Well, so much for R&R.

Instead of devoting the weekend to a concerted bout of chillaxin’, I found myself intensely focused on a new poem for most of Saturday and intensely focused on preparing my last batch of September submissions for most of Sunday.  I’m one trip to the P.O. short of finished, and then the slate will be clear for a new round of writing.  In another life I was probably a bulldozer.

Today, alas, I’ve already been distracted by the news, such as it is.  I had the good sense to abandon the attempt to catch up on election coverage (we’ve entered the slapfight stage of disputation, which never ends well), but I have been attending to the ongoing negotiations between the faculty and the administration here at CMU for a new contract.  Well, to be more exact, I’ve been attending to the peripheral discussion, since all bargaining (per said contract) occurs behind closed doors.  It’s hard to get a disinterested account of the proceedings or what’s at stake, but if you’re interested in such things, you can hop on over to our university newspaper and take a peek.  The main stories are about a week old, but you can tap into the discussion in the “Most Recently Commented” that can be accessed on the lower left-hand menu.  According to the latest informal poll (as of 9:23 am, anyway; the figures have slipped up and down quite a bit), 81% of CM-Life readers believe faculty deserve a better package, while 13% think faculty make too much money as it is.  As always, I try to keep something like an objective distance; not much for me to do but support the union and the bargaining team and await the outcome. 

My only grudge against CMU–and if you have to search as long as I have to establish a good grudge, you’re in pretty nice shape–is the dearth of contemporary poetry holdings in the university library.  The library is quite nice, really, and the acquisitions specialist for the English Department, Aparna Zambare, is excellent, but new poetry titles are hard to come by.  Worse still, our interlibrary loan department (which is also really strong) bounces back requests for titles published in the past year or two, which makes it tough for me to fuel my noodle with recent reading.  I can subscribe to a few journals myself, of course, and I naturally do, but I really need sustained engagement with a poet and a volume to develop a feel for rhythms, themes, and techniques.  For me the gulf between reading journals and reading collections is the difference between wading and swimming.

I buy several collections a year as well, but choosing ones that will suit me is a tricksy process of trial and error–lots and lots of error.  At bottom, I believe that I can learn quite a bit from any collection I pick up, but for me to really immerse myself in the pleasures of the work it has to strike some deep, congenial chord.  That’s why recommendations are just about useless:  many friends will write me and urge me to read one volume or another, but the aesthetics that call up a strong response in them only stand a 10% chance of calling up a comparably strong response in me.  It’s just the nature of that particular beastie, which is why having a strong browsing selection is so important to me. 

Being able to thumb through a few pages and catch the right vibes is a nourishing experience, but nowadays the pages I’m thumbing through tend to be a decade old.  That’s by no means a bad thing, but it is not perhaps as good as it could be.  It’s hard to develop a sense of what’s happening in contemporary letters when your exposure is a little dated.  I know that money is tight all over Michigan, but for a library to somehow pass over the Pulitzer winners every year since 2003 is really kind of appalling.

Nonetheless, I have to be selective and selfish:  when I work with the library, my priority is to get the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century collection of criticism, fiction, and poetry up to speed.  Perhaps a little self-absorption and time to myself will do my writing good, but I like to see fellow travelers on the shelves and experience that Rilkean sense of identification, like a dog seeing itself in the mirror and thinking:  there’s another dog.

Yesterday I was a diligent monkey and (again, despite my plan to simply plan) completed a set of revisions and prepared them for submission.  I’ve got to slap a few stamps on the set and drive to the P.O., Eudora Welty style, but I’m feeling pretty good about my productivity.  With a little luck I’ll have the table cleared to begin some new projects by next Sunday.

Over the course of the day–and the process did, in fact, take me all frickin’ day, even though I had three of five revisions finalized already–I experienced a bit of corroborative shock.  In perhaps one of every ten cases the most recent entries in the Directory of Poetry Publishers do not correspond to the most recent updates on the pages hosted by the journals themselves.  In a few instances addresses differed; in others, submission policies had changed.  One expects intermittent turnover in mastheads and the like, but making sure I had each packet properly posted nearly sent me into an obsessive frenzy.  My cross-referencing system salvaged my sanity, happily, but the process got me thinking about information on the net.  I can be pretty nerdcore when I try.

