River of Play

Composing

I'm spending the early mornings--yes, I have to turn on lights to kick the circadian rhythms into motion, and, yes, as the temperatures drop there are more bugs to stare at dumbly--working on my comps essays. Right now, I'm deep into the "how to apply ecocomposition to the creative writing workshop." First, most obvious point: you compose in a place. A variety of ecocomp folk are fascinated by maps, by context, by how the intensely local influences students, the classroom, the institutional approaches to curricula, and so on. Second, and maybe this should have been first, point: where you are changes how you experience who you are. And vice versa. But place, and self, are such givens that it's hard to get students to see it and, so, to write about it. It's like the joke with the baby fish chatting when the old fish swims up and asks how the water feels today and then swims off. The baby fish look at each other and ask, "What's water?"

So: how to get get poetry students to get out of their navels and into the world? Ah, and how to get them to see the ecology of the history of poetry and still strike out on their own? By that question I really mean to be asking this one: how can we rewrite the first and second points above in relation to culture? 

Go Toward the Light

As in, images. Cameras soaking up light. From last year. But you can find them here.

Touching Down

Which has nothing to do with the recently begun football season, though that brings a lot of red-clad folk from across the state to our small city. And it's always interesting to see the rural folk respond to life in the city, though Lincoln isn't nearly as touristy a town as the ones D and I grew up in. 

I'll use that to segue to our Marietta, OH trip. Many relatives from both sides in one spot cooing over baby clothes. W received a few useful devices and some puzzling tchotchkes as well as a hundreds of diapers. I got a chance to talk to pretty much everyone for at least a sentence or two, so that was good. 

I came home to an email from the KNOCK magazine Ecolit competition people. It seems that I'm one of the winners of that contest. So that was a happy thing. Poem out in their November issue.

And I came across some fine, fine sites on the web to keep yourself thinking about ecologies that don't involve the intricate connections between financial institutions. 

Whorled Leaves

EcoArtTech

Ecology Without Nature

And after our travels across the sky, D and I have vowed to spend more time shopping for train tickets. How about you? Discuss. I'll be back later to check on your work.

On and On

We're heading out on our trek to Ohio. Lots of family we haven't seen in years, lots of hills and trees, lots of temperatures much higher than we've had here recently. 

I'm heading out in just a minute for the Autumn Poetry Mailing. And when I get back: the final steps on the Schooner budget. Aaaaaaarrrghh...

But I'll be happy to see all y'all again. In the meantime, I'll be reading Winter 2008. Proofs. And then Spring 09 starts in two weeks. 

Bonus! To Increase Sadnesses

First, the ice shelf continues to deteriorate, and then so do your food choices. Discuss.

Bug Weather

We have survived the visitation of my parents, but the chaos of the first weeks of the semester continues unabated. Meetings and meetings and new students and readers and and and... Whew. The weather has taken a turn for the autumnal. Overnight lows in the 50s, daytime highs in the 70s. Long pants and closed toes are back, as are bugs. Our house, almost a hundred years old, was probably never airtight to begin with, and the years of settling further into the former prairie has opened gaps. So we get lots of crawly visitors when the weather turns especially damp or cool. (Or very hot. Tiny brains will seek water, eh?) So we're seeing a lot more insects and spiders than we have in a while. The situation can be a little unsettling, but the cats enjoy it, and we let the spiders thrive. A strong cold snap will thin the population a bit more, and then we'll reach a stasis again. Since we don't leave food out, and clean up after ourselves, the visitors don't find much to snack on. And, mostly, I haven't found that aggressive anti-bug action works well. So we let nature take its course. 

It's a bit tricky to track down ecopoets and green bloggers--not greenwash blogs--I've found. Lots of cobwebbed sites. Activists find better things to do, but poets... Anyway. I'll link to a good, consistent blog here. Go!