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Blockage, re-routing, clearance
Did I ever tell you about the time I was on an AWP shuttle bus and a publicist’s assistant told me that my sacral chakra was blocked? We were chatting about reiki, so I’m clearly receptive to that kind of random conversational offering, but it’s pretty bold to diagnose a stranger. I instantly knew that…
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STILL mythologizing solitary genius
I’m both proud of and embarrassed about where I went to grad school. I tend to avoid the name in conversations with new acquaintances because it triggers so much judgment: oh, you’re smarter than I thought, or richer and more privileged or snootier or whatever. I never felt as if I belonged at that elite…
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Writing about poetry with AI
Poetry’s Possible Worlds emerged from years of teaching undergraduates who don’t believe that learning how to write academic essays about literature has long-term relevance to their lives. Many of my students, though, enjoy–or can be surprised into enjoying–reading, thinking, and talking about books and poems, so the puzzle has been: how do I make writing…
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The magic of making things
I hereby direct you to the final project of my May term W&L class: a co-created website for a fictional liberal arts college, Bigglebottom Academy of Magic. The participants in English 239: Magical Education worked through four books in four weeks about schooling for sorcerous types: Le Guin’s novelette “Dragonfly”; Okorafor’s Akata Witch; Grossman’s The…
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Magical education
Monday I’ll teach Magic 101. At stake: what is magic–what are its sources, what can it do, and how is it supposed to differ from science or religion? Does it work mechanically, through wands and staffs and rings and words, or supernaturally, by more-than-human assistance, or in some other fashion? Can anyone be trained to…
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Occult AWP
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She carries me
In the Belly As a woman carries an insect, unconscious of the sign it shapes with diplomatic footfalls across her skin, she carries me. As a lake lifts the sky’s image, all burnished admiration, or proffers a crushed cup, a leaf, a rainbow slick of grease. As your network of neurochemicals and electricity carries, through…
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Easy poetry
“Excitement comes from being lazy and fun loving. O’Hara worked hard, but he also took it easy. His Collected Poems are a manifesto of the high aesthetic rewards that accrue from a life—albeit a tragically abbreviated life—of taking easiness as the gold standard. Like Warhol’s professed love of easy art (or art that was easy to make), O’Hara’s…
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Haunted Matisse & packing light
On the Friday after Thanksgiving, we visited the “Matisse in the 1930s” exhibit in the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts, and there was plenty NOT to like. So many odalisques! The images that stayed with me in a more positive way did so because the way they reflected process struck me as appealingly uncanny. The…
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Five year writing plan for the witches’ new year
As Department Head, I’ve been reading colleagues’ Five Year Plans, which oddly enough are due around Halloween or Samhain (or however you think about this spooky midpoint between the fall equinox and winter solstice). I have an official Five Year Plan myself–I’m halfway through that cycle–but maybe it’s time for a weirder one. I’m a…