I have written before about the peculiarities of the blogosphere and their impact on the dissemination of data.  For reasons I cannot fully explain my own blog rates pretty high in searches for certain keywords:  “single professor for marriage” will get you here in short order, as will quotes from Millay and Tennyson and more scintillating keywords like “naughty narwhal” and “Diane Lane navel.”  I am not making any of this up. 

Moreover, the “News Department” and “Hawt Post” links at WordPress invariably lead to all sorts of mischief:  the poor feller who routinely rails at Barack Obama’s charlatanry is having a hard time being heard over the Sarah Palin ruckus, and said ruckus seems to consist mostly of shrill demands to a) treat her fairly and b) make sure all the claptrap from the liberal media has been fully contextualized.  Such policies do not apply to other politicians, of course, but you get the gist.  It’s not so much news as much ado about ado.  Meta-ado, if you will. 

More troubling still is the tendency of contemporary news agencies to link to blogs and op-ed columns; quite a few political commercials running locally (here in Michigan, a battleground state) sometimes cite the same sketchy sources when they bother to cite at all.  It’s becoming more and more difficult to cut through all the blather, which is why I’ve recently reduced the time I devote to my daily news surf.  I hate coming away empty-handed, and given my druthers I’d rather research Charlotte Smith or evil clown puppets.  I have my priorities straight.

Frankly, the ready availability of information also has some creepy applications.  Let’s face it:  I’m not terribly difficult to find online.  I’m not a monument of unageing intellect by any stretch of the imagination, but my virtual footprint is sasquatchian by my modest please-don’t-look-at-me standards.  Were someone inclined to write me, it would take all of thirty seconds for them to find me in the CMU directory.  What’s more wiggedy, however, is the frequency with which people write me at my private addresses.  I’ve received fan mail for my horror fiction at one, and a scholar with whom I’ve collaborated in the past somehow wound up with an address I now use almost exclusively for e-commerce.  I also know a few alumni associations (against my wishes, I might add) have plunked old addresses in their databases, so I get regular solicitations mixed in with occasional blasts from the past.  Add in my accessibility here and on MySpace (and at some point I’ll probably establish a Facebook presence just to stretch myself thinner), and things get creepy, my virtual “friendship” with Elvira, Mistress of the Dark notwithstanding.  Well, actually that is kind of creepy.  For her, anyway.

I suppose there’s not much to do but learn to live with it and/or exploit it.  Toyota (or some other auto manufacturer–I clicked right past) has a new online ad, for example, that asks you to enter a friend’s phone number to place a free call.  I can’t imagine that ends well for the friend, but that seems to be the direction we’re headed.  I suppose it’s better to embrace the madness before the madness embraces you.  It will have you in its clutches sooner or later.

Let me begin by confessing that I am inexplicably exhausted, inexplicably because a) the most strenuous thing I’ve attempted today is brunch, and b) I have 3-6 shots of espresso circulating in my system (I have sown discord among the baristas).  I would not attempt to operate heavy machinery right now, nor would I strike bargains with Heather Langenkamp.  Mine is an ethical exhaustion.

Since my synapses are firing erratically at best, I thought I would wrangle with a subject that’s been around since Plutarch:  the antagonistic relationship between Apollonian and Dionysian natures.  I would not expect this to go especially well.

On principle, I’m not a fan of dichotomies, not even the fluid varieties.  Moreover, as I understand it, the Dionysian principle already has duality mixed into the batter.  Trying to figure out what the proper complement to a concept that already has a complement might be really hurts my head, as does the attendant syntax.  It’s a little more M.C. Escher than I need it to be.  Moreover, the Greeks did not view Apollo and Dionysus as oppositional terms, and the Greeks generally knew what they were doing.  When in doubt, I concede to their authority, if not to their salads.

I realize full well that the separation of the two can be quite handy:  if Apollo represents reason, order, and self-restraint and Dionysus represents passion, chaos, and abandon, we can do some festive critical work.  The more we elaborate the dichotomy, however, the muddier the water becomes, and to fix it too firmly obliges us to neglect a number of myths, origin stories, and overlapping functions.  For my purposes today, I’m also interested in the conventional alignment of poetry with Apollo (unless you create further functional subdivisions, as some folks do, Nietzsche included).  Viewed in that light, poetry is all about symmetry, harmony, and discipline.  Nowadays, that reckoning only gets you so far.

