"At the Galleria Shopping Mall," Tony Hoagland

Just past the bin of pastel baby socks and underwear,

there are some 49-dollar Chinese-made TVs;

one of them singing news about a far-off war,

one comparing the breast size of an actress from Hollywood

to the breast size of an actress from Bollywood.

And here is my niece Lucinda,

who is nine and a true daughter of Texas,

who has developed the flounce of a pedigreed blonde

and declares that her favorite sport is shopping.

Today is the day she embarks upon her journey,

swinging a credit card like a scythe

through the meadows of golden merchandise.

Today is the day she stops looking at faces,

and starts assessing the labels of purses;

So let it begin. Let her be dipped in the dazzling bounty

and raised and wrung out again and again.

And let us watch.

As the gods in olden stories

turned mortals into laurel trees and crows

to teach them some kind of lesson,

so we were turned into Americans

to learn something about loneliness.

Action List: 3.29.2011

First, some class notes:
1. Reading logs/blogs are due today.
2. Because the recitation "playbook" is due tomorrow for your memorized poem, please bring a hard copy of it to class, formatted the way I showed you in class. An example and instructions are on the class notes page.

Okay, here is our online fun for today. We're going to browse the online edition of Sunday's youth-dedicated edition of the New York Times Magazine. Please add the label "Tuesday Response" to your post for today and all future Tuesday blog assignments.

For today's blog assignment, you need to read and respond to at least two articles. First, follow the prompts for #1, below. After that, choose one of the following two prompts.

1. (Everyone do this one!) Listen to a few of these interviews of high school seniors about where they see themselves ten years from now. Use headphones if you have them, because they have audio.

Write a brief response that discusses your reaction to the interviews you see: Which student in the article do you relate to the most? Which one is the most interesting? Which one seems the most deluded? Then, in a second paragraph, write your own answer to that question: where do you see yourself in ten years?Next, choose one of the following options:

Respond informally, in at least 250 words, with your thoughts about one of the following articles, and incorporating at least two quotes from the article into your response:

2. "A Soccer Phenom Puts the 'I' in Team," an article with videos about a high school specialist in "free-style" soccer. Don't just watch the video--read the article; it's interesting.

3. "Online Poker's Big Winner," about a 21 year-old multi-millionaire online poker player.

"Love Song," Carol Muske-Dukes

Love comes hungry to anyone’s hand.
I found the newborn sparrow next to
the tumbled nest on the grass. Bravely

opening its beak. Cats circled, squirrels.
I tried to set the nest right but the wild
birds had fled. The knot of pin feathers

sat in my hand and spoke. Just because
I’ve raised it by touch, doesn’t mean it
follows. All day it pecks at the tin image of

a faceless bird. It refuses to fly,
though I’ve opened the door. What
sends us to each other? He and I

had a blue landscape, a village street,
some poems, bread on a plate. Love
was a camera in a doorway, love was

a script, a tin bird. Love was faceless,
even when we’d memorized each other’s
lines. Love was hungry, love was faceless,

the sparrow sings, famished, in my hand.

"Late Echo," John Ashbery

Alone with our madness and favorite flower

We see that there really is nothing left to write about.

Or rather, it is necessary to write about the same old things

In the same way, repeating the same things over and over

For love to continue and be gradually different.

Beehives and ants have to be re-examined eternally

And the color of the day put in

Hundreds of times and varied from summer to winter

For it to get slowed down to the pace of an authentic

Saraband and huddle there, alive and resting.

Only then can the chronic inattention

Of our lives drape itself around us, conciliatory

And with one eye on those long tan plush shadows

That speak so deeply into our unprepared knowledge

Of ourselves, the talking engines of our day.

"History of Desire," Tony Hoagland

When you're seventeen, and drunk
on the husky, late-night flavor
of your first girlfriend's voice
along the wires of the telephone

what else to do but steal
your father's El Dorado from the drive,
and cruise out to the park on Driscoll Hill?
Then climb the county water tower

and aerosol her name in spraycan orange
a hundred feet above the town?
Because only the letters of that word,
DORIS, next door to yours,

in yard-high, iridescent script,
are amplified enough to tell the world
who's playing lead guitar
in the rock band of your blood.

