Mister Congeniality

Après jeudi, le déluge. That is what I would be inclined to say if I knew a little French.

Today promises to be a kindly one, as my most onerous obligation will consist of sitting in the Strosacker Room on campus and listening to McNair Scholars describe their summer projects.  In the Book o’ the Bald Man, that’s a mighty fine time; if only all my days were that onerous.

Tomorrow, however, the fiesta of grading begins, and it will not stop until May 12th or so.  I’ve done a respectable job of keeping up with the curve–my finals are already designed and my piles of paper are nicely organized–but there aren’t too many ways to make final essays and exams go away.  Much ink will be spilt next week

The real crisis, of course, will be finding a few good volumes of poetry to read while students are taking their exams.  Reading poetry is one of my favorite ways to while away those hours, since I can manage to digest a book poem by poem and still attend to questions.  I have, however, rampaged through the oeuvres of Collins and Dobyns, Dennis and Doty over the past year–at least the books I could readily get my hands on–so now I’m going to need to drop a new name in the hopper.  That’s often a merry, heady step for me, since finding a new writer to read is one of the best ways I know of tracking my skittering sensibilities.

As my mentor and amiga Emma Bolden noted the other day, reading and responding to poetry involves a kind of readiness:  pick up a book today and it might catch you flat-footed; pick up the same volume one, three, or ten years down the road, and you may find it perfectly suited to the spot you’re standing.  In college and grad school I read Tennyson, Eliot, Whitman, and others with a certain grudging resistance.  Years later, when I encountered them again in new lights and new contexts, I found them congenial and revealing in ways my younger mind was unprepared to entertain.  That’s why hunting for new books to read tends to be an awkward, idiosyncratic process for me:  even savvy, sensitive recommendations from friends with the best of intentions can’t weigh much when compared with the freight of my current state of mind.

Of course, there’s big fun to be had in discovering what that state of mind actually is, so here’s to hoping I don’t get crushed by our robotic shelving system as I wander through the stacks this afternoon.  I have no names or titles in mind, so I’ll just drift and dither, skim and snatch.

And then maybe I’ll get together with my office mate and decide what colors we’re going to paint our space.  I’m angling for a “warm cognac” base with “caliente” accents.

Like I said, onerous.