Nevertheless, I am going to get all Stephen King for a moment (fun fact:  Stephen King and Iggy Pop are cited in Wikipedia’s notes on the Apollonian/Dionysian divide!):  someone else has been finishing my poems, Secret Window style (which is odd, as I live on the second story).  It is not John Turturro, although that would be awesome.

Four of the past five pieces have not gone as planned, not even remotely.  As you know, I am hesitant to speak organically of verse, to address anything other than the elements of craft over which the writer exerts visible control.  I would be fibbing, however, if I said that these deviations from my original schemes arose from conscious, deliberate calculation.  In fact, some of these shifts have effectively ruined the conscious, deliberate calculation I brought to the table.  The writing itself has been both frustrating and illuminating:  when an unscripted shift occurs, I always consider it carefully; if it’s good–if it does innovative, meaningful work for the poem–I invariably keep it, even if doing so fouls my forward progress toward the scripted goal.

I’m willing to concede that I write with contending impulses; because I am young in writerly years, I want to keep all channels open until a mature aesthetic decision teaches me to close some off.  The collision of orderly craft and insurgent imperatives, however–the Apollonian and Dionysian, if you feel like getting thematic–changes the terms of aesthetic evaluation.  I wind up with two scales in which the work must be weighed, two ways in which I might find it worthwhile.  There’s no clear relationship between the two standards (I would like to say I hammer Dionysian content until it takes on Apollonian shape, but that would be untrue), and the tension between them is fairly unnerving.

The ugly part–and this may just be the espresso talking–is that I’m starting to like it.

You know the day is going well when you’ve got three shots of espresso in your system and you’re still flatlining circa 11:15 AM.  Faulty wiring may be involved.

All things considered, it’s been a decent week.  I’ve got a rough script for the upcoming academic year in place; I’ve devised a spine-tingling new way to teach Film and Literature, and I’ve got a nifty theme in mind for a section of Honors composition; I committed to paper a draft of the capstone poem I’ve mentioned in prior posts; and I had the chance to catch up with a coupla friends on business utterly unrelated to teaching, writing, and scholarship.  Moreover, in one of the zazzier plot twists of the week, even an exceedingly random lapse into procrastination yielded a smidgen of sweetness.

On Wednesday I spent a couple hours searching old floppies for a syllabus file I thought I might adapt for the Honors course.   Way back when I designed a really ingenious sectional syllabus, although at the time I probably (definitely) wasn’t ready to teach it.  Alas, only a few files from that time in my life have survived, and the syllabus was not among them.  What I did find, however, was an unmarked disk with three poems on it. 

I am almost certain that all three were written during the summer of 2006, during my last Atlanta sojourn.  It was an awkward transitional time for me–I was actually chillin’ at my friend Eduardo’s apartment just prior to making the drive to Mount Pleasant–and two of the three poems are really, really awful.  I value them for what they are (an effort to make sense of my time in the South in slightly less space than Absalom! Absalom!), but they were essentially garbled attempts at catharsis, that sort of purgative poetry dense with personal reference but with little else to redeem it. 

The third poem, however, I remember rather keenly.   It was one of my first “arresting” poems, one so vivid that I had to pull off the highway and jot down the germinal lines that occurred to me when I was driving from Auburn to Atlanta (in the interests of full disclosure, you should probably know that this romantic image was almost certainly punctuated by the purchase of a Mountain Dew and a bag of trail mix).  At bottom, the conceit is nothing special; it’s a theme you’ve probably come across before.  In contrast to much of my other work from that time, however, the verse is unaffected and straightforward.  Rather than wandering through a swamp of complicated language play, it does nothing more than take a commonplace experience and appraise it from a novel point of view.  I hadn’t fractured my fingers looking for a five-syllable iambic adjective or a verb with an obscure tertiary meaning.  I had just revolved the image in my mind, describing the experience as carefully and lovingly as I could as each new element came into view.

As folks who’ve seen all my work (including my tragic early efforts) might have gathered, this lost poem probably marks the onset of my current practice.  In it I can see the writer I was and the one I was trying to be.