You don't consider for a moment
the shock in store for you in 10 A.D.,
a decade after Doris, when,
out for a drive on your visit home,

you take the Smallville Road, look up
and see RON LOVES DORIS
still scorched upon the reservoir.
This is how history catches up—

by holding still until you
bump into yourself.
What makes you blush, and shove
the pedal of the Mustang

almost through the floor
as if you wanted to spray gravel
across the features of the past,
or accelerate into oblivion?

Are you so out of love that you
can't move fast enough away?
But if desire is acceleration,
experience is circular as any

Indianapolis. We keep coming back
to what we are—each time older,
more freaked out, or less afraid.
And you are older now.

You should stop today.
In the name of Doris, stop.

"Wynken, Blynken, and Nod," Eugene Field

Wynken, Blynken, and Nod one night
  Sailed off in a wooden shoe,—
Sailed on a river of crystal light
  Into a sea of dew.
"Where are you going, and what do you wish?"
  The old moon asked the three.
"We have come to fish for the herring-fish
  That live in this beautiful sea;
  Nets of silver and gold have we,"
           Said Wynken,
           Blynken,
           And Nod.

The old moon laughed and sang a song,
  As they rocked in the wooden shoe;
And the wind that sped them all night long
  Ruffled the waves of dew;
The little stars were the herring-fish
  That lived in the beautiful sea.
"Now cast your nets wherever you wish,—
  Never afraid are we!"
  So cried the stars to the fishermen three,
           Wynken,
           Blynken,
           And Nod.

All night long their nets they threw
  To the stars in the twinkling foam,—
Then down from the skies came the wooden shoe,
  Bringing the fishermen home:
'Twas all so pretty a sail, it seemed
  As if it could not be;
And some folk thought 'twas a dream they'd dreamed
  Of sailing that beautiful sea;
  But I shall name you the fishermen three:
           Wynken,
           Blynken,
           And Nod.

Wynken and Blynken are two little eyes,
  And Nod is a little head,
And the wooden shoe that sailed the skies
  Is a wee one's trundle-bed;
So shut your eyes while Mother sings
  Of wonderful sights that be,
And you shall see the beautiful things
  As you rock in the misty sea
  Where the old shoe rocked the fishermen three:—
           Wynken,
           Blynken,
           And Nod.

"For My Daughter," Daivd Ignatow

When I die choose a star
and name it after me
that you may know
I have not abandoned
or forgotten you.
You were such a star to me,
following you through birth
and childhood, my hand
in your hand.

When I die
choose a star and name it
after me so that I may shine
down on you, until you join
me in darkness and silence
together.

Action List: 3.22.11

My dog Smokey.

Participation News: Grades are updated now, unless your display name is Reach for the Moon--I have misplaced your real name, so you need to let me know if that is your online alias.

Congratulations to Artemis, Mariah Hamil, lyssa, and Count Chocula--these four were consistently the most engaged and thoughtful contributors to our ongoing poetry commentary, providing insights that were well grounded in the poems themselves. Great work. 1% extra credit for the quarter to all of you.

A picture of my friend David on a puzzle he put together.

First, a slight change to the blogging requirements: Our page quotas are going to stay the same, but your blogging requirements are a little bit lighter. From now on, it doesn't matter if you are reading popular fiction or literary fiction--you only need to log your reading three times a week. This is only a change for popular fiction readers, but it should make things a little bit easier to keep up with and still allow you time to be outside more, selling lemonade and catching frogs, now that the weather is turning nicer.

Second: I'm giving you a free week for blogging. Blogs due today are now due next Tuesday, and blogs due next Tuesday are due the week after (the week after Spring Break, btw). Only two weeks of reading and logging will be due, though you will have had three weeks to complete it. Remember, you can't get credit in this class for any books that have been assigned, in any class, any time, at Homestead. So, sorry, but no Frankenstein, David Copperfield, Lord of the Flies. Those are for other classes, right.

A picture of rain that I have been liking a lot lately.

To do today: Pick 2 of the following 3 assignments.
1. Create a personal blog post that looks back at your reading from this past quarter. What was the best reading you did? What writers did you discover? What did you discover about your own taste in reading? What did you not like? What are your plans for your 4th quarter reading? Please Double-check your pages read over the course of the first quarter and update it at the top of this post--tell us how many pages total you've read, and, if you are up to it, break it down by pop and lit sub-totals, too.

