“Poetry is a bird. Prose is a potato.”

In an ongoing conversation with a novelist friend about their respective genres, Billy Collins said yesterday as the guest speaker at the National Writing Project annual meeting that “Poetry is a bird. Prose is a potato.” I wonder if he really means it — because I’ve met some potato poems and some bird prose in my time.

It may be that Collins pays prose a compliment — prose feeds us, does the hard, earthy work of conveying information, telling stories. Poetry does those things, too. But does he mean that prose is the workhorse of language? That can be both compliment and insult — especially if poetry’s birdiness takes us places, wings us up to the airy spots of imagination and beauty. But then poetry can also be flighty. And not in a good way.

Given Collins’ penchant for poking fun at everything, including himself, I suspect he means all those things. So while at first listen, “Poetry is a bird. Prose is a potato” sounds like an insult — and when we all laughed, I assumed the joke was at prose’s expense — that may not be so. I imagine potato-prose hopping on the back of bird-poetry, and the two of them flying next to eagles. When poetry gets hungry, it takes a bite out of prose. When prose gets bored, it shifts its perch for a startling view.

wordpress helps you proofread

Just read the WordPress blog — they’ve got a new service called After the Deadline, and it’s a proofreading application. Check it out here – http://en.blog.wordpress.com/2009/09/08/atd-wpcom/
Interesting stuff given everything we’ve been talking about with the Twenty Most Common Errors on EasyWriter. I found this suggested link, too: Five Grammatical Errors That Make You Look Dumb. The link was to a WordPress blog, but I found this posting by googling — it’s more thorough and has more resources — by Brian Clark.

my dad

My dad sent a picture yesterday of him playing the bagpipes last Memorial Day for the Memorial Day Parade in Wilton CT — something he does every year. My dad just turned 82, and he trains on his treadmill to make sure he can walk the mile or so, often uphill, while blowing his lungs out.

political road rage, or the cowardice of some conservatives

At a meeting the other day, someone I admire talked about her new car getting keyed all down the side. This person has a bumper sticker: “Middle-class White Women for Obama.” Maybe her car would have been safe in Seattle, and one would think she’d be safe in nothern Alabama and this city, which often votes blue — but her politics endanger her possessions — and her self. I’ve had several instances of road rage directed at me — big trucks tailgating and passing too quickly, squeezing me into my lane, close calls — and I wonder which instances are the normal road rage in any city and which are punishment for my dark blue Obama presidential campaign bumper sticker.

My son wants me to take the bumper sticker off. I won’t. I will not give in to my own fear and others’ intimidation.

The day after Obama’s speech on health care to Congress, a student in an elementary school here said, “I would like to put a gun to his head and shoot–but I don’t have to because somebody else is going to do it.” Another child said, “”That’s wrong to say. You respect the President of the United States and you don’t make threats of violence to anyone.” Where was the teacher’s input? Absent. The teacher said nothing.

Are we healing racism in this country? The hate talk against Obama indicates we are a nation in need of radical soul searching. Political road rage and cowardly responses inflame. Do we know how to debate with intelligence and decorum? Before the election, I came out to the parking lot and found a piece of notebook paper with a penciled message under my windshield wipers. The message said something about my being blissfully ignorant as a liberal. No signature.

Courage. Conviction. Respect. Dialog.

R. A. Nelson at Huntsville Library

The Bailey Cove branch of the Huntsville-Madison County Public Library hosted a talk by R. A. Nelson yesterday at 10am, and our small audience was treated to the story of Nelson’s writer’s journey. In order to get to the talk on time, I had to break off my reading of Nelson’s most recent novel, Days of Little Texas, about a young pentecostal preacher. Not the subject matter I would normally pick up — but his third novel, like his first two, deals with uncomfortable subjects (pentecostal evangelism and ghosts, our collective culpability in slavery), or as Nelson puts it, subjects that “scare” him, subjects that “push[es] him creatively” (“About the Author,” Days of Little Texas). I am glad he practices this creative courage because we reap the reading benefits. Discussing his research for Breathe My Name, Nelson said that he changed his views on the main character’s mother (I’m trying not to give away the book’s story — go read it!), and because he learned a different way of seeing, his writing gave me the same insight.