A nostalgic part of me wants to preserve the piece as-is and view it historically, as an artifact of the self fixed in figurative amber.  The better part of me, however, feels the best expression of that developing self deserves the chance to meet the person it prefigured.

(NB:  It seems a lot of folks arrive at this post whilst searching for the terms “lapsarian” or “post-lapsarian.”  If you’re hunting for something like a working definition, I eventually mounted one over here.)

Were you to see me on the street today, you would probably put your spare change in my hat.  Heck, you might even give me a hat to put change in.  That is how pathetic I look today, and it is an outward reflection of an inward state.

In good sooth, I don’t feel especially bad; in fact, I have many reasons to feel good.  On Thursday I learned that my mother had successful surgery, an eventuality we’ve been dreading since October, and her prognosis is quite good (admittedly, it would have been nice for the doctor to tell her this several months ago, as he apparently knew it all along).  I also finished my principal grading for the semester yesterday afternoon.  I’ve got essays coming in on Monday and exams on Wednesday, but I am well ahead of the burial curve. 

Nevertheless, right around 4:00 yesterday afternoon I felt my mojo waning, the proverbial puppet-with-snipped-strings feeling.  Whatever forward momentum I had was lost, and profound inertia set in.  We’re talking watching-Ghost-Whisperer-without-flipping-channels inertia.  It was just that bad.

When I feel the faceplant coming on, I prefer not to fight it.  For all my faults, I tend to brood efficiently, and it doesn’t take me too long to plumb the depths of my beleaguered psyche so long as I sink quickly.  In fact, right around 10 o’clock, staring at the ceiling at the beginning of what promised to be a sleepless night, the motive for these doldrums occurred to me:  I don’t know anything about anything.

Admittedly, this is a specially qualified kind of benightedness.  Just as Saturday morning disc jockeys don’t seem to grasp that they’re not hilarious, and just as a film critic can actually commit the opinion that Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay ”goes after easy targets and goes soft on the harder issues” to paper without the least trace of irony (I am, alas, not making that up), it is possible to feel quite competent without actually being competent.  A good brood, however, tends to puncture that bubble of seeming, leaving the brooder with existential gum in his goatee.

To wit, I’ve been thinking seriously about The Next Steps without having the faintest clue how to take them.  I would be more precise, defining the trajectories of nextnessitude in question for the sake of clarity, but I don’t think I can.  The Menacing Next pervades just about all of the professional and personal enterprises that line my horizon.  I have a decent grasp of what I want and ought to do, but a sense of how to do it?  Not so much. 

I started jotting down the things I need to figure out how to do earlier this morning, but it almost triggered another faceplant.  Between the house I want to buy, the tenure and promotions I’d like to earn, the collection of scholarly essays I’d like to edit, and the novel, chapbook, and monograph I’d like to write, the learning curve seems unnervingly steep.  More tragically still, that’s technically the “easy” stuff I have on tap (“easy” here meaning “terribly difficult but at least kinda quantifiable”).  I’m thinking really big, which suggests to me I might be wise to invest in a smaller skull.

I have world enough and time, to be sure, but the lump sum of my ambitions sometimes overwhelms me.  I fear there’s a reason that the latest search term that directed some poor browser to my blog was “what are some bad results of lightning?”

I attempted to blog yesterday, but at the tail end of grading 70 essays my prose was somewhat less than scintillating.  This is the only arena in which I try not to take my writing ultra-seriously, but I do aspire to something akin to zesty coherence.

Grading aside, it was something of an odd weekend.  On Friday we had our last department meeting of the year, at which I learned seven of my colleagues are moving on (a couple to very fancy jobs, a few to be closer to loved ones).  Happy trails, compañeros; may good fortune ride beside you, its saddlebags replete with ostrich jerky.

That evening we had our end-o’-the-year fiesta, which was a little wiggedy.  I have a smidgen of social anxiety, particularly in party contexts, as I always commit some social gaffe that reveals to my peers that I was raised by barbarians.  Friday’s party foul was an attempt to open a bottle of Sam Adams Light with some peculiar tool that apparently is designed to snip the seal off the top of wine bottles.  I redeemed myself by opening a particularly ornery jar of applesauce, so I think I came out even on the evening.  I find no shame in my failure to recognize the esoterica of the zinfidels.

