I recognized Bill Evan's piano playing instantaneously as I awoke to local college radio station. It's like recognizing the face of someone you know.

I expect students to react in the same way I do. I gave them some poems of Claudio Rodríguez and expected them to instantly recognize that this was the real thing. Of course, they were not at all impressed. It's like playing Coltrane for someone and having them think it's nice background music. You can't get angry, only sad.

This is the model of the poem that students were taught to write in creative writing workshops circa 1975:

The Sleeper

Long white hairs knot his fingers
which have grown into his chest like snakes.
His feet grip each other like gila-monsters.
There are toads in his ears,
boulders in his blood.
His house is floating, gasping, exploding
under the ocean of his children
who flee on insane ladders
into the dark university.

Strong, active verbs, flights of surrealist fancy, lots of animal imagery. Of course the poem looks like a cliché now, since there are so many poems written in the same vein. But this "false Latin American poem" by a poet I will call "Jim" still holds up reasonably well. It is more vigorous in language than the WSM poem I quoted yesterday. I give it 3 stars for phanopeia, taking off points for the similes in lines 2 and 3. I give 2 and a half stars for melopeia: a good "free verse poem." 1 star for logopeia: there is not a very convincing "dance of the intellect." The poem would be better without the words "long," "insane," and "dark." The adjectives weaken the force of the poem, which depends on its strong nouns and verbs. These adjective also lend a cliché quality to the text, in retrospect. Anything would be better than "dark" here. "into the ecru university."

Jim's more recent poems don't have that same vigor of expression. They are often deadpan prose poems in the mode of Russell, whom I have never appreciated. I think there is a similar evolution in Louise. Her first books had a more lively, variegated language. Is this also true of Mark and Charles?

In case you are put off by my use of first names, I will provide an interpretive key:

Bill = Merwin
Frank = O'Hara (duh, there is only one Frank!)
Jim = Tate
Russell = Edson
Louise = Glück
Mark = Strand
Charles = Simic

Who am I missing in this discussion? Stephen? Greg? Dean? The blog is working quite well as a place to work out ideas for an article I am writing. If anyone wants to help me out I'd welcome it. I'll acknowledge any help I get in a footnote.

My cognitive therapy last night was about my laziness. I said I was lazy.

--Why do say that, you've just worked a 10 hour day?
--I don't work very hard on the weekends, or even on Fridays.
--You never stop thinking, reading, writing your blog, teaching poetry to children. . .
--That's not real work. I have a stack of ungraded papers on my desk.
--You are teaching an extra class; most of those papers are from that.
--I only prepared my undergrad class for 15 minutes yesterday.
--How did the class go?
--Fine, the students responded well to the material; I asked good questions, came up with a nice reading of the play with their help.
--So what's the problem?
--My colleagues would never prepare class for only 15 minutes.
--Maybe you are more efficient or quicker to see how to teach a text after a single reading.
--It could have been a disaster! What if it hadn't worked?
--Well, what if it hadn't worked?
--Then I would have given a sub-par performance.
--That's never happened to a colleague who was meticulously prepared?
--I don't know...
--I'm sure it has. What if a colleague said he or she told you that a particular class didn't go well?
--I would say it happens to everyone!
--Then why are you singling out yourself for blame? Especially when the class did go well. You prepared to give a class the way you know best, based on your own capability and experience. The class was successful. Yet you perceive a problem here. You are a seriously fucked-up man.!


It's a lot cheaper to do it to yourself than to pay someone $75 for 50 minutes.