2. Best poem of the Quarter. Please make a brief post that identifies what you think of as your favorite poem from the first quarter and what you like about it.

3. Visit this site: 1000 Awesome Things. Read a bunch of them and make a post about awesome things--the ones you agree with from this site, and then name and discuss at least one thing that would be on your personal list.

4. When you are done with these things, read yer book and/or conference with me about your ATW essay.

"A Tropical Paradise," Madison F.

Lying on the beach
With sunglasses on your face
Shielding the harsh sunlight from your eyes.
You cover your skin with SPF 25.
Sand makes its way into your sandals,
but you don’t mind.
Off in the distance music is being played
on steel drums.
They set the mood of your whole vacation:
relaxation.
You see the boats drift by with their brightly
colored sides
And you hold onto your tropical drink that tastes
like bananas
With its tiny umbrella hanging off the side.
It makes you smile.
You wonder if the sailors on the boat are as
peaceful as you are.
Worries escape you as you drift into your own oasis
And your home life becomes something of the past.
Almost unreal.
You smell coconut everywhere you go
And wonder if you’ll miss it when you leave.
All you hear is the crashing of the waves.
All you can feel is your newly burnt skin.
All that matters is nothing.

"Notes on Poverty," Hayden Carruth

"Notes on Poverty," Hayden Carruth

Was I so poor

in those damned days

that I went in the dark

in torn shoes

and furtiveness

to steal fat ears

of cattle corn

from the good cows

and pound them

like hard maize

on my worn Aztec

stone? I was.

"Do Not Stand At My Grave and Weep"

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there; I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow,
I am the diamond glints on snow,
I am the sun on ripened grain,
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight.
I am the soft stars that shine at night.
Do not stand at my grave and cry,
I am not there; I did not die.

Mary Elizabeth Frye - 1932

"Morning," Mary Oliver

Morning

Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.

"Graves," Hayden Carruth

Graves

by Hayden Carruth

Both of us had been close

to Joel, and at Joel’s death

my friend had gone to the wake

and the memorial service

and more recently he had

visited Joel’s grave, there

at the back of the grassy

cemetery among the trees,

“a quiet, gentle place,” he said,

“befitting Joel.” And I said,

“What’s the point of going

to look at graves?” I went

into one of my celebrated

tirades. “People go to look

at the grave of Keats or Hart

Crane, they go traveling just to

do it, what a waste of time.

What do they find there? Hell,

I wouldn’t go look at the grave of

Shakespeare if it was just

down the street. I wouldn’t

look at—” And I stopped. I

was about to say the grave of God

until I realized I’m looking at it

all the time....

"Jabberwocky," Lewis Carroll

"Jabberwocky"

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

"Beware the Jabberwock, my son
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!"

He took his vorpal sword in hand;
Long time the manxome foe he sought—
So rested he by the Tumtum tree,
And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood,
The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,
Came whiffling through the tulgey wood,
And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through
The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!
He left it dead, and with its head
He went galumphing back.

"And hast thou slain the Jabberwock?
Come to my arms, my beamish boy!
O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!"
He chortled in his joy.

'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;
All mimsy were the borogoves,
And the mome raths outgrabe.

Action List: 3.15.2011

Work on your own today. Headphones are fine. Do at least one of the following, make a post that responds to the questions posed, and then choose a follow-up activity.

1. Read a brief piece, "Let Kids Rule the School," from the New York Times about a school that let students make their own school within a school. Would that work here?

2. Browse this visual timeline of children's picture books. What books have your favorite illustrations, and what books do you have the best memories of?

3. Read this piece in the New York Times about "over achievers" in the NCAA basketball tournament. Does it make you question any picks you made in your brackets for this year?

Follow-up Activities:

* Confer with me about your ATW essay.
* Log some reading you've done lately.
* Compose a personal post about things on your mind or what you've been up to.

"The Journey," Josh B.