Like that?  I totally just made that up, and I’m not even caffeinated.  I will not Google to see if the term already exists; I will not harsh my own awesome.

At the soiree I also had a disconcerting experience:  several graduate assistants already knew me by name, though I have only met a handful in passing.  Happily this was not a consequence of my general infamy, but because a colleague of mine has been teaching an essay I penned back in the day.  That mystery solved, I can now work at unriddling the wiggedy ways of WordPress.  Over the weekend, folks arrived at my blog by searching for “fear of rejection,” “need for acceptance,” and “carny jokes.”  I can only hope more than one seeker was involved.

Saturday and Sunday were devoted almost exclusively to grading, and by Sunday night my brain was the consistency of off-brand tapioca.  I’m exhausted this morning, but mostly because we’re in the throes of spring and my body has not yet adjusted.  I clearly became hardier this year as I adapted to my second Michigan winter, but the jump from the 50s to the 70s has caught my body off guard.  Still, I shambled to the gym this morning, I’m running an hour ahead of schedule, I’m caught up with grading, and I’ve only got two days of teaching to go. 

That’s a Monday morning tally I can live with.

Up  next:  my quest for a suitable avatar photo.  At the moment, this is the leading candidate:

I

Last night I was the victim of an instant earworm (which, I must say, is one of the most bitchin’ of German loanwords).  I was checking the top 30 list of our university radio station, seeing what the youth of America is into these days, when I spotted a new release from a band I quite like, Bullet for my Valentine.  The song is called “Hearts Burst into Fire”–yes, that’s right, “hearts” in peculiar plural terms, and “fire,” not “flames” or “song” or some other conventional consequence of burstability. 

As you might deduce from the title, the lyrics are a little on the lumpish side, but the tune lodged in my noggin almost immediately.  It wasn’t until I checked the lyrics online (I needed to know if the singer had indeed rhymed “sore” with “sore”), however, that I realized why the song was so damnably catchy:  the formula is classic 80’s hair metal.  It begins in melodic misdirection, turns into a fast-paced fiesta of pre-choral and choral shifts, and closes with a bloated “outro,” a word that I suspect must have been invented to describe the noodling that occurs at the end of most power ballads.  Moreover, the song partakes of the “I’m on the road and accordingly miss my best gal” motif that elicited many a sock-hop smooch back in the day.  Ah, the things my socks have seen.

Generally speaking, I’m fond of the old, familiar patterns; aside from flashbacks to the 80’s, however, this was not an especially good week for them.  Just scrolling through this morning’s headlines, I find Mugabe resuscitating the threat of colonialism (this appears to be Plan Q in his Bloviation for Fun and Profit series) in order to maintain his stranglehold on Zimbabwe; I find the “fallout” from the Pennsylvania “debate” spinning out of control, with news outlets covering the coverage of the news outlets covering the coverage of the misbegotten ABC attempt to rehash the well-hashed; I find the Pope subtly critiquing the “subtle influence of secularism” whilst attempting to reconstitute decades of predation on children as a prompt to “address the sin of abuse within the wider context of sexual mores.”  That kind of formulaic exercise just tires me out.

Perhaps the most life-affirming news I came across this week chronicled on-the-spot reactions from Pennsylvanians, who were of course grilled about Barack Obama’s recent comments on guns and God and bitterness.  Every single one of them in the piece I read–woman and man, programmer and plumber, coed and carpenter–hated being treated like a rube, as if they somehow lacked the discernment to make their own judgments based on the words that they heard.  I heart smart Pennsylvanians.

In good sooth, this train of thought also has a poetic application.  Some days it just takes me awhile to get there.

When I teach poetry, particularly in introductory courses, I go out of my way to frustrate students.  This isn’t (entirely) intentional perversity on my part:  I simply don’t want to be in the position of dispensing ideas and interpretations to be accepted as doctrine and rehearsed uncritically.  Methodologically, this is a blast from my own past.  Way back when, as a student in English 205 at Virginia Wesleyan College, I had a bona fide epiphany:  I realized that Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s “The Woodspurge” looked entirely different to me when I entertained the prospect that the flower’s “three cups in one” might be a reference to the Holy Trinity, although we read it in class as a simple descriptive piece.  Did the earth tremble?  Not exactly.  In retrospect, that insight seems kinda pathetic.  But it was my insight, one that I wasn’t spoon-fed, one that wasn’t the product of some kind of poetic scavenger hunt.  I relished that feeling of discovery.  I wanted more.

