Poetry & music & feeling better

This video is of a random person we watched on a quiet beach on our four-night trip to Aruba: a parasailer gliding back and forth for an hour, occasionally leaping or dipping into the Caribbean but mostly just writing his verse across the horizon, left to right and calmly back again as the sun set behind him. There was a casino-high-rise section in Aruba that we visited and got the hell out of fast; we stayed elsewhere, in a family-owned hotel that hadn’t been “updated,” and were glad. Highlights: a national park with caves and Arawak petroglyphs; good restaurants in Oraanjestad; and simply reading on the beach. Those heart palpitations I wrote about last time, occurring multiple times a day for long stretches? Mostly gone now. Sunshine, a radical change of scene, and, not incidentally, five days not doing any schoolwork–just what the doctor ordered.

Of course, the resumption of the term hit me hard: in addition to the usual, lots of meetings, grading, and visitors to wine and dine and pick up from the airport, and a small poetry festival on the 10th. Honestly, though, the weeks ahead, while busy enough, seem more do-able. My acupuncture and physical therapy regimes are tapering off. Shenandoah poetry submissions, open April 1, are always both good and overwhelming, and I’m serving on a search committee (93 applications for a one-year position in creative nonfiction!)–but as those heat up, the semester will be winding down, and I’m not teaching in our four-week May term. I mean, the world is still a mess and people in my inner circle are still struggling and I wish I had more time to write, but come spring, it’s easier to feel centered.

From the part of academic life that feels best: my Poetry & Music class has been deeply engaging. This is an optional, general education-level literature course of 15 students (I’m allowed a low cap for one of the literature classes I teach each year, and wow, it helps). We just finished Jan Beatty’s The Body Wars, plus she came to speak with them and give a riveting reading. She’s a wonderful visitor who loves working with undergraduates and brings out the best in them (one reported that a side conversation with Jan may have changed her life; a stranger on the street the next day thanked me for bringing her). A small example of Jan’s generosity: she picks out stones and brings a pile of them in her checked luggage, lets each student pick one, then tells them what powers each is supposed to convey. I learned that she’s married to a rock guitarist who owns a music store. We also followed her allusions to the influential rock, country, and blues artist Townes Van Zandt, whose amazing work none of us had known before. Here’s “Rake,” a song she quotes in an epigraph (sorry about the YouTube ads). Tomorrow we’re doing a little Bob Dylan, led by me in hopes it will help with a short essay I’ve been commissioned to write on “Talkin’ New York,” one of his early talking blues. Then they’ll take over with presentations on the history of spirituals, jazz, punk, and more, alongside related poetic readings I dug up.

Because I give them the option of writing a portfolio of poems in received forms, I also did a mini-creative-writing lesson last week that seemed to light them up. A two-stage prompt, in case it’s fun for you, too:

• Free-write for 5 minutes about either the first concert you ever attended or a memorable time someone sang to you, digging up as much sensory detail as possible. As they worked, I wrote about my grandmother singing me what I now realize are music hall tunes, often by Florrie Floyd (“Oh Flo” was a fave).
• Then I gave them a quick lesson on haibun and gave them 5-10 minutes to begin crafting a haibun from their free-write. (I think I got something good out of following this prompt myself.)

It was interesting to learn what music they listen to in the process. I was surprised how many of them follow their parents’ tastes, because I was so intent on rebelling against my parents’ Tony Bennett, opera, and country (although I came around to my mother’s love of female jazz singers). Here’s the list I jotted down later for Jan:

• Genres: r&b, indie, country, Americana, bluegrass, classic rock, blues rock, indie folk, 80s synth rock
• Artists and bands they mentioned: Jason Isbell, Top House, Rolling Stones, Fleetwood Mac, Taylor Swift, Justin Timberlake, Glass Animals, Billy Joel, Sabrina Carpenter, Grateful Dead, Rihanna, James Brown, Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, Radiohead, Led Zeppelin, Beyonce, AC/DC

Oh, and at that poetry festival I met Gerry LaFemina, a punk musician and festival organizer as well as distinguished poet. Synchronicities! I’ll close with another small good thing from the last couple of weeks: snippets from an FB thread about a poem that will be in Mycocosmic, “Sex Talk,” initiated by Simeon Berry. I was just stunned by the warmth of the comments. How good to feel like a poet again who maybe has something to say.