They say it’s all about the journey, I used to disagree.
Because I loved the destination but now I start to see
That when I finally get there, I think about the time
When we outsang the radio and thought we sounded fine.
The many fights that made Dad say, “I’ll turn this thing around!”
And how easy we’d make him laugh to calm him right back down.
The countless times we took a stop to stretch our legs were great,
Because space can get pretty tight when the car is packed with eight.
We all took turns to close our eyes and have a little nap
Or listen to whoever drives get lost and blame the map.
Oh how I love it in the car when we’re all having fun
So how I hate when we arrive and all of that is done.
Next to the pool, with earphones in, those times I can’t recall
But memories of getting there always do stand tall.
So Destination, here we are, but not as a family.
And as for me, I now agree, it’s all in the journey.

"The Summer I was Sixteen," Geraldine Connolly

The Summer I Was Sixteen

The turquoise pool rose up to meet us,
its slide a silver afterthought down which
we plunged, screaming, into a mirage of bubbles.
We did not exist beyond the gaze of a boy.

Shaking water off our limbs, we lifted
up from ladder rungs across the fern-cool
lip of rim. Afternoon. Oiled and sated,
we sunbathed, rose and paraded the concrete,

danced to the low beat of "Duke of Earl".
Past cherry colas, hot-dogs, Dreamsicles,
we came to the counter where bees staggered
into root beer cups and drowned. We gobbled

cotton candy torches, sweet as furtive kisses,
shared on benches beneath summer shadows.
Cherry. Elm. Sycamore. We spread our chenille
blankets across grass, pressed radios to our ears,

mouthing the old words, then loosened
thin bikini straps and rubbed baby oil with iodine
across sunburned shoulders, tossing a glance
through the chain link at an improbable world.

[love is more thicker than forget], e.e. cummings

[love is more thicker than forget]

by E. E. Cummings

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is more mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

"Love Song," Carol Muske-Dukes

Love Song

Love comes hungry to anyone’s hand.
I found the newborn sparrow next to
the tumbled nest on the grass. Bravely

opening its beak. Cats circled, squirrels.
I tried to set the nest right but the wild
birds had fled. The knot of pin feathers

sat in my hand and spoke. Just because
I’ve raised it by touch, doesn’t mean it
follows. All day it pecks at the tin image of

a faceless bird. It refuses to fly,
though I’ve opened the door. What
sends us to each other? He and I

had a blue landscape, a village street,
some poems, bread on a plate. Love
was a camera in a doorway, love was

a script, a tin bird. Love was faceless,
even when we’d memorized each other’s
lines. Love was hungry, love was faceless,

the sparrow sings, famished, in my hand.

"A Blessing," James Wright

Just off the Highway to Rochester, Minnesota
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Writing Lab Menu: 3.9.2011

Friday’s Drafts. We have a rough draft due on Friday: the introduction and one body paragraph from your project. This draft should have your actual name, not your alias. Like the last one, this is a pass/fail draft—either you have it and it is typed and you get the full 10 points, or it isn’t and you get zero.

ATW Conferences. For another 10 points, you need to confer with me during class either today or Friday about your project. Here are your options: (a) today, we can work through one of your passages and plan a claim and some of your response, or (b) on Friday, we can review the draft that is due that day. One or the other, the choice is yours.

Today’s Menu. We get five points of participation both today and Friday if we stay off of the games and are productive. Here are some things you can do today to be productive. Do any or all of them:

1. Find those passages: the Poetry Foundation web-site, your poetry journal, our classroom library.

2. Profile a poem or passage—like we have done with the Walton Ford painting “Falling Bough” and some diction exercises, compile (a) distinctive quotations from your passage, (b) words that describe that language, and (c) a possible claim for a paragraph about that passage.

3. Read any or all of the sample essays for this project. There are several:

a. My sample that was attached to the “Harlem” response that we annotated with highlighters.

b. Jessie Hanselmann’s, on our HHS notes page.

c. My sample beginning for the “Water” ATW project I am working on.

d. A “Winner” from the peer review we conducted on Monday.

4. Error Hunt—go through the draft for your diction exercise and see if you can find any of the six “Errors of Support and Discussion” that are demonstrated on the purple handout (and online.)

5. Use the “Observation Guide” for diction on the HHS notes page to help you free-write a response to one of your passages.