If that makes me something of a bastard in the classroom, so be it.  Last semester, however, after working through an appallingly literal-minded reading of Adrienne Rich’s “Diving into the Wreck,” my students revolted.  This isn’t about diving at all, they informed me, and then they laid a healthy half dozen alternative interpretive prospects on the table.  The same thing happened in class this semester, even though I have an unusually quiet bunch in an intro class.   We were trying to make sense of cummings’ choices in “somewhere i have never traveled.”  It looks a lot like a love poem, of course, and the reference to “small hands” allows me to break out my astonishing array of carny jokes; even so, the love poem reading only accounts for some of the nuances of meaning.  We were trailing off, seemingly content with the ideas on the table, when the most reticent student in class, a frown on her face, said “when I read it, I thought he was talking about a baby.”  And we were off.  Did we reach a semantic settlement?  Not at all.  Some folks nodded along to the father/child reading, while others thought that it didn’t account for some of cummings’ language.  We might have eventually found our way toward consensus, but we just ran out of time.

In a perfect world every class would end like Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas, with conclusions in which nothing is concluded.  I know closure can be a comfort, but when it comes to poetry, I’d rather leave doors open, or else sweep up the dust when students break them down.

Well, so much for spring.  It was nice while it lasted.

Since I’m icebound this morning, I thought I’d squeeze in a hasty post.  After that I must climb down into my essay-grading bunker, from which I may never return.  I just happen to like the MRE pudding.

Over the past week I’ve enjoyed a handful of reassuring professorial moments, which is an oddity insofar as profs usually have to steer the ship with the guidance of classroom affect alone.  Said affect isn’t the most reliable compass, since skilled students can learn over the course of a college career to feign interest and investment.  Of course, the converse is also true–sometimes the most engaged, avid students will spend 50-75 minutes staring silently at the floor.  As a result, a little transparent encouragement can go a long way toward making a prof feel confident about his practice.

Accordingly, I was delighted when a colleague stopped me in the copy room to pass along praise from one of my former composition students (our football team’s quarterback, as it turns out).  Said student is an enormously talented writer and gifted scholar in general, which tends to be a worrisome commodity–as I aim for the provisional classroom mean in terms of overall skill, I’m always concerned that the students at the extremes will become bored or overwhelmed.  Knowing that my approach worked for one of the sharpest knives in that particular drawer helps to allay those apprehensions, at least for awhile.  I’ll be fretful again by Wednesday, but I’ll enjoy the feeling while it lasts.

More encouraging still was a visit from a nontraditional student who’s facing one of the classic collegiate crises of conscience.  He’s in his 40s and nearing graduation, and only late in his career did he realize that he hearts himself some English.  Knee-deep in student loans and considering graduate school, he’s facing the inevitable question:  what does one do with an English major?  I’ve been in those shoes myself, and I fielded his version of the question as well as I could (it doesn’t hurt that I was a late starter bowed under the yoke of student loans myself).  What I found reassuring, however, was his motive for coming to see me:  unlike some of his other profs, who seem to him bitter like Canadian coffee, I strike him as one who is singularly satisfied with his career choice.  If that impression is coming across to him, I can hope that it’s making it out to all of my students.  Perhaps more than anything else, I think that satisfaction is one of the best advertisements for our English wares.

Finally, I received some sidelong reassurance from an unexpected source.  Last fall, following a talk in which our young poets were urged to search for secondary mentors against anticipated turnover in our creative writing faculty, I was approached by a student who asked me to read his work.  I did, and I thought it very fine, but it struck me as somewhat troublesome from a pragmatic point of view.  This student has an uncanny knack for appropriating and reimagining the stylistic quirks of E.E. Cummings.  While I thought his work was exceedingly accomplished (I’ve seen bad imitations of Cummings before, my own among them), I worried that the poetry editors of the world might find it simply derivative.  If he intends to make a career of writing verse, I told him, he might find the going difficult, and I urged him to seek the counsel of our creative writing faculty to get a better sense of how his work might be received.  Aside from a few hallway greetings, I haven’t spoken to the student much since.  My advice was the best I could offer, but I suspect it was unwelcome.

