1st Annual English Department Crawdad Boil/Pot Luck*

The highlight--without a doubt--was Prof. Howard Schaap's bowl full of crawdads, still clawing over each other, only recently netted from the nether depths of the Rock River.

But those crawdads weren't the whole story. Food and fun were in gracious supply, all of it on a windblown hill in Oak Grove Park. A bunch of students and profs had a joyous pot luck with, as fortune would have it, more than enough grub for the multitudes.

A great time was had by all.

*photos by Christina Van Single

Milton, Poetry and Christian Ambition

I've recently been reading Anna Beer's new biography of John Milton, Milton: Poet, Pamphleteer, and Patriot. Beer paints of a compelling portrait of Milton as a young man, wrestling between his religious faith and his own ambitions for fame through poetry. In the metaphors of Milton's day fame was imbued with all the vibrant pagan imagery of Ovid and Virgil, while the newly Protestant England was busy stripping its altars of any imagery or ritual that smacked of Catholicism. What imaginative and voracious yet devout reader wouldn't be torn between the two?

In fact, this tension really never ends for Milton. Many have noted that in Paradise Lost Satan, who is selfish ambition unincarnate, often makes a more compelling case than many of the angels. Every reader asks at least once, "Is Satan the hero of PL?" It's difficult to sort out, especially because Milton was trained extensively in rhetoric and in presenting arguments for both sides. It is hard to tell in almost all of Milton's poetry what he really thinks (if that's your particular interpretive interest!) because he often makes such a strong case for every position.

As a poet myself, I am often worried about the tension between my Christian faith (and its virtues of humility and servanthood) and seeking out creative success in the world. What I've learned is that this tension cannot be simply a theoretically question but it must be lived. Beer takes pains to portray Milton not as some austere, aloof prophet but a man who has his hands dirty with the ink of printing presses, his nostrils filled with the odors of constant urban disease and plague, his ears filled with the noisy chatter of London streets.

I believe instead of removing ourselves from the world to devote ourselves to God, we are called to set our faces to Jerusalem--the loud, dirty, complicated marketplace of the world. Unlike his Protestant brothers Milton does not strip his poetry of all paganism. He brings his Christian faith into that world and transforms it. Truly that is where all the friction (and therefore energy) is in Milton's work. Lycidas is a pastoral elegy in which resurrection explodes onto the scene. In Paradise Lost the poet's muse is transformed into the Holy Spirit. For Milton all things are drawn up and into the divine order. Perhaps it's not a solution to the tension but a way of bringing that tension into the Kingdom of God.

A morning's joy in pink

One could do worse than start the day with a poem. If you're connected to Garrison Keillor's Writer's Almanac, that's what you do. Sign up, and a poem is delivered courteously to your inbox doorstep every morning.

This morning it was "Pink," by my good friend Luci Shaw, a wonderful Christian poet from Bellingham, Washington. To hear her voice this early morning was a joy.

Pink
　

Not a color I've wanted to wear--too
innocently girlish, and I'm not innocent,
not a girl. But today the gnarled cherry trees
along Alabama Street are decked out
like bridesmaids--garlands in their hair,
nosegays in their hands--extravagant,

finally the big spring wedding to splurge,
and hang the cost. Each really wants to be
the bride so she can toss her bouquet until,
unaccustomed, the gutters choke
with pink confetti that flies up and whirls
in the wake of cars going west,

flirting shamelessly with teenage boys on
the crosswalks. The pale twisters,
the drifts of petals, call out to me, "Let go;
it's OK to be giddy, enchanted, flighty,
intoxicated with color. Drive straight
to the mall and buy yourself a pink Tee."

This old buck male says that Luci's "Pink" is a determinedly female poem. What's more, yesterday, for the first time this term, I wore corduroys because it's just now officially fall and we're an entire gray winter from Ms. Shaw's sporty spring. Sorry, Luci, but right now this old man isn't about to run out and buy a cute little pink Tee--just wouldn't be me.

No matter. I love it--the poem that is, nature's gaudiness begging us not only to take note, but to change course altogether, to doll up on our own lives, to run out to the mall and hunt down some showy stuff ourselves quick-a-minute.

Maybe a new button-d0wn shirt. I'll check Eddie Bauer. Maybe even pink. Some guys wear it.

You’ve Got Mail

Throughout literary history, the rejection letter has received more than its fifteen minutes of fame. In fact, a book by Andre Bernard, Rotten Rejections: The Letters that Publishers Wish They’d Never Sent (Robson Books, 2002) recounts several now embarrassing letters written to authors of what became famous books. Here’s a sampling: on Silvia Plath, “There certainly isn’t enough talent for us to take notice”; on The Diary of Anne Frank, “The girl doesn’t, it seems to me, have a special perception or feeling which would lift the book above the ‘curiosity’ level”; and even on Stephen King’s Carrie, “We are not interested in science fiction which deals with negative utopias. They do not sell” (http://www.writersservices.com/mag/m_rejection.htm).

As an aspiring writer, I was often told of authors who kept a file—some several files—of their rejection letters. Once they became popular, these files became the great moral to the writing story which naturally goes like this: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.” Everyone, it seems, can be the little writer that could.

Now, as the recipient of several of them myself, I would argue that rejection letters are largely overrated. Not because they take the wind out of one’s creative sails, or because filthy lucre blinds publishers to the genius of one’s work, or because the letters themselves are often written in cold, not even calculated language. No, rejection letters are overrated simply because they pale in comparison to the real king of the publishing process: anticipation.

