Blog Pedagogy!

In class, we were assigned to read Bridging the Composition Divide: Blog Pedagogy and the Potential for Agnostic Classrooms by Janice Wendi Fernheimer and Thomas J. Nelson- it's timely as I was questioning what a blog does to writing and audience. A blog is a new genre - a space that is semi-private/semi-public. The shifting nature of it is interesting-- I'm using it more as a notebook and marker of things than a journal now. 

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day.

What hours, O what black hoürs we have spent

This night! what sights you, heart, saw; ways you went!

And more must, in yet longer light's delay.

With witness I speak this. But where I say

Hours I mean years, mean life. And my lament

Is cries countless, cries like dead letters sent

To dearest him that lives alas! away.

I am gall, I am heartburn. God's most deep decree

Bitter would have me taste: my taste was me;

Bones built in me, flesh filled, blood brimmed the curse.

Selfyeast of spirit a dull dough sours. I see

The lost are like this, and their scourge to be

As I am mine, their sweating selves; but worse.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins

When Ecstasy is Inconvenient

Feign a great calm;

all gay transport soon ends.

Chant: who knows—

flight's end or flight's beginning

for the resting gull?

Heart, be still.

Say there is money but it rusted;

say the time of moon is not right for escape.

It's the color in the lower sky

too broadly suffused,

or the wind in my tie.

Know amazedly how

often one takes his madness

into his own hands

and keeps it.

—Lorine Niedecker  

* published in Poetry 42.6, September 1933 

Durch den sich Vögel werfen

What birds plunge through is not that intimate space

in which you feel all forms intensified.

(There, in the Open, you'd be denied yourself

and vanish on and on without return.)

Space reaches out from us and translates each thing:

to accomplish a tree's essence

cast inner space around it, out of that space

that has its life in you. Surround it with restraint.

In itself it has no bounds. Only in the spell

of your renouncing does it rise as Tree. 

— Rainer Maria Rilke (Trans. Edward Snow)

Durch den sich Vögel werfen, is nicht der

vertraute Raum, der die Gestalt dir steigert.

(Im Frein, dorten, bist du dir verweigert

und schwindest weiter ohne Wiederkehr.)

Raum greift aus uns und übersetzt die Dinge:

daß dir das Dasein eines Baums gelinge,

wirf Innenraum um ihn, aus jenem Raum,

der in dir west. Umgieb ihn mit Verhaltung.

Er grenzt sich nicht. Erst in der Eingestaltung

in dein Verzichten wird er wirklich Baum.

The Space Between Words: Book Review

My review of John Burgess's second book of poetry, A History of Guns in the Family.

Reintroduction

I've kept this blog around without updating it in nearly four years. It was my space to write in-between my transition from Japan in 2004 to life back in California--I was surprised by the frankness of my posts and how much I've changed since then. Most people didn't know about my blog, so it ended up being a confessional space--something I wouldn't share now. I've left a few posts that remind me of my time back then that aren't as confessional. 

I'm always hesitant to start writing in my blog again--it becomes a journal when it's not a personal journal--some days I'm in a confessional mood and other days I'm very private, which is difficult to monitor in a blog when typing and clicking "publish" is so easy. 

Writers are writing to an audience. Sometimes in a blog an audience is a friendly ear--one can only picture the eager blogger readers enjoying every secret disclosed. Reading my old posts, I noticed that there was an element of confession, but an element of resolution. As I typed, I figured out the whys of my wonders-- and I kept writing in that way because I felt closure--later I'd realized I'd disclosed too much. 

Returning to this blog may be productive for me to do now as I'm close to finishing my first year of the MFA program in poetry. Last semester was a deluge of poetry for me. This semester I'm quiet. Giving myself some space to write out things in other venues and forms than poetry or academic papers may be what I need to gently keep my pulse going.