During the past week, however, I had the opportunity to speak to one of our distinguished poets, one who is preparing to retire and is helping the department to sift through new job candidates.  After a job talk we walked back to the department; he had only lately learned that I wrote poetry, and we covered much of the conversational territory one might expect.  I happened to bring up the aforementioned student in passing, however, which yielded a spontaneous, heartening response:  the veteran remarked on his promise, though he wished the student could muster the gumption to venture beyond Cummings.

Offering students advice or perspective beyond my usual purview is always a little giddy–the gulf between meaning well and doing well always seems unusually wide to me in such instances.  Much of the harm a prof can do is incidental or accidental, and sometimes the things we feel we ought to tell our students aren’t easy to communicate.  Given such anxieties, I think it’s worth remembering that we are surrounded by folks who are in the same position, folks who fret about doing the same kind of damage or failing to offer the right kind of help–folks who, like us, can only venture their best guesses under virtually identical circumstances.

For that reason, even a little corroboration and commiseration can go a long, long way.

Welcome to the new virtual homestead of William H. Wandless–the “H” stands for heautontimorumenos!  Oh, would that it did, dear Reader, would that it did.

Fun facts:  I decided to use my middle initial after Googling “William Wandless,” which turned up 456 hits, at least some which refer back to me.  When I Googled “William H. Wandless,” however, I came across the following news item from the 20 November 1884 edition of the New York Times:

On Tuesday, William H. Wandless, aged 56, committed suicide at his boarding house, No. 18 Orient Avenue, Brooklyn, by opening the arteries of both arms at the elbow with a penknife. He was found dead in his bed by a fellow-boarder. Wandless was a glass cutter. His suicide was due, it is said, to despondency resulting from his inability to find employment.

This blog may never approach that level of detailed reportage, but now I have a kind of macabre transparency to aspire to.  And that, my friends, is the origin of the inner “H.”  It also helps that I sign my work “William H. Wandless,” but that’s not much of a story, is it?

If you’ve arrived here, chances are you’ve read something I’ve written.  Said reading might have included my now-defunct anonymous blog (for which I hope a parent or adult guardian scolded you roundly), but it also might have included my barefaced public writing.  In either case, welcome! 

My eldern readers (comrades all, none of whom I deserve) will know that this is my first attempt at writing informally in a self-identified guise.  Anonymous bloggery may be liberating in some wise, but I am nowadays of the opinion that if I’m unwilling to own up to my words, I really oughtn’t be typing them.  As a result of this transition to a more public persona, expect a little unsteadiness at first.  I’m not entirely sure what I’ll be writing or how, but I am eager to see what shape this self-representation will take. 

I am by trade a literary scholar, but I also write poetry and speculative fiction (read:  horror, fantasy, and sometimes sci-fi).  I used to hammer away at creative work avidly, privately, but once I entered graduate school in 1995 I felt obliged to focus wholly on my studies.  My writing from 1995-2006 was thus devoted exclusively to professional preparation and advancement, and it was not until the summer of 2006, as I prepared to assume my post at Central Michigan University, that I seriously considered revisiting that lost, beloved country.  Though I’ve met with early encouragement on several fronts, I still feel as though I’m working through a three-pronged novitiate; quite frankly, I hope I never lose that sensibility.  However, thanks to the help of excellent mentors, friends, and colleagues and the feedback I’ve received from myriad kindly and generous editors, I feel like I’m on my way.  Think of this blog as an especially life-affirming episode of Mary Tyler Moore, give or take the beret.

In a post I’ll save for later, I’ll explain how my fiction, verse, scholarship, and teaching are inseparably intertwined.  For today, however, a short origin story and a blog-specific raison d’être will have to suffice. 

I’ll try to update semi-regularly (at least once a week, more often if anything exciting transpires), and I should let you know that this venue will concentrate primarily, but not exclusively, on the writing of poetry.  I’ll most assuredly regale you with my thoughts on the various and sundries of my existence, and I may yet create a separate public venue devoted primarily to my fiction, but I’ll try to remain reasonably focused here.  I hope a little proactive compartmentalization will help readers find what they seek more readily.

Next time:  My love/hate relationship with adverbs…and a scathing critique of Encyclopedia Brown!