I did not want to stop reading Days of Little Texas to go listen to Nelson talk, and that’s the highest form of praise for an author. But the book was waiting for me when I got home, and I finished it. Nelson’s books have great pacing, and Days of Little Texas kept me hooked all the way through, delighted with some of the twists I didn’t see coming. Once again, I’m left thinking about things I’d pretty much fixed my mind about. I like seeing in new ways, especially if it’s a good story that helps me do that. I’ve always felt that a great novelist teaches as much as she or he tells a good story — Chinua Achebe’s essay, “The Novelist as Teacher,” has always made a lot of sense. I’m happy to claim Nelson as one of my new teachers and favorite authors.

the blessed sound of change

Is there anything that signals more radical change than Obama’s message to the Iranian people and its leaders? Watching the address, I wonder what rabbit hole we’ve fallen into — Bush’s 8 years have done just that much damage. What’s the shift? Listen to the speech. It’s short. But here’s my list of indicators that we are finally on the right track — this is what Obama does:

• he addresses the Iranian people and Iran’s leaders, but he speaks just as much to Americans
• by naming the New Year celebration of Nowruz, Obama starts by honoring a foreign tradition and educating Americans. There’s no condescension — just a matter-of-fact use of a term most Americans will need to go look up. Obama is a teacher at work.
• he begins with knowledge and a history lesson that demonstrate respect. Obama names the venerability and ancientness of Iranian culture and history.
• he maintains emphasis on commonality and coalition. The people of Iran and the U.S. share desire for peace and prosperity for themselves and their children.
• he puts the responsibility for peace on Iranian leaders and is clear that the path is diplomacy and not violence.
• he ends by reiterating his best wishes for the New Year and then repeats these best wishes in Farsi. That one Farsi phrase at the end of this short address will likely do more to heal Iran-U.S. relations than anything that’s been done in the 20th c.

Joseph Harris’s Rewriting

I just finished Joseph Harris’s Rewriting: How to Do Things with Texts. I want so much to talk with someone about this book but haven’t found anyone yet — so I’ll talk with myself here. Why do I like this book so much? It’s not that it’s stunningly new — Harris references Elbow, for instance, and Harris’s emphasis on social construction of writing and knowledge echoes Bruffee. I guess it’s that it makes stunning turns in thinking — or, that this book is stunningly useful. You get my drift — there’s something stunning about this book, even if I can’t quite fix that stunningness precisely. By rewriting and revising familiar terms (summary becomes “coming to terms,” for instance — although that’s a simplistic take on Harris’s project), Harris helps us re-think what goes on in college writing classrooms. Or, rather, what needs to go on in writing classrooms.

Obama’s Dreams from My Father

Last week, I finally read Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father. I expected it to be good — several friends had recommended the book. I know the man delivers a mean speech! But I did not expect the poetry, the storytelling. It’s one thing to be a powerful rhetorician and speechmaker; it’s another thing to craft a memoir that sings. This voice weaves, skips, mends, reaches, and sanctifies. A clear and deep voice for complex and difficult questions.

Encountering Disgrace

Some of my earlier posts discuss my attempt to work through an article on J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, and now that piece will appear this April as “Dis(g)race, or White Man Writing” in Encountering Disgrace: Reading and Teaching Coetzee’s Novel, edited by Bill McDonald. The collection has a lot to offer the solitary reader wishing for some kind of discussion and the perplexed teacher wondering how to work with this contentious novel.

Austin American-Statesman article on Ana Sisnett

Here’s the article on Ana from the Statesman, 15 January 2009. By Joshunda Sanders, it’s called “Celebrated author, artist and activist Sisnett dies after battle with cancer.” A beautiful picture of Ana and more information is at Lesbian.com, of which Ana was a founding member.