A Moving Object
March 18, 2008    File under: Alabama , America , Civil Rights , Denver , Editing , Food , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Labwork , Language , Listening , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

For my RSS readers, I am radically redesigning my entire site, so the blog root and RSS feeds are changing. Please visit me at www.jakeadamyork.com and let's go from there. It will probably be another 2-3 weeks before all the RSS feeds are in place, but maybe you can take a gander and let me know what you think of the new look and function until then.

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Migration
May 16, 2007    File under: Alabama , America , Denver , Editing , Information Technology , Intake , Interior Monologue , Language , Lomography / Photography , Memory & Memorial , Poetry & Poetics , Postcards , Self-promotion , Steganography , Tapeworm , Teaching , The South

This is for those of you who read my blog via RSS...

I am considering, very strongly, moving to WordPress in the very near future. I've already arranged a version of the Ladder at http://www.jakeadamyork.com/wp/, and I'm leaning heavily toward switching, in which case the feed addresses will certainly change. I will broadcast a warning before it happens however.

If you're reading via RSS, you probably aren't much concerned with the way the site looks, but if you're at all interested, please take a look and let me know what you think.

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Exactly as Exactitude
November 13, 2005    File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching

In response to my late-night note about teaching poetry, Dee responds:

The word "exactly" however, is not believable. How can the ideal reader, one with the best of skills and sensibilities and sympathies, possibly reenact the process exactly? And why would he/she want an exact replica of the process?

May I say if not believable that we must act, provisionally, as if it is believable, possible?

I've been slowly, fragmentarily, as I have the time and as my mind clears, thinking toward my own articulation of sympathetic reading, and I can say (provisionally) that I think good reading begins with the attempt to read the text as the author meant it to be read. Maybe we won't enter into the writer, per se, by following the bread-crumb trail back into the forest of thought, but we should enter into the writer's productive subjectivity, his or her imagined or created author or authority, the proximate if not ultimate source of the poem. Of course we won't get an exact shit-and-sweat replica of the process, but if we use exactly as a telos then we arrive more closely. Allow me my fiction.

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What I Keep Trying To Teach My Students
November 7, 2005    File under: Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching

Poems may not be products of a process that is over as much as records of process so sensitive they enable you to repeat that process exactly, if you read them carefully enough.

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Voting Irregularities (2)
November 3, 2005    File under: America , Denver , Information Technology , Intake , Language , Teaching

Tuesday after voting, I went on a eight-mile bike ride. It was nice to clear my head and forget about how underpopulated my polling place was. I rode past rows and rows and rows of signs for Referenda C & D. But I saw barely more people on my ride than I did around the voting booths. I ventured later onto campus, from which I'd taken an election holiday, and the place was crawling, yet few people were talking about the election, and there were scant evidence that anyone cared.

Two students wrote that day — one to say that he just didn't vote, and one to say that when he asked people if they voted they got offended — and while I didn't exactly get depressed, I was again disappointed by these signs of the health, or the lack of health, of our civic discussions.

It always baffles me that people don't vote. It isn't hard. And it's one of the few ways in which the common citizen can act directly on the shape of the government. I'd never think that protest or discussion of any sort were not political acts, but voting is a special act, one that's provided for in our history, one for which many people struggled and died — and I'm not primarily thinking about our military but about the Civil Rights Martyrs, many of whom died in protests specifically designed to expand voting rights and voting practice, activists of whom I've thought often in the days following Rosa Parks' death. I think each of us has a citizenly duty to vote. But we have an even more powerful ethical obligtion to vote in order to sanctify the deaths of those who fought for this.

I made my memorial.

And then I began thinking about why people don't vote.

I've been personally frustrated by our university administration's official discouragement of our (professors') involvement in political discussion or political action. I know there's a state law that makes it illegal for state employees (of which I am supposedly one) to engage in political campaigns, electioneering, or generally to advocate any policy or political position that might benefit them directly or conflict with the performance of their duties (is this a sedition law?) so that it cannot be said that the taxpayers have been forced to finance their own opposition, but we, the university, is in the business of dialogue, and I find it ludicrous that the professors have been officially asked not to engage in this dialogue. So I can't do any thing more, they say, than encourage my students to vote. So I cannot motivate them toward action through dialogue; I can only suggest that it's a good idea. And since people generally avoid discussions of politics in their daily lives, this means that one of the few places in which one should be able to have an open and spirited discussion is now no longer one of those places. As far as the citizenly conversation about the direction and health of our polity is concerned, it's almost as deserted as my polling place.

And then I see that the opponents of Referendum C, having lost the election, are considering suing to stop expenditure of the money retained under this provision, effectively working to void the election, and I wonder how much effect this has on voter participation.


Last year, I took my LCA with me to the polling place. I had some black-and-white film in it I was planning to double over. This is one of the frames that came up, one I find very appropriate at present. It's hard to see, but my ballot, my actual ballot, is just below the sign, almost wiped out by it.

I wish for a day when I won't think of this picture, but I don't know when it's going to happen.

And in the meantime, both the willfull ignorance and the horrible silence of our political exchanges make me wish again for greater conversational sympathy, more careful listening.

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Why I hate Anderson Cooper tonight
September 26, 2005    File under: America , Poetry & Poetics , Teaching

I'm just returned from another 3-hour History of American Poetry Monday-night-till-10pm extravaganza, and I turn on the television for some World Series of Poker or, if I'm lucky, something actually funny or intelligent, like The Daily Show, and my wife has been watching CNN, and there's Anderson Cooper saying how he got into the news business so that the lives of others could change his life, there's Anderson Cooper talking about how he carries the lives of others with him, how the suffering of others is secreted within him, and I understand now why it's so hard for students to read Whitman and consider his interest in the subject and his apparent self-aggrandizement as democratic, as a promise of equality. Whitman's claims — I am with you — are hollowed out here in this emotional pornography masquerading as magnanimity until we cannot believe anything sincere anymore, any gesture toward the enlarging positive.

Wanted for crimes against American Literature...

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Murphy's Introduction to Universal Laws
August 24, 2005    File under: Teaching

First week of school. You wear a white shirt, a bird will poop on you as you're walking to class or to get a drink of water. The sky will open and dispose Deucalion's flood upon your newly dry-cleaned coat. The Starbuck's coffee you've obtained with a thank-you gift card from last semester's students will leap from its mass-produced double-insulated cup and stain the new slacks your grandmother sent you last week. Students will continue to arrive like assassin starlings in the crabapple trees. Like RTD busses in the downpour puddles. Like independent study requests in the e-mail inbox. Like committee assignments in unsealed envelopes.

Still, I have survived three days. Only two more to go. Team-teaching, committee meeting, first-year convocation. Then a weekend chasing deadlines. Straight, eight chasers.

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