeks of record breaking cold now. What a strange weather month: record breaking heat, record breaking rain, record breaking cold, record breaking length of cold.

On Sunday night, the lights flickered, and then half the electric in the house went to half strength. And the heat wasn't working. So we sat in our dim house, with a fire in the fireplace, watching The Simpsons. You know, a fire doesn't really give out much heat, especially when it's your sole source of heat. Again, I'm in awe of what the colonists and settlers accomplished. I could never go off and settle Minnesota. Brr.

In the middle of the night, the electric came back to full strength, so it wasn't a restful night. So I didn't write yesterday morning before work.

I thought I might write when I got to work, but I discovered that I needed to revisit one of our SACS assessment documents. During the break, I took out a lot of material, on the advice of one dean. Then I had to rewrite a bit to make the remainder make sense. Last week, a different member of the team decided that the new document was a bit thin, so I spent several hours yesterday putting back in what I took out, and again, revising so that the document would make sense. Sigh.

I must keep reminding myself that when I taught, I had these Penelope moments too. Weave a tapestry, unweave at night, weave the same patch the next day--a metaphor for modern work!

At least I finally saw an uplifting movie. My parents were vacationing in Orlando, where we went to join them. It was much too cold and rainy/sleety to do a theme park (all those runners, doing the half marathon and marathon in such unseasonably cold weather--poor runners!), so we went to a movie. Mom chose The Blind Side.

I hesitated because the reviews and previews made it look like your traditional football movie and/or your traditional do-gooder/white person's guilt kind of movie. It was a bit of all that and so much more. There was a bit of your teacher feel good movie. A bit of your cute kid movie.

But more than that, it was one of those uplifting kind of stories, the kind where you leave feeling positive about the potential for human kindness (and if you're like me, you leave feeling like you haven't done nearly as much as you could have for your fellow humans). There were plenty of scenes where the movie was emotionally manipulative, but I didn't feel annoyed about that, the way I sometimes do.

Maybe I forgave the movie because it was based on a true story. Maybe I forgave it because I was being manipulated into feeling hopeful, as opposed to the effect that most movies are trying to manipulate my emotions towards. I grow tired of feeling bleak and hopeless about how existentially alone we all are. I decided against seeing The Road, because I wasn't sure I could handle all that bleakness (and because it left our theatres fairly quickly).

Of course, I'll probably go see The Book of Eli. Will it be uplifting or depressing? I don't know, but my spouse is interested in seeing it, and I'm always up for an apocalyptic movie!

Here we are, the first week of the term. I shall try to put some good patterns into place, so that all my writing efforts don't get subsumed into accreditation documents. A day here and there is to be expected, but my inner poet will get snappy if we don't get some real writing done soon.