At least, that is, in publishing poetry. The publishing process is greatly simplified in the publishing of poetry. To send out individual poems, you don’t need to write a “query letter” asking permission to send your work, and you definitely don’t need some agent ferrying your work back and forth across whatever River Styx it must cross. All you need to publish poetry is an address, a few sheets of paper, and two envelopes. You take one envelope and put in the following: a cover letter telling about yourself and your poetry; the poems you want to include, typically 3-5; and an SASE (self-addressed stamped envelope) in which the editor will return his or her verdict. You put these in the mail and wait. The longer the better. This is where anticipation comes in.

Snail mail may be old school. It may often contain junk. It may even be unstewardly. But it’s awesome nonetheless. My children love to get the mail. They take turns getting it, opening the mailbox in anticipation, mainly because their grandmother sends cards at the faintest whiff of a holiday.

The mailbox is the present we get to open every day. When you send out poems, every day you go to the mailbox is a day of possibility, and every day that you don’t get a response means the possibility is still out there. Where is your poem? Is it being opened at this moment? Is someone bringing it to the attention of another for input? Is it jarring a memory, a thought, a conversation? Actually, I’d never thought of these possibilities until just now. Personally, when I send out poems, I let them out of my imaginative reach and just enjoy the wait.

Last spring, I required that my poetry students send off poems to publishers at least two separate times: once to the Lyrical Iowa competition and once to another publication of their choice. Several balked at the requirement for various reasons. Then, to the surprise of at least eight of those budding poets, they got accepted and will be published this October in Lyrical Iowa.

One particular poet from the class, after she found out that her poem got accepted, confessed to feeling a bit ornery at being forced to send a poem off in the first place. “I thought ‘What’s the point?’” she later told me. In this case, of course, the publishing made a bit of a difference.

Still, the point in my mind was not publication—it was anticipation. Writing is communication. We write things so that there is some account of our lives, to show that we were here. What we write is ultimately completed by a reader on the other end. And so, to complete the process, we must put our writing before others.

Next time, for those who balk at marketing their work, I will offer another alternative: they may send out their poems to at least 15 family members or friends, thereby gifting their poetry. Yes, I’ll allow them to use email to do it. But how much better would it be for 15 people to open the present of their mailbox to find a gift of words?

One could live on that sort of anticipation for days.

Students Published in Lyrical Iowa

The Iowa Poetry Association’s annual anthology of poems, Lyrical Iowa, will be released in October and will feature the work of several Dordt emeriti professors as well as a number of current Dordt students.

Several Dordt students in Professor Howard Schaap’s spring writing class submitted entries to the competition, and their poems will be published in the college student division of the anthology released in October: Jane Wegener (Edgerton, MN) was awarded third place; Jurgen Boerma (Pantego, NC) received first honorable mention; Laura Heckman (Canton, SD) received second honorable mention; and Merlyndi Prosper (Coulibistrie, Dominica) received third honorable mention. Also being published in Lyrical Iowa are Jessica Klopstra and Dustin Biel from Lacombe, AB; and Luke Schut and Larissa Arkema from Pella, IA.

Judges chose from among more than 1,400 adult and nearly 1,000 student entries to award cash prizes for sonnets, haiku, humorous verse, national-world events, indigenous to Iowa, poems for children and general categories. The volume will be released in October.

I'm not a nut

Happens every year in 301. First essay of the year already, students look at the prof as if he's either a fool or demonic. I them that sentence fragments don't signal the apocalypse, that ordinary language might well be exactly what the doctor ordered, that use of the first person--as in "I"--may not lead to immediate expulsion. And they wonder where this guy came from.

The truth is, of course, we all write in different languages. What passes for grace in the MLA likely isn't energetic, gutsy prose in Wired or Rolling Stone. In fact, most of us monolinguals--like me--in truth still wield a variety of tongues. I write to my Mom in a voice that I don't use to write blog posts. I write stories--well, for goodness sake, every story's voice is different.

The "tongue" of the academy is the language of higher education, and it's often, well, higher, than the language we employ in ordinary conversation--and in blogs, Facebook, and a ton of other places where ordinary people ordinarily write, including most magazines and newspapers.

In this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, Gail A. Horstein, a professor of psychology at Mount Holyoke College--and a writer herself--takes a whack at the stodginess of academic prose.

A friend in mainstream trade publishing, who'd like nothing better than to buy books written by smart people on important topics, cringes when she spies an academic heading toward her at a party. For D and her editorial colleagues, "academic" is shorthand for "lifeless prose, cumbersome to read, filled with unnecessary complication, often disdainful and stridently obscure in style and tone." If by chance they do wind up wanting to acquire a manuscript by a faculty member, the first thing they say at the editorial meeting is: "But he doesn't write like an academic!"

But she doesn't stop there. She reverses the indignation, after a fashion, by asserting that academics often roll their eyes at the scribbles of ordinary people: "The contempt that academics have toward that kind of writing is, in essence, contempt for the ordinary reading public," she says. "We assume they're unable to grasp the subtlety of our thought. We think that writing for a broad audience requires "dumbing down" our arguments."

And then, "But that's wrong." She goes on to say that critics of non-academic writing are tougher than those in cap-and-gown. Having just finished the wholesale second draft of a novel that didn't catch on the first time around, I'm not only exhausted, but likely to let out a hearty "amen."

Prof. Horstein goes on tell her academic readers (The Chronicle of Higher Education, has lots of them, of course) to sharpen things up, to make them readable, to make the writing sing.

I think she's got a point. She ends by saying that we're in an era when higher educators don't sling much clout. She's right about that too. We might just be able to raise our profile if we learn to write with energy and zest. For everything there is a time and season--including academic writing, of course; but then there are times when it's not kosher either.

I intend to save some face. I'm sending the article around to my 301 students. I'm not a freak.

I don't think so anyway.
----------------------------------
You can read Ms. Hornstein's article at http://chronicle.com/article/Prune-That-Prose/48273/