6. Informal peer-review of a friend’s work so far.

Any of these menu items can be done with a friend, collaboratively, if you are able to stay on task.

Tuesday Poem: "Rain"

by Naomi Shihab Nye. In your poem journals.

What does the figurative description of the words as "houses in a landscape" suggest about his handwriting or the boy in general--what tone words seem to suggest to you, in other words?

Remember that "figurative" descriptions relate to an element of diction (connotation), and are good things to discuss/analyze in, say, an essay about language.

Action List: 3.8.11

Blogs of the Week: Hot Kool Aid, bloggerett16, Dewdrops on Daisies, and Te Amo. Great reads, all.

For today:

1. First, note some changed dates for the ATW project: The full peer review of your project, including photocopied passages, is next Tuesday, 3/15. The full, final project, with copies of your passages, is now due Thursday, 3/17. These are both one day earlier than originally planned.

2. Today, you have a few options.

(a) Prepare a reading log--periods 3 and 5 have blogs due today.

(b) Start searching for poems and passages that you can use for your ATW project. Your introduction and first body paragraph are to be peer reviewed on Friday, so it's good to get started soon. Try using the "Poetry Tool" at the Poetry Foundation to find a poem or two for your theme. If you like, you may use the poem that you wrote about for yesterday's peer review.

(c) Look at the sample ATW essay on the class website, or the "Diction Observation Guide" to get a better feel for how this project should work. Or ask me for guidance.

(d) Try the multiple-choice exercise on making claims about diction, found on the HHS class page under "Notes."

(e) Play Rock-Paper-Scissors against a computer and be surprised how tough it is to beat.

"Prayer," by George Herbert

PRAYER the Churches banquet, Angels age,
Gods breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth ;

Engine against th' Almightie, sinner's towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six daies world-transposing in an houre,
A kinde of tune, which all things heare and fear ;

Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie way, the bird of Paradise,

Church-bels beyond the stars heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices, something understood.

"Wilderness," by Carl Sandburg

At Bartleby.

"9," by Galway Kinnell

9

When one has lived a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog head half out of water utters
the cantillations he sang in his first spring,
and the snake lowers himself over the threshold
and creeps away among the stones, one sees
they all live to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one's kind, toward these other kingdoms,
the hard prayer inside one's own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one's own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Weekend Blog Assignment: Spellbound

To conclude our study of Spellbound, make an informal post to your blog that responds to one of the following prompts:

1. Pick any two of the students in Spellbound and compare and contrast what you see as their motivations for pursuing success in the National Spelling Bee.

2. Pick any two sets of parents and compare and contrast either their motivations for having their children excel in the National Spelling Bee.

3. Pick any two students or parents and compare and contrast the ways that they deal with the stress of the competition.

Responses should be thoughtful and contain references to the film itself.

Here is the IMDB link to help you remember names.

"Gee, You’re So Beautiful That It’s Starting to Rain"

By Richard Brautigan, at Poetry 180.

"Here, Bullet" by Brian Turner

Here, Bullet

If a body is what you want,
then here is bone and gristle and flesh.
Here is the clavicle-snapped wish,
the aorta’s opened valves, the leap
thought makes at the synaptic gap.
Here is the adrenaline rush you crave,
that inexorable flight, that insane puncture
into heat and blood. And I dare you to finish
what you’ve started. Because here, Bullet,
here is where I complete the word you bring
hissing through the air, here is where I moan
the barrel’s cold esophagus, triggering
my tongue’s explosives for the rifling I have
inside of me, each twist of the round
spun deeper, because here, Bullet,
here is where the world ends, every time.

Where or what do you think "Here" is, literally, in this poem--what do you think the speaker is talking about?

What do you make of the violent imagery that relates his body ("tongue's explosives," "rifling I have / inside of me") to weaponry?

Tuesday Action List 3.1.11

1. Complete the "2.28 Diction exercise," explained in the post below.

2. Once a few of us have finished the exercise, browse at least 8 other blogs to read the claims that they posted today, and then vote for your favorite by commenting to this post. Paste the claim into your comment and name the blog responsible for it.

3. Comment on a poem or two from the past week.

4. Make a personal post about your long weekend.