The Nubbins, Again

As I love to tell my students during the final weeks of class, we have now reached the "nubbins of the semester."  I like the metaphor of the semester as a pencil worn down to small stub barely big enough to hold between finger and thumb.   Or maybe the semester is an eraser so worn that it's now only a bite-sized piece of pink rubber.  

Whatever the metaphor for this semester, I know that I am very tired:  just fighting off a cold with the help of doubled doses of vitamin C, extras veggies on my dinner plate, and the occasional nap.  On the other hand, Argos the WonderPup has begun to look more himself.  His partially torn ACL appears less than partially torn, which means that he's anxious for the frolicking and gallumphing while I'm anxious for him to stay put.  How do you tell a dog to avoid all lateral motions?  Is there a command for that?

Looking back on the autumn, I realize how much poetry-reading my classes have allowed me.  Here are the books we studied in my "Living Writers" poetry class:

1.     Marilyn Nelson, A Wreath for Emmett Till  

2.     Caki Wilkinson, Circles Where the Head Should Be

3.     Daniel Anderson, Drunk in Sunlight 

4.     Daniel Groves, The Lost Boys 

5.     Rhina Espaillat, Playing at Stillness 

6.     Rhina Espaillat, Her Place in These Designs 

7.     Jill Alexander Essbaum, Harlot 

8.     H.L. Hix, God Bless 

9.     H.L. Hix, Legible Heavens 

10.  Dora Malech, Shore Ordered Ocean 

11.  Dora Malech, Say So

12.  Randall Mann, Breakfast with Thom Gunn 

13.  Melissa Range, Horse and Rider 

We also read David Orr's Beautiful & Pointless for fun.    

During the course of the semester, Rhina Espaillat, Jill Essbaum, Harvey Hix, and Dora Malech visited the College, gave readings, and met with students to discuss process.  Although "Living Writers" isn't a creative writing class, I've been excited to discover that students tend to be extremely interested in the writing process; they want to know how the poet came to write certain poems, how the poems intersect with personal experience, how the book found its shape.  All of the books we read in "Living Writers" examine or play with received and fixed forms, but they also provide a really diverse picture of contemporary American poetics.

We're ending the semester with Melissa Range's gorgeous Horse and Rider.  Everyone in the class has been very taken with the middle section of the book, a series of poems written in the voices of instruments of war.  Here's a link to one of my favorites, "The Rope," which first appeared in Issue 11 of Memorious.